“All of the organizing we’ve done. All of the issues. We have never, ever… I don’t mean one time, I don’t mean two times… never talked about climate justice. And I was intrigued by that. Why have we never talked about this?
How do westop organizing from the Right not to die and move towards the Right to live?”
Michael Johnson is an activist, artist, scholar, theologian, and a leader of the House ballroom Community, and historical, protective response to marginalization of Black and Latino LGBTQI + people that has been the creation of self-sustaining sanctuaries—formations of “Houses” and gatherings at “Balls”—an artistic collective and kinship system that has grown over the past 100 years into a strong network of LGBTQII persons of color. He is a ‘father ‘ in one of these families, and the co-founder of the learning initiative Ballroom Freedom School, whose roots are found in a collaborative art and theology project organized around three principles: a) to counter the prevailing abomination narrative and to assert the rights of health, wellbeing, and justice; b) to assume the ability to inform and even shape the future; and c) to engage critically with the present by developing an understanding of how capitalism and neoliberalism operate in the interests of a racial and class elite. The Ballroom Freedom School is a set of practices rooted in the traditions of skills exchange, collective learning, and self-organizing–practices that will help the larger environmental movement mobilize toward climate justice and a liveable planet for all people.
The project aims to create a curriculum that will help the Ballroom community to understand the risks of the ecological catastrophe, and its origins, sharing ways of recognizing human wrongs, de-linking, divesting, and repairing as part of its specific advocacy. A cohort of facilitators, activists, artists, and community members will inform a curriculum that will be prototyped in an initial session with community leaders, as a way to create a multiracial, diverse, and inclusive community of change-makers working across sectors and disciplines to drive an equitable, decarbonized, and resilient energy ecosystem. This initiative will be using this methodology to partner with other organizations to sustain the program. Fellows will be challenged to think critically about current energy policy and market structures, examine existing and historical inequities, identify barriers, and develop holistic solutions toward an equitable energy transition. the goal is also to bring diverse voices into the climate crisis conversation and recognize that a deeper level of collaboration is required to support the work of leaders from communities most impacted by environmental harms and energy injustice.
The House Ball Community (HBC) is part of Black history, and the legacy of struggles for liberation from slavery to the plantation, from school to mass incarceration, from redlining to everyday forms of exclusion, within the structural and systemic racist capitalism of the USA. The starting point of the inquiry is New York City, where Ballroom history also started during the Harlem Reinassance and where it continues, in the middle of a city that projects an image of technological developments, yet is indeed very fragile as Hurricane Sandy made it clear, and where infrastructures to defend rich neighbors and wall street from the rise of the ocean will dramatically impact the poorest neighborhood. With its unique intersectional perspective, complex understanding of wellness issues, and an as-of-yet unvocalized vision for a better future, the ballroom community is an ideal context for crafting a strategic narrative that imagines a cleaner economy that can work for all communities.
“Our community is not aware of the impact that environmental disasters will have on us, which is easy to observe even by mapping the places we inhabit or come from. we want to facilitate a conjuntural analisys of the intersection of our condition of oppression, and help create a language and discourse that this community canaccess, own , understand and start act from. we want to help investigate the fascinantion with capitalistic ways of living, the idea of success and the ways in which we are implicated in distructive behaviors, that we will ultimately pay a high price for. we want to produce a map of vulnerable places, in connection with vulnerable bodies and hostories, and find ways to act together in solidarity, connecting ancestral and spiritual traditions with the territory, the elements, reclaiming our ways of living and all forms of life.
The transgender, lesbian, bisexual and gay, African-American and Latino men and women who form the House Ballroom Community (HBC) sustain some of the highest rates of suicide, violence, housing insecurity, HIV infection, stigma, and energy burdens that will only be exacerbated by climate change. i’ve personally and in partnership with other organizations have seeded organizing infrastructures that have been been supporting the emergence of organic leaders within the House Ball Community to advance advocacy platforms.”
