I spent most of April trying to pull off a queer people of color dance party as a fundraiser for the may 3rd strike--it was extremely stressful but too fun to resist! We got the space at Hidmo, awesome qpoc spoken word poets and musicians. Everything just seemed to come together on that night, the poetry, the movie, the music, the people, the space, and the political messages we were sending out. It's weird because you would think that making qpoc the targeted audience you would be limiting who you were attracting. On the contrary, we had almost 200 people showed up that night--and lots of folks can't wait for another event like this. As a qpoc i feel everything we are fighting for--labor, immigrant rights, queer lib--just came together on that night, when i saw a room full of queer folks and folks of color responding so well to the May 3rd strike and March 4th action against privatization of university and its workplace. Some queer folks may see labor as something not concerned them or not related to their life struggle, but i would say labor is as much about workplace as bedroom. I know locally some queer activists are fighting for a grant that can build a cafe shop that would continually hire queer youth. While I understand the work is important, I also feel like we've fought for queer only space for a while, and it's about time for us queers to join the struggle at workplace, fighting for more accessible education, and just workplace for all. This notion of queer vs. class could be really harmful for the working-class and queer communities and would just continually privatize queer issue as something thats only about our sexuality.
On the next day I saw a lot of qpoc from last night at the May Day immigrant rights march. That was the time i felt this is really my community. I felt very honored to work alongside with everyone for queer lib even though we have to fight through so many barriers to come together and to finally get to know one another.
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