Everyone knows the story. Everyone knows the phrase: pride started with a riot.
The Stonewall Riots weren’t the first, even if it was the most well-known, but its impact on today cannot be understated. On a hot summer night near the end of June 1969, cops raided the Stonewall Inn in New York. Restless and angry at this injustice, bystanders began fighting back and finally pushed them back.
Today, we credit the work of Black queer and trans activists who led this work, who have continued to organize and march and show up to celebrate our rich and diverse identities. Today we say their names: Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Zazu Nova and Jackie Hormon, Stormé DeLarverie, and more.
Police have historically upheld a white supremacist state, reinforcing the status quo. For us young, queer, trans, people of color, we will never be the status quo. But we can always create a space where our young, queer, trans, people of color can exist and can be.
This year, AAOP’s Gender Justice team is excited to present our Beyond Allyship to Solidarity workshop series, a 4-part workshop series to provide key tools and information on queermiscia and how to address it. This workshop series will be facilitated by Gender Justice Interns Anne Hall and Savanna Thao, who joined in Fall 2020.
But this workshop series didn’t spring up overnight. In the summer of 2020, AAOP initiated our very first Gender Justice Research cohort. Members of the cohort discussed and chose a topic to research. For Siena Iwasaki Milbauer, who is currently AAOP’s Content Creator Intern and part of the 2020 Gender Justice Research cohort, it was so important to have research on what LGBTQA+ allyship really looked like.
“As a pansexual and queer mixed-race Asian American person, I have often felt like there was very little information that related specifically to my experiences, and that could help members of my community become better allies to queer folks that hold complex intersectional identities,” Siena shares. “It meant a lot to me to be even a tiny part of starting to center the experiences of myself and my peers in community-focused research.”
The research, led by haruka yukioka, Selena Vue, and Siena, was conducted through a series of interviews with 20 APIDA youth, both queer and non-queer identifying, on what specific resources would be helpful to bridge the gap of queer allyship and action-oriented solidarity.
“We were transparent with what we hoped to accomplish with our research and empowered participants to share ideas and resources that they wished they could access and utilize,” haruka says.
The team worked together to transcribe and code each interview, compiling a research report and even creating infographics to share the final results with the public. These infographics were shared on AAOP’s social media platform and were shared widely across a range of people. It quickly became a very accessible way of keeping a resource handy.
“It’s very meaningful and exciting to see our research turn into the Beyond Allyship to Solidarity workshop series,” says haruka. “My hope is that straight and cisgender APIDA allies take the time to attend and learn from these workshops, and that queer and trans APIDAs feel welcomed, affirmed, and accepted.”
Savanna and Anne spent several months curating these workshops to include various aspects of LGBTQIA+ education to support all queer and trans people of color. They planned to hold one or two workshops, but realized there was a wide range of topics that they felt were too important to leave out.
“We took the risk to dream big because we’re passionate about this work. Not only did we feel the urgency from our community members for more resources and education, but Anne and I both knew that this was going to be the start of something new and important for our APIDA youth and community,” Savanna says.
It was important to take historical context into account when talking about issues like queermiscia because that context is part of the larger narrative. For Anne, who is mixed Lao and Tai Dam, her ethnic roots, indigenous ancestry, family history, and upbringing have greatly influenced her passion for reproductive justice and health.
“Due to French colonialism, Japanese occupation, and US interventionism in Southeast Asia, many women in my family have had to survive war, forced displacement, patriarchal violence, poverty, lack of opportunities for education and safe employment, and language barriers,” Anne shares. In particular, Anne says that seeing how her mother struggled as a single immigrant parent has shaped her organizing and in upholding the life and dignity of refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized people.
These workshops, created by APIDA young folks for APIDA young folks, aim to create a space for all of us. The centering of our young APIDA folks gives us the opportunity to explore and learn unapologetically, something that Anne says is so important in creating safer families and communities to move beyond allyship.
“Whether people are newer to this work or have been engaging it for a number of years, I think having spaces of self-reflection and being able to support each other is extremely important especially in APIDA communities where there is still a lot of taboos surrounding queerness,” Anne says. “Transformative healing work often occurs in spaces where one is able to truly voice those experiences, and be wholly heard and cared for by another.”
The Beyond Allyship to Solidarity workshop series begins June 5th and runs every Saturday in June from 12pm to 2pm Central Time. RSVP now!