It's also a conversation about how we organize, about how democratic action depends on, in the words of my brother, a labor organizer, the obligation of the government, of business, and of other institutions to honor the contracts they have signed. All of this impacts LGBT people because as LGBT people, we are impacted by any erosion of basic rights.

But I've wanted to go deeper than that. Because the connection between LGBT communities and labor organizing is more essential than how our members are impacted by economic justice today. Our own origin story as an organized community is dependent on the power of labor organizing.

Here's what I mean:

I avoid grandiose plans. I start with a small piece that I can do. I go to the root of the problem and then work around it. It's building brick by brick. Muhammad Yunus, Visionaries by Utne Reader

What is interdependence? The easiest analogies are ecological: the recognition that every aspect of life is woven into every other aspect of life.

Here's the thing about interdependence: it's not just a theory, it's a practice. We can talk about interdependence for hours on end, understanding its nuances, its implications. We can hold conferences and create websites, perfect our language and our analysis, but unless we are practicing, consciously awkwardly practicing, we aren't changing a thing.

Susan Who is your community? Seriously. Stop and take a moment to notice who you think of when you hear that word: community. What makes them your community? Is it just that you like to hang out together, having each other's back in a kind of social interlacing that means you know people when you go out to a club? Or is it deeper than that?

Community is one of those words that us queer people can sometimes exchange like candy. Our community, my community, the community. Often it just means the people we recognize on the street who seem to be "like us," or the people we know are out there but whose faces we've never seen. Community can be a commodity, something pulled out at specific moments to justify an action or an argument, and then neatly put back on the shelf until another time.

I am interested in community as something practical, something concrete that I could literally draw on a piece of paper with names, addresses and details. I am interested in community that is interdependent. In this kind of community, it matters if I show up. I am missed and I miss you. Our lives are intertwined.

As a kid, I didn't really think about what Thanksgiving "meant." It was a day off school with lots of family and lots of eating. In school we had lessons on hungry pilgrims and friendly Indians, but I wasn't particularly captivated by the story. It was just the backdrop to that food-heavy date that fell a month before Christmas.

As I grew older, I began to learn more about this country's history of colonization and genocide. Those "friendly Indians" who helped the Pilgrims during their first winter were rewarded with violence and direct attack as British and Dutch soldiers systematically massacred those communities seen to be living in the way of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This was not the story that children learned in their schoolbooks. Public school lessons made it seem like the Brits and others gently touched down on unpopulated land, bartering new technology for food and paths through the forest.

I have remembered that conversation multiple times over the past month. Every time I have read the report of another suicide or learned of more hatred directed from young people towards other young people, bullying based on perceived queerness, Muslim identity, race, ability or immigration status, I have thought about how much where we are today comes directly from that moment in history. Here is what I mean.

While sitting in that Dallas hotel lobby, Pam was telling me about the formation of SONG and, in particular, why SONG was founded: as a creative response to many things, including the rise of the white Christian Radical Right's targeting of Black churches and Black church leaders around the issue of homophobia and the rhetoric of "Special Rights." In 1993, the film Gay Rights, Special Rights, released by the Traditional Values Coalition, used original footage from Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech and other interviews to argue that the "gay movement" threatened to undermine and belittle the entire civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Strategic and terrifying, the film presented queerness as only white and only middle class. It showed LGBT people as self-focused and without morality: taking footage from Pride parades and private parties out of context. It asked the viewer, and it presumed a Black viewer, why anyone would want to support rights for a group of people clearly already well off, privileged in their whiteness, and without any respect for how our sexual practices and interests might be experiences by all of the families watching from the sidelines. It depended on separating each from another: LGBT people from Black people.

It started gradually, somewhere around 7 years old, this shift from her life being an open book for any and all to read towards this sense of caution. She's clear that it isn't shame she feels, more of a desire to pick her battles. Because even here, in her small radical school focused on social justice and civil rights, there are kids who just don't get the whole two moms thing. The whole idea, they tell her, is stupid. Whoever heard of such a thing, having two mothers? And Luca, our daughter, very quietly just tucks away one aspect of herself into her back pocket, learning when and where it is safe to bring it out and when she should just not say a thing.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a whole host of written and YouTubed stories told by adults about how they were bullied as children. From the "It gets better" campaign started by Dan Savage and his partner to other first person tellings, all in the spirit of bringing to light the violence and horror that can be high school.

The first year was mostly spent in long distance. She had to go back to Brazil due to visa issues. I sat at home thinking, really? Really? Eventually I moved to Brazil to try things out, see if this was serious. We knew it was from the minute I got off the airplane.

Like lots of queer couples, we count our anniversary from the first time we had sex. That long night of intensity when we did all of the silly impulsive things without a shred of embarrassment: talked babies and future trips and what our families would think of each other.

That first night slid into a first year and then seven years later into having a kid together and building a shared culture of experiences and short hand language. We have taken trips and found out that our families each like the partner we chose. On today, September 11th, we celebrate 15 years.

It took me a minute to notice what was going on and then, when the two of us were alone together, to ask my daughter about it: "You're having a hard time with how many people stare at your mãe, aren't you?" Mãe, by the way, is Portuguese for mother.

This was it. Exactly. For her first eight years, Luca didn't notice the stares - both curious and hostile - that can gather around her mãe's body, around my partner, Rocki's body, when we are out in public. You know the stares - the "What are you?" stares, those moments of gender policing.

But now Luca notices them and for her, they are constant. And they feel very personal. However much they are directed at Rocki, Luca feels them as though they were all about her. And it makes her want to hide somewhere. It makes her walk carefully outside, her head down and her hand holding tight to mine.

Here is how Luca describes gender and her queer family: one mother plucks the hair from her chin and the other doesn't. This means that one has a little beard while the other one is smooth. Gender.

Today was a beautiful day. I pulled weeds from the garden and harvested more cucumbers. There is a pile of them in the refrigerator. I am thinking of making pickles this weekend. I've never done that before, make pickles. I bought the white vinegar at the store this afternoon and read the recipe twice. There's a war on right now.

In the afternoon I went with my eight-year-old daughter to our weaving class. We're learning some basic stitches. We started with plain weaving, three colors of stripes repeating one after another. Today we decided to switch it up a bit. We took one of the stripes and made it thicker at the side. Then we practiced curving it up, making it end in the middle of another color's space. It felt brave to try new stitches, our hands sweaty in the afternoon sun while the mosquitos bit us. And there's a war going on even this second.