Creating Change
BY John D'Emilio ON January 21, 2015
Two weeks from now, LGBT activists from around the U.S. will be heading toward Denver. Some will be paid staff of national, state, and local organizations; most will not. Ages will range from “old-timers” like me, who have been around for decades, to younger folks in their teens and early twenties who are newbies to the world of activism. They will span the broad and fluid range of sexual and gender identities, as well as race, class, ethnic, and religious identities. They will spend several days together talking, planning, discussing, and arguing. They’ll catch up with each other on a year’s worth of activism, and they will share hopes and dreams and fears about the coming year and beyond.
The excuse that brings them together is the annual Creating Change conference of the National LGBTQ Task Force. The first one was held in Washington DC in 1988. It attracted something like 325 attendees. Today, Creating Change regularly draws more than 3000 activists. As far as I know, it is the largest annual convocation of its kind in the U.S. I have been to many queer conferences, including many Creating Change gatherings, and in my experience there is nothing else like Creating Change.
Some of what makes it so compelling is the breadth and depth of the experience that attendees bring. There will be workshops and sessions on just about any LGBTQ issue that one can imagine, along with many workshops and trainings that also address issues related to the other identities that we carry. Some of what makes it so memorable is the extraordinary oratory of keynote speakers at plenary sessions. I particularly recall the emotional power of Vito Russo during his ACT UP days; the Reverend C.T. Vivian of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Kenyon Farrow of Queers for Economic Justice. And some of what makes it compelling for me is the knowledge, born of the experience of having been to many of them over the last twenty-six years, of the activist plans that got hatched at a Creating Change conference and that, over the years, grew to be powerful and effective initiatives.
It strikes me that, as histories of LGBT activism over the last thirty years get researched and written, Creating Change could be a valuable source of information. The programs alone, for instance, could be used to trace the development of different issues and the career paths of various activists. The conference can provide insight into the relationship between local and state activism and national campaigns. The changing focus of plenary sessions might offer clues to how movement priorities developed and shifted over time. And the organizational records of the Task Force that detail the planning of the conference are likely to reveal much about activist networks and concerns.
And then there are the oral histories that could be gathered of conference planners and participants. They could make for a fascinating reconstruction of the history of the conference itself and how it has evolved over the decades. Sue Hyde has been with the Task Force for the entire history of Creating Change and has been the chief planner and coordinator. And the records of the Task Force are in the Human Sexuality Collection of Cornell University. Scrolling through its online guide to the collection, I noticed that the records about Creating Change, at least for its first several years, seemed quite ample.
Creating Change is a topic waiting to be investigated, explored, and interpreted.
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