Midwest LGBTQ Activist Creates Cultural Spaces for Queer Youth of Color

If you ask Monica Adams how old she is, most of time the 25-year-old will tell you with a straight face that she is 57. “I’ve been here a while,” she says. “I’ve learned a lot from my elders—I’m not as old as them, but I’m getting there.”

She says that because she feels like she's been fighting for LGBTQ people of color for a long time. If you know Adams and her tireless work organizing and advocating for queer color of youth then perhaps it would be easy to picture Adams as a young black teenager who righteously inserted herself in to the scene of the Black Power movement back in the late 1960s.

Still, at an age when most people are going through a quarter-life crisis, Adams, who identifies as a gay, gender-nonconforming person, has already been called a revolutionary through her work in Madison, Wisc. Adams' work is evident through art shows she organizes, marches she participates in, and acts of civil disobedience she fearlessly commits. She has devoted the last several years of her life to establishing what she calls “cultural spaces” for LGBTQ youth of color in Madison. She wants young people to work through the often-complicated process of self-affirmation and self-acceptance of his or her identity.

"It is easy to forget that Monica is only 25 because she has become such a force in the movement here in Madison,” says Cynthia Linn, a social justice education specialist and advocate who has worked closely with Adams. “She is often working without mentors close by and it’s easy to forget that she is as young as she is and still possesses the same power and self-assurance of many elders.”

Early Beginnings

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Adams recalls her childhood as a fusion of love and challenges in discovering her sexual orientation and gender identity.

“Growing up, I didn’t know anybody … who was out in my community." she says. “Early on it was very clear that you were supposed to be heterosexual.”

Adams says that back then, she dressed in ways that were generally considered masculine and enjoyed playing basketball instead of double Dutch. “I didn’t really think about it,” she says. “I just enjoyed certain activities over others.”

It wasn’t until high school that she says she experienced pressure from family and friends to “grow out of” her tomboyish ways. “[People] would ask me if I had a boyfriend, or if wanted to get my nails and hair done. Even though I was surrounded by a lot of women growing up, those things just didn’t interest me much.”

Looking back, Adams says that she was pressured less because she excelled in school and didn’t get in to trouble. “That was definitely a source of pride for my family,” she says. “They were very happy to have had a young person like me make it.”

Unlike many LGBTQ youth, Adams says she was lucky to have the support of her family. Her grandmother especially accepted her for who she was and is today.

“I was raised by my grandmother who is at church more than she is at home, so her position [on LGBTQ community] is very clear,” Adams says. “Still, she is a very gentle and loving woman, so even though couldn’t understand my identity and still doesn’t to this day—she loves me."

As a foreshadowing of the self-sufficient and “go-getter” person she has become today, the younger Adams not only relied on the support of loved ones, but also relied on herself to find her own self-acceptance. It was helpful to construct language so that she could talk about herself as a gender nonconforming female.

“I found things in life that affirmed me,” she says.

Adams recalls that even though there organizational resources in Milwaukee such as a community LGBT center, its inaccessibility was twofold as she was growing up. “First of all, if I’m ten, I can’t go way over there by myself and then 'What is LGBT?' 'Who am I?' [was a challenge]. How do I construct the language to talk about it and be able to identify with it?”

That was when Adams began to rely on her peers to in order to as she calls it “survive and figure out how to make [her life work.]”

Taking Action

In her work as a queer youth of color organizer at Freedom Inc., a Madison-based non-profit she helped start and a program assistant for the city's Gay Straight Alliance for Safe Schools (GSAFE) middle school program, Adams says that LGBT communities of color—especially youth today—are facing the same issues she dealt with in terms of lack representation and a sufficient cultural space for LGBTQ youth of color.

Structural and systemic inequities have long plagued LGBTQ people of color in Madison. It has been a frustration point for Adams and other LGBTQ rights allies. “[Madison is] often toted as this extremely progressive place,” Adams says. “They’ve got rainbow flags and a pride parade and you and your partner can get benefits together, but that stuff doesn’t transfer to black folks. It doesn’t transfer to anybody that’s not white.”

Within Freedom Inc., Adams facilitates a group called People Like Us (PLUS), an organization that has allowed her to not only identify the often-compounded challenges LGBT youth of color in Madison are facing, but also to take action against these injustices under the umbrella of community organizing.

Under a three-pronged mission ultimately targeted toward preparing LGBTQ youth of color to become future community organizers, PLUS aims to create a safe and visible space for queer youth of color, take action against the heterosexism and genderism pervasive in communities of color, and challenge racism in the LGBTQ community overall.

When asked what challenges LGBTQ youth of color in Madison are facing, they are eerily similar to Adams’ early days in Milwaukee. “They aren’t being affirmed,” she says. “There is no cultural space in schools, and they are really to internalize that.”

The Wisconsin Gazette, a Milwaukee-based LGBT newspaper, published a story profiling gay teenagers who were kicked out of their homes after their parents discovered they were gay. The article stemmed from a study conducted by the Cream City Foundation on LGBT youth homelessness in Milwaukee. Released last January, the data from this report mirrored findings from national studies on LGBT homeless youth:

• LGBT youth in this study tended to be homeless for longer periods of time than non-LGBT youth;
• LGBT youth often reported higher instances of mental illnesses and substance abuse than non-LGBT youth; and
• the majority of homeless LGBT youth are African-American (42 percent) compared to white (22 percent) and Hispanic (8 percent).

According to the report, “The high number of LGBT youth that are homeless is sometimes attributed to the fact that youth are coming out at a younger age, creating friction in families and causing—or forcing LGBT youth to leave home. Still, others are homeless because they ran away from foster or group homes because they were mistreated or harassed.”

Better Together?

It is clear that Adams' passion and love for these youth is more than genuine and often lays herself on the line not just professionally, but personally.

“Monica allowed me to come in to myself—being gay wasn’t even a possibility until she opened my eyes and educated me,” says 18-year-old Alicia Muhammad, a coworker of Adams' at Freedom Inc. “On a personal level, there have been times when I didn’t have food or money and she helped me out.”

Adams draws on the false, yet popular, belief that communities of color are disproportionately homophobic, a notion that has was prevalent during the Prop 8 campaign, the 2008 California ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the state. Some attributed the success of the initiative to communities of color due to some exit poll data. When sharing the story of “her kids,” Adams notes that they are left feeling ashamed of not only themselves but their culture and community due to lack of acceptance.

Adams admits she's frustrated with Madison’s systemic problems for people of color—from excluding people color from discriminatory school policies to its lack of black hair salons.

In September, a national effort focused on strengthening and establishing the relationship between communities of color and LGBT groups was sparked following the release of The Applied Research Center's the "Better Together"report. [Disclosure: The author of this article has interned with The Applied Research Center.] The report focused on collectively mobilizing both racial justice and LGBT issues, breaking down social, cultural, and economic barriers between communities of color and LGBT organizations. Doing so will help shed the widespread belief that communities of color are disproportionately homophobic, the report argues.

Bridging racial justice and LGBTQ platforms in to a cohesive movement became a ubiquitous theme in the blogosphere and was underscored when the NAACP unveiled its first-ever LGBT Equality Task Force and publicly supported the LBGT equality movement during the “One Nation” March in Washington, D.C., this fall.

Despite the national climate surrounding LGBT advocacy that is dominated by a renewed sense of cooperation between LGBTQ rights groups and social and racial justice groups, Adams says the critical need for alliances has yet to be acknowledged in Madison. She cites a real disconnect between white and multiracial LGBTQ groups.

“We don’t work with other LGBTQ advocacy groups in a way that’s meaningful,” Adams says. “A lot times [predominantly white LGBT centers] try to co-opt us because they know that funding is available this way.”

Adams recalls an instance when an LGBT center made up of mostly white people reached out to Monica and Freedom Inc. with an interest in starting its own queer youth of color group. Instead of making an effort to establish a connection with these communities by distributing flyers themselves, they looked to Freedom Inc. to do it.

“First of all you don’t have any connection or ties to this community and basically they [wanted us] to do all of their recruiting,” Adams says. “They asked us to put the flyer in Hmong and our response was, ‘that’s not a good way to reach this community because first of all the ones you want to reach may read Hmong but they don’t speak it. Then what if I give this to a Hmong reading and speaking person and they in turn show up at your door? What are you going to do? You’re going to call us yet [this center] still gets to put on your paper that you reached out queer folks of color.’”

Keep on keeping on

Still, through it all Adams remains on the front lines of this seemingly never-ending battle to generate and sustain more cultural spaces for LGBTQ communities of color. It is clear that just as she draws her inspiration and energy from black feminist authors like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins others in the community are doing the same when it comes to her.

“I’m very happy to see her grow,” says Jonathan Williams, 28, who worked alongside Adams as an organizer. “She is very committed to establishing a diverse movement and it’s very clear that she’s willing to do the work.”

Currently Adams is keeping herself with busy with preparing for an art show that is part of an LGBT rights visibility campaign that is taking place this month.

Nothing’s going to stop her, not even “old” age.

“If you ain’t changing folks’ lives,” she says, “then I don’t know what point is.”

Jessica Strong is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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