Welcome everybody.
Welcome everybody to the panel on the film Fire and Flood: Queer Resilience in the Era of Climate Change.
This panel was inspired by Vanessa Radditz's film "Fire and Flood: Queer Resilience in the Era of Climate Change." The documentary examines two climate related disasters from 2017:
Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico and the fires in Santa Rosa, California through the lens of the queer communities who experienced them.
Thank you Vanessa for joining us this evening. Before we begin discussion. I would like to make a few acknowledgments.
First, this panel has been made possible through the American Library Association's Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change pilot grant program, which Fondren's
Green Team won last fall. Our programming through this grant centers on intersectionality and environmental justice.
I would also like to recognize our many partners in the creation of this event.
So thank you to Rice's Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management,
Rice's Center for Environmental Studies, Rice's Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, Rice Environmental Society, and Houston Citizens'
Environmental Coalition. Our panelists for this evening are Vanessa Radditz, director of the documentary; Kennedy Loftin, chief development officer at the Montrose Center; and Rice anthropology grad student Kriistin Gupta. Welcome everybody.
So first we would love for all of the panelists to introduce themselves. Tell us about your current work and what inspires you to do this work. We can start with Vanessa.
Great Thank you so much Ashley. It is really a pleasure to be here tonight.
You know,
Texas has been in the news too many times this past year, so my heart has definitely been with you.
So, my name is Vanessa. I use the them pronouns and I'm currently calling to you from the traditional lands of the Muskogee Creek Nation within the traditional hunting grounds of the Cherokee Nation
in what is now called Athens, Georgia, and I am a graduate student at the University of Georgia, where I am in the geography department and I'm working on a dissertation loosely titled towards Queer Eco Justice Studies so this film is now a major component of my work.
One other thing I just I want to say is so you know yesterday was trans day of visibility, so I feel
very compelled to share with you all. you know I use them pronouns, identify as gender queer and you know right now I'm presenting
pretty femme and it's pretty easy to just slip into you know you see one presentation and you think that's what that person is and
no, this is just one presentation of many that i've had over the course of my life. and I hope that there will be many more.
Because I contain multitudes so I'm really grateful for all the trans community leaders and particularly black trans women of color who have paved the path for
me to sit here and be the out and proud for for who I am and to break the the binaries that are constricting us and actually at the root of climate change. So great to great to be here. I'll pass it on to-- how about Kennedy.
Hi it's great to be here. thank you Vanessa. My name is Kennedy Loftin. I was born in Houston and grew up in East Texas. and then, when I came out to my family, which was
fairly conservative, I experienced housing insecurity. And it was during that time of lost privilege, where a lot of things changed and I decided I want to dedicate my life and channel my activism into nonprofits that impact underserved communities.
I moved to Miami, Florida, and I was working with organizations called Best Buddies, working with individual intellectual disabilities, and during a time period of a series of hurricanes-- Hurricane Ike here in Houston and many others that hit Florida,
it became clear to me because of climate change, I did not want to live or grow old in Miami. So I moved back to my home in Houston and I started working for an organization called Interfaith Ministries, working with Meals on Wheels, refugee relocation, and disaster preparedness and response.
And then I finally got the call from my [?] organization, the Montrose Center, which is one of the nation's largest LGBTQ resource centers.
And I got to come over here and bring skills I picked up along the way. And in my work here we do a lot of things-- we serve everything from youth to seniors in their rainbow years.
But, specifically in the disaster space
we have had a lot of work to do. We really saw all the issues after Hurricane Katrina and
the individuals coming here, specifically intersectional
and trans folks that came to Houston and how they really fell through the cracks of disaster response.
So learning from that, during Hurricane Harvey we launched the LGBTQ Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund.
And over the course of that fund we raised $2.3 million to give back, mainly indirect financial assistance and services and response to Hurricane Harvey. We currently have our Covid 19 fund, which has secured $2.1 million.
And in other ways that we're expanding our work and really working to help vulnerable communities, the vulnerable queer folk, live better. We just opened the nation's largest LGBTQ affirming affordable senior housing complex
in the traditionally African American neighborhood of Third Ward and it was a $26.5 million build, and we have our first 59 of 130 seniors already moved in. And so I love working with the Montrose Center. I'm very passionate about this topic.
And I if I can I will pass it over to Krista
Hi everybody, first and foremost, I just want to thank
the organizers of this event
for creating a space for what I'm sure is going to be a lovely and very necessary conversation, especially as we are all living through multiple and overlapping crises these days.
So my name is Kriistin and I am a PhD candidate in the anthropology department here at Rice, and I am currently residing on unceded Duwamish land, Seattle.
My dissertation research follows the work of American end of life doulas, in particular a collective of queer anti capitalist practitioners
who see death care as a predominantly oppressive space and are trying to imagine more ecologically and communally minded funeral options.
So I come to this work as a bisexual woman who grew up on stories about the AIDS epidemic and, as I got older and kind of came into my own queerness, I became very interested in death, as this site
you know that is very universal but also incredibly unique, especially for LGBTQ communities. So based on this interest and kind of my own personal commitments to social justice
outside of my dissertation I have an ongoing archival project that traces how queer people have responded to discrimination from the American funeral industry
from the 1980s onwards and so much of what I have found so far are these really beautiful but also tough stories about care, creativity and mutual aid and really finding practices that feel so familiar to those featured in Vanessa's really beautiful film.
Thank you, everybody.
for introducing yourselves, so we are going to
have a few kind of categories that we're going to have questions for. We'll talk about resiliency talk about diversity and we'll also have more queer specific questions.
So the first thing that I wanted to ask is how do you define resilience and anybody can answer this question, but that is a very prominent word in the film and just in discussions on climate change in general.
I feel confident starting this one off and I'm
very excited to to hear how you all engage with this word as well because it's a pretty tricky and slippery word these days as well, so I do want to acknowledge that.
So my my favorite definition of resilience is from Movement Generation Justice and Ecology project located out in
Oakland and they are you know, basically, a think and do tank for the climate justice movement and they define resilience as a reflective, responsive and reciprocal relationship to place.
A reflective, responsive and reciprocal relationship to place and I love this for so many reasons. First,
because like I said resilience can be pretty slippery and sometimes in climate conversations resilience is used and kind of co opted to mean
large multi million dollar adaptation projects like sea walls that would really just only protect economic capitals like New York, while the rest of us have to fend for ourselves,
a phenomenon that's increasingly called a climate apartheid so sometimes the word resilience is used in a way that's really just reinforcing a lot of the inequities
at the heart of this, so what Movement Generation's definition does is it says that you know, while we need both-- we certainly need climate adaptation,
and we certainly need climate mitigation, right, the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases and in increased sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere.
Both of those obviously are are necessary but they're not sufficient on their own. And one question that they've posed the just kind of sticks in my in my brain is
what are the most effective ways to conduct mitigation and adaptation, so that they reinforce each other?
So instead of seawalls, how can we adapt in ways that also reduces our dependence on fossil fuels. And since climate disasters cause ruptures in the status quo right and they offer a new ways for us to see how
these systems of inequity work, it reveals them and it offers us an opportunity to imagine the world anew and so with those opportunities, how can we rebuild in a way
that offers us a reflective, responsive and reciprocal relationship to place and that's that's really what sticks in my head. So it's not so much about,
bouncing back-- like back to what, what is normal right-- but it's a balancing towards and thinking about what that towards is that we need to use these these shocks
to create new worlds.
Lots of other thoughts, but I want to hear, I want to hear some of the other panelists what they what they think on this word.
Kriistin, if I can jump in and Sasha I just want to acknowledge you in the chat there's a lot about the definition about the ability to move forward and progress after adversity.
With all the considerations you listed here that really aligns a lot with the definition that comes up for me at the Montrose Center.
I think that the Montrose Center because our purpose is to empower that we deliver services and take a very action approach to resilience and
we have to start really acknowledging that inside of the queer community, that we have lower incomes, you have higher rates of hunger.
you have increased food insecurity. When I get people tours and I explain that 27% of LGBTQ adults are food insecure, a lot of people are not aware that stat is real or that is something my entire community is facing.
From higher unemployment to high levels of discrimination and just greater vulnerability to homeless. And that's across the board, not even talking about the most vulnerable intersection of gender, race and other elements. We see it just compounding.
And so, in a lot of ways resilience is a story of the queer community.
From each of epidemics and crisises we've faced. from being criminalized,
from cross dressing
ordinances and sodomy laws, and I mean I remember graduating from university and I date myself and being, it not being legal for me to be gay. And Lawrence v. Texas was not overturned until 2003 and that feeling of going from being what I internalized as being a criminal to being...
At that point. I feel like I can now be more of a full citizen, so this is toughness and this moving forward.
Very much to Vanessa's point-- not getting back to anything that was particularly good but consistently moving forward to a better ideal.
And something much more equitable. A rights movement that includes our civil rights movement,
eco-justice movement and all of them working together and seeing those linkages. For me and for the Montrose Center resilience is actually one of our core values, and I think that that's not surprising, because it is so big into the queer community.
Yeah I will just echo
some of those themes. You know I very much agree with Vanessa-- resilience is,
can be yes such a slippery term and so often, at least in my own research, it's really over the last few years, especially become
a phrase that is shorthand for preparedness, or you know specific sets of these you know techno economic measures that we can do
to mitigate climate crisis and so often, especially in particular circles, there really isn't an acknowledgement of the social and political inequalities that result in all of these differential vulnerabilities that Kennedy just mentioned.
So, for that reason, I think a lot of social scientists, including myself, oftentimes are very skeptical of resilience frameworks.
A lot of times these normative definitions of it don't do enough to politicize adaptation because they're not thinking about it in terms of this contested process
that can be really, really raw with issues of inequality, exploitation and violence, but I think, for me, you know something about the documentary really raised some important questions about how this term can be used and understood in ways that just really resonated.
So many moments in the film reminded me of something I came across recently on... Queer philosopher Kim Hall has this concept of radical hope or this kind of insistence on the potentiality of bringing about other you know more just ways of living and relating to each other.
And that just makes me ask like how might we think resilience differently.
If we follow the lead of Vanessa's interlocutors of you know, of Movement Generation
by approaching adaptation, as this relational process, you know, to place but also to each other in ways that are meant to foster
you know, not just adaptation to all of these really difficult situations that we are face facing right now and are going to continue to face,
but also doing so in ways that foster social transformation and imagine much more radical socio-environmental futures and you know I think that's a very different conversation than what was happening in a lot of other climate change focus areas or sciences.
Now, before we move on, I just want to comment on something.
Because
I really appreciated just
you know I approached this question and I dove straight into climate resilience and, but that is just reminding me I for years I've been hearing this different conversation on resilience from
you know, environmental movements and, especially, I did a lot of gardening and agriculture work.
And we talked a lot about how you know biodiverse ecosystems are more resilient and then you know I've been an out
queer person, since I was in middle school and in our GSA spaces and things like that we've we also have this long history of talking about resilience and talking about adaptation to the kinds of a
psychological resilience to the oppression that we deal with in our day to day and through some of the the experiences in the film with some of these folks, particularly when we're thinking about
ancestral plant medicines and different kinds of holistic care and community care I've been starting to see some of the ways in which, like how much
more powerful is this concept of resilience, if we consider both that the psychological, the mind-body and the earth land place
resilience all together and weaving that relationally so I just yeah I really appreciate the the the spectrum of of resilience that was that was shared here.
I would like to ask Vanessa a little bit about the
structure of the film.
What the thought process was behind the creation of the film and what we can learn from comparing California and Puerto Rico and fires and floods and basically different types of disasters across different spaces?
Right.
So first off the film was not planned in advance yeah it has really been an ongoing kind of
unfurling based on different personal experiences and relationships, so I want to tell a little bit of the story of the the origin story of the film, which was back in 2017
I was at the building resilient communities permaculture convergence in northern California. It's an annual tradition of people from across climate justice, environmental justice, but particularly
looking at people who are looking at how do we create a place and agriculture in more ecologically
sane and sustainable ways it, how do we live in alignment with ecological principles. So I was at this conference, and I was creating a space, called the queer magic tent, which was the first time at this
annual convergence that we'd had a place that was specifically dedicated to queer and trans people within this permaculture movement to come together and
build relationships and there was a library where you could find out more about queer ecologies and drink tea and an ancestors altar where you could sit and like learn more about
Harry Hay and the Radical Faeries and Zora Meale Hurston and the kinds of voodoo traditions that she studied. you know and just like deepen into our legacies and in this space. I met these two really incredible Puerto Rican
queer and femme folks who were there at the conference raising money and collecting seeds and solar panels to send back to
Puerto Rico because Hurricane Maria had just hit a couple weeks prior so you know I spent this weekend in deep conversation with them
about you know what were the experiences of queer and trans people on the island, all the way to like what were the experiences of farmers on the island and all of that was just weaving in.
And then Monday morning, last day of the conference we're taking down the tent and I wake up to the news that there are 13 fires surrounding us. The the sky is thick with smoke and we we hear that three of the four exits have been
evacuation routes are closed because of the fire and so we're just we're kind of just stuck in this bubble.
It's if you know northern California it's Hopland, and so there were fires up in Mendocino, fires in Napa, fires in Sonoma we were all at the same time.
At that point in time in 2017 they were the worst fires that have ever happened in California. Every year since then we've had the worst fires that have ever happened in California.
So that was really you know that's what shaped this the the film, it was these conversations
leading up to the fires that then shaped my perspective moving through the fires. And so that fall I started doing interviews with some of the people that I had done community response work with.
And that varied from like hanging out at the local LGBTQ Center to like chat with youth, who were coming back from the shelters with all kinds of crazy stories about things that were happening.
And, and also working on farms and harvesting
local produce to bring to the kitchens and evacuation shelters, including a Latina community garden that was you know...
Everyone had taken in as many families as they could in their own homes because the shelters are not safe places for undocumented people, so they you know these are these were all the things that that
they were just all together in my experience, and I was like this is a story that needs to happen, so I started doing interviews with the people that I'd
done response work with for a workshop at the Creating Change conference, so when you watch the film and you see those zoom
sections, those were the interviews from that fall. At that point, I didn't I didn't think that this was going to be a film. I thought it was going to be a workshop I was like I don't want to just have my voice telling the story.
I want to share the experiences of of multiple people. And then at that conference, you know people were telling me like this is this, this is the kind of story, we need
to like have in our intro to women and gender studies class like this is the story that we need to like talk to our youth group about climate change, like this is an important...
This would be helpful to us, there's no media about this, and so that that thought kind of lingered in my mind, for over a year and then
Tara actually from El Departamento de la Comida invited me to come out to Puerto Rico in 2019 and I said
yes, of course, and I put I'd written a bunch of grants. I didn't get any because I've never made a film before, go figure, you know, so I had been pretty deflated and then I got this invitation and I was like you know
I just put the the the put the whole trip on a credit card, not a wise move and, but I just put up a gofundme and it and it worked it.
People were really excited to see this happen, and here we are now with the you know within a couple months of going to Puerto Rico and back to California. I put together the draft that you
have access to and it's still an ongoing process of creation so I'm sharing the film as part of fundraising to finish it, but the finishing is a lot of work. I've been talking to people about their representation in the film,
asking them for their advice on the next phase. Over the course of 2020 I now have
all of these interviews with people that I did through Zoom on their experiences through you know
pandemic, earthquakes, police violence, protests,
the elections, another fire in California-- like it's 2020, right was obviously a big year and I have all of these stories now to figure out.
Well, you know how can I put these in a relationship to the film because what's happening through time are the same themes. So that's that was probably a little longer than you wanted, but.. Oh no here's here's here's the other thing that I really have to say is um,
So these these two near simultaneous climate disasters, why California and Puerto Rico besides just my own personal experience and that origin story.
Beyond that you know these these two climate disasters create a temporal link between very different geographies but, in doing so, they highlight the shared
histories of colonization, where you know both Puerto Rico and California were colonized first by Spain and later by the United States.
And this this the specific histories there are different but looking at the two together reveals the impact of these tangled colonial relations on bodies in the land.
And you know, this is not just historic. I think that the speakers in the film call on us to recognize that Puerto Rico is still a colony of the United States.
And that indigenous people of California are also still living under settler colonialism, where their very existence.
let alone their traditional ecological knowledge, is routinely invisible, so we have to take that very seriously.
And so, looking at fire and flood together across these very different geographies we see that some of the experiences of queer and trans people
across geographies, across disasters, there are some similar themes that come up and there are also some common strategies being deployed across social movements and resistance to you know not only cis-hetero patriarchy but colonialism.
Thank you so much for that. I really hope that most of our attendees were able to watch the film beforehand, if they haven't you should still have access to it, so I highly encouraged that you watch it.
So I think now be a good time to go more towards really specific queer challenges, so I would like to open up to ask what particular challenges do queer people face in climate emergencies and anyone can take this question and then I have more specific ones for each of the panelists.
I would really love to hear from your experience, Kennedy. I have plenty of thoughts on this, but you have direct experience with this.
Well, the Montrose Center never intended to be a disaster response and recovery organization, but big part of our mission is responding to.
And Katrina really comes to mind and was a defining moment for our organization because busloads of individuals from New Orleans, many of them
have the Trans experience coming in to big shelters and the levels of discrimination and demonization that they face.
And the Montrose Center being the largest LGBTQ org the calls we were getting and our response was reactive and we promised ourselves that we will be proactive.
And so we built a three tier plan to try to tackle the fact that our community faces this discrimination,
can't get clothes from the pile that is their gender identity, can't use the restrooms, don't feel comfortable in the sleeping shelters.
Then fall through the cracks of faith based disaster response organizations which come into the space are far too late and are mainly really set up for home owners,
people that are renting, not for the housing insecure, not for non traditional families. And inside of a cultural community where non traditional families are so important
and poverty is more common, it is, there are fewer resources. You know when when I first came out, for seven years, I couldn't go stay with my Aunt Gayle
you know until my family came around to my sexuality and so what we see is vulnerable members very quickly slip in like
really far out of housing insecurity, food insecurity and into really vulnerable places. We're talking about
the very few culturally competent and culturally humble organizations being overwhelmed or not being able to operate. People can't get their HRT, can't get their HIV medications. They cannot find a safe space for them to get [?].
And the way our country or the way we currently respond to these kind of crisis is not very effective, it is not grass roots up.
It is very top down. A large organization---won't name any of those names--will come in
and they'll hire people very quickly, they won't have connections to the communities, they'll try to pass money out and the money will start flowing in odd ways, and while that's happening, while that's been set up, sometimes three to six months.
our community is losing their housing. not able to feed themselves, not able to take care of [themselves?].
And so for any organization and for any justice movement really trying to get into the core the social determinants of health that are keeping our community held back, you've got to be ready, especially if you're almost any place in United States, these days, but if you're on
this coast, the Gulf Coast, you have to be ready to respond and help with direct financial assistance and case management.
One of the biggest things we do as a company, our community members into these other organizations do case management, so we can help them navigate these spaces, that are not particularly queer friendly.
There was a lot more to say, but I am going to take a breath there and toss it back.
Thank you so I'm going to ask Kriistin a question next. Climate disasters often bring feelings of despair and ending. How does the queer community response to these feelings differ from that of the broader society and what does community response to queer deaths look like?
That's a very meaty question. I could talk for a very long time.
You know it's very it's very true that climate disasters can bring about feelings of despair, you know for everyone.
You know, over the past decade, there has been increasing political acknowledgement of climate and grief, or what some are even calling solastalgia you know, which is a shorthand for distress over changing environments.
However, I think that the idea that the world is ending is something that speaks to privileged communities, much more than the marginalized.
And of course it's hard to just talk in blanket statements like queer community because you know we all experience such different forms of privilege or oppression or both at the same time, but oftentimes you know the the thought of apocalypse or death is something that has been perceived
you know, particularly by you know people who have money, people who are white, people who are in privileged spaces as something that is distanced from them
both in social terms but also in temporal and kind of geographical terms it's it's something out there that happens to other people, but of course that's not a luxury that everyone has. For some people. death is immediate, it's constant, it's ongoing.
As those in the film, you know really underline repeatedly, climate change in particular it's not this imagined future or the end of days scenario.
For many LGBTQ people it's happened and it's happening right now. You know, in particular queer people of color are unduly subject to its violences and all of the kind of accompanying social abandonment that can happen in the aftermath of something like a hurricane or a fire.
So I guess the way I want to phrase it as like this sense
that like we're on our own that I think you know we get at multiple points in the film but also you know, those of us who are in different organizing a queer spaces. That sense isn't new by any means, and there have been
so many moments in you know histories of various LGBT communities that no one was coming to save them, you know even
it's it's hard to not bring everything back you know to what we're currently experiencing, but even just the ways that you know
particularly the American government has responded to the pandemic is kind of a good example of that. You know know we've all been responsible for our own outcomes and well being, unfortunately, in some ways,
So so often, you know these differential experiences that marginalized communities have are really excluded from hegemonic discourses about death, you know, grief, mourning, loss, all of it.
You know, and I alluded to this a bit earlier, but there you know in my kind of archival work that I've been doing, recently, you know I found so many instances in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the US,
for example, where funeral homes refuse to handle the bodies of the dead or did so in a really undignified way,
you know, and that oftentimes left people to make arrangements for themselves.
I interviewed an elder recently, who told me this story of,
you know, a cemetery would not accept the body of their loved one, so they ended up having them cremated and then this person snuck into the cemetery at night
to inter their ashes, because that was the only way they felt like they could you know meet you know their loved one's wishes and what wasn't what they wanted, but it was the best thing they could do at the time, you know and that's kind of an extreme example of you know
of something in the kind of more you know, in the past, but you know those kinds of instances, and you know so many of the deaths that have happened
due to different climate disasters, you know they really can underline how important things that we talked about all the time in LGBTQ spaces like chosen family and mutual aid are so important, and especially in a time of crisis, they can be the only safety networks that people have.
So I think you know it's just for me, you know these kinds of conversations about the end of the world
it's really important for us to recognize our privilege and see where those narratives are coming from and try to qualify them a bit.
And then just really you know something yeah I keep on keep going to say it, but something that I love about the film is just reiterate how these forms of community are so important and really are going to be even more important as
our climates are likely going to worsen.
We have a question in the Q and A and I think it goes really well with this discussion. Amy asks how can somebody who is not a member of the queer LGBTQ Community or indigenous community
engage with them, or just learn more about their experience beyond this panel. She says she did not know very much about either until fairly recently.
But also does not want to impose herself on people just because she wants to learn more about them and their ideas.
And I think that Kennedy might be able to speak a bit towards an organizational approach to addressing these challenges and getting involved and
Vanessa might be able to speak to the challenges that might exist in expanding local community responses to larger scales and involving more people. So whoever would like to jump in first.
I'll just say really quickly. and I do want to hear from you Kennedy, is when it comes particularly to the intersections of
queerness and queer liberation and ecological justice,
the Queer Ecojustice project's website has a lot of introductory places that you can explore so that was the... The Queer Ecojustice project is a reading group I started with Desi Fontenot who works now with Movement Generation and
so on that website, you can find a lot of things that can get you some definitions on two spirit and the ways that two spirit communities have been involved in ecological justice movements. they can give you some introductions on
disability justice and the different ways that disability communities and body communities of care during all the time... exactly as Kriistin was saying that the crises of daily existence under late capitalism right so because of that. the kinds of community care is an important...
... it embodies important leadership that we need to turn to in this time of escalating climate crises. So for those kinds of intersections if you want to you know first get more
information and knowledge. I recommend going there. And then for how to get involved, particularly you know you have a great community center right here, where I'm sure they could use some wonderful volunteers and in the in the to echo an important phrase from Southerners on New Ground
transformation in the service of the work. You know, get involved and you'll learn over time and if you make a mistake,
allow yourself to be corrected and think about it and keep going.
And the Montrose Center--Vanessa's right--
we always need volunteers.
And I really appreciate the thoughtfulness of your question, because in a lot of ways, especially now that in a pandemic
you could be entering the space where there's a lot of trauma and the Montrose Center is very focused on trauma informed care and
even with that understanding there is such a desire and a need to bring in allies, there is no work at the Montrose Center that is done specifically and completely inside of the queer communities such as
the Senior Center, for example, was such a collaborative project between the Third Ward community, city government, so many allies. There are simply not enough resources, leadership and money inside of any of these justice movements for them to be insular.
And so,
One thing that the Montrose Center that I do is I help run the nonprofit incubator which we borrowed from my friends in the environmental movement, and so we incubate mainly
communities of color and trans organizations and we can never find board members and enough volunteers for the organizations that are coming up.
The need for infrastructure, specifically the queer community, but a lot of the underserved communities, we do not have the infrastructure.
Whether it's systemic racism or LGBTQ discrimination, we have not had the same length of time of other privileged communities to build the infrastructure that we need to respond.
The Montrose Center is the largest queer org in Houston and it's about a $10 million dollar organization and that's great, but the next largest organization is less than a million dollars.
And we can't, there's no way one organization with any leadership [mix?], with any focus on diversity, equity and inclusion could ever really reach the full needs and services that really help our community.
And so volunteer and join and any, any social justice and any justice movement needs more individuals. Just your interest and your passion--and it is a great way to learn.
You know I came from East Texas. I grew up in episode a Friday Night Lights and now I happily live in an episode of Pose. That's a big swing for me.
And there's a lot I learned along the way. I had to check my white, mainly cis presenting and male privilege and so many others along the way, but that journey is one of the joys of this whole path and so don't be afraid of that.
Thank you. So I would like to pivot a little bit
towards diversity. So there are many times that the in the film that resiliency is connected with diversity. There's also connections between biodiversity and other types of diversity.
So I was wondering if anybody would like to talk about the connections between biodiversity and other forms of diversity, whether it's actual gender identity
diversity and how we can promote and guide diversity to create resilient LGBTQ plus communities. or how we can use those ideas to help with the climate crisis.
I could. I could take this first unless anyone's just chomping at the bit to. Okay. So um yeah you know I really loved how this this term of--and for those who haven't seen that film bio biodiversity forms an entire chapter early on, even before you get to the disasters, and that was
that's still you know a
tricky decision you know, but it's it was really important because if it was a theme that emerged from the interviews over time.
And I was so, I was particularly struck when Patty Berne from Sins Invalid, this disability justice performance organization.
you know she straight out expressed that you know what she wants folks to walk away with the most is knowing that people with disabilities are part of human biodiversity.
And like that was what she wanted people to hear. You know we can we can cure whatever, but there will always be people in our communities who have greater and lesser abilities in any kind of physical or mental
areas of our human expressions. So I think it's a powerful framing with a whole bunch of lessons for us. And
uh
you know one thing that I didn't get to say earlier in terms of colonization that I think is really important.
So you know you know you asked like, how can we successfully promote diversity to create resilient LGBTQ communities. I think one...
For me as a filmmaker what that means is representational justice, it means highlighting and visabalizing the diversity that is already here in our communities. So you know the film has a really deep deep colonial
lens to it and that's not separate from queerness right because there are queer people in our communities who are indigenous. How would you separate their queer knowledge from their indigenous knowledge.
So, first and foremost, I wanted to make that visible. because when I talked to disaster preparedness professionals and I talked about the
vulnerabilities of the LGBTQ community, you know that the the image that they have in their mind is like a middle class white gay couple, and then they just look at me like. What do you mean
this is a, this is a vulnerable group? And, you know, because that is an image that has been perpetuated in the media, and so, you know. I think that there are a lot of really
critical lessons that this film offers from indigenous people and people living under under colonialism, and so I want to really stress in this in this
this time, this brief time I have with y'all just how important that connection is. So indigenous communities of North America and around the world crafted innumerable different cultures of gender and sexuality.
The particular gender binary that we have here like a cis hetero patriarchal gender binary that was brought to these shores
was one that was specifically designed to do harm to bodies and land that was required by colonization.
You have the very toxic masculinity capable of that kind of brutality and you have a devalued caring labor to perpetuate the subtler population.
And so, as indigenous people in the climate justice movement have repeatedly. repeatedly
asked us to pay attention to, it's this settler colonial exploitation of land and the disciplining of bodies into Labor that is the driving force of climate change, and so we need to
understand that and really take that in to understand why it's important that in these conversations on climate change, the voices of particularly two spirit and queer indigenous people, but
queer and trans people of color and folks who are facing multiple marginalizations from the the white settler,
white supremacist, settler, colonial, cis-hetero, patriarchal, ablest system that is multiplying marginalizing communities that live at the intersections of those different kinds of violences.
So I just want to say that when it comes to diversity, it's not just you know. I think that there's there's something beautiful underneath of that like we need to
acknowledge that we are also part of the land, like we are also you know part of nature. We can look to queer ecologies for innumerable examples of our queer non human kin, from avocados to clownfish to did you know that among giraffes 94% of
any sexual activity that's been observed is male/male mounting behavior.
Giraffes are pretty gay. I mean it's it's pretty wonderful when we when we stop and we look at our identities, not just identities, but our diverse expressions in the natural world.
But then, even more so than that to think about. So why is it that that kind of diversity and that kind of difference
has been
has been paved over and we have not only monocultures in the field, where we have you know entire fields that used to be
plentiful with a rich biodiversity, including our queer non human kin and are now just miles and miles of corn.
We have that in the physical world, and then the ideological cultural space, we also have a monoculture of the mind and a disciplining of genders and sexualities into one particular way of being.
How does a shared experience, whether that is by the queer community, by an indigenous population, a local group or a more than human kinship in a local area, how do those shared experiences transform into community knowledge, especially in the context of disasters?
So what does that process of knowledge production look like?
I'm gonna go first because I really feel that both of the other panelists have really
better perspectives on this. But storytelling and visibility is so important.
People were not aware and even members of our community, especially more privileged members of the queer community, have no idea what it like was for vulnerable queer people after a disaster.
And so, being able to respond and to be a part of those individuals response and recovery.
And then being able to take that
into storytelling, allowing individuals that it was a part of their journey to share that.
Not not any kind of poverty porn, but actually allowing them to share it was a part of their journey.
And, and then it becomes real and then it becomes something that individuals are conscious of and they want to support.
After Hurricane Harvey we launched our disaster relief fund first and we had so many stories from Katrina ready to go.
And because of that celebrities picked it up and we went viral and in the matter of three months we raised $1.2 million from 6300 individuals, mainly LGBTQ individuals from small events in Australia.
And it was the storytelling, it was the visibility of experience of what these members of our community were going through.
And then they were seeing that we're seeing that storytelling on TV and they were able to come back and access something that really resonated with them with us and then that was how we were able to make that one moment of resiliency, maybe, happen.
Would anybody else like to add to that or we can move on to another question?
Yeah I'll add to this and then I'll add also um
it connects to
Kristen I am
fascinated by your your work on on death and it's it's made me think about
some some of the thoughts I've read from from Pinar of Queer Nature on
their work of uplifting the [?] of their Indian ancestral community who were you know what we now call, I suppose, two spirit people whose you know gender is no way definable by the gender binary and they they held important sacred roles in
Incan ceremonies regarding transition and the liminal spaces, particularly during pachacuti, which is a cataclysmic change,
which you know to me I'm like that's wow that's a perfect definition of the situation we're in now globally, right, a cataclysmic change.
And so, as Pinar rights, you know in many indigenous communities there are gender liminal community members who hold a similar role of midwife, doula, medicine person, undertaker, initiator, underworld guide you know, a
person that deals with the ceremony of death and departure that will be a liminal space, right.
And so Pinar asks us, you know how do we honor the emergent gifts that the queer and gender creative youth of our time are bringing in the midst of our own pachacuti right now?
And what are the consequences to the human and more than human community of not honoring this emergence?
And I just I think in terms of this question of like, how can we use these ideas of diversity to move us forward during these times of disaster, that's one that I think of, like what are the emergent gender creative
youth that have not been as inculcated into the settler colonial gender binary reality, what what are some of the gifts that they're moving towards and that they want to give and how can we support them in taking on those important cultural roles that we most need at this time?
Yeah there is there's just so much here. I feel like I could talk on some of these themes forever, but to return it back to what Kennedy was saying, I think this aspect of
storytelling, you know and kind of this creation of knowledge and passing of knowledge is so so important.
Particularly you know I'm going to say it again during these times, you know I know I'm currently in Seattle doing field work with doulas and
there was, you know a lot of anxiety in the beginning days of the pandemic about, or even before the pandemic about how so many kind of queer spaces
of knowledge generation, or even just meeting communally are disappearing, particularly in places, you know, like Seattle, where
you know, industry and you know the tech sector is just you know demolishing you know gayborhoods, lesbian bars, many of the spaces, where that might be the only opportunity for queer youth and queer elders to come together in some way.
So my main my main doula teacher, you know, she's this amazing elder lesbian in our little death care community and she practices a lot of plant medicine and
her way of kind of passing that on is to offer this completely for free, this is not normal in most death care circles, but for her
it's so important to create these generational memories and exchanges, because you know something, something I can't remember if we talked about earlier but
you know if we don't if we don't actively engaged in this process, whether it is you know within our own communities or as allies with other communities,
our memories, our ways of knowing and being-- those will be lost, you know remembrance both of you know experiences of crisis, but also different care practices.
Those are not things that you know hegemonic narratives and cultural memory is going to center, they're not going to center these experiences.
Hope you know, maybe one day that will change, but I don't foresee that changing in the immediate future, so I think
you know whether you are a young queer person who's interested in kind of the connections between you know ecological justice, and you know
you know more broader like queer feminist you know, social justice, like you know connect with elders in your area, volunteer, find out what opportunities, particularly to speak with people who are older than you it's
you I don't I don't think that's where we started necessarily with this question but it's just something, especially over the last year, I've become so passionate about because
it's really easy for us to assume that people will be around forever, or we can do it next week, next year, and I think we've really been shown that we cannot count on certain futures and that we need to act now.
With only a few minutes left, I would like to ask what you guys would like all of our attendees to leave with from today, and maybe that question goes to Vanessa first with what is the main takeaway that you want people to leave leave with after watching your film?
Well,
Can you actually, can you give me a minute for that I thought
maybe
Kennedy and Kristiin do you feel ready to jump on in?
I'll go quickly. Take action, the strongest queer communities are ones that are really connected, not only through all the different intersections
inside of that community but also connected to all the other justice, social, environmental movement. I think of Taiwan and the youth movement, environmental movement and how that is one of the only really functional queer spaces in
most of Asia. And you can see that in our in our community. So jump in just to echo what Kriistin said, which could not be more powerful, don't wait, don't wait. Jump in, take some action, join and get involved in one of these movements and it will [?].
Yeah I will I will keep it short, because I think what I just said it kind of sums up a lot of my thoughts and feelings on this issue. but
I know a quote, that has been sitting with me a lot recently is this beautiful Audre Lorde quote
where she talks about survival is not just about mere existence; survival means living with focus, and I think you just have to find whatever your focus is and whatever speaks to you about something that you can contribute to your communities and just run with it.
Absolutely yeah. Thank you. I think that that that definitely fits the themes in the film as well. Which is you know it's not we're not going to be
saved by any one magical bullet; it's really the work of every single person in building these webs and communities of care that
are the solution and depending on your skills, your gifts there's a there's a way for you to help both when it comes to preparedness
and, in the long process of rebuilding this new world that we get to envision together. And the other thing that's a part of that that is really important to me, and I think we've covered it, but you know I want to make sure people leave with this is that
the queerness in this film to me it's really important that it's a bridge, not a wedge, to use this phrase from Mab Segrest. one of the founders of Southerners on New Ground.
So you know I'm not trying to say that queer and trans people are some separate special interest group in the climate justice conversations, the point is to make visible
our presence in its multiplicity. Queer and trans people are among all of the front lines in climate justice,
climate disasters, and queer and trans people are among the visionary solutionaries at the forefront of the climate justice movement. And so
to walk away, you know queer climate justice isn't different from climate justice, we're just visablizing the queer within that existing movement.
It is eight, so we have reached time, so all of our attendees are welcome to leave.
Thank you guys so much for joining.
This as such a pleasure. Yeah as Kristen said, I could I could I could talk with both of you about this for a long time and I
yeah I said this to Kennedy at the beginning, but I've talked about the the Montrose Center in presentations I've done before, because of the exceptional work
that you've been doing, in light of these disasters, so it's it's such a gift to be able to speak on this panel with you. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you to
everyone who helped put this together, and thank you Ashley for moderating and pulling these many divergent thoughts into something coherent.
Thank you. Have a good night everybody. Thank you again for sharing with us and teaching us today.