Creating Change carries a legacy of bringing together LGBTQIA+ leadership from all over the nation to one city- to teach, learn and experience each other for the last 38 years. Stepping into a space that holds 2-3000 people who have embraced their Queerness and often made it an extension or the centerpiece of their work isn’t an experience that is easy to adequately verbalize. Breaking the 4th wall a bit to speak in 1st person as an individual who has shared that space, opposed to just a journalist that is reporting on it, feels important. Creating Change and the hotel it lives inside of each year feels like a living, breathing thing. After so many days together, you almost feel like you live there. Each day full of activities from sunrise to nearly sunrise again makes every day feel like three. All of those people that climb out of your email, DMs, and zoom calls- to standing in front of you, arms outstretched to embrace you is more beautiful and overwhelming than I know how to put words to. Creating Change feels more like a city than a conference. It is an ecosystem that only includes community and that is both refreshing and staggering. There are co-workers, friends, enemies and exes. There are lovers, strangers, former business associates, allies, accomplices, entities with competing goals, shared dreams and shared fears. There are endless possibilities and endless work to be done. There is a space to teach and endless things to learn. 

Orlando, FL - On June 30th, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) issued a memo to municipalities, banning street art containing social, political, or ideological messages on roads, shoulders, intersections, and sidewalks. They cited safety concerns for the aggressive stance and went on to threaten withholding state funding from cities that didn’t immediately comply. The directive targets public art like Pride crosswalks that appear throughout the state and the "Black History Matters" street mural found outside of the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African American Museumin St. Petersburg, FL.

Since, several cities including West Palm Beach, Boynton Beach and Tallahassee, have started willingly removing the art while the cities of Delray Beach, Miami Beach, Key West and St. Petersburg, FL seem poised to fight back. In a subsequent letter from the State, several of those cities were told to remove the Art by a deadline of Sept 3rd and if they did not, FDOT would come in without further communication to remove the artwork “by any appropriate method”, the expense of which would be charged back to the municipality.

In stunning news, the City of Orlando woke today to learn that the State of Florida had come in overnight on Wednesday under the cloak of darkness and removed the rainbow cross walk that stretched across Orange Ave, the street that sits directly in front of Pulse Nightclub where 49 innocent victims lost their lives in a mass shooting on June 12, 2016. The city of Orlando, it’s Mayor, several elected officials and countless community members condemned the act and began immediately filling the then blank crosswalk spaces in with color chalk.