My Plenary Remarks at Creating Change
3 Feb
Hey folks, sorry I been gone so long, but I was in Denver al last week for the 21st annual Creating Change conference, this year in Denver. Bilerico.com just published the speech I delivered at the HIV/AIDS plenary at Creating Change on Saturday, January 31, 2009. My other co-panelists, Marjorie Hill, PhD (Executive Director, Gay Men’s Health Crisis), Bishop Yvette Flunder (UCC Ark of Refuge, San Francisco), & David Ernesto Munar (VP of Development & Communications, AIDS Foundation Chicago), were quite brilliant!
Excerpt below. Go to Bilerico to get the full text:
First and foremost, the time where we can pretend that there is no viable, credible or visible Black (or other POC) queer leadership is over. While we certainly need to be developing leaders, leadership per se, is not the problem. We have lost of leaders, but leaders with no base that they’re accountable to. Because what little Black LGBT infrastructure that exists, is largely due to HIV/AIDS service delivery, we are able to reach lots of people in our organizations as “clients”, but are rarely engaged as potential leaders, organizers or members of our organizations. We need the investment of both progressive philanthropy and LGBT funders to help build the capacity and infrastructure of organizations to move from strict service delivery to doing community organizing, leadership development, and base-building.
Lastly, as long as the White-led mainstream LGBT movement is invested in seeing itself as the only credible leadership or it’s organizations the only ones doing “the real work” or having “real impact” we will continue to invisibilize the work that Black and other POC organizations are doing on the ground, in spite of real material obstacles. So every time the gay news media and organizations promote ideas of the gay community vs. the Black community, Black queers will continue to remain invisible, and assumes that Black queer people are not engaging in a battle against homophobia and transphobia in the Black community.
Here’s the last 3 minutes of the speech on Youtube:
Tags: creating change, essex hemphill, HIV, hiv/aids, kenyon farrow, marlon riggs, NGLTF, tongues untied
FIERCE!!! Thank you for speaking up and speaking out!
You go!!! I am glad you were given the floor. I hope people left thinking about what you said. The story you shared about the person who said “some people are fit to sing and dance,” that is terrible. So much for people to learn.
Great speech, Kenyon. You raised critical issues. I do so agree that our HIV organizations need to morph into community service and political organizing tools. Interestingly, many of them started out that way, but AIDS took us by storm. The need to provide those services was so pressing and the funding was geared toward public health, not human rights. We haven’t done enough to set our own agenda, rather than responding to the shrill cries of an epidemic and the demands of external funders.