LISC’s senior program officer for Community Research and Impact, Julia Duranti-Martinez, reflects on the intersection of LGBTQIA+ liberation, land ownership and community building, and highlights forthcoming LISC research on people and groups across the country working to realize those intersections through community ownership.
As Pride Month draws to a close, communities across the country are preparing for their annual marches, parades, and parties. I’m most looking forward to the NYC Dyke March, a longstanding tradition that draws thousands of queer and trans people to celebrate our communities, protest the ongoing violence and discrimination we face, and remind us that all liberation struggles are intertwined. One of few free, large-scale Pride events focused on people often excluded from other LGBTQIA+ spaces—including women, trans and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) people, people of color, people with disabilities, and immigrants—the march is a treasured community “space” and a powerful and energizing experience. But it is fundamentally fleeting. I’m always left wishing for more enduring spaces for us to gather and build community the rest of the year—even in a city like New York, often seen as an LGBTQIA+ hub but where rising rents threaten the long-term presence of LGBTQIA+ organizations and businesses.
As one of the authors of a forthcoming LISC Community Research & Impact report focused on the intersections of LGBTQIA+ liberation and community development, research made possible with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I feel fortunate to have spent the last few months speaking with LGBTQIA+ and TGNC leaders throughout the country who are successfully organizing to claim spaces to build community and economic power through community ownership. This work has often been neglected by larger LGBTQIA+ organizations and funders focused on legal protections and visibility, as well as by community development organizations focused on affordable housing and equitable development without displacement, but who may not name LGBTQIA+ and TGNC people as part of their constituencies.
Building on long traditions of mutual aid, community care, and multi-issue organizing and advocacy, queer and TGNC-led organizations sprang into action when the Covid pandemic hit (the second pandemic that LGBTQIA+ communities have survived in recent history, after HIV/AIDS) to coordinate mutual aid programs and advocate for urgently needed resources. Building on their deep relationships and understanding of community needs, the groups we spoke with in Baltimore, Chicago, Kalamazoo, Little Rock, New Orleans, New York City, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Seattle leveraged pandemic relief funding and a brief influx of donations during the summer 2020 racial justice uprisings to expand their programs and physical spaces. In some cases, this resulted in acquiring the first buildings owned by Black and brown TGNC organizations in their communities.
For many groups, collectively owning a building is both the culmination of decades of work and the first step in realizing a long-term vision for a future in which all communities can live with dignity and safety. In her memoir, Black trans freedom fighter Miss Major Griffin-Gracy recounts her work with TGNC communities at the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in San Francisco in the 1990’s. Realizing that their office was too small to serve community members lining up outside even as the adjoining space sat vacant, Miss Major spoke to her director about renting the empty space, but her proposal was denied. Undeterred, she decided to reclaim the space, taking the first swing to literally break down the wall with a sledgehammer, and creating GiGi’s Place drop-in center.
GiGi’s Place was temporary, but a quarter century later, Miss Major fulfilled her longtime dream and bought two homes in Little Rock, AR, creating the House of gg, a retreat and historical center for TGNC people to connect with each other, build community, and fortify themselves to keep fighting another day. Meanwhile, another organization that Miss Major helped lead for many years, the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, recently bought a building and created the Miss Major Alexander Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center in the Tenderloin neighborhood—the site of the 1966 Compton Cafeteria uprising, a protest led by TGNC people, drag queens, sex workers, and unhoused youth against criminalization, over-policing, and violence that predated Stonewall by three years.
In an echo of this history, the last few years have been marked by an alarming rise in assaults on LGBTQIA+ lives and rights. Longstanding anti-LGBTQIA+ violence, criminalization, and exclusion have created significant inequities for LGBTQIA+ people and organizations, particularly TGNC communities of color. LGBTQIA+ people and especially Black and brown trans people are disproportionately likely to experience housing insecurity and homelessness, for example. And severe funding inequities further challenge the long-term survival of LGBTQIA+ and TGNC organizations and spaces. LGBTQIA+ issues receive just 28 cents of every $100 awarded by foundations in the U.S, of which less than 10% goes to trans issues and just 5% goes to Black LGBTQIA+ communities.
Miss Major’s story and similar efforts playing out across the country remind us what futures are possible when queer and TGNC communities have permanent spaces to dream and build together across generations, and the resources to fight back and fight forward and carry out these visions. LGBTQIA+ spaces serve as essential movement infrastructure and hubs for community resources and organizing, for everything from safer, more inclusive housing to support groups to growing healthy food to sustain people, to providing access to information in the face of rising censorship and reductions in essential public services like libraries, to simply offering a quiet place to rest. But a drop off in funding since 2020 poses a threat to sustaining and growing this work at the precise moment that it is most needed.
For funders and CDFIs, let this Pride Month be an opportunity to recommit to meeting this moment and supporting LGBTQIA+ and TGNC groups working to build community and economic power with long-term funding, organizational development and capacity-building, and non-extractive capital financing, as a starting point toward liberation for all.
We’re excited to share more in our forthcoming report this fall. For more resources on this topic, check out our recent LISC Institute for Community Power Spotlight.
About the Author
Julia Duranti-Martínez, Senior Program Officer for Community Research & Impact
Prior to joining LISC, Julia (she/her) facilitated coalition organizing, advocacy and capacity-building with community land trusts in New York City, conducted collaborative community research in a self-built neighborhood in the Dominican Republic, and worked in Colombia providing human rights accompaniment, policy analysis, and popular education with communities resisting displacement and organizing for collective land rights. Julia has also worked in family and emergency services for Latinx immigrants in Portland, OR, and volunteered in Bolivia and Chile. She holds an M.S in Community and Regional Planning and an M.A in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.