Category: #QueerHeroes

In June of 2018, I began posting a brief bio and picture/video of a different queer hero every day to Facebook to celebrate Pride. The posts became invigorating to write and research; a way to commemorate the reasons Pride exists.

Posted on

#QueerHeroes Day 10 – Alok Vaid-Menon

#QueerHeroes Day 10 – Alok Vaid-Menon

Alok Vaid-Menon is a gender nonconforming performance artist, activist, and poet who regularly calls attention to the stratospheric amount of violence and prejudice against trans/GNC people of color.

In 2015, they partnered with Janani Balasubramanian to create the trans South Asian performance art group Dark Matter, which—in addition to poetry performance—mobilizes activists on the ground to work for various social justice causes.

“Trans people and gender nonconformity is biological, natural, anatomical and all of the words they gatekeep from us,” they told Out Magazine. “What is unnatural is their prejudice and transmisogyny. We should be able to look like whatever we want and not have our identities be up for debate.”

In keeping with that, Vaid-Menon has released a third fashion line for gender-nonconforming individuals.

Posted on

#QueerHeroes Day 9 – Anne Kronenberg

#QueerHeroes Day 9 – Anne Kronenberg

Practically everyone (rightfully) knows who Harvey Milk is, but many haven’t heard of his campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg.

Milk had lost three races before hiring the leather-wearing, motorbike riding, then-openly lesbian activist Kronenberg to his campaign for San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Many of the gay men on Milk’s campaign were skeptical of her, but Milk would win the race, making him the first openly gay elected official in no small part because of Kronenberg’s tireless work.

She would learn of Milk’s assassination while on a plane to Seattle. She got the first flight back to San Francisco when she arrived.

Kronenberg fell in love with a man in the 80s, whom she remains married to today. She’s served the queer community and the city of San Francisco for the past 40 years.

Posted on

#QueerHeroes Day 8 – Tourmaline

#QueerHeroes Day 8
Tourmaline

Tourmaline is a queer transgender filmmaker whose work examines the “the capacity of black queer/trans social life to impact the world while living what is simultaneously an invisible—and hypervisible—existence.”

Her films highlight the every day acts of creativity and rebellion that can build to make a movement.

One of her films, “Happy Birthday, Marsha!”, imagines the hours leading up to Marsha P. Johnson’s infamous night at Stonewall.

Set in 1855, “Salacia” tells the story of a trans woman named Mary Jones, who lives in the free black community of Seneca (which was torn down to build Central Park).

Tourmaline’s creativity combined with the tapestry of histories that inspire her work is a force of queer pride.

New Yorkers can catch her latest work—”Salacia”—at the High Line every day at dusk, running on a loop until July 3rd.

Posted on

#QueerHeroes Day 7 – Ernestine Eckstein

#QueerHeroes Day 7
Ernestine Eckstein

Eckstein moved to New York in the 60s after graduating from Indiana University, where she was a star student, with a degree in magazine journalism, government, and Russian.

She learned from a friend in Greenwich Village what the word “gay” meant. That’s when she came into her lesbian identity.

One of the most progressive activists of her time, Eckstein joined the early lesbian rights organization Daughters of Bilitis. Her experience with the civil rights movement made her an asset and she became Vice President of the NYC chapter. Nearly all gay and lesbian organizations at the time were founded by and catered to white people. She understood the importance of intersectionality before it was widely used in the social justice lexicon. In leading her majority-white chapter, she encouraged them to examine the intricacies of simultaneous identities.

The majority of gay and lesbian activists at the time focused on educating healthcare professionals, and would only occasionally picket or publicly proclaim their sexuality. Eckstein thought picketing was an education in itself. Three years before Stonewall, she called for bolder and more effective demonstrations:

“Picketing I regard as almost a conservative act now. The homosexual has to call attention to the fact that he’s been unjustly acted upon. This is what the Negro did.”

Eventually fed up with infighting in Daughters of Bilitis, Eckstein moved to the west coast where she joined the activist group Black Women Organized for Action.

Nothing conclusive is known of her life after her work with BWOA. Death records indicate that she died in 1992.

Posted on

#QueerHeroes Day 6 – Willi Ninja

#QueerHeroes Day 6 – Willi Ninja

Ninja was born in 1961. He’s known as The Godfather of Vogue.

He was a relative newcomer to the Harlem Vogue balls when he formed the House of Ninja, becoming its mother.  He called it “Ninja” because they hit hard and they hit fast.

The unwritten standard for forming a house was that a queen win three grand prizes, which Ninja hadn’t done. Nevertheless, Ninja’s mix of martial arts with Vogue would reflect the vivid imagination that guided his house to immortality.

Ninja died of AIDS related heart failure in 2006.