November 2024 Monthly Update

November is a heavy month for so many of us. There’s some sense of despair up and down the ballot as election day nears. There’s Trans Week of Awareness leading up to the annual Trans Day of Remembrance, where we continue to evolve our revolutionary practice of collective grieving and recommitment to safety. And, it can often be a check box of naming violence without any room to actually share that grief or safety building.

“The Houses Our Ancestors Built,” a guest blog by Oklahoma Queer History

October 2024 Monthly Update

Every year, as October begins, we celebrate 2SLGBTQ+ history month. An exercise that has become grounding for all of our team, in expanding our knowledge of the 2SLGBTQ+ folks who came before us, who fought and loved before us, who paved the way for us, as our work now will become history for future generations. Marsha Pay-It-No-Mind Johnson said, “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.” We each have a responsibility, not just a role, in our community history. And so we’re kicking off this month, focusing on what a commitment to keep one another safe means, what it means to build a future where every 2SLGBTQ+ person has the safety to thrive. So, we’ll ground our history in our commitment to the future. 

September 2024 Monthly Update

As an autistic kid growing up in the era of LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow, I knew from an early age there were few places cooler in the world than a local public library. And I am grateful as an adult to have rediscovered that magic (as my Libby app TBR list can confirm). Books have always held such a special place in my heart, and sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by everything on my to-read list, and what that means for all of the stories I won’t have the opportunity to experience. And still, even as a kid who made a summertime game out of reading, writing reviews, and swapping books to repeat the process with my best friend, it was not until I was an adult that I really found characters in which I could really see myself.

August 2024 Monthly Update

Last year, we launched The Freedom Sessions (TFS)–a program that aims to create a platform that provides education, awareness, and community engagement for the 2SLGBTQ+ community and their allies. We wanted to do more than just convene once a year during a conference, we wanted to build something that allowed for year-round learning and connecting. We hope you’ll join us for this year’s conference and TFS events to learn and develop best practices for organizing, community care, power building, and sustaining our liberation movement, together!

July 2024 Monthly Update

Raymond Williams said, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” As we prepare to take some rest this month, we invite you to join us in focusing on the people, the spaces, and experiences that give you hope. What does that list look like when you’re really paying attention? I’ll start.

To pretend that the spirit of Pride celebrations is not rooted in the fight for collective liberation is to willfully misunderstand the 2SLGBTQ+ movement and the ongoing work to secure a future where we all have the safety to thrive. That future is not possible without a Free Palestine.

Every June, the world erupts in a dazzling display of colors. Pride parades, a kaleidoscope of joy, weave through concrete canyons. Yet, beneath the vibrant surface, a disharmony simmers. Rainbow capitalism, with its glittering facade, often overlooks the Earth's silent cries and the marginalized voices within the 2SLGBTQIA+ tapestry. This year, let us delve deeper, seeking a Pride rooted not in fleeting profits, but in the enduring wisdom of rematriation – the act of reclaiming what was stolen and nurturing a more just future.

As we mark a new pride month, I think back on the evolution of pride events. I think of Sylvia Rivera, at the end of her life, saying that queer folks had made ourselves so small at pride, to make room for capitalism to accommodate the comfort of straight folks, that there wasn't space for her, for trans people anymore. I hold that with me in this work. Each day, as I do it, I ask myself who we do this work for, and who is left out. I know we'll always do movement building imperfectly, such is the nature of being human. It's a necessary struggle, to build the table, to reimagine together, because this work, this movement, this pride, is something we do together.