Grover Wehman-Brown

"Long before I was out, I was known... As we close out LGBTQ pride month, I want to share my story with you that shapes my motivation– my shared interest– in ending white supremacy as a white queer person. What do I mean by shared interest? I mean the specific ways I, in my specific humanity as a white person in a racist world, have a personal stake in the work to end racism and white supremacy."

"when asked to bring
my ancestors into the room
alongside those they would
want to harm the answer
is surely no. and i must."

Click through to Writers Resist's site to read the poem in full. 

http://www.writersresist.com/2019/06/27/with-risk-to-inhabit-that-whole/

Three poems are included in Issue 2: Transcend edition of the Ghost Heart Literary Journal. 

• range inflected care in our lavender too-familiar 

•  DEPICTING OR DEPICTING; HESITANTLY BEING VIEWED 

• What can I weave for you, this next life emerging?

You can view these poems by downloading the PDF available on their website. 

"There is a necessary and lively conversation unfolding in reproductive health-care and justice settings over how gender matters in reproduction—and how we might build more inclusive and culturally competent modes of advocacy and care.2 Queer, trans, and nonbinary birth workers

are growing in ranks and visibility—organizing collectives, educating other birth workers, and creating gender-affirming spaces for conception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care." - interview between Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (1st author)  and Grover Wehman-Brown (2nd author)

Peripartum Cardiomyopathy isn’t “random”; it is clustered at higher rates in certain communities, just like MS is clustered into certain communities, but with a more rapidly fatal impact. “Why do so many people in my community have autoimmune diseases” now extends into “to what extent did MS contribute to PPCM; to what extent did the things that contributed to MS (for example, stress created by trauma and the vigilance of survival as a visibly gender-non-conforming person) also contribute to PPCM?”​

Aiyahnna Johnson, a resident of Housing and Dignity Village and former leader of Occupy Oakland, said the community is fighting the eviction because the city’s approach to curbside communities is “just belittling to anybody who deserves the human rights in this. They’re looking at the money instead of the actual people. And that’s a problem. They don’t care about the resources that they can provide or the help that they could provide.”

Both of us are bookish and deeply smitten with our femme/butch and lesbian ancestry; we are each deep in individual projects that return to texts of the 20th century, particularly the 1970’s-90’s to reflect on and position ourselves and our communities in the current moment. In these re-readings, we notice how the struggles to support butch/femme, trans liberation, sex workers, and kink are intertwined in the past as well as the future. 

Those who spend their days in collective struggle for equality see the holidays as a time to send cards with a social-justice bent.

Before I had kids, I always intended to send holiday cards, but usually never got around to it. When my first baby was born, our extended family made it perfectly clear: A holiday card with a picture of the kid on it was now mandatory. That first year, 2014, we went all-in with a picture of the infant in an elf outfit...

"M Archive is a corrective lens that allows us to see the way the world is literally constituted from the legacies of harm. It allows us to see how seemingly harmless ways of being are linked to the possible destruction of humanity, but it also shows us the skills needed to transform and survive this harm."

One wet New England day, Liz Buxton got stuck to the bottom of one of the many mobile freezer units outside of the food processing facility where she is the Director of Operations. But thanks to $750,000 in grants from the USDA, Massachusetts Department of Agriculture, and private donors, Buxton and her co-workers at the Franklin County Community Development Corporation (FCCDC) will no longer have to shuttle food from the mobile freezers, through the ice, rain, and snow, and into the commercial kitchen for processing...

Living in an automobile is an increasingly common but underexamined experience in the United States. The car provides shelter against the elements of outdoors, but living in the automobile requires a complex set of practices over dispersed space in order to meet basic bodily and social needs. Using accounts of car dwelling found in survival guides, news reports, blogs, and day-in-the-life videos, this article analyzes some of the fundamental tensions between stillness and mobility, private and public, and home and homeless evidenced in the place-making practices of car dwelling...

We are prodigal daughters and sons and chickens come home to roost.

The USDA knows this. I think deep down you know this, too. We are your children and grandchildren. We are the people whose ancestors’ lands were stolen that keep returning to the countryside against the odds. The gay pride slogan “We are everywhere!” is actually true. Many of us are already here, and even more are coming on out to the country...