5 Days in the Queer Bubble: Creating Change 2018

I’m sure some journalist who is more skilled than I am can write about the 30th Creating Change conference that just wrapped up in Washington DC in a way that encapsulates the entire experience. But I want to do it via the bullet points that form the highlights of my experience:

• So many young people! (And that’s a good thing) As I walked across the lobby level of the Marriott Wardman Park hotel I repeatedly heard phrases like “as I was walking across campus,” “our campus queer group,” etc. Yes, that did make me feel old, but so what? There’s nothing wrong with being old. Plus I’m heartened that so many young queer people are being moved to activism.
• I end up hanging out with my NYC friends when we’re all out of town. Everyone in NYC is so busy and so exhausted that it’s not always easy to make plans. So it was great to walk into the hotel restaurant my first night at Creating Change and run into two good friends from NYC. We ended up spending hours together over dinner and having a great time.
• Because I had so many work meetings, I purposely chose workshop sessions that were fun and nourishing. Six grantee meetings, one meeting with coworkers, a funder meeting and an evaluation workshop (plus prep meeting) with two awesome co-presenters. Enough work already! So I attended sessions that were less about work and more about what I wanted to learn and discuss. I also went to Shabbat services and visited the lovely Elder Hospitality Suite that boasted really good, and free, coffee.
• The lexicon of identities based on Asexuality and Aromanticism is relatively new, still developing and not always easy for me to grasp. But it reminds me that at 62 (in a few days) I’m still learning and that’s a good thing. And I’m learning a lot from younger folk.
• Both the young and the old are hungry to talk to one another. We need to keep figuring out how and where to do that. And never forget that it’s a two-way dialogue that goes beyond learning history and mentoring. Young people come with an important and fresh perspective.
• More of us are creating family outside a heteronormative model of two parents and children, and that’s good thing that we need to talk about more often. Luckily, the amazing Andrew Solomon (Task Force board member and author of the incredible book “Far from the Tree”) is working on a non-fiction anthology. But as I sat listening in a session on alternative models of family, I realized that our fiction needs to reflect this too. Chosen family was a sub-theme of my third novel, “Getting Back.” I need to keep writing about this and hope my sister and brother authors will as well.
• There are a lot of adults who grew up with LGBT parents. They have their own terms of identity and their own perspectives. We need to listen to them and not just to their parents. I learned that my gay son can be termed (if he so desires) “second generation.” And my granddaughters are “GOLAGErs” (grandchildren of LGBTs). I wonder if there’s a t-shirt?
• Lesbians and queer women are debating among ourselves about whether there is “lesbian erasure” at Creating Change and elsewhere and whether we have a responsibility to do something about it. I still maintain that queer women have not yet had the important cross-generational, cross-race, cross-gender identity conversation about what it means in 2018 to identify as a lesbian. What images does that evoke? How are those images (or triggers) different for women of color, for young women, for trans women? What models can we learn from that are showing us a new way of asserting lesbian identity without falling into past exclusionary practices? (I’ve written about this here.)

All of this and I still haven’t mentioned the plenaries:

• As I stated in a separate Facebook post, Urvashi Vaid’s 5 points about tyranny shows why she is still one of the most important and inspiring visionary thinkers working in social justice movements.
• Andrea Jenkins, newly elected to the Minneapolis City Council as its first African American transgender member, is a dazzling poet!
• The State of the Movement plenary remains on the most important moments at Creating Change and Kierra Johnson, the National LGBTQ Task Force’s new Deputy Executive Director is poised to become of one the movement’s most incredible leaders. Combining her talents with those of the wonderful Rea Carey’s can only mean a good future for both the Task Force and the movement.
• Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (and the coterie of trans women and men of color who accompanied her onto the stage) not only deserved her award for longevity in the movement, she deserves our unending gratitude for her pioneering work on prison reform and all the ways she has made a difference in the lives of the women she calls “her girls.”
• And finally, there’s Sue Hyde. I’m reminded of a line from a Ferron song that goes “40 years is 40 years.” In the case of Sue, it becomes “30 years is 30 years” — an incredible achievement of bringing Creating Change to cities across the country since the first small gathering in 1988 up through to this almost 4000 person conference in 2018. And not only that, Sue has an activist resume at the Task Force and in Massachusetts that is extraordinary. Now she’s hopping the fence into my territory of philanthropy and I welcome her clear and insightful thinking.

So Creating Change is once again a wrap. The bubble I lived inside for almost 5 days had burst but it has not disappeared. I carry a piece of it with me into my wider world where it will sustain me over these many months until I have the opportunity to return to the bubble next year.

(from top left clockwise) Sue Hyde, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Rea Carey, Kierra Johnson, Urvashi Vaid, Andrea Jenkins