About this site

This website was created as part of Professor Doris Santoro’s Education 2272 Urban Education class at Bowdoin in the Spring of 2017.

The culmination of a semester of inquiring about and thinking critically about educational reform efforts that come from the top-down in urban places, this website aims share examples of communities organizing around queer people of color and advocating for their rights. In the case of queer activism in urban settings, activism is often centered around organizing a community to fight injustices, providing educational resources about queer bodies and desires (which are rarely found in the classrooms of urban public schools), and providing safe social spaces where identities are validated and celebrated.

This website is centered around queer youth in urban spaces, a set of subjects that is necessarily related to the school system in one of a variety of ways. Although most of the grassroots organizations I introduce here aren’t focused on school reform, they focus on the needs of queer youth of color that are deliberately left behind by schooling institutions. In many ways, these organizations create spaces of teaching and learning, mentorship, and community-building for youth that are more effective than those that schools ostensibly seek to create for their students.

Here is a glossary of terms related to queer people and their identities for your reference.

Here is a glossary of terms related to race and racism for your reference.

-Please contact [email protected] with any questions or to suggest a change to this website-