Awwwww

Hi all, my friend Ember needs help! She’s trying to cover transition-related medical expenses and moving back to Copenhagen after struggling with an unstable housing situation here. Anything helps! https://www.gofundme.com/ember039s-tide-of-emotion

In her own words:

“Hello, my name is ember avian blooming.

I am a transwoman, and an immigrant from Croatia. I have started this fundraiser to help with relocation costs to Denmark and to access the transitioning healthcare I need. My housing has lacked stability since I’ve come to the United States a few years ago, and I have been houseless, jumping couch to couch for the last 8 months.

Failed surgery attempts

Earlier this year I was raising funds for my facial feminization surgery. It has revealed to me how the medical system privileges those with the political and financial capital to access it. I was given two surgery dates that were supposed to get covered by my insurance and both times my surgery was canceled last minute without explanation and without a replacement surgery date. The organizations and providers that were supposed to support me have fallen through and left me feeling alone and hopeless.

It has been an exhausting and unsuccessful journey to get the healthcare I need and one, as you may know, that is not unique to trans women in America. Nearly one third of trans folks in the US do not have access to regular health care. And for those with access to health care, many fear discrimination from the doctors we can see. In my own experience, the system of medical gatekeeping keeps treatment from those whose identities are the most oppressed. One in three GoFundMe campaigns are for medical expenses – THAT is a telling statistic – that this site has now become the real healthcare provider in this country.

Processing my trauma As an immigrant, born into war in Croatia, I know that I have come a long way. I am aware of that and try to celebrate that each day. Even now in Croatia, the impact of war in the 90s and of the glorification of American culture has had real effects on individual lives. Young people growing up in Croatia hold the trauma from our families and from a society steeped in misogyny, patriarchy and homophobia. I have had to fight for my existence from the day I was born, and capitalism’s disinterest on how it effects people has created a disgusting system in which I must continue to fight for myself each day.

Capitalism continues to be successful because it has convinces us that we have to earn our existence. That is an exhausting concept that has worn down my mental health, but I know it is not the truth. I am worthy of existing and thriving, and I have decided to go back to Denmark to rebuild my life and free myself from the person I’ve had to become to survive in America.

Relocation to Denmark

The money I can raise through this fundraiser will go directly to helping me pay for my hormone replacement therapy in Copenhagen as well as putting a deposit down for my first and last months rent to allow me stable housing once I arrive. I know that money is tight for lots of you, any amount helps. Thank you all so much for reading my story!

love, ember”

Practical Organising

“Only the Organised Survive”: A Rebel Worker Handbook

Direct Action in Industry by the Direct Action Movement

Weakening the Dam by the Twin Cities branch of the IWW

How to Hold a Good Meeting and Rusty’s Rules of Order by the Industrial Workers of the World

Community Control of the Poor community

A Practical Guide to Anarchist Organisation – Compiled by Andrew Flood

How to Fire Your Boss: A Workers Guide to Direct Action

The Bosses Need Us… We Don’t Need Them: Common Sense Reasons for Worker Self-Management

Organising in the Workplace

Organising Communities by Tom Knoche

Anarchist Agitation & Community Building by Ronald A. Young

His siblings refused to be named in one very prominent obituary, and Greg’s gayness and death from AIDS were not to be mentioned at his memorial service. Fortunately few of us heeded the family’s prohibition. While his family and society may have wanted to dispose of Greg even after his death, some of us tried to reclaim him and love him again and only then release him.

I was reminded of how vulnerable we are as gay men, as black gay men, to the disposal or erasure of our lives.

But Greg was a writer, a journalist who had written on AIDS, on the business world, and on his own curious life journey from his birth in the poor Anacostia district of Washington, DC, to scholarships that allowed him to attend Exeter and then Williams College and on to the city desks of our nation’s most prominent newspapers. His words are still with us even if his body and those gorgeous programs are gone. And Greg is somewhere listening for his name.

We must, however, guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives. As white gays become more and more prominent — and acceptable to mainstream society — they project a racially exclusive image of gay reality. Few men of color will ever be found on the covers of the Advocate or New York Native. As white gays deny multiculturalism among gays, so too do black communities deny multisexualism among its members. Against this double cremation, we must leave the legacy of our writing and our perspectives on gay and straight experiences.

Our voice is our weapon.

[…]

As for me … I may not be well enough or alive next year to attend the lesbian and gay writers conference, but I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.

I may not be around to celebrate with you the publication of gay literary history. But I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.

If I don’t make it to Tea Dance in Provincetown or the Pines, I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.

You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.

Read the entire archive of OutWeek Magazine at the OutWeek Internet Archive!

The site contains all 105 issues of OutWeek, published from June 1989 to July 1991 in PDF format.

More about OutWeek:

OutWeek Magazine was the seminal lesbian and gay publication during the peak era of AIDS activism in the late 80s and early 90s.

Founded by Gabriel Rotello and Kendall Morrison, it employed a staff of about 30 people in Manhattan during its tumultuous two-year existence.

OutWeek redefined the role of the activist gay press, not only by reporting the news but also by frequently making news itself. Its aggressive coverage, incisive commentary and in-depth investigative articles on gay rights, politics, AIDS, the arts and popular culture made it a must-read publication far beyond the usual scope of gay magazines.

Several of the most contentious controversies of that era were sparked by OutWeek. The magazine pioneered the use of the word ‘queer,’ which was highly controversial at the time. It was closely associated with the AIDS activist group ACT UP, and several of its staffers and contributors helped to co-found the group Queer Nation.

Many of OutWeek’s editors were committed to sharply challenging the then-pervasive culture of the closet, and a sideline of that commitment - the advocacy of ‘outing’ prominent gay and lesbian celebrities – began in Michelangelo Signorile’s “Gossip Watch” column and was one of many things that made OutWeek a household name and a lightning rod.