Get Your Power and Pride On!

It’s time to show some love for Brooklyn Pride. The borough is set to culminate its Pride week celebrations with the mother of festivities, The 15th Annual Pride Day Parade and Festival this Saturday, June 11th in Prospect Park.

Meantime, The Audre Lorde Project celebrates diversity of gender and sexual orientation every day.  The group is a mighty grass-roots force in the LGBT community and is actively pushing the envelope to ensure equality, justice and safety for LGBT people of color. It’s a citywide group with a satellite office and meeting center in Ft. Greene.

Many of its members hail from right here in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “In 2005, we started working in Bed-Stuy mostly just because a lot of the members live in Bed-Stuy and were experiencing a lot of hate violence, and really wanted to focus more on local politics and a neighborhood-based way to address violence in our community,” said Chelsea Johnson-Long, Program Coordinator at The Audre Lorde Project.

Johnson-Long is a bright, well-informed rising star in community organizing. Her “Safe Neighborhood Campaign” strives to make sure hate-violence is stopped and those involved are held fully accountable. The non-profit group is actively creating a network of safe harbors in Bedford Stuyvesant.

These so-called safe spaces inside store front businesses would potentially support and assist any LGBT person in imminent danger who is  being harrassed or brutalized by an attacker, or even at the hands of authorities.  There are a handful of stores involved now, but The Audre Lorde Project is working with the community to establish more.

Business owners put up a visible sticker indicating that their shop is a safe space and staff undergo training on assisting the LGBT person in potential crisis, as well as how to diffuse or intervene before a situation escalates. “It’s also saying that your space is a space that is intolerant of homophobia or transphobia on any level,” said Johnson-Long.

This activism  in the community for people of color who also identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and/or Gender Non-Comforming  rings loudly of the spirit of its namesake.  Audre Lorde was a lesbian, scholar, and poet of Caribbean-American heritage. Lorde was a leader in tearing down oppression and injustice. She died in the early 1990s.

In a cozy, dimly lit church basement, it feels like a dormitory where young people are hard at work on signs for Satuday’s parade.  Glitter, markers and bright fluorescent oak tag spruce up the dingy gray floor of The Audre Lorde Project office on South Oxford St. People drop by at various points in the night for their Tuesday meeting.

Elliot Fukui is filling in bubble letters with permanent marker.  He is a Bedford Stuyvesant resident and member of The Audre Lorde Project. He remarks at how well the organization is progressively at the forefront of non-violence and alternative community policing initiatives to keep LGBT people protected and able to carry out their every day lives.

“What’s good about community accountability is that it’s kind of pushing folks to recognize that  this work is about how violence affects everybody,” said Fukui.

The Audre Lorde Project is just one of many groups keeping the dialogue of LGBT Brooklyn relevant and effective.  They’ll be joined by hundreds more people from all walks of life Saturday, who will be raising awareness and standing up for their core beliefs.  

It’s going to be a rocking party all day with an evening parade. Be there.  Work it out!