When: 
Monday, June 13, 2011 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Mondays, June 27 from 6pm-8pm
Where: 

@ 147 w 24th st 3rd floor, NY NY 10011

Contact:        to RSVP by monday, June 27

As Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming people of color, we live at the intersections of multiple oppressions. From daily media messages to messages from our childhood, we sustain wounds that we carry with us, often going without healing. We do what we need to do to survive, and when we lack access to care and sustenance, we find our own ways to self-medicate.  

 

Many in our community have found the space for healing through harm reduction or 12 step models. Harm reduction counseling and 12 step organizations are welcome tools in our quest for healing—though those tools speak only to a segment of our community and are neither ubiquitous nor effective enough to stem the ever growing tide of HIV infections and substance abuse. The annual numbers released by the CDC speak to this so very clearly.

 

 For many queer people of color those spaces and rooms continue to lack a cultural component that is essential to understanding our healing and well being. When we walk into places of healing but do not see ourselves or our stories reflected in those places, many of us are unable or unwillingly to set our skins aside in order to access a generic cure-all. Indeed, sometimes those places, where racism is sometimes unexamined and methods of communication and engagement are unreflective of the ways in which our communities communicate, our people often times find more harm than help. Yet, when those are the central tools for healing, what about everyone else? Where are the answers they need? Where is the healing we need?

We cannot rely on anyone else to help us find the way forward except our own community. The answers, love, support, and tools exist within our community to find complementary paths towards wholeness, but first we have to honestly and openly engage in a dialogue that identifies the sources of our common harm, outlines the ways in which we attempt to self-medicate, acknowledge the ways in which we have opened the master's toolbox and gone to work on ourselves and our community with his tools, and, finally, begin to identify strategies that we can use to begin healing and bringing our family together again.

The Audre Lorde Project and GLO TV invite you to a series of open dialogues on the issue of HIV, Addiction, and Healing. This group facilitated conversation is exactly that...a conversation. This is a beginning dialogue...a star to the discussion...a new way of looking for solutions that brings the impacted together to share, shout, cleanse, heal, and begin outlining tools that we may use or develop to begin a process of community healing---without shame, without judgment, without fear, without stigma, and without further harm.

 Food and refreshments will be provided as well as Metro Cards for those that need them.

Contact: to RSVP by Monday, June 27