BGLTQ Activist Calls for Move Beyond Marriage Equality

UPDATED: September 19, 2014, at 2:50 p.m.

While BGLTQ activist Aisha C. Moodie-Mills acknowledged that marriage equality is a huge victory for the queer movement, she said in a talk Thursday that in order to attain true equality, priorities in the movement must shift towards recognizing and addressing issues of race and class.

A diverse mix of undergraduate students, graduate students, and Cambridge community members packed into the Barker Center on Thursday to listen to Moodie-Mills’s talk, which addressed how race, class, and sexual orientation intersect.

“[The BGLTQ community is] coming at this from a ‘one percent mindframe,’ and we’re leaving a lot of people behind,” Moodie-Mills said, noting that the queer community is already more diverse than the general population.

Moodie-Mills is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization with a long history in political campaigns.

Through personal stories of the activism in which she and her wife took part as the “public faces of marriage equality” in Washington, D.C., Moodie-Mills related her gradual realization that marriage equality was only one of the many concerns in the BGLTQ community. She argued that the priorities of young queer people of color are not currently reflected in the mainstream queer movement.

“People of color, they don’t really care about marriage…not that they don’t care, but it’s like the fifth on our priority list,” she said, listing issues such as HIV/AIDs, assault, unfair criminalization, homelessness, and unemployment as more pertinent issues for the black community.

She urged attendees to think of these issues as being intrinsically linked.

“People want to box out. What’s the gay problem? What’s the race problem? You can’t isolate this,” she said.

During the extended question-and-answer section, one female attendee thanked Moodie-Mills for working in politics to broaden the conversation beyond “people who look like her.”

The event launched this year’s Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series, a series of public talks sponsored by various on-campus and off-campus groups including the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, the Committee on Degrees in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, GLAAD, and the Open Gate Foundation.

According to Michael Bronski, a professor in the WGS Department and curator for this year’s seminar series, the series is entitled “After Marriage: the Future of LGBTQ Activism” because it is meant to explore issues in the queer community beyond marriage equality.

Bronski described these issues as having “gripped the public imagination” in a previously unparalleled way.

“A lot of the funding of the past ten years—development money—has been targeted towards same-sex marriage,” Bronski said.  “That money could possibly dry up if [the funders] thought getting marriage was the be-all and end-all.”

Bronski said he was thrilled by the large and diverse crowd Moodie-Mills’s opening seminar drew, as this was the first year organizers publicized the seminar series to the local community and worked with outside organizations like GLAD.

—Staff writer Quynh-Nhu Le can be reached at quynhnhu.le@thecrimson.com.