June is not an uncomplicated month for us as a multi-racial, intergenerational, working class LGBTQ southern organization and kinship network. The start of summer brings with it LGBTQ Pride Month, it brings SONG Gaycation, and our need as LGBTQ family to celebrate our lives and each other in public a little more than usual en masse. Together we hold Juneteenth to recognize the abolition of slavery and the deep memory too of the massacre at Emanuel AME church in Charleston last year. And now we hold in our hearts those slain at Pulse Club in Orlando.
Pulse, the club itself, represents some of the best of SONG’s principles and some of the best of our LGBTQ Southern traditions. It’s a space cultivating LGBTQ sanctuary, fortified by cross-race, cross-class relationships, aiming itself as an institution of joy and refuge for so many of us from the daily trials and tribulations we face. The owner of Pulse vowed to reopen to, “keep our hearts beating and our spirit alive.” Like so many before her, LGBTQ people are answering the call to each other to say, “I will harbor you.”
They Put a Target On Our Backs
As justice seeking, trans and queer people we know the blessing and the curse that our religious, spiritual, and faith based traditions offer us. Our traditions, whether we are born into them or claim them, are not monolithic. We know the feeling of exile from our churches, mosques, temples, and communities for who we love, the bodies we carry, and for our beliefs. We have seen and felt the scapegoating and wedging of communities before that use gender and sexuality to divide around race and ethnicity. We have lived transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny drowned in anti-Black and anti-immigrant violence meant to blame and divide communities in the name of politics and control. This classic right wing tactic in the US, and now exported globally, uses our queer and trans bodies to turn our own racial and ethnic communities against us, to justify increased policing and targeting of Black, immigrant, Latinx, and Muslim communities, and to build their own political platforms and power based on our suffering and death.
For decades, the right wing, and especially the Christian Right, has put a target on our backs. Their strategies of division and co-optation seep into the strategies of LGBTQ leaders and organizations who are fighting to be part of the status quo contributing to: prioritizing issues like marriage over freedom from violence; misinformation and ignorance that leads to blame of certain non-white racial, ethnic, and religious groups in moments of crises; and the call for increased policing in the name of security. The multiple dimensions of our lives as LGBTQ Black, Latinx, immigrant, indigenous, and people of color centers our experience in calling forth our vision for liberation in our lifetimes. Vision grounded in our bones and our souls knows that police do not make us safer, that Muslims are not the curators of violence against us, and that immigrants and refugees are not a threat to our lives. But we have also lived to know what refuge feels like in the sanctity of spaces we have created together.
SONG’s call to protect and defend our communities rings truer and truer. A vision of a world free from fear, of liberation in our lifetime will not happen idly, without our active resistance, without our organizing, without us holding ourselves and each other, without guarding our spirits and our bodies, without forging leadership, alliances and relationship, without brushing aside ego for the sake of our people. The relentless rising tide of bigotry and violence through culture and policy wars on our communities requires us to remember that our visions mean more when we move together because we are the key to each other’s survival and liberation. Let us hold collective memory of all the ways we resist, of all the ways we have moved forward before, and of all the ways we plan on getting to a world free from fear. Let that memory inform our path forward towards the best of what we can imagine is waiting for us.
Read More from SONG
One Rise, One Fall: Organizing, Resisting, and Grieving for Pulse
Pulse: Lessons from the Gay Club toward Collective Liberation
from SONG member Cazembe Jackson
From Charleston to Orlando: Reflections on Massacre in a Time of Backlash
from SONG staff Elias H. Lyles
One Rise One Fall Regional Membership Call
Join SONG family on solstice (the longest day of the year) to hold space together and to discuss rapid response and longer term organizing strategies to increase and expand our power, kinship, resiliency and safety. Please RSVP for call info HERE.
Since this past weekend so many of us are in need of solace, consoling, love. We’ve been reaching out to each other with experiences of anguish, a sense of futility in the work, despair, and isolation. And a deep need for connection, counsel, and care.
This Sunday, our groups will hold an hour of what we’re calling “spiritual solace” for LGBTQ movement people and our broader communities. It will not be a discussion. It will not be a strategy session. It will be an hour of prayer and blessing for the LGBTQ community by LGBTQ people of color who are spiritual leaders – ordained and non-ordained.
You can sign-up to receive the link here: http://bit.ly/sundaysolace
People who RSVP can join for the entire hour or just five minutes.
Co-sponsors include: Standing on the Side of Love (UUA), Southerners on New Ground, Mijente, the National LGBTQ Taskforce, Kindred Southern Healing Collective, and Auburn Seminary.
Some of our prayer givers so far are:
Paulina Helm-Hernandez, SONG
Cara Page, The Audre Lorde Project
Terna Gyado, MASGD
Ricky Cintron
Rev. Alicia Forde, UU
Malachi Garza, Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY)
Sokari Brown, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective
Lisa Anderson, Auburn Seminary
Imam Daaiyee
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Rev. Candy Holmes, MCC
Rev. Maricris Vlassidis, UU
Rev. Rodney McKenzie, National LGBTQ Task Force
