Heather Cronk has served as the Managing Director of GetEQUAL and today she announces an important change at the LGBT civil rights organization, in this exclusive op-ed.
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Today, GetEQUAL is undergoing a transition of leadership.
Starting today, Felipe Sousa-Rodriguez and I will begin serving as co-directors of GetEQUAL. This decision has been a long time coming and has resulted in some incredible conversations with our board members. For a board to trust the leadership of the organization to a young female seminary graduate from the South and a young undocumented man from Brazil is a brave move — but it also marks a shift that I hope becomes the norm for the LGBTQ movement.
I didn’t always have the urgency for LGBTQ equality that I do today — that I developed three years ago. I came to GetEQUAL after having worked in the progressive movement for years, but had always seen myself as an “infrastructure builder” and not an “organizer.” That all changed for me in 2010 when I started watching four brave young undocumented immigrants walking from Miami to DC, risking life and limb along the way, to draw attention to the need for the DREAM Act.
These four folks caught my attention not because of what they were saying (though that was powerful, too), but because of where they were walking. I’m from Kentucky and have lived all over the Southeast. I went to college in Georgia and have visited most of the state with college friends at one time or another. I knew the towns these four folks were walking through, and those towns weren’t going to be kind to them. These are towns where the KKK is alive and kicking — towns where sheriffs pride themselves on roughing up anyone who isn’t white. The four folks were risking their lives because they believed in their own moral equality, but they needed America to recognize that moral equality and therefore grant them legal equality. What, I asked myself, the f*&k am I doing for my own equality?
At the same time that this Trail of Dreams was happening, I had connected with Kip Williams and Robin McGehee — two crazy radicals who had just organized the National Equality March (with a legion of volunteers) and believed that LGBTQ folks not only *should* be equal under the law, but *could* be equal under the law. The crazy part was that they believed that could happen in short order — it didn’t have to take a generation, as most of our national LGBTQ organizations believed. I was skeptical. I lived in DC and was well-acquainted with the political calculus that LGBTQ issues were “the third rail of politics” and all other manner of euphemisms for “DON’T TOUCH THAT ISSUE WITH A TEN-FOOT POLE!”
But I started talking with Kip and Robin, and I started to see the organizers they were attracting — folks from states like Texas and Mississippi, folks who had been left behind by the rest of the movement, folks who were working two and three jobs to get by, but could always figure out a way to organize and take action and dream. I started to realize that there was a moment in front of us — something was simmering below the surface but, if we did thingsright, we could raise that simmer to a rolling boil. We could get equal.
Three years later, I’ve met some of the most incredible folks who are organizing at great risk to themselves, their families, and their livelihoods. GetEQUAL organizers have lost their jobs because of their activism, they have been passed over for jobs because their names are “Googable” now, and they have had enormous strain put on their families because they’ve been so “out” in their communities. This work is no joke.
I’m thrilled that I get to work every day with one of the people who inspire me the most — someone who has shown incredible courage and who has unrelenting energy for this work. Felipe was one of a small group of folks across the country who created the moral crisis around immigration that has resulted in today’s prospect of comprehensive immigration reform. I have no doubt that, as we embark on this new phase of GetEQUAL’s work, we’ll be working like mad to do exactly the same thing for LGBTQ equality — creating the moral crisis that will open up a conversation about solutions to the problem of inequality.
As Felipe and I head into our new roles as co-directors, we hope that we can continue to inspire folks just as Robin and Kip and so many of GetEQUAL’s organizers have done over the past three years. As Gaby and Carlos and Juan and, yes, Felipe walked through the South three years ago to inspire me to take action, I hope that we can do the same for the LGBTQ community and our allies. It’s time to rise up, it’s time to realize our own moral equality, and it’s time to translate that into the struggle for our legal equality. It’s time to get equal — will you join us?