'Queer Brown Voices' discussed at WC&F

At Women and Children First on Jan. 21, activist Letitia Gomez, American University Associate Professor of Sociology Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and Chicago Commission on Human Relations Chairman/Commissioner Mona Noriega welcomed a packed crowd to engage in a discussion and readings from the book Queer Brown Voices—a first-of-its-kind volume that, according to a Women and Children First press release, counters a trend of reducing the role that Latinas/os played in LGBT activism from the 1970s on by “documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latinx activists through authentic testimonies of their own lived experiences.”

Gomez, Vidal-Ortiz and Noriega each read his or her own contributions in the construction of the anthology before reading a passage from the book.

“The most important reason we created the book is the fact that there really hadn’t been [one] that dedicated itself to the voices of Latino/a LGBT activists,” Gomez said. “It was important for us to capture those voices.”

She added that she had been interviewed a number of times for books on LGBT civil rights but that her contributions rarely made the final edit.

“It was apparent to me that we needed to write our own history,” she said.

“We were angry. We were frustrated. We were invisible,” Vidal-Ortiz recalled. “Those emotions can stop someone in their tracks. The stories [in the book] are not simply personal narratives. They are connected to many communities. Writing this book as an act of activism so that we could offer a primer of LGBT Latino/a history that isn’t by far the end. It is just the beginning.”

See related article at the link: windycitytimes.com/lgbt/BOOKS-Queer-Brown-Voices-Personal-Narratives-of-Latina-o-LGBT-Activism/52729.html.