Public speaking has always come naturally to Elena Rose.
“My first public political speech was when I was 15 in my hometown,” said Rose, a poet, writer, activist and seminary student. “I was pushed to the front of a pro-choice rally and a speech just came out. I had no idea what I was doing: Words just started coming out, and then all of a sudden people were crying and hugging me.”
Public speaking has always come naturally to Elena Rose.
“My first public political speech was when I was 15 in my hometown,” said Rose, a poet, writer, activist and seminary student. “I was pushed to the front of a pro-choice rally and a speech just came out. I had no idea what I was doing: Words just started coming out, and then all of a sudden people were crying and hugging me.”
Rose, a self-identified Filipina-Ashkenazic mixed-class trans-dyke mestiza, will speak at Portland State Queer Resource Center’s Martin Luther King Day celebration Wednesday, Jan. 18. She will discuss King’s idea of radical love and the importance of embracing that ideal across lines of race, gender, class and sexual orientation.
“Radical love places us in community with each other,” said Cat McGraw, coordinator of the QRC. “More than walking a mile in someone’s shoes, you’re trying to understand their entire worldview, what is real for them.”
The center had Rose on their radar after she appeared at last spring’s Queer Students of Color Conference, which was hosted by the QRC, the Multicultural Center and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Department.
“Elena spoke about love and her desire to continue to pursue the work of social justice with love,” said Jayvin Gordon-Green, the QRC’s queer student of color coordinator. Rose’s message of inclusiveness and action struck a chord with many of the conference’s attendees. “Many, many people were moved and impressed by her talk,” Gordon-Green said.
Although the QRC may not be the first organization students think of for an event honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Rose emphasizes the interconnectedness of all types of oppression.
“You can’t really separate racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism and transphobia,” Rose said. “All of our struggles are connected.”
Reaching out to queer people of color has been a particular priority for the QRC since Gordon-Green was hired last year, around the same time that McGraw became the center’s coordinator.
“Anybody can want to make a space inclusive, but if you walk into a place and don’t see yourself represented, don’t see anything that denotes that you are welcome in that space, you may still feel uneasy,” Gordon-Green said. “In the past year, it’s gone from me being one of the only people of color to being one of many people of color in the room.”
The QRC’s drive to be an all-inclusive space acknowledges the difficulty of balancing two potentially marginalizing identities: being a person of a color and identifying as an LGBTQ person.
“To be a queer person of color is to occupy these incredibly difficult places,” McGraw said. “Where is home for folks who occupy multiple identities?”
McGraw and the rest of the QRC have made a concerted effort to work closely with other university organizations to ensure that students who occupy multiple identities feel like they have ample resources on campus.
“Cat [McGraw] has been really persistent in working with other departments, specifically the Women’s Resource Center, the Multicultural Center and La Casa Latina, to make sure that the constituents of those groups know that the QRC is an open space for everybody,” Gordon-Green said. “Places are starting to address the intersections of people’s identities.”
Resources like the QRC were not available to Rose while growing up in a small town in rural Oregon: “My high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance met in a locked bathroom in a Planned Parenthood in the middle of the night,” Rose said. “It was a very hard place to be queer and brown.”
The difficulty of occupying multiple identities is exemplified by Bayard Rustin, a close adviser to King and a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement. McGraw cites Rustin as an influential figure at the crossroads of the fight for both gay and black rights.
“Rustin was a radical queer man,” McGraw said, “and he had to keep a lid on his sexual orientation” while King and others fought for African-Americans’ rights during the Civil Rights movement.
Rustin, in fact, was instrumental in shaping the Reverend’s politics. According to a 2011 story on National Public Radio, Rustin convinced King to remove the weapons from his home that were being used to protect his family. It’s fair to say that Dr. King’s view of nonviolent tactics was almost non-existent when the boycott began, according to the NPR story.
Rustin formed the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942 and, in 1947, organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first of the Freedom Rides to test bus segregation. After studying Gandhi’s techniques of nonviolent resistance in India, Rustin was chosen to advise King on Gandhian tactics in 1956 to prepare for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Later, Rustin and King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an instrumental organization in the Civil Rights movement.
As King’s prominence in the movement increased, however, other Civil Rights organizers felt that Rustin’s sexual orientation was a hindrance to the movement and he was shunned by many.
“The leaders of the southern ministries were concerned by Rustin’s sexuality because he had been pretty active in the queer movement,” Gordon-Green said. “He made no secret about his sexuality.”
Elena Rose believes that the struggles of leaders like Rustin and King are vital lessons for those fighting oppression in the 21st century.
“I think the queer community has a lot to learn from the Civil Rights struggle,” Rose said. “If we really want to honor Dr. King, we have a duty to carry on his work.”
