Pride Month!

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who showed support at the June 10th Dreams of Hope fundraiser!! The Community House Church is a beautiful space with an over-abundance of genuinely nice people. Wow, those Dreams of Hope kids too...It takes a lot to be so professional, while candid, and deliver a great performance. I also really loved how comfortable audience-members felt in sharing some personal and touching stories how they really needed something like Dreams of Hope when they were younger and are still feeling the pain of bullying years later. I felt honored to be sitting with the young adults of Dreams of Hope and may have teared up once or twice...

The feeling at Community House reminded me of a film screening I went to with my partner, her sister and a friend on June 9th at the WQED studios.

Two Spirits: "Fred Martinez was one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at 16. This film explores the life and death or a boy, who was also a girl, and the essentially spiritual nature of gender."

First of all may I just say that I love WQED! Deborah Acklin, WQED's president and chief executive officer, spoke to us at the beginning about WQED being such a great place to work, with a rich history in bringing a diversity of perspectives to communities. She spoke of Mr. Rogers and his commitment to making television nurturing and educational. I never knew WQED was the first! The room was nearly full of people and chilly.

The film was beautiful and showed a variety of perspectives, although it was at times too dramatic. The best parts were the close-ups of Fred's mother speaking about her son and her very real awareness and feelings about him. I like that the directors chose to include a lot of the history of the oppression of and brutality against native peoples in this country.

After the film, a member of the transgender community, a member of the American Indian community and a member of the film community sat on a panel and a moderator asked questions to each. Then the audience was asked to provide questions. One older man spoke for a long time (and maintained most people's interest the whole time) about how Paganism (which he actively practices) allows for much more celebration of the body, of gender fluidity and or sexuality than nearly every other major religion in the world. How sad that so much torture and "justified" hatred is promoted by religions throughout history...I spoke to this man after the Q&A session and thanked him for sharing personal stories of overcoming bullying and discrimination and living through the AIDS epidemic. I see a need for more inter-generational connections in the queer community. There is conflict for sure. Older gays tend to think only in terms of gay and straight and many men are often blatantly sexist. Younger folks invoke the wrath of older gays, who believe we all don't know how good we have it. And there is this big gap in our community--everyone that died of AIDS, is dying. Not to mention all the other ways we are divided as a community.

I raised my hand at one point and said how tired I am of seeing films about trans people who are murdered, are murderers, or who kill themselves. I outed myself and I asked why aren't we seeing more films of queer people who survive? I can't really remember now what they said. But something like--these traumatic stories are effective, and who wants to watch a movie about a a boring well-adjusted person anyway? I guess also that there are so many of these hard stories to tell and they deserve to be told--all of them.

After the event I had my picture taken with Mr. Rogers, the dinosaur out front.

Pride weekend was emotionally fraught, thinking about what we all had to endure to make it to this point, what still has to be done. I may have my personal issues with Pride's focus on getting wasted, corporate junk and apolitical-ness but when I saw that man in the parade in a cop uniform (not actually a cop unfortunately), hairy chest visible to the world, twirling with a baton and looking AMAZING, everyone cheering for him and taking his picture, and he kept his energy up the whole time...I just thought how great it all is, being out, loud and proud.

Dreams of Hope Benefit

On Friday, June 10 from 7 – 10 p.m. at Community House on Pittsburgh’s North Side, dynamic youth performers Dreams of Hope will share their talents and stories at their performance to kick off Pride Weekend in Pittsburgh!

Tickets are $5 for students, $10 general admission and $20 for champions for information and to purchase tickets via the PayPal button at http://transyouthleaders.blogspot.com. All proceeds benefit the Initiative for Transgender Leadership, a job training placement initiative for transgender youth.

Join us June 10, 7:00 PM Community House,

120 Parkhurst Street Pittsburgh, PA 15212 where

Dreams of Hope will entertain, engage, and teach us.

Dreams of Hope is teaming-up with ITL to benefit our Trans Youth Fellowship.  The fellowship provides professional skills, mentoring, and community impact.  We have raised nearly $13,000 of the total $20K needed to support (1) the Fellow (Rayden Sorock), (2) the Sponsoring Organization (Regional Internship Center of Coro Center for Civic Leadership), & (3) grassroots change of the region's transgender conversation.

Learn more: http://www.dreamsofhope.org/about

Philly Trans Health Conference & other updates

Hello all!

I haven't posted since before Memorial Day and I'm thinking about all this beautiful weather we've been having--with the exception of today's black skies and thunderstorms. Mem day weekend was spent attending the Justice for Jordan Miles protest downtown--http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/--where I saw Jen and her son; and biking almost 50 miles on the 29th. My partner Ocean read part of her as-of-yet unpublished novel at Fleeting Pages on the 30th.

Last week was crazy leading up to the Philly Trans Health Conference and I haven't had the chance to update in a while. A couple friends and I performed in a band called Gutter Glitter on June 2nd. So much fun playing for that crowd full of friends! We opened for Kaia Wilson, former lead singer of Team Dresch and The Butchies. She sang a bunch of songs that she wrote 15 years ago and totally charmed the crowd. Here's a pic of our band!

 

So the morning after our performance, Ocean, two friends and I loaded up the car and drove to Philly. We arrived around noon on the second day of the conference. Unfortunately missed Chaz Bono's Q&A. So much fun to pack a convention center with the trans and queer community and allies galore! I attended some okay workshops and some great workshops, and one lame workshop. But each taught me a lot about leading a workshop: the presenter/attendee dynamic, pacing & organization, keeping questions and comments on track, etc. I wish I could have gone to more workshops. It seemed that for every one I attended, I felt like I was missing 2 or 3.

On Saturday 12:45pm I led a workshop called "Bringing Our Whole Selves to Work" for about 25 people. Adorably, the parents of a trans youth introduced themselves to me and said they wanted to know more about what their child could expect in employment. There was a range of folks in attendance--some in the corporate world, some in the non-profit sector, some unemployed, even one outspoken Republican. Bobby was there to give support (thanks!) and one of my friends too. 

First I started off with introductions and describing what the workshop was going to be like. Then I allowed the attendees to introduce themselves to each other, and everyone was enthusiastic. Then they filled out an "Identities Worksheet" with 20 categories like gender expression, class, communication style and I asked a couple people to read their lists out loud. I was trying to get at the idea across that there are lots of identities we each have, some of them may give us a lot of grief in the workplace, others we may never think about. Next I surveyed the group in regards to the parts of themselves they feel like they can and can't bring to work. We picked that apart for a while: What is it about where you work that allows you to be out about being a liberal? What is it about where you work that makes it difficult to come out about your sexuality?

Then we got into categorizing workplace barriers into three groups: POLICY, PHYSICAL and CULTURE. This got tricky because a dress code may fall into all three: the dress code may be part of a policy, it affects the physical environment of the workplace and the workplace culture may affect what is and isn't appropriate to wear.

We ended with sharing strategies for solving problems at work; some people shared success stories too. I hope that people left with a new or modified framework for thinking about their problems at work and how to solve those problems. Additionally, in hearing other peoples' stories of workplace discrimination and difficulties, perhaps we all came away with a greater sense of what our community members are dealing with.

After that, I networked a bit and attended one of the plenary lectures on global transgender issues (really putting things into perspective--check out http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/ for more info) and watched the movie Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria which was AMAZING. All in all a great weekend in Philly.