The National LGBTQ Task Force’s annual Creating Change Conference, originally scheduled to be held in New Orleans, will be held virtually from January 12—16, 2022.
Begun in 1988, in part as an outgrowth of the 1987 National March on Washington, the Creating Change Conference focuses on networking and grassroots organizing skills. In recent years, the conference has attracted roughly 2,000 attendees.
The 2022 conference will feature author and performance artist ALOK as the keynote speaker. ALOK is a mixed-media artist, writer, poet, and advocate for LGBTQ equality and gender inclusivity. ALOK’s dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to their work has led to being featured in HBO’s The Trans List (2016) and Random Acts of Flyness (2018), as well as publishing the poetry collection Femme in Public (2017) and the handbook Beyond the Gender Binary (2020). ALOK has been honored as one of HuffPo’s Culture Shifters, NBC’s Pride 50, and Business Insider’s Doers and is the creator of the #DeGenderFashion movement, which calls for the degendering of the fashion and beauty industries.
Conference organizer Danny Linden said, “It is clear that 2022 will be a critical year for all of us, including LGBTQ communities. We face a historic midterm election year, ongoing attacks on our rights and our very democracy and a continuing epidemic of violence targeting trans and non-binary people. Creating Change is our family reunion, one that is even more meaningful this year—where LGBTQ advocates, activists, leaders, and allies come together as we safely emerge from the pandemic to learn, connect with each other and create a welcoming space for queer people. We need that now more than ever.”
Creating Change 2022 continues a long tradition of institute programming. New this year, the conference will introduce a day-long program focused exclusively on queering climate justice. Attendees will be able to build their personal conference schedules by choosing from over 100 workshops and caucuses.
The Task Force, one of the oldest LGBTQ advocacy groups in the nation, was founded in 1973 in New York by Dr. Howard Brown, Martin Duberman, Barbara Gittings, Ron Gold, Frank Kameny, Nathalie Rockhill, and Bruce Voelle, among others. In its early years, the Task Force played a vital role in declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, and it fought for federal employment protections for lesbians and gays. The Task Force played a key role in making the Democratic Party more sensitive to the needs of LGBTQ people and later successfully raised awareness in Washington, D.C. regarding the AIDS epidemic.
Registration link: https://pheedloop.com/register/cc22/attendee/
