Our Future in a Burning Room
Keynote Speech at Creating Change 2026
This Saturday, I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote at Creating Change 2026, the nation’s largest and longest-running LGBTQ+ advocacy and leadership conference organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force.
It was a heavy, chaotic day that started with the murder of Alex Pretti and ended in a winter storm that paralyzed DC…
12 minute video + full text of the speech.
Creating Change 2026 Keynote
When Creating Change asked me to give this speech, my first thought was “immediately no.” Why would my Mexican, immigrant, Queer brown ass go to Washington, DC right now? To travel into the heart of American authoritarianism and breathe the same air as the architects of so much misery for people like me? And to top it off, I was asked to speak about “the future.” I don’t even know how we’re making it through the next three years.
It was tough to admit I was scared. I had to sit with that old, familiar fear. Childhood fears. The emergency numbers taped to the phone in case my parents got deported while they were at work. Ducking in the car if cops or immigration drove by.
Fear expands, picks up other fears. As a teenager, the fear of being beaten to death like Matthew Shepard and being too brown for martyrdom, getting sick with HIV and being too poor for treatment. And now, the fear of losing access to PrEP, getting pulled over because my mustache looks too Mexican and being stripped of my naturalization.
Those fears don’t define who I am. I don’t want to wallow or indulge in victimhood. We are all dealing with the cyclical nature of our fears, watching them echo and boomerang.
Our HIV warriors, activists and health professionals, who could see a future without the virus, are now struggling with cuts to research and treatment, afraid of another wave of AIDS deaths. Our Trans aunties who lived through illegal silicone injections, who could see a future with gender-affirming care available to all, now fear the return of that black market. Elder married couples who survived the plague, now worry they won’t be allowed to visit their spouse in the hospital if our marriage is overturned. Queer Immigrants who not long ago were told they were essential, fear being snatched off the street.
And the Queer experience is an immigrant one. Many of us leave our hometowns and families behind. We earn less, depend on clandestine economies. We’re used as political pawns and scapegoats every election cycle, like refugees in our own country. As our phones show us the howling of migrant parents and whispers of a transgender genocide…
We are all asking “How are we back here again?”
This loop is part of being a Queer in America. There is no static place for us. We are always recalibrating, in a constant negotiation with our environment.
But that negotiation has a constant too. This room. We are always gathered in this room. There have been thousands of versions of this room.
The firehouse of the Gay Activist Alliance where we planned zaps and then danced to disco. The buildings owned by Black labor unions in New Orleans, where Queer Mardi Gras krewes formed a voting bloc to elect a sympathetic mayor. ACT UP afterparties in San Francisco leather bars. Memorials in vogue ballrooms and potlucks in tiny southern dive bars. Bathhouses that dispersed the Mpox vaccine.
This room transcends time and space.
Because in this room, we don’t dwell on the past, though we honor our history. In this room, we’re not throwing a pity party for the present. For all our diversity of body and ambitions, in this room we do one thing and one thing only: we plan for the future.
And for a people who were told we’d never make it to 40, we sure love planning for the future and we’re damn good at it too.
So how do we talk about this Queer future?
I could fill you with memes and platitudes. Tell you that your “joy is resistance” and that the future really is female and Queer and Brown, I could tell you it gets better because you were born this way and need to protect the dolls so that love wins. A gay “live laugh love” poster to calm your nerves.
The truth is, it does get better but also impossible in ways we cannot imagine, because the world lacks the imagination for people like us.
I could entertain you with predictions, just make shit up. Predict a future where we invent a brand of poppers that cures AIDS and sex robots in every darkroom. I could predict that our “cult of gender ideology” registers as a religion like Scientology and Trans people stop paying taxes! I could predict top surgeries that leave no scars. I could predict a generation of Queer kids who will never know relationships outside of chatbots, and a surveillance state so wide that we’ll be too paranoid to daddy role-play anymore. I could predict we’ll all be sent to camps.
Anyone can predict the future. Just wish fulfillment and nightmares. Predictions are easy. But questions are hard.
Questions about our future demand something of us. They require us to see the Queer experience holistically, our body, science and spirit.
So I may not be able to tell you what the future holds but I do have questions…
What is the future of our body?
Our bodies are so often boiled down to just our gender transitions, or diseases or pleasure but not considered as vessels of time.
What does aging look like for a community who never expected to live long enough to get old? How is growing older different for us? How are we fortifying the caretakers of our elders right now?
Our contributions to technology are often overlooked. Queer people always pioneer using bleeding edge tech for connecting with one another. When straight people were too scared to meet strangers off the internet and online dating was still a joke, we met through that “information superhighway.” Our PlanetOut profiles and spicy AOL chatrooms predate social media. There is no Tinder without Grindr.
How will we Queer technology again?
AI is here. How can our smallest non-profits and independent artists use it ethically to tell our stories with shrinking budgets? We’ve created safe sex messaging and systems of consent, how can we apply those lessons to protect women and kids from non-consensual AI porn? As our healthcare professionals are forced to go rogue, how do we harness technology to strengthen our warning systems for STI outbreaks?
Our algorithms boost the most dangerous political messages about us. Grifters and rage-baiting narcissists who speak for our movement, LGB neocons who seek division with our Trans siblings and call us “groomers,” aligning themselves with our oppressors. How will we welcome them back into the fold when they inevitably find out that tokens get spent? Is it even possible to bring people back from the wrong side of history?
What are you willing to forgive?
Our spirituality is talked about as a deficit, about the religions that abandoned us but rarely how we too are vessels of divinity. As white Christian nationalism barrels toward us (again) how do we define Queer spirituality and how will it fit into our politics? How can imagining our future become a form of prayer?
Our people have always been baptized in fire, from a gun barrel or a match. And our dead used to pass without names. Families who never claimed the victims of the Upstairs Lounge Inferno or the Everhard baths fire, the names in Transgender science books that were burned. But in this era, our dead have names. Colorado Springs and Pulse, we know who perished. We showed one another how beautiful our mourning is and how bright our funeral pyres.
What piece of your future are you willing to give up to save your neighbor? What jobs, funding, brand deals are you willing to decline in solidarity? What laws are you willing to break?
Who will you pull out of our burning room?
We have to answer that question every generation.
How are we back here again? We ask.
That is the arithmetic of our progress: always ten steps forward, six steps back. Our movement’s constant circle, fossils in a wider circumference. Sky-high victory and fiery defeat, our names in skywriting, our names in embers.
When you leave this room, travelling through space and time in that loop of fear and love, how will you leave the future better than you found it?
We were never promised linear progress beloved. Nothing about us has ever been straight. You are not a line, you’re a propeller.
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Thank you for reminding us who we are! Gonna need to watch this again from time to time.
Phewww, what a treat to read your words.