Queer Design Club

Owner/creative strategist of A Great Idea (https://weareagi.com), a US-based care + community brand communications agency supporting nonprofit and for profit partners.

How does being queer inform your work?

As a lifelong harm reduction activist and community organizer stemming back to my teens, 'queer' as a term filled the lack of language I had to articulate the recognition that there is an unlimited number of paths and identities that people will use to define their stores, their paths. Each of those stories and lives deserves dignity and celebration - and the leaders (named and unnamed) who advanced queer liberation in spite of threats, violence and harms are the voices who keep me aligned and committed to a vision of what must be possible for all those in our LGBTQIA+ communities and not just those who intersect with other privileges.

What are your favorite pieces of queer visual culture?

Queer visual culture's rich heritage of voices (Basquiat, Pierre + Gilles, Catherine Opie) inform so many powerful conversations about identity made by artists like Gio Black Peter, Marcus Chin, and Lex Barberio that ask us to push harder, demand more. I was proud to create and continue to be in community with the Queer | Art initiative that started in NYC with Ira Sachs' film series and is now continuing to propel queer art forward through commitments in cinema, visual work, and performance each year.

Which other queer people inspire you?

The legacies of Rivera and Johnson are critical, of course, and the intellectual work of visionaries like Foucault were powerful in my comprehension of queerness, but if you ask me day to day? People like Ceyenne Doroshow (and Rivera), whose commitment to sexwork decriminalization has been important to recognizing queer liberation and then there is a slate of powerful young leaders who are re-contextualizing gender identity and expression to better model inclusion and demand the table's shape change to reflect the many communities and their intersections. So, I look and learn and listen to them. They inspire me :)