💌 Queer Agenda: Belated Love Letter Edition

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Valentine’s Day… Galentine’s Day… Palentines Day… was yesterday. Today is discounted chocolate day! And time for a Belated Love Letter from Queer Agenda.

All of my love for folks who are reading this, clicking the links, commenting, meeting up on Zoom. All in the name of community, building a support system, sharing our experiences, and staying connected. Even if we don’t meet up on Zoom super regularly :)

A warm welcome to NEW SUBSCRIBERS!! If you’re new here, don’t worry, you can catch up on past newsletters here. More importantly, introduce yourself in the comments on the first post!

ALSO — Happy Lunar New Year! The New Moon on February 12th rang in the new year for people in many East Asian countries.

In the hardworking spirit of the Year of the Ox (which may be construed as male, female, neutered, hermaphroditic, and either singular or plural) and its representation of forward movement and progress, I want to give y’all a preview of Queer Agenda’s agenda for the Spring and into the Summer.

At the end of graduate school, I applied for a grant/scholarship/fellowship that would fund a program/initiative that was socially-minded and architecture-related. I came up with Queer Queries, a tongue-twister name for a survey of queer folks working in architecture. Here’s the description from my application:

Queer Queries is a nationwide survey of LGBTQ architects and designers at various points in their career, including students and practitioners, regarding workplace and school conditions, challenges, and barriers in the profession. The results will be reported on a website that will also function as a way to connect members of the queer design community in both academia and practice.

The project takes the position that personal identities are political, and that quantifying and qualifying personal identities is important to both the diversity and sustainability of the profession. As LGBTQ issues and queer spaces become increasingly important, engagement with the queer design community is vital to improve the design of LGBTQ-inclusive spaces.

In an effort to make this as collectively-minded as possible, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what kinds of questions you’d like to ask queer other architects and designers. The survey could easily be stale af, or exciting af, or way-too-personal - and maybe there’s room for all three. The survey could be a different question each week, with a discussion of the results in the next week’s newsletter. (That would require me to actually send this newsletter out on a weekly basis 😅🥴) If you have some thoughts, please sound off in the comments!

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And without further ado, some queer events & news this week (and beyond) ::::

❣️ 💔 🔴 🔻 🌶 🍷 🎈 🎒 🚨 📌 🟥 🌹

💔 Right-Wing Donors Fuel Anti-Trans Legislative Efforts in Multiple States

“As many as 14 states have proposed legislation against the LGBTQ community, some of them targeting exclusively transgender youth, since President Joe Biden took office. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an organization with 40 years of experience in fighting for equality and against discrimination, the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom (designated by Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group), and Eagle Forum are key donors behind this rise of these legislative efforts. The Eagle Forum avidly promoted the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol on social media, likening it to D-Day, according to Time.

“Conservative state legislators in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, South Dakota, and Tennessee are pushing for new legislation that directly targets trans youth to restrict the participation of trans children in sports based on their gender identity, to refuse them the right to change their birth certificate, and to deprive them of gender-affirming health care rights.”

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🔻 Five Action Items to Stop Anti-Trans Bills

By Chase Strangio

Honestly, this: Affirm those around you. Every day, part of our work is to love and care for each other. Those leading the movement to criminalize trans lives and eradicate transness are hoping to exhaust and demoralize us. We can always fight back by caring for each other, uncovering our long and beautiful history and sharing information and resources. This is a long fight and the coming years are going to be brutal. As we continue to push back the power of the state to control and surveil us, we are our own best resources and resistance.

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❣️ Pascale Sablan: I Was Asked to Stand

DeeDee and Herb Glimcher Lecture

This is huge, considering the architects who have given past Glimcher Lectures! Congrats Pascale!

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❣️ Kate Thomas, ‘Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden

At the end of the nineteenth century, British and American lesbian artists settled around Florence, Italy, renovating neglected Renaissance estates. Contemporary accounts describe the hillside region as colonized by a “cult of women.”

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❣️ Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week

February 21 - 27, 2021

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week (ASAW) is an annual, international event meant to spread awareness and acceptance of aromantic spectrum identities and the issues we face, as well as making more people aware of our existence while celebrating it.

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Thank you for reading.

Until next time 🌒,

🧧 with a flutter of good fortune,

A.L.