Berkshire County — The outcome of November’s presidential election has given rise to trepidation about the future among minority and marginalized groups, including the local LGBTQ+ community.
“Some things that people are really worried about are the kind of vilification of the trans community, and they see that as evident that ‘divide and conquer’ is the strategy of the MAGA movement in general,” said Bart Church, executive director of Queer Men of the Berkshires (Q-MoB). “The more crazy things get, the more their targets will expand to include all of us.”
“We were, in many ways, prepared for this, and in many ways not,” said maayan nuri héd, executive director of Seeing Rainbows, which was founded in May and is led and operated entirely by transgender individuals. “You can never fully be prepared, especially when our community in particular was the target of so much vitriol during the campaign,” she continued.
One of the classes taught by Carla Stephens, Ph.D., director of the Bard Queer Leadership Project at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, is Cold War Civil Rights, and “we were covering McCarthyism and seeing the parallels in the 1950s to what’s happening now,” she said.
Stephens explained that “the disappointment and the uncertainty and the fear and the desire to act is very high” among her students. “It feels as if the the weapon of this [incoming] administration is fear, and if you can make people fearful enough, then they will believe that you’re all powerful and then you can control them,” she said. “So I’ve been really trying to impress upon my students that they aren’t powerless, and that it is in times like these that leaders, like they are hoping to become, are most important.”
Concerns held by LGBTQ+ community members, according to Church, also include anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, what could happen to healthcare, and threats to their physical safety. Church said he has seen “an increasing number of people” moving to the Berkshire County region due to these concerns. JV Hampton-VanSant, who, among the many organizations they are affiliated with, is a former president of Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition and a volunteer with Berkshire Pride, also feels that Massachusetts is “fairly well insulated” and that that “does give us a very particular type of responsibility towards our queer brothers and sisters … We are the ones that then have to make space for them, make room for them, try to help them as best we can if they need to get out of an awful situation, [if] they need places to go.”
“I would describe what we do as mutual aid for art and art for mutual aid,” said maayan nuri héd, who went on to emphasize that the construction of mutual aid is different from charitable giving. “It’s not the kind of thing where people are giving out of the goodness of their heart. It’s almost completely selfish, when you think about it, if you’re completely dedicated to mutual aid, because you realize that your survival depends on giving everything you can to others.
“Literally, I exist as a result of mutual aid,” maayan nuri héd continued. “In Belgium during the Shoah, my grandparents were engaged in mutual aid networks in Brussels that ultimately were the ones who shielded my father and his brothers … They were kept safe and fed through mutual aid networks … This is very much rooted in traditions of resistance to oppression and authoritarianism. Mutual aid networks are resilient and survive even the most oppressive regimes.”
In conversations with her students, Stephens has stressed the importance of understanding “what the political landscape is in the places where they are” and that, along with organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU, “there are people that are prepared to fight the worst of what could be happening. … [I]t feels as If the the weapon of this [incoming] administration is fear and and if you can make people fearful enough, then they will believe that you’re all powerful, and then you can control them.”
Jason Vivori is a former board member and president of the Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition and has been active with the organization since 1997, around the time of its founding. “We’ve certainly seen challenges,” he said in regard to Berkshire Stonewall’s history in the county. “It’s not like we haven’t run into threats to the [LGBTQ+] community in the past … In my time on the board, one of the challenges I’ve found as difficult is, when things have gotten to a point where people feel we’re in a good place, the community has kind of drifted apart,” said Vivori. “It wasn’t until we saw a threat again that we kind of came back together. But I think it’s pretty strong now.”
“Whenever we’ve been threatened, we tend to come together, get really creative, really fabulous, and we produce miracles like marriage equality, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, like ending employment discrimination,” said Church.
“As we’ve come under threat, it’s going to be very important for people to find resources quickly and find community quickly, and right now, it can be really hard,” Church said.
Berkshire County’s LGBTQ+ organizations offer many events and other opportunities for members to socialize with each other and the larger community. Q-MoB holds weekly coffee klatches in different towns throughout the region and also sponsors history walks, art tours, and potlucks. Berkshire Pride holds a yearly series of events in celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month in June. And just a couple of weeks ago, Seeing Rainbows received a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts Office of Outdoor Recreation for its Berkshire Trans Hikes program.
“There’s a long tradition in New England of neighbors helping neighbors,” said Church. “We need to practice that ourselves within the queer community, but I also think we need to show up as good neighbors and be seen as showing up as good neighbors. That’s how we’re going to ride out these next four years of what could be really scary stuff and really big changes.”
