What a weekend! If you weren't aware, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's annual Creating Change Conference took place this year just across the bay in Oakland. I missed last year's event in St. Louis, but had previously been to the conferences in Miami (2003) and Portland (2002). (I worked for the NGLTF as their Creating Change Intern in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of '03).

There are so many amazing things I could say about this year's event. Creating Change is composed of nearly 100 workshops that take place over a long weekend that kicks off Wednesday and ends Sunday. I attended workshops Thursday through Saturday. Each day, there is also a plenary session (where all of the nearly 3000 conference attendees come together to hear the same speaker(s)). Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the premier plenary featuring former Task Force ED Urvashi Vaid and the famed gay historian John D'Emilio. Vaid has long been one of the most inspirational figures in my life as an LGBT activist. She keynoted the first conference I organized at UNC in April 2003. Hopefully the Task Force will post the text of their speech and I'll put a link up if that happens.

I went to seven amazing workshops. It would take much too long to attempt to describe them all, but here they are by title:

1. Deterioration of Privacy Laws and the Effects on Transgender People (including none other than Dean Space of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project)

2. Sex, Race, Class and Gender: Establishing All-Inclusive, Sex-Positive Public Policy

3. Gay Men and Crystal: Probing the Root Causes (in which one important point from the facilitator Eric Rofes was that we talk so much about crystal meth but not about, say, crack - a drug done by heavily by poor people of color. We also heard from Tony Valenzuela who recently wrote a beautiful piece for LA Weekly on Crystal and gay men)

4. Radical Feminism: Still Sexy, Still Tool for Change

5. Defunding Our Lives: The LGBT Community and the Privatization of Social Security and the Federal Tax Cuts (a *fantastic* workshop)

6. From Gay Marriage to Queer Gentrification - Radical Queers Critique the Mainstreaming of the Gay Movement (Evan Wolfson, ED of Freedom to Marry, was about to rip his arm off next to us in this workshop haha - they put this workshop in a room that could hold maybe 50 people. About 300 or so showed up - we had to be moved!)

7. Legislative and Legal Battles for Transgender Equality

All in all, the workshops were fantastic. I felt like I saw an increase this year in targeted educational workshops that focused on specific issues of economic and racial justice for LGBTQ people (specifically, the workshops on Social Security and the one on Privacy Laws). It was, for instance, extremely useful to hear an in-depth analysis of what privatization of Social Security looks like (for everyone) and how that specifically threatens queer people, especially those of us who are working class and/or people of color. These are the kinds of trainings that one simply doesn't have access to anywhere else but spaces like Creating Change.

After the three days of intense workshopping was over, I was lucky enough to be invited to a soiree at Eric Rofes' house where I got a chance to speak with Suzanne Pharr (who keynoted my third and final Unity Conference at UNC), Urvashi Vaid, and Amber Hollibaugh (long-time economic justice activist within the LGBTQ movement).

It was, without a doubt, a needed jolt to my activist spirit. My graduate program has unfortunately not been providing me space to think about the kinds of issues the Creating Change brought to the table. I've been feeling starved of critical analysis - feeling as though my skills for analysis were actually starting to evaporate. That's a whole other blog entry, though.