Gaslit Nation Transcript 30 July 2020 Supporting LGBTQ Youth: The Raquel Willis and Lindz Amer Interview Andrea Chalupa: Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, available now. We're grateful and honored to welcome to the show two inspiring experts who will be sharing their advice and insights for both LGBTQ youth and their families stuck at home together during this pandemic, and how to help navigate this difficult time and build a more inclusive and safe environment. Our guests are Raquel Willis, a Black transgender activist, writer, and media strategist dedicated to elevating the dignity of marginalized people, particularly Black transgender people. She is the former executive editor of Out Magazine and a former national organizer for Transgender Law Center, TLC. In 2018, she founded Black Trans Circles, a project of TLC focused on developing the leadership of Black trans women in the South and Midwest by creating healing justice spaces to work through oppression-based trauma and incubating community organizing efforts to address anti-trans murder and violence. Andrea Chalupa: During her time at Out Magazine, she published the Trans Obituaries Project to highlight the epidemic of violence against trans women of color, and developed a community-sourced 13-point framework to end the epidemic. This project was nominated for a GLAD media award. Raquel is a thought leader on gender, race and intersectionality. She'll be releasing her book, The Risk it Took to Bloom, her debut essay collection about her coming of identity and activism, with St. Martin's Press in 2021. Andrea Chalupa: Our other guest is Lindsay (Lindz) Amer, who creates LGBTQ and social justice media for kids and families. Lindz writes, produces and co-hosts Queer Kid Stuff, an original LGBTQ educational web series for ages three and up. They also produce and host a brand new family friendly podcast called Activist You, where they explore social justice topics through interviews with kid and youth activists. They are the founder and CEO of Queer Kids Studios, a multimedia production company based in Portland, Maine, making queer-focused, intersectional, all ages media. Before we start the interviews, we're going to play a clip from Lindsay Amer's Ted Talk, and also a clip from Raquel Willis speaking at the Black Trans Lives Matter rally in Brooklyn in June. We'll link to both videos in our show notes for this episode. Lindz Amer: Lesbian, gay and bisexual teens are more than three times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. And transgender teens are almost six times more likely. According to one study, roughly one third of homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or questioning, and about 4% of homeless youth identify as transgender, compared with 1% of the general youth population surveyed. According to the Human Rights Campaign, there have been 128 killings of trans people in 87 cities across 32 states since 2013, and those are only the reported cases. And 80% of those killings were of trans women of color. The queer situation is bleak, to say the least. Raquel Willis: And so let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power. So when they try to erase somebody's bold, beautiful figures, they build out infrastructure, they build our organizations on their foundation. They've had white cis, queer sometimes, people in leadership. I might get in some trouble for saying this–and yes, the legislation matters–but white queer folk get to worry about legislation while Black queer folk are worrying about our lives. Andrea Chalupa: So I am here with two greats for LGBTQ rights, Lindz Amer and Raquel Willis. Thank you so much for coming on Gaslit Nation today. The purpose of today's discussion is to reach out to our LGBTQ friends out there listening, and their families and friends, whoever they may be sheltering in place with during this zombie apocalypse with no end in sight, and just to say that we see you, we love you, we support you. You are not in this alone. And we especially want to talk to young people because high school has been disrupted. Junior high has been disrupted. Going off to college has been disrupted. And those are times where people find themselves. You find yourselves through your friends, through your heartache, through your boyfriend, girlfriend, your loves. And you come out. You come out of the closet. You find yourself. Andrea Chalupa: And so for youth stuck at home today, maybe in homes that may not fully understand you, or you don't feel safe in, we want to talk to you. We want to reach out to you, and we're going to do that with this conversation with these two amazing experts who are remarkable in their work for human rights and inclusiveness and equality. We're so grateful for all that you do. And so we want to just start by asking you both, what advice–and we'll start with Lindz, and then we'll go to Raquel. So Lindz, what advice do you have for a young person that wants to come out of the closet but doesn't know how? Lindz Amer: Yeah. I think it's tough because of the times that we're living in right now and everything going on, in particular with quarantine because we're stuck at home, and in homes that might not be supportive. So I think that the first kind of step in that is making sure that you feel safe in your environment to come out in, and that you have kind of an adult support, so having someone who can come and back you up and be that person who can support you through that coming out process when and if it might get difficult. So I think that's the most important is to feel safe and comfortable in your space, and finding the places, even if they're not inside your household, where you feel comfortable expressing yourself, so yeah, comfort is a big part of that I think. And navigating that in quarantine makes it a lot more complicated, obviously. Andrea Chalupa: Raquel, what's your advice on this? Raquel Willis: Safety and comfort is important. I believe, especially if you're in the state of where you're trying to figure out how to come out, really be strategic and assess that safety and that comfort that Lindz was discussing. I think that there's such a cultural push, of course, around everyone being out, and of course the world that we want to live in. But we also know that sometimes folks don't respond well to you living in your amazingness and brilliance. So that means you have to do what is best for you sometimes just to simply survive. Raquel Willis: When I was growing up in Augusta, Georgia as a teenager trying to figure out how I was going to come out, I felt very isolated. And I think that was probably the most devastating part of that experience, was just feeling like no one understood, feeling like there was no one to talk to. And I tried different things. At that time, we did, obviously, have forums on the internet and so I found folks to connect to who were of a similar age and having similar experiences, and found community in that sense, even though I didn't really have folks in person. Raquel Willis: And then I also just kind of–on my own–kind of experimented with finding support in the form of an adult in my life, whether it was trying to talk to a guidance counselor, or a teacher who I felt like would be affirming. And I found a few folks who were supportive of me before I was able to kind of fully come out to my parents, so that was helpful. I think the other thing too, now there's obviously so many TV shows and so many musicians who are out, so that's a great outlet. Raquel Willis: For me, it was books. So I remember reading these very cheesy books about queer life, being gay. At that point, there weren't really many books about the complexity of gender, or being trans, or non-binary, but media was also an outlet. So I think finding that support, whether it's in your real life or online in terms of community, finding adults in your life who can be a support to you as you navigate, and then also finding the media that kind of expresses the life that you're currently living or the life that you want to live. And I think those things can be very helpful. Andrea Chalupa: So I want to talk about gender as a journey and exploring gender and gender fluidity. I think some of us in the West may have a tendency to think, "Okay, this is new. I don't understand it. Is it a trend? Is it a media concoction?” And so I think people have to understand how natural this idea of gender fluidity is and how it's always been with us, but we're finally at a point to have greater visibility, greater understanding of it, and hat's why we're hearing about it more. We've denied it for so long as a country, and now it's out, and we're talking about it.