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It’s one thing to memorize an acronym, but it’s another to understand identity, oppression, and resistance, and how systems impact the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people. Deepen understanding of sexuality and gender, and why they matter, as a critical to provide quality public engagement, care, and services.

LGBTQ elders are everywhere if we open our eyes. We did not lose an “entire generation” to AIDS. Learn how to identify and consider the needs of LGBTQ+ older adults in aging care. Or, for LGBTQ+ organizations, learn how to make your services, advocacy, and activism intergenerational, and check your work for ageism and equitable access across the life course.

HIV/AIDS is often discussed as a crisis in the past tense, framed as a heroic uprising of mostly white gay men. At the same time, mainstream culture looks ahead toward an elusive cure that does not yet exist. When our gaze settles only on the past and the future, we lose sight of people living with HIV today and the systems that impact them. Learn about issues such as HIV criminalization, harm reduction, and how stigma can be reinforced by some prevention campaigns.

Sex workers face cultural stigma and explicit exclusion from care and social services. Meanwhile, the conflation of sex trafficking with sex work leads to further harm. Learn about the impossible choices faced by sex workers as they navigate systemic exclusion, and how to shift toward an understanding sex work as a legitimate form of labor and intimate caretaking.

Older adults, chronically ill, and disabled people tend to be desexualized by mainstream culture and systems. In professional care settings, many are even disciplined for sexual activity or expression. Learn why sex positivity matters for aging, ill, and/or disabled bodies, and how to shape systems of care and services to affirm sexual expression.

Changing our culture means changing what stories are told, known, and listened to. Learn concrete ways to develop narratives and influence cultural shift. From themed storytelling public events, to preparing citizen advocates to meet with legislators, to public testimony, to town hall meetings, learn how to tell the stories we need to hear to move toward liberation.

People who exist at the margins of society often experience grief that is misunderstood, unseen, or rendered invisible by mainstream culture, systems, and services. Learn how to start seeing grief you may not be privy to, and how to respond with care.

Traditional nuclear families provide privilege and security to people who happen to be born into them. Meanwhile, “chosen” non-biological families have been long embraced by queer communities to support people rejected or misunderstood by their families of origin. Yet when we shift away from exclusive “family” structures - biological or chosen - and toward models of kinship, we can imagine new, more equitable ways of relating to one another.