Queer and Trans Organizing in Pomona

by Sam Gutierrez (they/them)

Time and time again in Pomona, I have witnessed elected officials and community leaders with Spanish last names take patronizing stances and act against the interests of our working-class Latinx community members. I’ve also watched as LGBTQ+ spaces push out queer and trans working-class Black folks and felt hopeless as the minimal spaces for Queer and Trans folks in our city that folks feel comfortable going to diminish. 

I’ve witnessed too many groups and individuals in Pomona seek to support and provide resources to vulnerable people in our community. Yet, fail to proactively back movements to support street vendors, destigmatize sex work and humanize sex workers on Holt, and provide real solutions to the rampant homelessness in our city. 

For too long, we have been complacent about accepting crumbs and celebrating symbolic progress in our community.

Take the annual raising of the Pride flag in front of City Hall, for example. Our city leaders have graciously taken the time to officially recognize June as LGBTQIA+ Pride Month these past few years, yet anytime I go to the City Council meeting and need to use the restroom, I have to decide whether I want to deal with judgment from a man or a woman because there aren’t any all-gender restrooms in the City Council Chambers. But at least we have the Pride flag in front of City Hall for a single month out of the year!

On a national scale, contention between disabled queers and LGBT organizers can also be seen as a long-term battle between meaningful and limited change. In 2015, many of us witnessed the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage as a result of the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. As a 16-year-old lesbian at the time¹, I naively thought that love had truly won. Homophobia had been defeated, and gay people were free!

Silly little me. I later came to learn that, although queer folks could now marry and seek the material benefits that come from marrying in our country, disabled Queer folks relying on government financial support continue to face penalties for being married.

To this day, ableism within mainstream LGBTQ+ spaces, and community spaces in general, continues to prevail. Just take note of how the most seasoned and well-intentioned community leaders and organizers fail to do the most basic form of disabled allyship by consistently masking in public spaces.

These experiences have all moved toward trying to figure out what it means and looks like to build power among Queer and Trans people in Pomona. During this search, I’ve been careful about not moving with seemingly “progressive” and “liberal” values that only bring symbolic wins for my community. Instead, I’ve focused on thinking through how to bring forward material changes to our living conditions.

Questions like, what are the areas or issues Queer and Trans folks need to mobilize and organize around to decrease the high rate of houselessness and housing insecurity our community faces? How can we create a sense of safety for Queer and Trans youth beyond passing diversity and inclusion policies within educational institutions? What is needed to ensure that people understand why the experiences of Queer and Trans folks should be central to any movement, no matter what scale the work is being executed on? How do we actually get organizers to take the needs and asks of disabled and immunocompromised Queer and Trans folks seriously?

These questions and conclusions I’ve gathered have been informed by my experiences as a Queer and Trans Mexican-American person organizing in this city, and building community with other Queer and Trans racialized people that I’ve had the privilege of meeting. 

Recently, while using my primitive web search skills and typing in the Google search bar “queer liberation” and “class liberation”, I came across an article at the top of the search results titled “Queer Liberation is Class Struggle” by JOMO, the author’s pseudonym. 

I immediately started to read through the article, feeling the clichéd feelings that people describe when they fall in love. Y’know the hearts fluttering, mind racing kind of vibes? I had finally found something that clearly spoke to the ways I have felt living as a Queer and Trans Chicanx, and provided answers as to why my Queer and Trans comrades share some of the struggles we do.

What struck me the most and resonated with my experiences and observations of organizing in Pomona was JOMO’s explanation of the specific way intersectionality has been popularly wielded by academia and non-profit organizations, as well as organizers around the country.

JOMO goes on to explain how intersectionality, though useful in some ways, “fall[s] flat as an organizing theory” because it dilutes the power in understanding class oppression as classism, or discrimination based on class.” According to JOMO, this leads to efforts to organize around consciousness raising of the rich to be “NICE, FRIENDLY, [and] SENSITIVE to their poorer brethren” instead of working to organize working class and poor people to take over the means of production and run our society.

At this point in reading through JOMO’s article, I fell in love. Reading the words on the page felt like I had come across a gift put out into the universe by someone who didn’t know they were sharing a gift but trusted that it’d get to the right person at the right time.

As I continued reading, past conversations with friends came to mind about the difference between people who identify as “Queer” and people who identify as “LGBT” and the efforts to be informed by and continue to build Queer movements that aren’t only grounded by our

non-heterosexual or non-cisgender identities, but by the way we are opposed to non-normative structures and understandings of existing and being in relationship with the world we live in.

Either intentionally or unintentionally (more than likely it’s both), advocates, organizers, and institutions working to “fight” for oppressed peoples have blurred the way power works within our capitalist society. They have overemphasized the importance of people’s identities, whether that be their gender, sexual, racial identities, or economic status, and have moved us away from being capable of clearly understanding how power works and manifests itself.

When I think about what it’s going to take to build Queer and Trans power, I think about the questions JOMO poses and the way that going beyond racial analyses of power in a predominantly Black and Latinx community like Pomona, where those in power look just like the people they allegedly serve, is crucial. I also think about the work not just Queer and Trans people need to urgently undertake, but the work that everyone needs to undertake. 

JOMO’s wisdom and the questions I’ve grappled with lead me to believe the following:

1) We have our work cut out to have others understand why we need to build working-class power in Pomona in a way that brings people across gender, sexuality, age, race, ethnicity, etc., and what self-transformation it will take to make that happen

2) Organizers in Pomona must bring a class analysis to the forefront of any work we do. That means moving beyond the language of “Black and Brown” people being impacted by institutional violence and leaning into naming violence for what it is, aka capitalism.

3) If we really want to create the conditions for liberation, we need to ground our work within a global context. How are we consistently working to connect local struggles to anti-imperial struggles and making these connections impossible to deny for everyday people?

I hope that for those who made it this far, it leads you all to reflection and tangible tasks forward.

1 Many queer folks can share about their ever-shifting understandings of their identities, but this story is for another time!