Every Family Forward: Solidarity and community for LGBTQ+ families
How can we build solidarity with and community for LGBTQ+ families?
I appeared alongside Krista Scott from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Sade Dozan from Borealis Philanthropy for a wide-ranging discussion of LGBTQ+ families in this moment.
We discussed community, legibility, looking beyond protection to possibility, care as a strategy, and the practice of curating joy.
Here's a little snippet of something I said:
A fear that I have is that we will end up in a situation where we can only tell one story.
Narratively, I experience myself as being a little bit backed into a corner, in the sense that, our families are under attack, which they are. We need to talk about that. We need to talk about these things that are happening and their negative impacts. But where does that leave room for us to talk about what our lives are like outside of that? Where does that leave room for us to talk about our feelings of joy, of empowerment, and of new discoveries? And specifically, where does that leave room for us to push that narrative about what our families are and can be.
This is a moment where there are a lot of concerns on the table from a political and policy perspective that we have to look at and address strategically from that perspective. But I also want us to tend to our imaginations and to our sense of possibility, and to not forget what our families are and can be and could be, and how we can look at things in a more expansive way.
Related reading:
The Right to Care for Those We Love
A report of the TGNC Families Think Tank.
Finn Schubert