Reflections from Creating Change 2025
Kiki, Diana, Tatyana, and Lance meet up for lunch at Creating Change
Kiki Lopez - Unbreakable: Rising Together in Love, Truth, and Resilience
As we conclude this year’s National LGBTQ Task Force Creating Change Conference, I want to share some reflections and realizations with you. It has been a privilege to spend time with community leaders, organizers and trailblazers from across the country. Despite the targeted attacks from this administration starting on their very first day in office, we understand that these challenges are not new. Yet, we continue to move forward, determined to strengthen our movement.
Let us hold fast to our commitment to protect and uplift our chosen families, our Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, and the broader LGBTQIA+ community.
The recent speeches, executive orders, and actions from this administration have made it painfully clear that some of the progress we’ve fought for is being rolled back. While it is difficult to witness, let us remember the strength and love that exist within our communities. We’ve always had each other, even in the absence of laws or policies that protect us. Together, we have endured, and together, we will continue to rise.
We must also stay vigilant against the weaponization of misinformation, disinformation, and the lack of accurate information used to spread misunderstanding and hatred toward the queer community. Clarity is our strongest tool. Let’s fact-check everything we encounter on social media and share truth to combat fear.
Lastly, we celebrate the beauty of who we are—our genders, our sexualities, and our truths. No one can erase our stories, no matter how hard they try. They can incite fear and perpetuate hatred, but they will never break us. We will face every challenge with resilience, creativity, and unapologetic fabulosity.
Mahal na mahal ko kayo.
Lance Dwyer - Holding Joy and Resistance
I had the great privilege of attending Creating Change the week of the inauguration. The conference collectively was a paradoxical space that was challenging, encouraging, terrifying, hopeful, heartbreaking, and inspiring all at once. The messages that resonated and repeated the most were that we have to unify and take care of each other unconditionally. This administration's executive orders rocked and shocked our Creating Change community, but I have a great deal of faith in the leaders of our movement. So much of what is happening is unprecedented, and yet our history as an LGBTQ community reminds us that we have been here before and have persevered.
Creating Change covers so much ground in their workshop offerings—I attended sessions on policy, organizing strategy, resource mapping, Asian & Pacific-Islander unity, geopolitical conflict history and so much more. I gained so much knowledge that I plan to share with my colleagues and friends but what I want to bring back from Las Vegas most of us all are the bright shining moments of lightness and joy. The LGBTQ community is resilient, innovative and above all, creative. I will cherish the opportunities we had to celebrate the talent of our community, the moments we got to dance, sing, and even cry together. I will carry with me and spread the tender, bittersweet joy that permeated throughout the Creating Change conference as we gear up for this fight.
Diana Lieu - We Are Still Here: Grief, Community Care, and Queer Joy
I’ve been in Vegas this week at Creating Change with queer movement folks. With so much at stake for queer people, immigrants, and BIPOC right now, I am full of sadness and worry. I have been oscillating between ‘we take care of us no matter what—we always have’ and ‘but what if we can’t this time?’
One workshop on DEI backlash led by a cis white lesbian used a 2022 video of hope and opportunity from Black organizers to frame this moment; and her solution: resiliency. Instead of hope, it reminded me of what has been lost in the matter of a few months. It reminded me of what resiliency asks of people: to exist within systems and a society that was not made for them and actively seeks to harm them. We wear resiliency like badges of honor and forget that they are battle scars. And what about its casualties? What of our people whose identities exist within a nexus of oppressions? Nevertheless, we have been, are, and will continue to be resilient, and herein lies our power.
There is attempted systemic erasure of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and trans people in language, research, and funding right now. For those of us working in the health care space, the unprecedented attacks and threats to our communities have life-threatening ramifications for our patients and clients. Concurrently, there is a rise in explicit use and ownership of white supremacy—this is no coincidence. Still, this is only a small microcosm of what is happening. This week, I learned that some organizations are self-censoring their language to continue working within the system. Not everyone is so privilege adjacent to be able to do this. None of us are free until all of us are free, so we cannot deliberately leave anyone behind.
Basic human rights, civil rights, and the right to exist are NOT political issues. It is simply the truth that must be. So many Black, Indigenous, and trans organizers this week stated, “we are still here.” It feels simultaneously encouraging and harrowing. This week has been a space to hold a lot of dissonate emotions—panic, resilience, betrayal, solidarity... Every time I felt myself slipping, there was someone to witness, validate, and ground me. Beyond community care, the abundance of queer joy and culture here has been comforting. And nobody can take that away from us.
Lastly, some beautiful drag queens told me they liked my purple hair at drag brunch.