We Keep Us Safe 🏳️⚧️
To our beloved community:
On Thursday, April 10th, a group of Christo-fascists showed up outside of our center prior to our scheduled drag program for LGBTQIA+ youth.
Christo-fascism is a right-wing radical political and religious ideology where its followers advocate for Christian authoritarian rule, including an end to LGBTQIA+ identities, reproductive rights, and non-Christian religious beliefs. They showed up with the intention to intimidate, shame, and silence anyone who does not fit in their narrow view of religious purity. Despite their efforts, we remain here, Queer, and continue to come back stronger.
We find it deeply ironic that the people calling us groomers are actively trying to coerce others into their Christo-fascist beliefs. The hate they preached from their loudspeakers was drowned out by the sounds of Big Freedia, and their anti-pride signs were obscured by rainbow umbrellas.
Everyone at the center was safe. As soon as our staff became aware of the situation, we issued a call for support and protection to members of our community. Youth who arrived were safely escorted into our space by our trusted, volunteer-led security team.
A supportive gathering formed outside including Queer elders, other LGBTQIA+ nonprofit members, neighborhood businesses and families, religious leaders, and family members of our youth. For every Christo-fascist spreading hatred, there were five Queer folks and allies drowning them out. We keep our community safe, and we will continue to do so.
While our community stood guard outside, we protected peace, creativity, and self-expression inside. We planted seeds, listened to music, ate barbecue, and painted in the art room. We had several wonderful therapists from Cornbread and Roses respond rapidly, coming to our center to provide support to our youth both during the event and at our virtual drop-in held the following week. They also provided support to our staff once the youth had been safely escorted out of the building.
Spaces like ours are vital. They are where Queer and Trans youth can explore who they are and connect with their community—surrounded by adults who honor their autonomy, imagination, and dignity. Queer history has always centered resistance through joy, connection, and art. Our staff is deeply honored to hold a space that embodies these values and to serve as facilitators and protectors of Queer and Trans youth as they realize their power and live true to themselves, despite what the world may bring.
We have already implemented several measures to ensure that our center is a safe space for our youth. These measures include not publicly posting our address, keeping our door locked to all unauthorized persons, and having community members on call who are ready to provide security as an alternative to a police presence.
Although police did arrive in response to the events on April 10th, we want to be clear that they were not called by us.
We only share our location information with our youth and their families after they have registered to attend our events. Unfortunately, the protesters gained access to this information by falsely registering as Queer youth attendees. It pains us to know that we must reevaluate our policies for sharing our private address, which may inadvertently create barriers to access.
For months now, our staff have been meeting internally and with community partners and outside organizations to strengthen our safety protocols. We knew that something like this could happen, and we are proud of the way our community showed up and how the planning we had already done prepared us for this moment. Over the next few weeks, we will intensify our efforts to develop a comprehensive safety plan that will be shared with our youth and their families prior to resuming standard programming.
We ask for your patience as we move through this work with intention, care, and our full humanity. We are balancing wanting to be with y’all as soon as we can with the belief that urgency is a White Supremacist tactic meant to create chaos and increase mistakes. Urgency is not our priority. Safety and sustainability are.
We want you to know:
They will not stop our joy.
They will not scare us into the shadows.
They will not erase our presence, our art, or our future.
The safety of our youth and staff is our highest priority.
If you’d like to support our work, including ongoing security, space-making, and youth programming, please consider making a donation at givebutter.com/youth-outright
Thank you for standing with us in protest, in planning, in protection, and in power.
We’re not going anywhere.