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BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published February 11, 2010

Hundreds of high school and college students and community organizers from all across the nation came together last Tuesday in Dallas, Texas to promote the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender social justice movement at the annual Creating Change Conference. Among this group were Anjali Jaiman ’10, Watufani Poe ’13 and Luis Peñate ’13, all three of whom are current members of Swarthmore’s COLORS, a closed campus group for queer students of color.

The conference started in 1988.

Sponsored and organized by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, it aimed to drive the focus of participants towards the intersectionality between LGBT issues and other forms of discrimination, including race, socioeconomic status, religion and disability.

“A lot of times, I’ve had to wrangle with the fact that I feel like sometimes my race clashes with my sexual orientation,” said Poe, who, like Peñate, was a first-time attendee at the conference and was introduced to this gathering by Jaiman, who participated last year. “At the conference, I got to learn that the intersectionality between race and sexual orientation was not as clashing as I had viewed before.”

After applying and subsequently receiving funding from Fierce, an organization based in New York City dedicated to shaping young leaders in the LGBT movement, these three students participated in a variety of workshops at the conference aimed at building their leadership and organization skills.

Topics of these discussion-based workshops include Homophobia and the Black Church, Intersections of Disability and Economic Justice in the Queer Movement, Multilingual Accessibility and Justice and the Black Panther Party, an organization of the 1960s and 1970s consisting of African-Americans who aimed to spread Black Nationalism, said Peñate.

Organizers of particular workshops established ground rules before each discussion to facilitate the positive flow of ideas. For example, in the Black Panther workshop, there were three rules: being open, no judging each other or the Black Panther movement itself, and stepping up then stepping back to allow for equal participation.

The three students said that not once did they feel as if their voices were suppressed by other attendees.

“In most of the workshops I went to, I felt very candid and felt like there wasn’t judgment towards me because there’s this sense that these people were coming together on issues that they cared about; they were going to these workshops because they care about politicizing their identities and activism,” Poe said.

This year, the conference was more diverse than in previous years, Poe said.

This was an intentional choice made by Fierce and the National Task Force in order to highlight the importance of diversity on all levels in the LGBT movement. For the most part, this diversity allowed for the free expression of a wide range of ideas and opinions, Poe said.

“One thing that I’m always faced with is at the conference there are people coming from very different backgrounds who understand their LGBT identity very differently and make connections with other identities,” Jaiman said.

Instead of just identifying oneself in terms of race, class, gender and sexuality, Jaiman realized that there were other lines along which LGBT people strongly identified, such as able-bodiedness and immigrant status. The characterization of these identities sparked discussions of disability and immigrant reform throughout the conference.

The diversity of the people at the conference also exposed the three students to new ways of approaching the LGBT social movement.

“I went in with pretty set ideas of what the queer movement was and the conference definitely opened my eyes to the idea of becoming more progressive and more radical and more inclusive of other people,” Peñate said.

Near the end of the conference, Peñate and his colleagues sat in on a panel of LGBT youth of color that stressed the value of understanding the obscure issues that are sometimes suppressed by the mainstream movement. Certain matters such as immigration reform, homelessness, sex education and HIV/AIDS as related to LGBT issues were brought into focus.

“In my opinion, mainstream LGBT organizing is pretty white and pretty middle class and the issues are not relevant to a lot of people’s lives, particularly young people, because the focus is on marriage or ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell,’” Jaiman said.

Tension arose in the panel, however, when some aggravated members of mainstream organizations, those that are most prevalent in the media, got up and left during the middle of a panel, said Jaiman.

For all three Swarthmore participants, the most memorable part of the Creating Change Conference took place on the last days when they attended a workshop hosted by Vogue Evolution, a dance group that competed on MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew. “They come out of this thing called ‘house ball culture’ in New York City where vogueing kind of came into being,” Jaiman said. “They were talking about how to do outreach about HIV/AIDS to queer people of color in New York City and how you do that through art and dance.”

Vogueing, a type of modern dance that incorporates model-like poses, is widespread in the gay ballroom scene in major cities across the country. On the very last day of the conference, Vogue Evolution treated participants of the conference to an energy-rich dance performance.

Having attended this conference, Poe and Peñate, both members of Student Council, hope to use some of the leadership and organization skills they acquired to promote more activism across the campus and to encourage more freedom of expression.

“We need to fight for what’s right,” Poe said. “We need to fight against oppression anywhere.”

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