Workshop Notes: Surviving the Hot Seat: Protecting Yourself and Sharing your story

Ready to educate the masses? Many queer and allied people are called upon, formally and informally, to speak about our community and answer a wide variety of questions. This can be an exhausting and daunting task for many, including those new to the idea as well as the veterans. The session will focus on skills and strategies necessary for community members to participate in panels and presentations of any sort. Join us to learn these skills and work with those "difficulty" audience members. This program is for all skill levels and a great tool for any student organization. Presenter: Jess Berndt.

This was a great workshop with a very polished presenter. She spent a lot of time talking about introductions and establishing repoire with the audience. Be authentic and yourself as much as possible, and share as you feel safe. Tell jokes and make a connection with the audience. In an intro, say many different things about yourself, including your other identities, things people can relate to. Provide a hook. What questions do you get asked the most?

Know your audience. "What does LGBT mean to you?" is a good way to test the waters. Some people might not know the acronymns: define your language and terms. She does "pride panels" which are a recruitment tool also.

Don't go to a pride panel when you are tired and stressed-- the audience can tell. Be in right frame of mind and be aware of body language. Tables can be a barrier and create audience apprehension. Your own nervousness about speaking can translate to the audience. Once you get the first couple of questions asked, you're over the main hurdle.

Be prepared. A lot of this is about finding your own voice.

**Don't lessen the impact of difficult stories. When talking about negative life experiences, discrimination, etc, people will try to save emotional face by saying, "but I'm here, I'm OK, I'm fine now." This is a mistake because it communicates that it's somehow OK to treat people this way and lessens the power of the story. They will see that you are here telling your story anyway, despite all of that, and it speaks for itself. Don't waste it -- Use it! (This was a WOW moment for me!!)

Don't be too familiar on panels, such as inside jokes.

The hostile takeover: the agenda hog!

Part of knowing your audience is language and respecting people's identity labels. Call people what they want to be called. Some discussion ensued of language reclamation, insider usage of terms, the fact that not everyone is comfortable with "queer" and other terms. "If there is a big gay caucus on language, where is my invite?" she joked.

I think it was here that someone asked about white supremacy within the community and language, and that did not get answered to my satisfaction. Jess said something about how she tries to include people of color on pride panels and worries that they get exhausted because she's calling on them all the time.

We practiced introducing ourselves to the person next to us. I met an adorable foreign exchange student.

She talked about how the audience is a bell curve: the 15% on either end don't worry about, the one end are going to support you no matter what, the other end are against you no matter what. Focus on the middle 70%, the "movable middle" as I heard it called later.

Dealing with hostile audience members:
--deflect with humor
--example of someone pushing a religious agenda: they are not actually asking a question. Say: "What I'm hearing is that you are a member of a faith community that's not affirming to LGBT people." Address it to the room, not to that person: de-escalate.
--example of the very personal, embarrassing question re sex. "That sounds like a very personal and individualized question and I bet it's different for every person." Also, people can look things up on the internet.

Notes: Mia Mingus

Here is a great YouTube clip of Mia Mingus receiving an award at 2008 Creating Change

She started with a moment to recognize that we all bring histories and stories.

"To be as able-bodied as possible is to be as white and straight as possible."

She is not a fan of criminalization-- we know who gets imprisoned first, so let's think about that re hate crimes legislation.

"Queer" is both a descriptive and political term which is confusing.

Fighting white supremacy is queer liberation! No one org. is responsible for ending oppression *but* we can do something about it! If you have privilege you can not be neutral. There is no neutrality because everyone is privileged in some way.

Intersectionality is a big fancy word for LIFE.

Fighting for justice is queer. Justice not equality: we don't want to be "like you" because how you are depends upon oppression.

Re Disability: Most social justice movements are inaccessible. And the disability movement by and large is white male veterans.

Ableism dictates how bodies should function. The Normal Body. Ableism set the stage for other oppressions (reproductive oppression, queer people classed as mentally ill, etc etc)

Leadership and who gets to tell the story shows you a lot about privilege. Must actively resist racism and be intentional because it's so entrenched.

"How could I not want to be able bodied? How could I desire to be disabled?" (AWESOME, yes) Talking about how disability is also Queer!!! "The wrong body, the public body" that she must daily fight to claim. We are uncomfortable talking about bodies in the queer community.

Question what family means.

Who do we desire to be? As queer people and community? Fight for community at all costs. Don't let others divide us.

Q&A starts
Re: intersectionality: You don't have to give up one thing to fight another. This is very important! We who live with multiple oppressed identities know this.

Q: "What do we do?" re racism.
A: Confront own privilege, hang out with other white radical allies, study and read.

Q: Transnational and Transracial Adoption.
A: Tied to reproductive justice, tied to prison-industrial complex and the military, tied to population control. Relates to children as commodities that one can shop for. Tied to colonizing wars and natural disasters, in which we have no business removing kids from their communities (ie Haiti). Stories of unethical adoptions in S. Korea and Mexico where people are selling kids and making huge profits. Why do this when there are children here? Also this serves the best intent of the parents, not the kids. Funnels kids out of poor countries, out of POC families, breaks apart communities, ie Native American boarding schools.

The next person in line for Q&A, also a transnational/transracial adoptee, gives a dissenting opinion and says he is glad he got a loving home and feels himself a success story. Mentions being a minority within a minority.

Q: How to stress inclusivity, how to get people to come to events not their own interest area?
A: Takes generations. Build coalitions.
audience member: Fight with me, even if it's not your fight.

Q: Where do poly people fit into the queer community?
A: Movement has been struggling with this and must keep evolving. Must be more written and spoken.

Q: Calling people out and getting upset and how that is OK.
A: People aren't perfect. We're living in the machine. Take responsibility and work through our shit - everything is useful, nothing is wasted. Leave a situation if you are unsafe. It's a life long process.

Q: Physical location and Geography.
A: She talks about living in Atlanta.

Q: Educational privilege. Reconciling scholarship and activism.
A: Very hard! Rigid lines in academia, but exciting work being done there.

Q: Being informative vs. being annoyed by people (being in the hot seat)
A: Advocates self-care. Personal choice every day.

Q: Immigration and citizenship.
A: So important for queer community! Think about connections with photo IDs, trans issues, and the outsider identity. Think about who gets demonized, blamed, and thought of as dirty.

Notes: Kate Bornstein

Create a life for yourself that is more worth living

*Identity
*Desire
*Power

These exist in a Venn diagram. Desire gets the worst rap in society and can mean many things, but she is mostly going to talk about the fucking aspect. She gives a call out to asexuality which gets a big cheer.

In the middle of the diagram should be something like Goddess/God, your heart, compassion. But instead exists:

-Gender
-Race
-Class
-Sexuality
-Ability
-Age
-Religion
-Looks
-Citizenship
-Family and reproductive status
-Language

Each by itself can be fine, but all these things combined can be deadly: they are vectors to rules, hierarchical systems of oppression. Masked by binaries.

Postmodern theory can keep you alive. She gives a 2-minute summary of post-modern theory which basically boils down to "things are more than one/things have more than one interpretation."

Bullies use language to coerce us into being false. Either/Or. She gives some examples. Classic is "man or woman" and they should be separate and equal. She doesn't think this is possible. Riddle of what weighs more? 1 tonne of bricks or 1 tonne of feathers? If you say they weigh the same you are wrong, because as soon as you move, some of the feathers fly off! The only time they weigh the same is IN A VACUUM, and life does not exist in a vacuum!! Others: Real or Fake, Kinky or Vanilla. Many binaries all over!

She lists many identities not covered in LGBTA: feminist, sadomasochist, queer, femme, butch, drag queen or king, intersex, asexual, kinky, queer heterosexuals, poly, gender queer etc, etc. She suggests GASP for Gender Anarchy Sex Positive.

Expression of gender and sexuality constantly shift depending on environment.

The US is the bully of the world. The right wing is defined by the radical right. Where is the radical left movement? Even those on the far left are still operating under the hierarchies of gender, race, class, age, looks, religion, sexuality, ability, citizenship, family and reproductive status, and language. There has never been a coalition that has included all these vectors of oppression.

*When values fail, we go to ethics. When ethics fail, we go to morals: this is where either/or comes from, the 10 commandments kind of things. When morals fail, we go to laws and the criminal justice system.

Somewhere she also talked about her scale of emotions which is in her book Hello Cruel World. She made clear that anger is a lot better place to be than some other emotions. There were some people at this conference that were quite angry: a group of queer people of color talked about how they and trans people and people with disabilities had been marginalized, tokenized, and excluded.