Act Queer! Teleconference: Police, Prisons and Queer Organizing
The purpose of Act Queer! is to connect grassroots LGBTQ racial and economic justice organizations with national queer and/or allied coalitions and organizations to share information and strategies on racial and economic justice research, organizing and advocacy.
Our June 25, 2009 teleconference focused on queer organizing around prisons, policing, and violence around the country.
To hear the each presenter, press play on the audio player. Read materials from each presenter just below the audio player.
Travis Sands & Christoph Hanssmann, Queer & Trans Jail Stoppers (Seattle, WA). Discuss the reasons for the forming of the group, the work they’re doing in coalition to stop $232 million dollar jail, and how they’re using this as an opportunity to build movement toward a queer movement that sees racial justice as part of its work.
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Materials from Queer and Trans Jail Stoppers
Join the Facebook Page Queer and Trans People Say no New Jail in Seattle (or Anywhere)
Queer and Trans Jail Stoppers Talking Points
No New Jails Queer Graphic Image
Ejeris Dixon, Safe Outside the System Collective, Audre Lorde Project (Brooklyn, NY). Discusses the politics, vision, and strategies of building community led solutions to violence against LGBTQ and gender nonconforming folks in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn.
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Deon Haywood, Women With A Vision (New Orleans, LA). Discusses how an HIV prevention & education organization is having to transform its work to doing organizing, leadership development and advocacy, due to the post-Katrina criminalization of sex work through Lousiana’s “Crimes Against Nature” statues, that forces sex workers to be distinguish as sex offender. This work is happening with the help of CHAMP’s Project Unshackle.
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Materials from Women with a Vision:
Newspaper Article on Crimes Against Nature Laws
Louisiana Crime Against Nature Law
Lori Girshick, Sociolgist/Researcher/Writer. (Arizona). Discusses the results of an upcoming research project on masculine-identified women in the California Prison System.
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If you have questions, comments, or know of other resources or events related to this topic, please feel free to post in the comments section!
QEJ June 2009 Newsletter
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Copyright © 2009 Queers For Economic Justice · 16 W. 32nd St., Suite 10H, New York, NY 10001
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Staff Transitions Happening at QEJ This Summer
TRANSITIONS
A lot of changes are happening at QEJ this summer:
Founding Executive Director Joseph DeFilippis has his last day this Tuesday, June 30th, after starting the QEJ Network in 2000, which became QEJ in 2003. Joseph’s transition has been planned over the past year, when he announced his desire to move on, and consultant Achebe Powell has been working with QEJ since September to guide us through this transition. Our National Public Education Director (and former Board co-chair) Kenyon Farrow will step in as Interim Executive Director, during the search for the new Executive Director. After that hire is made, Kenyon will return to his role as National Public Education Director.
In addition, Mary Guyton, QEJ’s Administrative Director will be leaving QEJ in August to move to Canada. Mary has been with QEJ (first as a volunteer, and then as staff) for almost four years. We will miss having Joseph and Mary in the office, but look forward to their continued involvement in the QEJ family in new ways.
We would also like to welcome Ash Hammond, Mel King, Aiden Kiriese, Kayden Moore and Jessica Valdez. They are working in the QEJ office this summer as interns and volunteers, and we are delighted to have them join our wonderful crew of existing QEJ volunteers.
Shelter Project Creates Community Among LGBTQ Homeless
You can tell that directing the Shelter Project at Queers for Economic Justice is more than just a job for Jay Toole. “Even though [sometimes] I’m tired,” she says, “I see twenty women painting [banners for Pride] and laughing and smiling, which is why I do this work. These are queer people in a safe setting that are proud of who they are.”
QEJ’s shelter project has been organizing support groups in Tillary Street, New Providence, Broadway House, and Park Slope since December. (All are shelters for female-bodied or identified people – transgender individuals can decide which gender shelter they would like to be placed into, regardless of their birth sex.) Toole realized the need for LGBTQ-specific support groups after her experience within the shelter system. After attending a group meeting in which all the female members talked about their husbands and boyfriends, but she was not allowed to speak about her partner, she knew something was wrong. “How can I help myself if I can’t talk about my relationships?” she thought. On top of their daily struggles, queers in the shelter system are often isolated from each other. They’re “hungry for community,” says Toole. “They have no idea what is going on in the queer [world].” These support groups provide them with an outlet to talk about their day-to-day struggles as well as connect with each other and share important information. “I’ve been in and out of shelters,” says group member Margarita Moya, “but when I saw Jay running the group, I knew she was going to help me…I can talk all I want to in the group, I’m always the same person.” Lillian Wisner, another group attendee, says, “[Queers] really need it because they can’t find themselves and can’t relate to the people in there…[but because of the group] we keep on multiplying.”
The groups have certain guidelines – confidentiality and respect – but otherwise run with a minimal amount of structure. “It’s hard enough for me to follow rules, so why should I make them?” jokes Toole. QEJ’s support groups are spaces that deal with a very visceral kind of political engagement – from venting about “being called a dyke by security,” as one group member spoke about, to how to obtain a domestic partnership. The support groups have given members the confidence to advocate within the shelter system for both themselves and each other. “I want to keep learning more, and help more,” says Wisner. Even just having the presence of other LGBTQ folks in their shelter is empowering. “They know we’re queers coming in, and they’re so thankful…you can feel the electricity,” says Toole.
QEJ also directs group participants to support services, which encompasses everything from lawyers doing pro bono work clearing criminal records and filing name changes to referrals for queer-friendly medical treatment.
Even when many LGBTQ folks themselves think about the movement, poverty is not on their priority list – hot button issues like gay marriage dominate media coverage, along with the funding and resources of mainstream gay right’s organizations. But considering that at least 30 percent of homeless youth in New York City are LGBTQ-identified, and LGBT adults are disproportionately represented in the shelter system, economic justice is a huge issue. “Queer homelessness is so buried and invisible in our own communities,” says Toole. “Gay marriage isn’t everything and it shouldn’t be.”
As group participant Moya says it, “[These groups are] needed everywhere and in every shelter.”
The Shelter Project marched at Brooklyn Pride, and is planning to march under the QEJ banner at New York Pride this Sunday. “They all want to march,” says Toole. “[They are] our community, our family.” QEJ invites you to march with them! We’ll be stepping off in Section 3 at 11:00am Sunday morning on 56th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue.
6/28: QEJ Co-Sponsor New Martin Duberman Book Event
Martin Duberman, "Waiting To Land"
Waiting to Land: Celebrating the Work of Martin Duberman in Building a Radical Queer Movement 40 Years after Stonewall
A Book Launch and Panel Discussion
Monday, June 29th, 7pm, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby St, New York, NY 10012
Please join us for a panel discussion and book launch to celebrate the publication of Martin Duberman’s Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Although best known for his acclaimed biographies, historian Martin Duberman is also a renowned memoirist who has plumbed his own life for truths that have meaning for us all. In the bestselling Cures, he carried his story up to 1970, focusing on his fear that homosexuality was pathological and on his desperate search for a therapeutic cure. Duberman’s second autobiographical book, Midlife Queer, centered on the 1970s, by which time he’d thrown off his earlier doubts and become fully engaged in the worlds of gay politics and culture.
Waiting to Land takes Duberman’s story up to the present day. As his public engagement deepens, Duberman finds himself increasingly at odds with the mounting assimilationism of the mainstream gay movement—and with the left itself, which Duberman has come to believe is smugly oblivious to the realities of gay life. Disaffection leads him to till crucial new ground, including the founding of the groundbreaking Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) and serving as an original board member of Queers for Economic Justice.
Interweaving diary entries with letters and with reflections written in 2008, Waiting to Land incisively probes issues of crucial import for everyone. By turns moving, funny, provocative, and profound, this book is an unflinchingly honest and deeply important window into an extraordinary life.
Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv
with
Martin Duberman
Richard Kim, The Nation
Joesph DeFilippis, Queers for Economic Justice
Marcia Gallo, author of Different Daughters
Book signing to follow
Sponsored by
The New Press
The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS)
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
Queers for Economic Justice
The Nation
The Indypendent
Stonewall 40th and Pride Unveil NYC’s Shameful Priorities
Marsha P. Johnson: Stonewall Veteran, Artist and Activist
Written by Yasmine Farhang & Kenyon Farrow
Just months before the 40th anniversary of one of the most significant rebellions of poor and working class queer and transgender people (mostly of color), out-lesbian New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced the city’s proposal for rich gay tourists to commemorate this anniversary—shop till you drop. But for us at Queers for Economic Justice and our allies, our movement for sexual liberation is not for sale.
This announcement was made weeks after New York City refused funding to organizations that house and provide services to homeless queer youth, leaving several organizations on the brink of closing. Speaker Quinn made the City’s priorities clear when she announced that two million dollars would go to launching a gay tourism marketing campaign called Rainbow Pilgrimage. The campaign claims to commemorate the forty year anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion by imploring tourists, domestically and internationally, to connect with this proud lineage.
The campaign’s website encapsulates Stonewall in a nostalgic distant light; a movement of the past now best found in a culture of style, restaurants and hot new clubs that are profiled in the ad campaign. The past violence and homophobia is replaced by the promise of a New York experience akin to Sex In The City. Further denying the violence of that fateful night in June, the Rainbow Pilgrimage describes the West Village as having a “population [that] has matured and neighborhood scene [that] has quieted along with it.”
But that “quiet” has come at a cost to poor and working class queers today. What tourists may or may not see coming to NYC this Pride.
- Every day, Jay Toole, QEJ’s Shelter Director, works with scores of homeless LGBTQ adults in NYC’s shelters who face homophobia, transphobia, and isolation from queer community.
- The recent string of false arrests and police abuse gay men who were set-up for prostitution charges by undercover cops this past February in the East Village being led by the Coalition To Stop the Arrests.
- Several Black lesbians reported being beaten and harassed by NYPD in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn outside a party in May for which Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System Project has demanded accountability.
- The constant policing and harassment of queer and trans youth of color that FIERCE! continues to organize around.
- ·Due to the constant targeting of transgender people of color by police and prison guards, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project provides legal services and advocates on behalf of the safety of trans people in custody.
- Our Welfare Warriors project, led by Reina Gossett, is documenting the many ways LGBTQ folks in NYC continue to survive and thrive despite poverty, violence, and police brutality.
Rather than representing queer progress, the policies supporting the Rainbow Pilgrimage campaign (that the groups mentioned above are all fighting against) are frighteningly similar to the conditions that created the Stonewall Rebellion–Mayor Robert Wagner in the 1960’s launched a campaign to crack down on the city’s queer bars to clean up the city’s image for the 1964 World’s Fair. Similar to the raiding and closing of queer working class spaces and social services in the West Village over the last 10 years, Wagner revoked the liquor licenses of the bars, and undercover police officers regularly entrapped gay men, and arrested butch dykes, trans people, and drag queens for wearing clothing of the “opposite” gender.
Instead of commemorating the rich history of New York City’s movement for queer justice, the campaign tokenizes its leaders and landmarks and dilutes this history to a gimmick that will benefit corporations. Once the parade packs up this summer, and tourists leave with Rainbow Pilgrimage-themed t-shirts and mugs, those who need economic support more than ever – such as Sylvia’s Place and other resources for low-income and homeless queer folks and youth in New York City – will be right where they were, struggling to survive.
Struggle On,
Queers for Economic Justice
6/10/09 Newark NJ: A tale of Two Movements
This event should be a really interesting conversation. If you’re in NYC/NJ you should come through!
