My blog is home to several kinds of writing. You can find talks like the keynote on Queering Leadership that I gave at Yale University—it was later featured on the Queering Leadership episode of the UnLeading Project.
You’ll find the articles I write for Xtra Magazine, where I share personal essays like this one about co-parenting with three other queer people. I also write empowering, research-based articles on topics like Queering Death and how we can build intergenerational communities where queer and trans older adults can thrive.
As a queer femme who came of age in communities of Leatherdykes, queer perverts and witches, knives have a way of grabbing my attention. In this spirit, I have engaged with Perry’s question as a means of sharpening my thinking on what I have learned about holding power and creating change in LGBTQ+ health.
What is my knife? What is yours? What becomes possible when we wield them together in service of queer and trans survival and liberation?
Read MoreIt reminds me of the rich legacies of community care and mutual aid that have helped our communities survive across generations. This everyday preparedness is an important strength to recognize and draw on as we gear up for the bigger disasters that might affect us in the future.
Read MoreLike LGBTQ2S+ people ourselves, our grief is powerful and sacred. I dream of a world where we feel equipped to take hold of its transformative potential, directing it to more revolutionary ends. I dream of a world where we all feel supported to embrace grief’s wild unruliness and myriad expressions and where no one asks us to deny it or box it in.
Read MoreMany LGBTQ2S+ people connect with ourselves and others through pleasure, eroticism, our bodies and our senses. We bring creativity, playfulness, ritual and sacredness to these experiences, which can be spaces of healing, discovery and enjoyment. While not everyone wants or needs to bring these facets of queerness to dying or mourning, for others they’re a vital part of imagining a fitting death or the process of moving through grief.
Read MoreWe know how to advocate for ourselves and each other in the face of systemic and institutional gaps, failures, barriers and harms and are skilled at building community-led alternatives to those systems and institutions, often with limited resources. My hope is for us to become more capable of intentionally applying these skills to death and dying as a means of enacting our self-determination, resisting oppression and caring for ourselves and each other.
Read MoreAs a community, LGBTQ2S+ people are skilled at understanding and articulating who we are and what we care about, navigating systems not designed for us, maximizing pleasure while reducing harm and forming networks of care and kinship to help us survive. These are all skills and knowledge that can be applied to end-of-life planning—even if you haven’t thought about this stuff before, you’re starting from a place of strength.
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