By Michael J. Crumpler

Happy PRIDE, My Friends!

In years past, this salutation has landed in a variety of ways.

I remember my first real PRIDE in 2009 in Chicago. (I was a late bloomer.) I was fresh out of the closet and so very overwhelmed. I was alone and filled with trepidation. A recovering Evangelical, I was in spiritual shock. It was like I had been invited to a party that no one expected me to show up for. And to be honest, I didn’t know what I was there for.

My second PRIDE was in 2011 in Durham. Life had relocated me South. I was actually in the parade, with my church contingent. This time, I knew why I was there. Beyond just being OUT, I was accepted. I had community. I felt like I was representing God.

Beyond the half-naked bodies and glitter and rainbows, I was PROUD to be in a better place in my life.

It’s 2026, and I’ve been to many PRIDES. Sometimes I’m just a spectator. Other times, I’m in the streets or on a float. I’ve promoted PRIDE, and I’ve protested Pride. Pride is complicated.

On the one hand, it’s appropriate to celebrate the progress that has taken place, both publicly and privately, in the ordinary lives of people moving beyond the shadows of shame and into the light of healing, authenticity, and life.

On the other hand, it’s appropriate to remember that the first PRIDE was not a party. The context was angst and trauma, and a refusal to be violated by conspiring systems of cruelty and hate.

Pride was a FIGHT. It was a RELIGIOUS FIGHT, a POLITICAL FIGHT, a FAMILY FIGHT, a PERSONAL FIGHT. It was a FIGHT for safety, a FIGHT for legitimacy, a FIGHT for marriage, a FIGHT for gender diversity, a FIGHT for sex, a FIGHT for truth.

Today, the FIGHT continues! American exceptionalism would have us believe that all our fiercest FIGHTS are behind us. American privilege would have us believe that we are beyond hate, struggle, and harm.

We must accept that as long as America is America, the FIGHT will continue. Because not only is PRIDE a FIGHT, but so is America itself….and an ongoing FIGHT for freedom, a FIGHT for dignity, a FIGHT for equity. It’s the FIGHT of our lives. So FIGHT like hell!

Happy Pride America!!!

By Kimi Floyd Reisch

July 4, 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States. Across the country, there will be celebrations, parades, speeches, fireworks, and patriotic displays. We will hear speeches from many about how “they,” meaning their direct ancestors, triumphed in “conquering and civilizing” this land.

Anniversaries like this one invite us to celebrate achievements. But they also should invite us to remember those whose stories were left out of the historical retellings.

LGBTQ+ people are not a recent addition to the story. We have always been here, loving, worshiping, creating families, and helping shape the communities around us, just like everyone else who has called this land home.

The challenge is that our stories have more often been forgotten, hidden, or erased, especially as later generations reinterpreted religious and cultural traditions in ways that obscured our presence. And that loss means the world has forgotten some fascinating folks who also deserve to be remembered.

Long before the United States existed, there was an incredible human named Thomas or Thomasin Hall living in colonial Virginia in the 1620s, Hall moved between what society understood as male and female roles. Hall wore different clothing at different times, performed different social roles, and refused to fit neatly into categories that colonial authorities considered fixed and unquestionable.

The local court became so unsettled by Hall’s existence that officials ultimately ordered Hall to wear a combination of men’s and women’s clothing at the same time all the time, a public declaration of difference intended to satisfy the colony’s demand for certainty. But four hundred years later, the questions raised by Hall’s life remain remarkably familiar.

Who gets to define another person’s identity? And what happens when a human being refuses to fit within them?

Here’s another story.

In 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed, a young Quaker named Jemima Wilkinson experienced a severe illness and later announced that the person known as Jemima had died. From that point forward, this individual insisted on being known only as the Public Universal Friend. The Friend rejected gendered titles and gendered language, traveled throughout the new nation preaching and gathering followers, and they eventually established a religious community in western New York.

The Friend’s life stands as one of the clearest examples of a gender-expansive religious leader in the Revolutionary era. While a new nation was arguing and struggling whether to define freedom for all or based on racial categories, the Friend was already challenging assumptions about identity, authority, and belonging and found a place to thrive. There were many others like Universal Friend.

Couples likeCharity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who met in Vermont in 1807 and began a life together that would last more than forty years. They shared a home, a business, finances, responsibilities, and a deep commitment to one another. Their relationship functioned like a marriage, and many neighbors appear to have accepted them as a household. They were respected members of their community and active in civic and religious life.

This LGBTQ history is not only a collection of stories of people living beyond gendered expectations, but stories of love and those who found acceptance by their communities even though their relationships or lives were unusual for their time.

These stories complicate the assumption that LGBTQ people have always existed entirely on the margins. The reality is more complex. There were moments and places where communities made room for people whose lives did not fit conventional expectations.

Again, we are not new to the story. We were just left out of the history books.

Yet, as we approach this 250th anniversary, many LGBTQ people find themselves living in a moment of profound uncertainty. Across the country, questions of who is allowed to belong once again dominate public life.

That reality makes this 250th celebration complicated for some LGBTQ+ people. How do we celebrate a nation that has often failed to live up to its own ideals?

Perhaps the answer is to tell the truth.

The United States was founded on aspirations of liberty and equality while permitting slavery and then Jim Crow, Indigenous dispossession and erasure of traditional societal and gender roles, and the exclusion of women from equal rights. The promise was real. The practice was incomplete.

The work of every generation has been to widen the circle.

LGBTQ people have farmed this nation’s fields, fought its wars, preached from its pulpits, taught its children, built its communities, and dreamed its dreams.

The lives our LGBTQ ancestors lived are not footnotes. They are history.

As we mark 250 years, the most important question is not whether LGBTQ people belong in the story. The question before us now is whether the United States is willing to remember the fullness of its own story and whether, at last, it is ready to become a nation where all of us belong and thrive.

By Michael J. Crumpler

Sunday, May 17th, is International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia.

This weekend, I am traveling to Selma for the first time in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the great state of Louisiana to redraw Black representation out of Congress.

Selma is hallowed ground. It’s where we go when we need to call upon the ancestors. We go there when we need to draw upon powers greater than the powers that be today.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge is Mecca. It’s the Promised Land.

Edmund Pettus was a U.S. Senator from Alabama, a Confederate General, and the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. I wonder what he would think about his name being associated with the very thing he feared the most: freedom.

Freedom is dangerous.

I’m a Black queer nonbinary queen freely moving back and forth between the byways of Brooklyn and the highways of rural southeastern North Carolina. Rarely do I think about the danger that exists around me. Even more rare is the memory of those who made it possible for me to move with such freedom and dignity.

We are going to Selma to remember the danger we are in. Selma will not undraw any maps or overturn any Supreme Court decision. Selma will remind us — and them — that our fight for freedom is through the South.

All our freedoms — homosexual freedom, bisexual freedom, transgender freedom, freedom to immigrate, freedom to not to parent, freedom to be — are connected to the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

On this International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, may we remember that these fears are really about freedom.

The same fear that beat, lynched, and maimed Black children in Selma is the same fear that bans, misnames, and destroys transgender children today.

The same fear that annihilated Indigenous tribes is the same fear that undermines the rights of undocumented immigrants.

The same fear that put jelly beans in a jar next to a ballot and scribbled a price on a piece of paper for Black people to pay in order to vote is the same fear that says one Black district is too many. We wouldn’t want people to become too free.

On Sunday, May 17th, may we fear not, and may we all be free indeed.

By Kimi Floyd Reisch

The great poet Khalil Gibran once said,“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life, bringing peace, abolishing strife.”

If you have been watching the events unfold in Minneapolis and across the nation over the past month, you can see that truth unfolding in real time.

What we are witnessing is not entirely spontaneous. It is remembered and learned from similar movements and moments in our shared history. It is carried in bodies that have learned, across generations, how to stay present with one another when fear is loud and the future uncertain.

Singing Resistance is one organization that has risen up and has been an important part of the communal care and resistance movement rising in response to this moment and time in Minnesota. It has offered people a way to remain connected physically and emotionally, through shared breath as they learn the new and old songs, which helps them resist the isolating effects of fear. As local composer and participant David Hovick Lohman reported on social media, the movement had 500 participants the first week, 1,000 the second week, and over 2,000 people participated in training and a march that began at Westminster Presbyterian Church before moving outside a local hotel on February 1st.

Music As Resistance Is Not New

This focus on music as a form of resistance is not new. It was learned from the songs of those enslaved, when songs were shared that carried grief but also instructions and hope for escape. Those songs became the music of a long history of marching for justice and equality in this nation. Those songs taught people how to endure, how to communicate under threat, and how to remember themselves when systems were designed to erase them.

Music has never functioned only as inspiration. It has functioned as a way of keeping people present when exhaustion might otherwise send them home. When our speeches feel too thin or our statements feel too small, the body can still hear and remember song. Song reaches places language alone cannot, especially when words are no longer enough. Music gives emotional strength when the world feels heavy and the path forward unclear. It helps people stay together in moments that ask more than they feel they have to give.

Clinical studies now demonstrate what movements have long known. Listening to music for twenty to thirty minutes can lower heart rate and reduce cortisol, the stress hormone that floods the body under threat. Slow, repetitive musical patterns can deepen meditative states, support focus during complex tasks, and foster internal awareness. Researchers have found that familiar music can even help people living with Alzheimer’s or dementia reconnect to memory and the presence of their families and friends when other pathways falter.

Our movements understood this truth long before science caught up. And the people singing in Minneapolis and across the nation understand it now. Holding space musically is not about nostalgia. It centers communities away from fear and toward action. Just as music helps individuals re-regulate, it helps entire communities do the same. Singing together creates room for courage to return and for persistence to take root.

From the Black Gospel Tradition to LGBTQ Justice

In the Black Gospel traditions, songs have long lived as theology made audible. Gospel music has always held grief and joy in the same breath, lament and hope in the same body. LGBTQ people have deeply shaped and sustained it, even when they were denied safety or full recognition within it.

Queer and gender expansive musicians have always been present in the Black church and in the justice movements that rose within it. They carried songs into marches, jail cells, sanctuaries, and organizing spaces, too often singing for movements that did not yet know how to protect them. Even so, they held communities together through sound, helping people remain grounded, human, and connected when the work was long and the cost on human bodies and lives was real.

Singers like Willmer Broadnax, known as Little Ax, carried the emotional depth and spiritual authority of Black Gospel both into and beyond movements with narrow definitions of holiness. His voice held devotion and complexity together, refusing the idea that faith required erasure of himself as a Black transgender man. Others, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, reshaped American music entirely, carrying Black Gospel beyond church walls and into the formation of Rock and Roll. Her bisexuality and relationships with both her Church of God in Christ (COGIC) first husband and partner, Marie Knight, challenged the church that raised her.

Queerness has always been part of the work of seeking justice. Artists like Sylvester, whose roots were formed in the Black Pentacostal church, carried gospel sensibilities into LGBTQ liberation movements with them when they came out, at a time when institutions, especially churches, sought to silence queer voices. And when Shirley Miller, known as Mother Shirley, sang “Oh Happy Day” in 1969 with the Edwin Hawkins Singers at the Harlem Cultural Festival, she was standing inside this long lineage, modeling how to hold space musically so other people’s fear or condemnation did not have the final word on her authenticity or her being a lesbian.

By refusing to diminish who they knew themselves to be, these musicians taught generations how to stay present with one another and come back into relationship. They remind us that the movement of the Spirit has always traveled beyond and between the boundaries that institutions and governments try to impose.

Singing Resistance today draws from this lineage, whether it names it explicitly or not. It carries a tradition shaped by Black, queer, and gender expansive people who understood that song is how movements stay human, how courage returns to the body, and how communities remain connected when the work is long and the outcome uncertain.

Lohman is not new to the continuing march toward the formation of the Beloved Community that Dr. King focused upon. In Minneapolis, his song For All the Children (YouTube) centered the fight for marriage equality in the state between 2012 and 2016.

Here are a few of the lyrics from Lohman’s song that still sing true today:

Though the day may not yet be here,
We trust it soon will be
When your children will be free…

Oh, may our hearts and minds be opened…
May there be room enough for everyone inside…
May that welcome be our song.

These words name what Singing Resistance has always held. Welcome is not abstract. It is something we practice with our breath, our bodies, and our willingness to make room for one another when fear tells us to close ranks. As another of Lohman’s songs reminds us, when we remain in relationship as a movement, “Together we’ll build a world where there’s room for all to be; a world where we’ll live our lives, liberated, strong, and free.”

When people sing together in Minneapolis and across the nation, they are not inventing something new. They are stepping into a lineage of courage shaped by Black Gospel, by queer faithfulness, and by communities who have always known that song is how we remember who we are. Song is how welcome survives. Song is how justice stays human. And song is how love at the center finds its way forward, again and again.
So, we ask you – what songs frame the inherited memory of justice work, and LGBTQ welcome in your congregations and fellowships? We invite you to sing those songs again, and to learn some new ones as a community in the coming weeks and months (including from the new UUA virtual hymnal). We would love to hear from you. Drop us a message at lgbtq@uua.org and title it Music of Resistance. We will share the playlist next month.

References and Resources

Singing Resistance

Visit Singing Resistance Training and Toolkit to learn more about the work of Singing Resistance or to participate in one of their training sessions.

Willmer Broadnax (1916-1992)

Willmer Broadnax, known professionally as Little Ax, was a Black transgender man and renowned gospel singer whose powerful voice carried the emotional depth of Black Gospel while challenging narrow definitions of holiness and gender within the church.

Listen to The Lord is My Sunshine (YouTube)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a queer Black gospel musician whose innovative guitar style transformed American music and laid the foundation for Rock and Roll. She blurred sacred and secular boundaries, carrying Black Gospel into new cultural spaces while living openly outside conventional norms of gender and sexuality.

Listen: to Didn’t It Rain (YouTube)

Sylvester (1947–1988)

Sylvester was a Black gay singer shaped by the Black church and gospel tradition, who carried those musical roots into LGBTQ liberation movements as well as mainstream Disco in the 1970s. His work offered joy, affirmation, and sanctuary at a time when queer communities faced profound violence and erasure. Sylvester became one of the many victims of the AIDS pandemic during the 1980s.

Listen to How Great Thou Art (YouTube)

Mother Shirley Miller

Shirley Miller, widely known as Mother Shirley, is a Black lesbian gospel singer, preacher, and movement elder who has been a foundational figure in Black LGBTQ Christian life for decades. She is married toYvette Flunder, Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and her singing and spiritual leadership have been central to Black LGBTQ liberation, worship, and justice movements, including the legacy of Singing Resistance.

Listen to Oh Happy Day (YouTube)

David Hovick Lohman

David Hovick Lohman is a Minneapolis-based composer and organizer whose work centers on communal singing as a form of resistance and care. For more than a decade, Lohman has helped communities sing their way through moments of fear, change, and moral courage. You can contact him if you would like to incorporate one of his songs into your gatherings.

Listen to We’ll Build a World (YouTube)

By Kimi Floyd Reisch

The Long Faithfulness of Justice

I spent New Year’s Eve watching the conclusion ofStranger Things. The show did not hook me with any one character, or one act of courage, or one heroic moment that fixed everything. In fact, I loved the show because there was no single leader — no savior who carried the story alone. Even the magic was never just in Eleven. It was in the family and friendships of the entire group. Each person had a role, a particular set of skills, and a way of showing up that mattered in how they could resist and stand together, down to the youngest member. Some were brave. Some were smart. Some just stayed when leaving likely would have been easier. And some were jerks, at least some of the time. What saved them was not one extraordinary sacrifice, but the fact that they kept coming back to stand together.

And that feels like an important place to begin this year. We are often taught to imagine the pendulum of justice comes as a single wave, a decisive protest, or one clear moment that changes the world. But real societal change rarely works that way. It is collective and uneven because it unfolds through relationships, not heroics. Transformative justice is many people offering what they have, when they can, and trusting that shared commitment over time is what carries us through the hard moments. It is sustained by ordinary people doing unremarkable things without certainty that their efforts will succeed in their own lifetime.

Justice Moves at the Speed of Commitment

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. The Greensboro Woolworth sit-ins persisted for 174 straight days and spread from there to multiple cities for the next four years. The first formal petition in North America to end chattel slavery was written in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1688. It would take nearly two hundred years, a war, and the suffering and deaths of millions of Black people before legal emancipation happened. Those numbers do not just measure endurance but tell a larger truth about how slowly change happens over time. It is rare for those moments of change to happen rapidly enough for those seeking them.

Most of the people who walked instead of riding the bus every day for over a year did not see themselves as heroes. They were tired and they worried about their jobs, their safety, and their families. But they kept walking anyway, because it was necessary to do something even when the something seems like too little for that moment.

Many of you in our welcoming UU congregations understand this kind of faithfulness. You know that being welcoming is a way of being in community, even when it is messy, or when attendance dips, budgets tighten, and wider societal winds shift.

And right now, many of your communities are holding people who are hurting and afraid. This includes transgender and nonbinary members wondering whether they will be safe this year. Immigrant families are bracing for what additional policies may bring after a challenging 2025 and watching actions unfold in cities across this country. Black and brown members are frustrated that the rhetoric of white nationalism remains targeted on their families.

Movements endure because relationships are built that continue working together. Welcoming work is not about reacting and chasing the pendulum as it swings backwards. When we anchor ourselves in relationships, they provide strength to us to keep pressing forward in community. This enables us to see and recognize that each swing backward is followed by a swing forward that brings us further toward a world centered in love.

Unitarian Universalism offers a spiritual grounding for this kind of persistence. Our values and our covenants do not ask us to save the world in a single season. They ask us to refuse to abandon one another when the work becomes slow, complex, or uncomfortable.

The Quiet Work That Keeps Us Together

This kind of faithfulness is quieter than a march. It looks like keeping the doors open. Like listening again to a story you have already heard, because the teller needs to remember it again. It looks like the tedious and hard work of updating policies when language changes and training leaders when practices adapt, along with the emotional work of repairing harm and making space for grief. It is about boldly continuing to declare “you belong here” even when the world is getting louder in demanding you reject some to fit in.

Cesar Chavez once said, “Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.”

We do not know all of what 2026, or 2027 might bring. So perhaps the question before us this year should not be how much more we can take on, or how loudly we can speak, or how quickly we can change what feels broken. Perhaps the question is whether we are willing to trust that what has already been set in motion still matters. That the relationships we have built, the truths we have named, and the people who have found courage because they were welcomed as their authentic selves in our spaces is transformation that cannot simply be undone.

Our work now is to tend to what is already alive, keep faith with one another even when it is complicated and when we are hurt, and to stay present, steady, and unafraid enough to continue. Not because the outcome is guaranteed, but because this is how long-lasting change has always happened.

A Chalice Lighting

We light this chalice at the threshold of a new year
aware that beginnings are rarely clean.

What we carry did not just fade when the calendar changed.

This flame is not a signal that everything will be different now.
It does not promise resolution.
It simply names that we are here, together,
still willing to stand in relationship
even when the work is slow, when the path is unclear,
and when justice asks more patience than certainty.

We light this chalice to honor the quiet courage of people who refuse to disappear from one another’s lives even when the world is hard.

May its light become an reflection of trust
that what has begun among us cannot simply be undone,
and that the long work of love continues
because we choose, again, to carry it together.

By Michael J. Crumpler, Kimi Floyd Reisch

On Thursday, November 25th, a post appeared on my Facebook timeline that read, “The U.S. Government will not be commemorating World AIDS Day this year.” As is my practice to never overreact to what I see on social media, I immediately began to scour the internet for published guidance directly from the government and found nothing. I assumed that since the post originated from a well-known AIDS activist, he probably received the information earlier than the general public. While I await the official guidance to become public, I figured it was the perfect time to draft my annual World AIDS Day reflection.

On Wednesday, November 24th, it was announced that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, was dissolved. As World AIDS Day approaches, it’s impossible not to consider its impact on the world of AIDS. Of the many irresponsible cuts exacted by DOGE, the halting of PEPFAR has been the most destructive. From February to July, experts report more than 330,000 deaths worldwide due to AIDS-related illness. In essence, the richest man in the world is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. For what?

The answer to this question is deeply complicated—and also not very complicated at all. Since the mid-1980s, the reality of AIDS has shocked the conscience of the Western world, forcing us to consider what happens in bedrooms and bathhouses, drug houses and jailhouses, and in the far reaches of poverty-stricken places we’d rather not think about. I remember being ten years old and being deathly afraid of a disease that seemed so very near to my future Black queer reality, as relatives whispered about how “faggots die of AIDS” and “AIDS is God’s punishment.”

Fast forward to age 51: I am surrounded by a world of AIDS. But instead of being a cursed world or a God-forsaken world, it’s a beautiful world of resilience and access and art and care. A world of survival forged by movements of warriors, both dead and alive, who refused to be silent. A world where antiretrovirals exist in abundance and preventative medicines are commonplace. A world where the HIV-positive are unashamed and the HIV-negative are unafraid. A world where we are on the precipice of being free of AIDS—both its shame and its existence.

On this (No) World AIDS Day, may we not be silent as we approach a year of 1 million AIDS-related deaths.

May we redirect our shame to those in power, eager to return us to days of old, when medication did not exist, and those diagnosed had no hope.

May we lift up our voices on behalf of the Black and the poor in the far reaches of the world and demand abundant access to the medications that are freely available in the Western world.

May we celebrate (No) World AIDS Day not by following an immoral decree, but by refusing to be silent and demanding a world where treatment and hope are accessible to all.

Ashe

A Brief History of HIV and AIDS Work in the UUA

The Unitarian Universalist response to the HIV and AIDS crisis began long before 1989, shaped by congregations and ministers who were already providing pastoral care, memorial services, and mutual aid within queer communities that were losing people every week. While many denominations debated whether compassion was even appropriate, Unitarian Universalists were stepping into hospital rooms when families refused, blessing the ashes of those whose names the world would not say, and organizing local ministries of presence, education, and advocacy.

In 1989, at a time when much of the religious world was silent or hostile, the UUA became one of the earliest mainstream denominations to pass a full denominational statement on HIV and AIDS. The General Resolution on the AIDS and HIV Crisis was a landmark declaration of moral clarity, scientific honesty, and unconditional human worth. It spoke against stigma, against the misuse of religion to justify cruelty, and against the political negligence that was costing lives.

After 1989, the UUA continued to deepen its response. Congregations created HIV ministries, partnered with local AIDS service organizations, offered prevention education, supported grieving families, and became early sites for needle exchange advocacy. Many UU ministers became known in their communities as trustworthy clergy for people living with AIDS. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the UUA supported international AIDS justice work, expanded congregational education on safer sex and LGBTQ liberation, and radically affirmed the dignity of people who use drugs at a time when few faith communities dared. These commitments laid the groundwork for Transgender Day of Remembrance services, LGBTQ ministry programs, and the ongoing call to center the lives and leadership of those most affected by systems of neglect.

Today, on World AIDS Day 2025, the words of the 1989 resolution still speak with a clear moral voice. They remind us who we were called to be then and who we must continue to be now. These lines remain especially powerful:

“We reject the notion of disease as divine punishment or natural retribution for moral failure.”

“AIDS and HIV infection present a human crisis of global proportions that threatens the lives of millions of people irrespective of sex, age, race, or sexual orientation.”

“We call upon our congregations to work with compassion, energy, and imagination to care for HIV-infected adults and children.”

“We oppose discrimination against people living with AIDS or HIV infection, their domestic partners, their families, and associates.”

“We acknowledge the humanity of I.V. drug users and call for public policy that reduces the threat of HIV infection among this population.”

“People living with AIDS and HIV infection, their families, partners, and medical personnel have the right to die with dignity.”

These commitments still matter. They remind us that our faith tradition has a long record of choosing compassion over fear, honesty over silence, and human dignity over stigma. On this World AIDS Day, we honor the memory of those we lost, the courage of those who survived, the caregivers who held communities together, and the ongoing struggle for treatment access, prevention justice, and the full humanity of every person living with HIV.

May these words call us again to the work of love made visible.

Link to original statement https://www.uua.org/action/statements/aidshiv-crisis

Book Review: AIDS in the Heartland: How Unlikely Coalitions Created a Blueprint for LGBTQ Politics 

Katie Batza’s Michael Callen “Love Don’t Need a Reason”

New Study Guide: Love at the Center – Defending Trans Lives and Democracy

We’re thrilled to share a new Welcoming Religious Education Study Guide inspired by Imara Jones’s 2025 Ware Lecture at General Assembly: “Love at the Center: Defending Trans Lives and Democracy.”

This guide invites Unitarian Universalists to explore five key themes from Jones’s powerful message—manufactured fear vs. love, wedge politics, dehumanization, sacred care, and spiritual transformation. Designed for congregations, small groups, and justice teams, it offers framing quotes, discussion questions, and actionable steps for putting love and interdependence into practice.

Watch the Lecture

Download the Study Guide

Host a Discussion — and bring your community into deeper reflection and courageous solidarity with trans and nonbinary people.

By Kimi Floyd Reisch

The first person I loved who died was someone no one remembers. Nettie was my adopted godmother, a neighbor who claimed me as her spirit child when I was still in diapers. Nettie taught me how to see dandelions as food, how to see ants as helpers, and how to speak gently to the land to help the plants grow. When she died, I was twelve.

If you search for her carefully in genealogy records, you can find two marriage licenses and her name, but little else. There is no birth certificate, no descendants, not even a published obituary made it into the local paper. Her story now exists mostly in my own memory, shared in a small way with one of my cousins. She is buried next to her second husband, using a name she traded in before I was born when she was married to her third. It feels strange to realize how easily a whole life can fade from record, how quickly a lifetime of memories can disappear.

I think about Nettie often in this season, when memories seem to rise with the scent of woodsmoke and burning leaves. Maybe it is natural that fall has always been a season of remembrance, as we watch the seasons change, the leaves fall, and things planted in the spring die and slowly turn back into the dust. That same rhythm of change echoes through our UU faith tradition.

More specifically, within Unitarian Universalist LGBTQ+ circles this time of year carries our collective memory. Each November begins with All Souls Day, then comes Intersex Day of Remembrance, followed by Transgender Day of Remembrance, and then World AIDS Day in early December. Each is a day when we remember those we have lost to the long legacies of transphobia and homophobia, but also the resilience, art, and activism that shaped generations of lesbian, bisexual, gay, intersex, and transgender lives through seasons of profound transformation.

Each observance invites us to pause but I still wonder if we are remembering deeply enough. Too often our rituals to remember have become lists of names or brief glimpses into the violence that took too many lives. But remembrance must hold more than death. It must hold the wholeness of living, including the love, the laughter, and the ordinariness of being alive.

So, this year, I want to invite you to remember at least one person in a deeper way. Choose a name of someone whose story you’ve carried quietly in your heart since you learned of their loss. Learn something about their life, their passions, their joys. Speak their name aloud, not as a tragedy, but as a blessing. Let them live again for a moment through your memory, your prayers, and in each breath.

Remembering Sam Nordquist

Right now, the name that I carry most tenderly from this past year is Sam Nordquist. Sam was a Black transgender man from Minnesota, the same state where I lived for twenty-two years, raising my own trans son in the same county where Sam lived. They were the same age.

Sam Nordquist was more than how he died. He was a 24-year-old man from Oakdale, Minnesota, who worked in a group home caring for vulnerable adults. His coworkers and family remember him as patient and compassionate, someone who made others feel safe. His family shares that Sam loved animals and Halloween, celebrating each year with his nieces and nephew, delighting in the simple joy of being an uncle. He was close to his mother, Linda, and carried her love with him wherever he went. Those who knew him described him as joyful and extroverted, with a heart of gold and a smile that lifted a room.

Sam was also a storyteller, a dreamer who shared his life online through humor, honesty, and a longing to connect. He wanted to build a life rooted in love and authenticity.

Both my son and Sam left Minnesota to go to New York state, carrying the same hope that the world might be kind beyond home. When I learned of Sam’s death, I stopped breathing for a moment. My son came home, and it is cruelly unfair that Sam Nordquist did not. The echo between them feels unbearable. And it feels far too familiar as a person who has been living with Matt Shepard’s memory walking next to me all these years since I left Wyoming.

More Than Ritual Repetition

Remembrance must be more than ritual repetition of a name and the date when they died. These were people taken too soon who dreamed, created, studied, and laughed. They had favorite foods and songs, and people who loved them. When we speak their names and grieve their loss, we must remember the fullness of their living.

Sam Nordquist was taken from us by cruelty and violence in February of 2025. But the truth of Sam’s life cannot be held by that violence. His life was radiant, creative, and filled with care for those around him. To remember Sam rightly is to speak his name as blessing, to hold his light close, and to promise again that we will keep building toward a world that will learn to love better than it did for him.

Over my lifetime, I have learned that grief is a teacher that never leaves once it enters our lives. It waits for us to slow down long enough to listen again and to hear the echoes of the past and those we have lost. It is not an interruption of life; it is the pulse beneath it, the heartbeat of loves that no longer have a body we can hold close. Grief reminds us that those connections do not end; they only change form.

When we gather in this season, especially in spaces with other trans and gender-expansive people grieving together, we find proof that we are still alive, still loving, and still creating kinship despite grief and loss. When hatred searches for a scapegoat, it often seeks those of us who are visible and unashamed, but when we gather in love, it cannot destroy us.

The Sacredness of Trans-Only Space

This year, more than others, I need space to be in trans-only spaces. My body needs to breathe, and to release all the stages that come with grief without translation for allies or even my cisgender spouse. These spaces are not about exclusion. They are about survival. They are sanctuaries where we remember that even in our sorrow, we are whole.

Grief is holy. It lingers in the silence that becomes prayer. When I say Sam’s name this year, I will think of all our beloveds who deserve to grow old. I will think of every person whose light was taken too soon.

Grief has taught me that remembering is resistance, but also renewal. It is how love keeps finding us. It is how we keep one another alive.

As you remember those lost too soon over the coming weeks, I leave you with words from the Audre Lorde Project:

Sam Nordquist’s life is precious. 
Lorena Xtravaganza’s life is precious. 
Honee Daniels’ life is precious. 
Islan Nettles’ life is precious. 
Layleen Cubilette Polanco’s life is precious. 
Alexandria Winchester’s life is precious. 
Tiffany Harris’s life is precious. 
Deshauna Smith’s life is precious. 

We honor the life of Sam Nordquist and every trans life taken. 

We are responsible for each other’s precious lives.

Beyond Ritual: An Invitation to Allies and Congregations on Transgender Day of Remembrance

Each November, Unitarian Universalist communities are invited to honor Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR), a day born from trans communities themselves, created to mourn and remember those whose lives were taken by anti-trans violence.

This year, what trans people need most from allies is not another memorial service, but sustained action, listening, and commitment. Rituals without relationship can unintentionally recenter grief around cisgender emotions rather than trans survival. We need your courage, your willingness to build relationships, and your readiness to repair the harm facing our communities.

If your congregation includes trans, intersex, and gender-expansive people, we encourage you to hold a trans-centered service designed and led by those voices, with their full consent and safety prioritized. Let trans people define how and whether they want to gather, grieve, and celebrate, and support their wishes.

However, if your congregation does not currently include trans members, consider a different but equally sacred response: to pause, listen, and act in solidarity as our allies. Rather than hosting a TDOR service that centers cisgender voices, use this time to deepen and expand your congregation’s capacity to embody love in action.

Ways to Honor TDOR with Integrity as Allies

• Hold an Allies Vigil.
  Create space for reflection and recommitment to trans justice. Read the names of those lost (or use this video, or the one from UUA Communications) but then ground your time in the call to make your congregation or local community more welcoming and life-affirming.
• Learn and share trans-led stories.
  Feature trans and intersex voices in your newsletters, small groups, or worship throughout the year – not just the third week in November or the last week in March. Draw from the UUA’s UPLIFT blog, TRUUsT (Transgender Religious professional Unitarian Universalists Together), or the Transforming Hearts Collective to help your community learn directly from trans leaders through small group offerings.
• Act and give generously. 
  Offer a special collection or fundraising event to support trans spiritual leadership and education. Below are two of our national UUA organizations or support a local group or effort.

  • TRUUsT (Transgender Religious Professional Unitarian Universalist Transgender)

    TRUUsT is a network of transgender religious professionals within the Unitarian Universalist (UU) tradition, offering spiritual care, advocacy, and resources to support the well-being and inclusion of transgender individuals in faith communities. TRUUsT holds a spring virtual gathering and a fall in-person retreat.

  • Transforming Hearts Collective

    We are queer, transgender, and nonbinary faith leaders of many races, classes, abilities, spiritualities, and ages. Transforming Hearts Collective supports spaces where LGBTQ+ people can access resilience, healing, and spirituality, and provides guidance and resources to faith communities and other groups committed to radical inclusion and culture shift.

A TDOR Reflection: Let the Living Be Witness

Today, we remember our sacred kin.
Each one was beloved. Each one mattered.

But memory alone is no longer enough.
Our candles do more than flicker in sorrow.
They are beacons that light a path for the living to find sanctuary.
They lead us toward a world where every trans, nonbinary, intersex, gender-beautiful person can safely live in their truth.

To honor the dead is not just to say names,
But to commit to protect the living.
To mourn is to move, to build, to act,
To center love in a way that keeps people alive.

May we commit to love the living well enough that we keep fighting,
No matter how long it takes,
Until there are no more names to be mourned,
No more lives taken by violence too soon.

By Kimi Floyd Reisch

“Gay people aren’t straight before they come out as gay, and transgender people are who they are before they come out and transition.” – Rep. Sarah McBride

This truth is not a new one. Across centuries and across borders, queer and trans people have lived, loved, and resisted. Their existence has always been part of the human story, even when societies have tried to erase it. You can take away rights, but you cannot stop people from being authentic and whole.

The first recorded same-sex couple comes from ancient Egypt in 2450 BCE. Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were royal manicurists buried together in a single tomb. On its walls they are depicted embracing and kissing.

Jump forward several thousand years, and across more LGBTQ ancestors, and in 19th-century New York City, Murray Hall lived for decades as a man. He was a fixture in the city’s political circles, a gambler, a drinker, and a bail bondsman with connections in Tammany Hall. He married and divorced multiple women, sometimes amid accusations of infidelity. His life was complicated, ordinary, messy, and human. When he died in 1901, newspapers sensationalized the revelation that he had unexpected anatomy, turning his life into a scandal. Today, his life is remembered because he dared to live it.

It is important to honor those who lived their truths loudly and boldly, speaking in powerful ways that changed the world when they could have remained silent. James Baldwin wrote and spoke with piercing insight, exposing America’s lies and offering a vision of justice rooted in love and truth. Pedro Zamora used reality television in the 1990s to educate a generation about HIV and AIDS, bringing compassion and clarity into homes across the country. Both lived with courage that cost them dearly. And still living folks continue living with that boldness, breaking new barriers. From Janet Mock to Artemis Langford to Brenda Biya to Carl Nassib, LGBTQ people continue to live their lives authentically, each in turn breaking ground.

Sometimes that kind of courage has been resistance enough. Other times, queer and trans people have been called into larger struggles. Willem Arondéus, a Dutch artist and author, was one of them. During World War II, he forged identity papers to protect Jewish neighbors and helped plan the bombing of Amsterdam’s population registry when the forged papers failed. When he and his companions were arrested, Arondéus claimed full responsibility, saving the lives of two young doctors who had joined him in the work. Before his execution in 1943, he left behind these words: “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.” His courage reminds the world that resistance takes many forms, sometimes survival and sometimes sacrifice.

We also remember the ancestors who lost their lives to violence along the way. Matthew Shepard’s murder in 1998 became a national turning point because his story fit the narrative of innocence within whiteness. His youth and the way the media described him shaped how his death was received. For many of us who grew up queer in Wyoming, the death of our peer changed how we came out and lived our lives, but in doing the work of justice many of us also learned how many others are not remembered. Their lives are no less sacred. The selective way society chooses who to memorialize exposes how racism, transphobia, ableism, and class bias work together to determine which stories are silenced.

To honor LGBTQ History Month is to hold all these stories together. Pluralism insists that no single history is enough. To resist erasure requires remembering them all, carrying them all, and telling them all. When communities remember fully, they weave a fabric strong enough to hold every truth. This is how circles of belonging are widened. This is how resilience endures.

Here are a few other stories to look up this month as you remember and reflect.

• Frieda Belinfante (1904–1995): Dutch cellist, conductor, and member of the anti-Nazi resistance who disguised herself as a man to survive after Willem Arondéus’s execution.
• We’wha (1849–1896): Zuni lhamana (two-spirit person), cultural ambassador, weaver, and diplomat.
• Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876): American stage actress who lived openly in same-sex relationships, forming one of the earliest lesbian artistic circles in the United States.
• Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014): Biracial butch performer, remembered as a fighter at Stonewall and later as a protector of queer communities.
• Gladys Bentley (1907–1960): Harlem Renaissance blues singer and pianist known for performing in tuxedos and singing lyrics that challenged gender and sexual norms.

Discussion Questions

1. Whose stories have been missing, and how can our community help bring them forward?
2. How should we confront the ways racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, ableism, transphobia, and other beliefs affect which stories we tell?
3. The essay names both everyday courage and larger acts of resistance. In what ways can we see and honor both kinds of resilience in the lives of LGBTQ people today?
4. What does pluralism look like for you as a spiritual or religious practice?
5. How do you live into pluralism in your own life or in the life of your fellowship or congregation?

Chalice Lighting for LGBT+ History Month

Today, we remember those who lived boldly,
the ones who resisted erasure,
the ones whose names we know,
and the countless others whose names were lost but whose lives still echo in ours.

This flame honors all LGBTQ ancestors and leaders
who carved their truth into history,
who resisted injustice,
who loved boldly,
and who made survival possible for those who came after them.

Let us remember, too, the ancestors close to our own stories.
Perhaps the aunt who lived for seventy-three years with her best friend,
the grandfather who came out only after death through a note,
a teacher, a neighbor, or a friend who carried their truth quietly.
Hold their names in your heart or speak them aloud into this circle of remembrance.

All: We remember you. We honor you. We carry you forward.

By Kimi Floyd Reisch

“The first rule of Bi Club is that you can talk about Bi Club all you want, because most people won’t believe it’s real anyway.” ~ Lindsay King-Miller, Ask a Queer Chick
The first time I read that line, I laughed out loud. It was funny because it was true. You can come out again and again, and some people still tilt their heads at you like you’ve spoken in riddles. That has been the pattern of my life as a bisexual, Two-Spirit, and nonbinary person.

When you are bi, many social gatherings come with a pop quiz. At one party, someone leaned in and asked, “So… are you still married to a man, or are you over that phase?” I smiled and said, “Still married. The expiration date on my vows hasn’t happened yet.” They laughed, but I could see they were puzzled. For them, bisexuality had to be a phase, never a whole truth.

Another time, I told a coworker I was bi, and they blinked twice, like their brain had hit pause. They responded, “Oh… so you’re half gay and half straight?” I laughed and said, “No, I’m whole me. That’s already complicated enough.” And then there was the dinner party guest who leaned in and whispered, “So… does that mean you’re attracted to everyone in this room?” I shot back with a laugh, “Well, not you.”

The truth is, I’m not the confusing one. The confusion belongs to the assumptions people make. That is the joke, not on me but on boxes they keep trying to fit me into. We live in a world that insists on either/or, and bi folks keep showing up as both/and. People want categories; we bring abundance. People want boundaries; we say no.

Bisexual people are not a sliver of the LGBTQ community. We are the majority. Study after study shows that more than half of LGBTQ people identify as bi+. Yet we are also the least likely to be out, the most likely to struggle with mental health, and the most likely to feel invisible in our own spaces.

Bisexual people are told we are confused, unstable, greedy, or unfaithful. I have heard it all from family, from straight friends, and even from other queer people. After a while, the clichés stop cutting and start sounding like a bad sitcom.

You say I’m confused? Please. I know exactly who I am.
You say I must be unstable? I have been married for decades.
You say I must secretly be straight or gay? Sorry, no. I’m bi today, bi tomorrow, bi forever.
It is important to remember that this erasure is real and has deeper consequences. As Scholar Shiri Eisner reminds us, erasure is never passive. It is the active rewriting and collapsing of bi identities into gay or straight until our truth no longer counts. But we are here, and we always have been.

For me, the best part of being bi is the freedom to love beyond boxes. I do not fall in love with genders. I fall in love with minds, with laughter, with kindness, and with the spark in someone’s eyes. Love, as Leah Raeder wrote inBlack Iris, is “blurry, slippery, quantum.” That feels right to my experiences.

And — I love my spectrum of attraction: crushing on Kristy McNichol in the campyPirate Movie, falling for the tenderness of Tre inBoyz n the Hood, crying over River Phoenix inMy Own Private Idaho, holding hands with my college girlfriend Mindy at a party, being married to my spouse of 24 years. These were not just infatuations. They were lessons in understanding myself. What draws me in is not anatomy or a single image of beauty. It is courage, gentleness, humor, and loving resilience.

What I love most about my bisexuality is the way it reminds me often that my heart is not limited. It has always been wide enough to hold more than one kind of beauty, more than one kind of love.

The first rule of Bi Club may be that people will not believe it is real.
But the rule I live by is this: I am real anyway.

Discussion Questions

1. What assumptions about bisexuality have you heard?
2. Why do you think bisexuality, though statistically the largest identity in the LGBTQ community, is still so invisible?
3. How does erasure show up in faith, family, or community spaces you know?
4. What would it mean to celebrate bisexuality as an example of human possibility, not just a tolerated identity?

Chalice Lighting for Bi Visibility

We light this chalice in honor of bisexual people.
Too often their truth has been called confusion,
their love erased by silence,
their lives doubted for crossing boundaries.

This flame reminds us that bisexual people are here
in our pews and pulpits,
in our families and friendships,
woven throughout history and present among us now.

This light proclaims that bisexuality is real,
that it is faithful and holy,
that abundance is not indecision,
and love that spans genders is love in its fullness.

As we kindle this flame,
we commit to seeing what has been invisible,
to naming what has been unnamed,
and to welcoming all who live beyond either/or
as beloved and whole.

More Recent Resources

• Life Isn’t Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between by Meg-John Barker and Alex Iantaffi (2019). Explores bisexuality, gender, and fluidity through a lens of possibility and liberation.
• Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life by Lois Shearing (2021). Accessible and practical guide to navigating relationships, identity, and community as a bisexual person.
• This Is Why They Hate Us by Aaron H. Aceves (2022). Young adult novel centering a bisexual teen, offering humor, heartache, and honesty.
• Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw (2022). A lively exploration of bisexuality through history, science, and culture.
• Bisexual Men Exist: A Handbook for Bisexual, Pansexual and M-Spec Men by Vaneet Mehta (2023). A passionate call to visibility for men who love across genders.