LGBTQ+ Power Players

Kaz Mitchell (she/her) is the executive director of Circle of Voices Inc., which serves women of color under the aU-nU-bU© — about Us, needs for Us, because it’s Us — initiative, providing cultural, competent and caring resources. She is a recipient of the 2019 Gay City News Impact Awards; the 2019 Ebony Pyramid Entertainment of Washington, DC, UnSung Award; the 2017 Callen-Lorde Community Health Center Health Award; and was a Barclays Center Pride Night panelist. She also served as a board chair of Callen-Lorde’s advisory board. Kaz was the campaign manager and political strategist for the first gay man in the Brooklyn District Attorney race.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
Pride Marches — now that every borough has one, it gives me so much joy to see everyone celebrating who they are with their partners, spouses, friends, and family with PRIDE.

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
Always the great Audre Lorde, Bayard Rustin, and Marsha P. Johnson.

What can people and corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
Support the smaller organizations; we are the ones who have earned the trust of the challenged communities and so often can’t serve them because of lack of funding, because funding does not come to organizations serving people of color because their numbers are lower. So often I have to send people to other organizations that they don’t trust. They need to see people that look like them work with them. Take time to see the value of the work as many people of color don’t have visibility.

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
Have more sensitivity training to explain and celebrate community history and PRIDE time events. Show that love is love and let people know about the violence and hatred that LGBTQIA+ face.

Dominique Morgan (she/her) is an award-winning artist, activist, TEDx speaker, and executive director of The Okra Project. Partnering her lived experience of being impacted by mass incarceration and solitary confinement with a decade of change-making artistry, advocacy, and background in public health, Dominique continues to work in spaces of sex education, radical self-care, and transformative youth development. Her work is rooted in the belief that we all deserve to thrive and experience radical healing.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
Youth Pride — as a kid growing up in Nebraska, the idea of celebrating in a space that affirmed my queerness seemed so far away — I’m honored to have created Youth Pride in Nebraska and now I’m excited to support NYC Youth Pride as a grand marshal!

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
Oh goodness there are so many — of course Mutha Marsha P. Johnson and Ms. Major but also Aria Said of the Transgender District, Mariah Moore of House of Tulip, Diamond Styelz of Marsha’s Plate — my team Gabrielle Inez Souza and Alana Giselle Banks. Our Okra founder Ianne Fields Stewart! Black trans women are my hope and reason, so I’m moved daily! It’s the living history that I get to experience every day that blesses me!

What can people and corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
Invest in our work in radical and transformative ways!

Engage in work that removes the barriers to our liberation — we want equity. Equality is VERRRYY early 2000s.

And acknowledge and celebrate Black trans women in the living. Stop waiting until we are gone to lift us up.

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
Center the most impacted as you create solutions for change. Think of the ways you can shift the lived experience of these people in the work space. Investigate WHO isn’t represented in your work force. Compensate those most impacted to educate if they have the capacity (ERGs are amazing, but positioning oppressed and impacted staff to fix organizational issues without compensation or job protections is unacceptable).

Aaron C. Morris (he/him) is the executive director of Immigration Equality, an organization offering free legal services to, political advocacy for, and impact litigation on behalf of LGBTQ and HIV-positive refugees and immigrants. Aaron is a recognized expert in LGBTQ immigration and human rights law, and a staunch advocate for asylum seekers. Aaron graduated from the University of Oklahoma and the American University’s Washington College of Law.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
I love Dykes on Bikes!

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
Harvey Milk for sure, and of course Lorena Borjas.

What can people and corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
Why, donate whatever you can to advocates like those at Immigration Equality!

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
Every business should have an expansive and inclusive view of relationships that make up a family. Non-traditional families deserve the same rights and benefits as everyone else.

Paul Nagle (he/him) is the founding executive director of Stonewall Community Development Corporation, whose mission is to see New York City’s LGBTQ older adults in safe, welcoming housing they can afford, with access to health and mental health services that meet their unique needs. Since 2014, he and his board have built the organization from an $8,000 community start-up with one employee, to its current $1.4 million annual budget and 15-person staff.

Paul has over 30 years in both nonprofit administration and LGBTQ activism. He served as the founding executive director of All Out Arts and produced its first five annual festivals, presenting plays, concerts, and art exhibits by LGBTQ writers, musicians, and artists. He created the initial development strategy for the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, raising the center’s first grants. Both organizations continue to thrive.

His early career work in theater producing and arts administration developed his reputation as a policy specialist. He served as director of cultural policy for Council Member Alan J. Gerson, helping Lower Manhattan arts organizations rebound and rebuild after the 9/11 attacks. He went on to found the Cultural Strategies Initiative, a project funded with a 2010 Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund grant. The Initiative’s mission was to explore arts as a fulcrum for community, cultural and environmental sustainability. CSI’s most prominent project was Musicians United to Protect Bristol Bay, which harnessed the power of musicians and their fans to help stop the disastrous Pebble Mine project in Alaska.

As an LGBTQ activist he believes that understanding that the system will fail us, the LGBTQ community should leverage its shared lived experience, its history of building networks of care and support and its deep creativity to create our own community-based solutions to the challenges we face.  Known for evidence-based innovation, Paul believes deeply in the importance of community education, organizing and activation.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
Drag March.

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
I worked in the trenches against the Briggs Initiative in California under the leadership of Harvey Milk. His ability to inspire people to action, especially to come out, made a huge impression on me. 

What can people and corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
Find a community-based project to support. Grassroots orgs, close to the ground, are often the laboratories for innovation. 

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
There is so much danger in the wind again. Outward signals of inclusion are extremely important. One great signal is the sharing of preferred pronouns, which telegraphs a whole new way of thinking. It also has the added advantage of communicating to LGBTQ folks living with blindness who can’t see a rainbow flag lapel pin. 

Carmen Neely (she/her) is a co-founder of Harlem Pride. Harlem Pride’s mission is to empower Harlem’s Same Gender Loving/LGBTQ community (which includes family, friends, and allies) to improve its physical, mental, and economic health and wellness. She is also an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., a board member of the Harlem SGL•LGBTQ Center, a co-chair of NYC Pride and Power, NYC’s Black and Latino LGTBQ political organization, and she is the newly named vice-chair of the Board of Directors of The Center For Black Equity.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
Harlem Pride!

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
Audre Lorde, Barbara Jordan and Bayard Rustin.

What can people or corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
People and corporations can support our LGBTQ+ community year round by volunteering, donating funds and resources, as well as voting for candidates that support LGBTQ issues.

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
Businesses can create more inclusive environments by having LGBTQ employee resource groups, celebrating LGBTQ holidays, and instituting LGBTQ sensitive company policies.

Alyssa Nitchun (she/her), executive director of The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, oversees the museum’s many initiatives and long-term growth. Prior to LLMA, Alyssa held a variety of positions centering the arts and social justice through development, communications, and strategy at institutions such as Creative Time and StoryCorps as well as the CUNY Graduate Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. Alyssa received an M.A. in Gender Politics with a focus in Queer Theory from NYU.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
For me Pride Month is both celebration and protest. I DJ’d for over half a decade so celebrating Pride on the dance floor surrounded by sweaty, glorious bodies is always a homecoming. And NYC dance floors are back! For protest, the Dyke March is another kind of homecoming. This year’s march on June 25th marks 30 years of organizing among ourselves to fight for our rights, safety, and visibility.

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
Queer icons, activists, and patron saints are critical for modeling what’s possible. My young self encountered Leigh Bowery in the club then at The Metropolitan Museum and felt SEEN. I left my job at Artforum, to go work with Patricia Field in her 8th street store because I craved nourishment through Pat’s queer scene. Honey Dijon is literally everything and I follow her intently. This June, Leslie-Lohman is devoting time to queer icon futurism bringing together Raquel Willis, Madison Moore, and others. It’s truly queer path makers who inspire me to get out of bed each morning.

What can people and corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
Support and amplification on a daily basis from both people and corporations has the potential to be transformative to our existence. Share your time and your means generously as you are able. Seek out and actively support intersectional queer organizations and change makers in all sectors. Pride is everyday for queer folks which means living your life to its fullest in a world still deeply regulated by heteronormative expectations and forms of control. At best this is deeply exhausting; at worst, it is the cause of violence, suicide, and murder. Allyship everyday is non-negotiable.

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
Be a receptive space of listening, action, and accountability. Even if your business doesn’t have an LGBTQIA+ ERG or any “out” people (that you’re aware of), queer folks are there, we’re everywhere! There are businesses getting it right and there are best practices, so do your homework with intention, then foster a space where the full intersectionality of people’s lives is honored.

Daniel O’Donnell (he/him) was the first openly gay man elected to the New York State Assembly. Assemblymember O’Donnell has been a local and national leader on LGBTQ rights, including authoring and sponsoring New York State’s Marriage Equality Law (2011); the Dignity for All Students Act, which was the first time trans rights were written into New York state law (2012); the bill prohibiting “gay/trans panic defenses” (2019); the Gender Recognition Act (2021); and more. His district includes Manhattan Valley, Morningside Heights, and the Upper West Side.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
Periodically, I’m invited to a town or community somewhere in New York State that is having its very first Pride parade. Whether it’s a small town upstate, a community in New York City, or an organization in my neighborhood creating the space to celebrate LGBTQ people for the first time, these events are always Pride at its purest: courageous, exciting, and full of joy.

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
My own path to coming out and entering public life was only possible because of those who fought to make the space for me to be an out gay elected official. Harvey Milk and Barney Frank were path breakers. Closer to home, my good friend Deborah Glick was the only out LGBTQ person in the State Legislature for years, fighting vicious homophobia in and outside the Capitol building.

What can people and corporations do to support the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride Month?
Corporations should put their money where their mouth is. I’m sick of organizations having ad campaigns that feature acceptance, but then donate money to those who promote hate and bigotry. I’m tired of companies who claim to accept everyone, but whose HR policies don’t acknowledge LGBTQ people.

For individuals — I am grateful that the world is full of LGBTQ allies and supporters these days. But when “allies” put themselves at the center, or take credit for LGBTQ people’s accomplishments, it undermines our progress. Keep LGBTQ people at the center of our own movement — listen to us and support us.

How can businesses create more inclusive environments for their employees and patrons?
Understand and acknowledge that LGBTQ relationships sometimes look different. Creating an inclusive environment may mean reviewing policies to make sure that people’s partners can be included in benefits, or that the way we build families is integrated into a company’s parental leave policies. Let each individual be themself and express their gender identity or sexual orientation. And please — don’t schedule any meetings the day after the Pride Parade!

Adam Odsess-Rubin (he/him) is the founder and artistic director of National Queer Theater. There, he is the co-creator and lead producer of the award-winning Criminal Queerness Festival at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which has been recommended by The New York Times, The Advocate, and Thrillist. Odsess-Rubin has worked with MCC Theater, Carnegie Hall, International Rescue Committee, The Guthrie Theater, and American Conservatory Theater. He is currently a lead teaching artist for New York Theatre Workshop and Arts Project of Cherry Grove. Odsess-Rubin received a NYC Mayor’s Grant for Cultural Impact in 2020 and has been awarded grants from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Stonewall Community Foundation, and Brooklyn Arts Council for his work promoting activist queer theater. From 2016-2018, Odsess-Rubin served as personal assistant to AIDS Memorial Quilt founder Cleve Jones, protégé of Harvey Milk. B.A. UC Santa Cruz. M.A. NYU Steinhardt.

What is your favorite Pride Month event or celebration?
I produce the Criminal Queerness Festival at Lincoln Center during Pride each year. This international theater festival showcases LGBTQ playwrights from countries that criminalize or censor queer and trans people. Each year, we produce new plays from around the world and bring together artists and activists to discuss LGBTQ+ rights from a global perspective. While some of this work is heavy, we focus on celebrating the artists involved and the ways artists and organizers are fighting oppression and censorship from Syria to Uganda and beyond.

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
I love writers. I get a lot of inspiration from queer writers like James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Larry Kramer. They were not afraid to be deeply unpopular, and faced a lot of harassment for their writing on queer issues. They powerfully broke open so many closet doors through their words, and helped to articulate the challenges and joys of the queer experience through poetry and prose. I wish LGBTQ history and culture were taught in schools, because these authors should be required reading for all high school students.

Samy Nemir Olivares is a queer activist, organizer, and writer. They are currently a public information officer at Lambda Legal, and are running as a candidate for the New York State Assembly in District 54. If elected, Samy would be the first openly genderqueer assemblymember in New York State history. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Olivares first began working as a journalist after coming to the United States. They later worked at the Center for Popular Democracy, and on numerous campaigns on issues like ending the school to prison pipeline, workers and immigrant rights, universal healthcare, and civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community.

As director of LGBTQ+ cardiovascular health at Lenox Hill Greenwich Village, Dr. Caroline Ong (she/her) is a cardiologist dedicated to delivering individualized and affirming cardiovascular care to LGBTQ patients. Through her training at University of California San Francisco and New York University, Dr. Ong has experience working with and for diverse communities in San Francisco and New York. Her ongoing work in queer health education and understanding LGBT health disparities aims to support LGBTQ patients to achieve their optimal cardiovascular health in the face of ongoing barriers to care.

What LGBTQ+ icons or activists have inspired you?
Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer for showing us an enduring and determined love that has made the country more free, fair, and equal.