Courage, Creativity, and Curiosity

[Editor's Note: On Friday, April 20th, the LGBTQ and Ally community came together at Lavender Graduation to celebrate the senior class of 2012. Today is Duke's graduation, and we would like to honor our outgoing seniors. We are indebted to them for their contributions to this Community and this campus and they will undoubtedly be missed. Below is the speech that Kyle Knight gave at Lavender Graduation last month. Kyle is a Trinity 2008 graduate, the current president of the LGBT Alumni Network, and is Fulbright Fellow in Nepal researching the LGBTI rights movement.]

What I treasure most about the work I do is that I’m surrounded every day by people who are unquestionably more impressive than I’ll ever be. Their story, their struggle, their triumph is not just an inspiration, but a constant reminder that the world can be a cruel place – and also contain beautiful things.

So today, I want to share a few stories from halfway around the world, and propose how they might inform some decisions we in this room can and will make.

In 2001, a young gay man named Sunil Pant returned home to Nepal, a country in the middle of a violent revolution that would eventually claim nearly 13,000 lives. He had been away for the beginning of the conflict – first, at engineering college in Belarus, then at a short-term job in Japan. In Belarus, above the doors of health clinics across the country, he read “beware of homosexuals;” in Tokyo, he found semi-secret gay bookstores, bars, and cafes – and in them, queer people to talk with.

Back in Kathmandu, he started visiting a dusty park in the middle of the city every night. It was a place where people could congregate in public without the threat of anyone noticing them. They could meet, they could chat, they could cruise.

In his conversations with gays, lesbians, and transgender people he met there, he began to notice patterns: people were kicked out of their families, people were abused by the police, people saw no hope for their lives going forward.

So in September of 2001, while Nepal was distracted by a recent massacre of the royal family, and the world was distracted by the 9/11 attacks, he went to the government to register his country’s first ever LGBT rights organization. The official who took the application was thrilled: “fantastic! We need an organization to convert these people back to heterosexuality!”

That wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, so he rescinded the application, but returned a few days later and filed the same papers with one line different: the organization was dedicated not to rights, but to health outreach and HIV prevention.

It was approved immediately.

Today, eleven years later, the organization, Blue Diamond Society, has nearly a thousand employees; Sunil is the only openly-gay federal-level politician in Asia; and the country has some of the most progressive laws – particularly when it comes to gender identity – the world has ever seen.

Now it’s easy – and perhaps tempting – to sit here half a world away in awe of this vibrant queer human rights movement in the world’s seventeenth poorest country. We can gasp and think “how on earth did they do it?!” In fact, I suspect that exact line of thinking – that awe – explains why I’m living there now, why the Fulbright Commission thought this was a valid project among dozens of applications.

There are plenty of ways to explain it: cultural, historical, political, legal. But after having spent nearly a year day in, day out with the activists responsible for this progress, the message I want to extract and share today is simpler. They did it by acting out courage, creativity, and, to sustain those two admirable pursuits, curiosity.

First: courage.

Two weeks ago, I woke up on a Saturday morning to a friend calling me with news that a transgender sex worker had been murdered. She was taken to the hospital, and died as doctors treated the wound on her forehead.

5 minutes after the phone call, this friend picked me up and carried me across the city on his motorcycle to the police station.

For three hours, members of the queer community, friends of the deceased, her family, and her church pastor pleaded with the police commanders to conduct a thorough investigation. There was yelling, there was crying, there was begging for due process. The police made vague promises, but couched them in comments such as “well if harassment happens from our officers, it’s probably because they don’t really understand what you people are,” and “of course if she was carrying condoms, she would get harassed – she’s a whore.”

The meeting concluded without any tangible progress, the group filed out into the parking lot where an ambulance waited with the casket inside. We walked about half a mile to a deer park near the airport, and watched as her brothers and cousins dug a hole. Over two hundred people gathered to sing, pray, and listen. The pastor delivered the Lord’s Prayer. And friends poured gifts of flowers and small bills into the casket. Some cried; many took photos on cell phones and chatted casually.

What does this say about courage? People, powerful people, people with money - have told the activists in Nepal for years to back off of cases like this: “Stay away from the prostitutes and other people who live on the margins of society because they undermine the cause.” The activists’ response has always been: but they face abuses, human rights violations, and horrendous marginalization. We won’t abandon them to fight instead for LGBT people who have jobs and salaries and security.

That’s courage.

Next: creativity.

In 2006, when the king stepped down and the people’s revolution ended in Nepal, one of the leaders of the revolution reached out to the LGBT community for votes. Once his party was elected and he became a powerful minister, they went back to him with a request of their own: put us in the budget.

He hesitated. No government had ever officially acknowledged this population before. But he was a revolutionary, an ideologue, and a few days later, a pile of dense academic texts appeared on his desk – arguing for him that Marx and Lenin cared about queer human rights. Weeks later, “sexual and gender minorities” was the newest budget line in the fledgling country. Today, they’re using this money to build the first LGBT community center in South Asia.

That’s creativity.

And finally: curiosity.

Next week, the US Embassy in Kathmandu will co-host a seminar with LGBT organizations to discuss disaster risk reduction considerations for the queer population.

This all came out of curiosity. We’ve seen LGBT people suffer in the wake of disasters. In Haiti after the earthquake, in an effort to empower women, some food aid was distributed to women only, which left out households that didn’t contain women. In Pakistan’s recent floods, transgender people were denied entry to relief camps because their appearance didn’t match that on their ID cards.

But beyond being concerned about protecting themselves post-disaster situations, networks of LGBT people in Nepal want to know how, through empowerment and recognition, they can be a resource for other marginalized communities. For example, since the LGBT community has been so successful in working on both visible policy and an invisible grassroots, how can they help people living with HIV access medication and health care if an earthquake destroys thousands of miles of roads and bridges?

These are the questions they are asking. This is curiosity.

And when work, activism, exploration driven by these ideas, it can free us from the traps of competitive progress.

Because whether it’s on a university campus or in the city you move to for your first job, or in a faraway country where you find yourself at the wise old age of 26, it’s not about fighting over who is the most oppressed group, who suffers the most at the whims of the powerful. It’s about identifying the structures of oppression that hurt our communities - and uniting to erode and eradicate them.

It’s not easy; just observe and it seems as if ranking and marking others is in human DNA.

I hear it in fancy restaurants in Kathmandu – when wealthy, Western-educated high-caste gay men deride the local LGBT rights movement for focusing too much on “low class trans people.”

We see it in the Wall Street firms that promote themselves as being open and “gay-friendly,” then implement policies harmful enough to ignite thousands of occupiers against their greed.

And we see it here at Duke – when admissions promotes the University as “need-blind” but still asks all applicants to check a box on the application if they want to be considered for financial aid.

Sure, we have to be courageous. But courage is not enough – courage can cause tunnel vision. Be creative. But creativity is not enough – creativity can cause irrelevant actions. Combine these, and be curious – ask what’s next, and what we might not be doing well enough, for ourselves and for our fellow citizens.

Duke has this energy, this tradition. And while it might be overlooked for traditions of basketball-inspired bonfires or Rhodes Scholars, the impassioned social activism emanating from this campus can be felt around the world.

Take, for example, Tico Almeida, who as a junior in 1997 started a small organization called Students Against Sweatshops. Within seven months of forming SAS, Duke became the first university in the country to adopt a code of conduct that required a process for monitoring apparel manufacturers. This swept the nation. Almeida is now the president of Freedom to Work, which is leading the way toward ending employment discrimination against LGBT people in America.

Or how about Raphael Lemkin. Trained as a lawyer, Lemkin started his American teaching career at Duke Law School in 1941. But when he wasn’t lecturing law students, Lemkin was holed up in his office working on perhaps one of the most important inventions of the 20th century: a new word. You see, dozens of members of Lemkin’s family had been killed in the Holocaust, and he’d read the stories of other mass killings until he decided there was no word that adequately described or incriminated such atrocity. So he set out to create one. Seven years later a UN convention was introduced and a new term entered conversations about mass killings around the world: genocide.

These are just a few examples – and I don’t mention them to intimidate you. But regardless of what we all do with and for our own rights, we have to remain courageous and creative (and even critical of our moves) or we’ll fall into the trap of ranking oppression instead of eroding it, of in-fighting instead of learning from our peers.

Our group, if I may call it that – we have something to offer.

After all, the discrimination and structural oppression we face is triggered by everything from our outermost expression – how we dress, act, speak – to our innermost feelings and identities and, to be blunt, what’s inside our underwear – or what other people think ought to be there. And this constellation of ways of being a person – check boxes in some situations, poetry in others – makes us into individuals, groups, and citizens of societies, cultures, and countries.

But at the core of making it all better is an inquisitiveness, a curiosity, a willingness to engage with the ideas of others who face the same structures of oppression that we do, and also to go beyond that which is similar to our experience and see where we might contribute to structures that, while having nothing to do with us, in fact oppress others.

In many ways it’s been a great year for us. We have a president in office who has done more for our community than any before; Hillary Clinton has decided to make her legacy as Secretary of State the fight for LGBT rights around the world; the United Nations published its first report on LGBT rights; and, a little closer to home, I’ve been told you all cleaned up at the student awards ceremony on Wednesday night.

For years and years, the LGBT population - and the rights movement we’ve built - has suffered at the hands of people who can’t imagine being us. How can we do better than that?

There are plenty of ways to get involved. You’ll find the one that’s right for you.

And given the history of the institution you’re graduating from, I’m confident you won’t go narrowly or unquestioningly into a movement so full of potential to change the world.

Navigating Multiple, Seemingly Conflicting, Identities

[Editor's note: We are thrilled to welcome newest faculty writer, Dr. Brian Ammons, to the blog!]

In the midst of final papers and projects, advising and fielding questions about next fall, and all of the other minutia that creep up at the end of the semester, I’ve got a rally to plan. On Sunday, April 22 at 1:00 PM, I’ll be gathering at the Trotter Building (410 West Greer) with other church folk who are opposing Amendment One, doing my part to try and actually get people to the polls. I imagine it will be a strange moment for me. Church folk aren’t the first set of allies that many of think of in political battles for LGBTQ rights. But it’s who I know, and as I’ve asked around, these are the folks who have been willing to step up and commit to standing against this amendment.

Alongside my faculty appointment here in the Duke Program in Education, I am also an ordained Baptist Minister. As far as I know, I was the first out gay man to be ordained in North Carolina outside of the predominantly LGBTQ Metropolitan Community Churches. I still serve a small congregation in Raleigh, and much of my speaking and writing remain tied up in religious conversations. Yet, here at Duke I generally keep my “Rev.” title in my back pocket, only whipping it out for strategic purposes now and then.

I always find the process of coming out as a teacher to be strange and complicated. Part of me resists the idea that I need to make myself easily intelligible to students in order to claim the authority to speak about queer theory or the experiences of LGBTQ people. And yet, part of me believes that visibility matters, and that in claiming and normalizing my own sexual identifications I stand with my queer students and have space to disrupt the assumptions of some of my other students.

But I come out twice…given that I teach about controversial social issues, it is a rare case that at some point in the semester we doesn’t land in some conversation about the role of religion in public discourse. Again, I have to navigate whether or not self-identifying as a Baptist minister is productive or likely to shut down conversation. Part of me believes that visibility matters, and that in claiming and normalizing my own religious identifications I stand with my religious students and have space to disrupt the assumptions of some of my other students.

Be clear, I’m not interested in using my authority to coerce or convert on either count. I am however conscious of the complicated choices around self-identification and disclosure I am asked to make in my professional life. I teach courses largely about power, politics, and identity in education systems, and yet two of the most centrally defining aspects of my own identity are consider by many educational institutions as out of bounds – rendered invisible by academic discourse. Or, on the other hand, in making them visible, I chose to let myself be reduced to being the “gay Baptist guy” who talks about schools.

It’s a complicated dance, and I almost always stumble. In the end, I count on the relationships we build in the classroom to be able to hold the tensions that each of us carry with us as we engage complicated questions. I am intentional about not requiring my students to self-disclose, and yet simultaneously try to create an environment that values the organic knowledge that comes from lived experience, the kind of stuff I learned on Sunday afternoons sitting at the feet of my elders on my great-grandfather’s front porch. It’s a dance about showing up, living with the tensions, and trying to navigate the contradictions with grace and integrity.

Not all of the folks coming out on Sunday are affirming of same-gender relationships. In fact, many of them are openly opposed to them. Yet, they are standing against the Amendment based on their understandings of the role of government in society, the nature and purpose of constitutions, the very practical realities of how the amendment could affect children and all unmarried couples, and even a sense of neighborliness. These are folks who live with tensions. Some are taking significant risks in their personal and professional lives to stand with those of us who are outspoken in our opposition. They are my friends, and I’m grateful for their choices.

I am a queer North Carolina native, who has made intentional choices to stay in my home state and work for progressive change. I am a minister. I am a teacher. I am an activist. I live in those tensions. So I’ll take a break from grading final papers on the implications of French inflected poststructural thought for American public schools to hang out with some Christians and cast my ballot.

Healthy Confrontation

As my semester at Duke slowly comes to an end, I realize how much my routine reflects that of the average Duke student: I have worked hard (kind of), played hard (REAL hard) and have, more often than not, taken what Chronicle writer Ryan Brown describes as the “something bigger than ourselves” mentality.
My semester at Duke, unlike my previous semesters at UNC, has forced me to face many unfortunate realities. One of these realities is the palpable sense of destructive gender norms that exist in the world (and the notion that feminism is a bad thing); another is the existence of individuals who are, dare I say it, conservative!
[I am not saying destructive gender norms and conservatives do not exist at UNC; rather, I am saying that they exist behind a liberal curtain and (as recent weeks have demonstrated) a safe and inclusive university façade.]
At Duke, I have interacted with conservatives, with the “I’m not a feminist, but…” students, and with those that would fight till the end to maintain the existing gender culture at Duke. I have attended a handful of meetings at the Women’s Center and have had numerous conversations with individuals, both conservative and liberal and all in between, regarding feminism. Yet, like Brown, I prefer to push my headphones into my ear and pump up the volume rather than fighting complacency and, in turn, a destructive culture. I have these conversations, but then I go on with my business, thinking to myself, “Well, we talked and they still didn’t get what I had to say…oh, well!”

What I have loved most about Duke, however, is the opportunity to have interacted with those that align themselves on the opposite sides of an issue. What I love about my semester here is the fact that I think about these things and realize my “something bigger than ourselves” mentality. And most of all, I love that I have more opportunities to not be complacent; to continue to have conversations with people, but also take action—to attend events such as Be A Man [Thursday (April 14th) at 8:30pm in McClendon 5] and Fab Friday with these people who have different views than my own.

Confrontation is uncomfortable, but healthy confrontation can be life-changing. So I encourage myself and others to have conversations with individuals who normally wouldn’t agree with you on an issue (such as feminism), befriend these individuals and listen to their stories, and then bring them to some healthy confrontational events (such as Be A Man or Fab Friday). Whether they change their minds or not is not what is important; what is important is us not subscribing to the “bigger than ourselves” mentality and taking action AND making new friends.

If there is nothing else to bond over, you and your new friend can always bond over being Blue Devils, a community I am honored to be a part of during my college experience.

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Susan Stryker

I recently just finished reading a great book callled, "Transgender History" by Susan Stryker, after it was recommended to me by Jack and Jess McDonald this summer. I was really impressed by Stryker's work and wanted to highlight her accomplishments here on the blog.

Susan Stryker is an openly transgender woman who has worked diligently to advance the transgender equality movement in America as a transgender historian. She recieved her Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stryker is a community-based historian, and she makes media and works to develop her community's history as a form of activism for the trans movement. Between 1997 and 2003 she worked as the Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, which works to preserve and further ongoing research in LGBTQ studies in one of the largest collections of queer history in the nation. She also is a vocal feminist, noting that as someone who previously presented to society as a white male, she has a "good yardstick" for measuring misogyny and sexism.

When I was reading "Transgender History" by Stryker this past month, I realized that San Francisco actually has a really rich trans history. In addition to the Compton Cafeteria Riots (see below!) and housing one of the best LGBTQ historical collections, San Francisco is also home to the country's first transgender activist group, "Transgender Nation", founded in SanFran. in 1992. The

organization worked successfully to begin integrating transgender concerns into the larger movement for LGBTQ equality. One of the activist demonstrations that TN was best known for was it's 1993 protest of the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, in which the group rallied against the APA's diagnosis of the transgender identity as disordered (GID).

In addition to publishing "Transgender History" and many other works on transgender history, Stryker also co-directed the documentary, "Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria". (You can also find an Amazon trailer to the documentary that is a pretty good summary of it, here.) Here's an excerpt from the documentary below (there are some other great vintage footage portions on Youtube, too!)

"What happened at Compton's Cafteria that night wasn't a 'catfight' between screaming queens-it was a riot, and it kicked off a new human rights movement."

The documentary "Screaming Queens" covers the 1966 Compton Cafeteria Riots, which until this book (Transgender History) and this documentary, I knew very little about. It turns out that Stryker hadn't heard of the riots either, until she uncovered a vintage publication about them in the San Francisco GLBT historical society warehouses. The story goes that Gene Compton's cafeteria (at the corner of Turk and Taylor street) was a safe-haven in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco for transgender individuals (as well as other LGBQ individuals), and it was open 24/7.

"It was beautiful. Everybody would just die for window seats [at Compton's], just to show off. Jehovah's Witnesses used to drag crosses in the street in front of Compton's, and tell us we were going to burn in hell, but we ignored them. Compton's was fabulous. It was like Oz. Something like The Wizard of Oz."

The Tenderloin district of San Francisco had a police department that was allegedly paid off in order to keep the area open to prostitution and drug hustling, . The transgender and drag communities were eventually forced to the Tenderloin simply because restaurants, beauty shops, bars, and the hotels, etc. in other areas of the city wouldn't serve transgender people. The Tenderloin (and specifically, Turk Street), became known as "the gay ghetto", home to drag Balls and a larger transgender community. Not withstanding, the police could take transgender individuals as any time to jail for "female impersonation", and oftentimes they would:

"The first night I was in San Francisco I was arrested for 'sidewalk obstruction' by the 'tax squad', which was a police squad that generally made life unpleasant for people who didn't fit in. Later, I was arressted for 'female impersonation'. I never felt that I was impersonating female, I thought, I am a female!"

And while the Tenderloin was safer than other areas of San Francisco for transgender and queer individuals, it wasn't completely free of violence; there was once a serial kiler in the district who specifically targeted transgender individuals. The "Camelot" haven of the Gene Compton cafeteria didn't last forever either. When a new political activist group (composed of

many transgender individuals) named "Vanguard" started meeting at the restaurant, Compton's eventually started kicking them out. Nevertheless, Vanguard members picketed Compton's due to the discrimination they felt, which upset the Compton cafeteria management even further.

One night (the date is uncertain, but it is believed to be August 9th, 1966) the San.Fran. police department raided the cafeteria (presumably after conversations with the Compton management). Fighting started when a policeman grabbed one of the drag queens, and she threw coffee in his face. All hell broke loose after that, "triggering years of resentment", and "all the sugar shakers went through the windows and the glass doors." Police called for more backup as the fighting continued, and eventually a police car and a local newsstand were set on fire. (Business at Compton's never recovered, and a porn shop took it's place a few years later.) After the riot, police officer (and director of Community Relations), Elliot Blackstone pioneered services and helped to overturn many anti-transgender laws, thus improving conditions for the transgender community in San Francisco. Many transgender individuals at the riots also noted the marked change in the community:

"Out of Compton's [riots] came some very beautiful, beautiful women. We felt good about ourselves. And that's the most interesting part of it, because once you feel good about yourself, nobody can hurt you. Nobody can come in and turn anything around that you don't want."

Through her research, Stryker found that while the Stonewall Riots of June 28th, 1969 are typically cited as the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, the Compton Cafeteria Riots were actually one of the first radical acts against police and institutional trans/homophobia in America. Stryker's work was instrumental in sheding light to this important and watershed event in our LGBTQ history (and if you notice on the Wiki page, Stryker is the primary reference of the entire account). She interviewed people in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco who she believed might have been present at the event, and collected first-hand knowledge of the riots through interviews and personal accounts.

Thus, we have Stryker to thank for uncovering an incredible part of our community's history; "the story was bigger than I could have ever imagined", she says of the night. Stryker also said that researching the riots made her feel the presence of a larger transgender and drag community; I think it's awesome that we can look to this group of empowered individuals in our community as a source of courage and strength.

To Be Or Not To Be...

Active. That is the question.

When I first came out, I had no clue what to do. Where should I go? Who should I talk to? What am I supposed to do now? So, looking towards other out people on campus, I followed their lead and became very active in the gay community. I began attending meetings, helping out with different activities, and generally hanging around the Center.

I did that for about a year or so and everything was great. I made new friends. For once, I was able to be as vocal as I wanted to about my sexuality and it was the best feeling in the world.

But then, something happened. Around the end of last semester, I started to feel different. I began to feel as though something wasn't right, as though I was changing. I didn't know what it was. But something just felt different. I began feeling out of place at certain events. My enthusiasm had died down. I didn't feel as "out and proud" as I once did. I began to go to the Center less and less. For the life of me, I just couldn't figure out what in the world was going on.

So, I decided to just pull myself out of the scene for a little while until I figured out what was up. I spent the rest of last semester, this summer, and the beginning of this semester trying to figure it out. I'm gay, so I kinda belong in the Center by default right? I'm supposed to be at every rally, every meeting, every event aren't I? I'm supposed to spend all of my free time in the Center. But I just couldn't pull myself to do that and I felt awful. I felt absolutely terrible. I was being a "bad gay" as I so often referred to myself. Seeing others be so happily active in the gay community made me feel horrible. But even this guilty feeling wasn't enough to cause me to become active again.

I pondered this for so long. Eventually, I was talking to some very close friends of mine that made me realize something: I don't have to be active if I really don't want to and I shouldn't feel bad about it. Now, I know this should have been common sense to me, but as my dearest mother said to me when I was younger, "Boy, you're all book sense and no common sense." A light bulb went off in my head. I got involved in the community because that's what I thought I had to do, not what I wanted to do, and eventually, my mind got the message my heart was trying to tell me all along: This amount of activism isn't for you.

Now, this still caused me a ton of stress. I still felt like a bad gay. But I had to realize that everyone isn't meant to be the great activists that others are and it doesn't make me a bad gay for not being such an activist. I have to find the level of activism that fits for me and it's not being in the forefront of the movement. And that's okay. I appreciate everyone that continues to push forward but that's not my place. And I'm fine with that. I've found a level of activism that isn't in the forefront but I'm still happy with it.

So, to those out there that don't want to be as active as some others, know that it's perfectly fine. Just don't begin to hate yourself like I started doing. We all have to find that balance that works for us and everyone's balance is different. Don't force yourself to be something that you aren't and everything will be okay. Take it from me, I've tried that and it made me miserable. The Center is a great place to meet people and hang out, but if you don't want to participate in the activist side of things, then don't. And don't let anyone make you feel guilty for not doing it. While many people would love for everyone to be active, they understand that everyone isn't comfortable or doesn't want to be in a high-profile level of activism. And isn't that what the gay rights movement is all about at its core? Allowing people to do what makes them happy in life?

I'm still active within the gay community but I no longer feel the pressure to be active in every single thing. I think that I might have found my "happy medium" now. We all have our place in this world. Find your own. Don't try to share a space with someone else.

On a High!!!

I'm on such a high right now. It's one of my last nights home before I leave to be a counselor and I just got back from the 19th Annual Awards Dinner for Equality Arizona. With everything that's going on these days, espcially around the hot topic of immigration, it's easy to name all sorts of not-so-good things going on in my state. I left the dinner, though, with a lot of hope and enthusiasm [once in the car on the way home, my exact words may or may not have been "I wish I could go back to Duke tomorrow and get started on stuff for BDU"]. Hundreds of people gathered tonight for this dinner, all of whom are well-connected and all of whom actively support efforts towards equality through their money, time and/or energy. I was fortunate to be invited last minute by a good family friend (she's my parents' age; a lady at our table asked us if we were on a date...I'm not making this up) and Equality Arizona made it possible for me to attend free of charge as a "Young Emerging Leader." I joined public officials, business leaders, educators and so many other passionate and hardworking people. Donna Rossi, an out lesbian and senior reporter for CBS News in Phoenix, emceed the event; David Mixner, activist extraordinaire and a contemporary of Harvey Milk, gave an inspiring keynote address.

Last but not least, as the BDU blog (and sports) are always on my mind...I even managed to score (pun intended!) a picture [below] with 2006 Olympic Ice Dancer, Ryan O'Meara. O'Meara shared his story as the evening's prelude speaker. Be on the lookout for a future post featuring O'Meara, who's agreed to let me interview him!

A few more pictures...

With eight-time (count it...that's 16 years, folks) Arizona Legislator Ken Cheuvront (left) and Phoenix City Council Member Tom Simplot.

With Kyrsten Sinema, who visited Duke in February.

With keynote speaker, activist, political strategist and contemporary of Harvey Milk, David Mixner.

With Arizona's Attorney General and Gubernatorial Candidate, Terry Goddard.

I did it!

Yall already know that I came to my homeland with a MISSSION (thanks Chantel!)

I'm not religious and resent the fact that much of the support for LGBT people in San Antonio is done through churches. I personally do not feel comfortable going to church or church related events. I think non-religious as well as religious folks should have access to this kind of support.

Unfortunately I developed activists block. I had sent e-mails to coffeeshops and community centers to no avail. Last night I bypassed my pride and e-mailed a slew of LGBT friendly churches that I found in an online directory. This morning three e-mailed back saying I could use their space for an LGBT youth discussion group.

One pastor in particular lamented the dearth of resources for LGBT youth in San Antonio. He, along with some other pastors, was trying to start a religious group for LGBT youth. He could get the message out to members of gay-friendly parishes across San Antonio. Most importantly, he promised me access to a large meeting place equipped with state-of the art games like ping-pong.

I was wholly unprepared for this to happen so quickly. I did what anyone in my situation would do: I created a Facebook group. Now the group has almost thirty members. I have sent e-mails to arts organizations, synagogues, HIV/AIDS organizations, meditation centers- every place I think will lend me a sympathetic ear.

I would like to contact high school GSAs (does anyone know if an online directory exists?) and reach out to all sides of town. I want people to hear about and have access to this group whether they live on the Northside, Southside, Eastside or Westside. The highways in San Antonio can take you anywhere. Unfortunately, public transportation is limited and doesn't yet exist in the newer parts of town. I love that the church is located near San Antonio College in the downtown area.

I know this was a simple step that required no high-tech skill or grant-writing ability. Yet for some reason it hadn't been done before (correction: I have since learned is has been done before, it just didn't last.) I can't wait to see how this group develops and meet some more amazing people.

For those of yall who found this via Google and want details about the group: the first meeting will be Thursday June 17th at 6:00 PM at the Cove. Check out the Facebook group San Antonio LGBT Youth Discussion Group. Please RSVP for the event. I look forward to meeting you!