What is the future for the queer community?

Continuing the queer 101 posts for pride month (hey it’s pride month somewhere), I had the honor of participating in a queer bloggers of color roundtable over at COLORLINES this week. Kai Wright (the amazing new Editorial Director at Colorlines) invited me, Pam Spaulding from Pam’s House Blend (swoon) and Rod McCullom from from Rod 2.0. I was stoked to be included with such amazing bloggers.
Kai asked us a series of questions about the queer community, blogging, Obama and what the future might hold.
An excerpt from one of the questions:

There’s been lots of talk about Obama and whether he’s delivered for queer (or is it just gay?) people. He doled out some new rights this month, through executive power. So what do you think? Is Obama making things happen?
PAM: Honestly, his administration has delivered more significant boosts for the transgender community than has been recognized (but we’ve covered on the Blend). It has appointed the first publicly-out-at-the-time-of-appointment transgender appointees — Amanda Simpson and Dylan Orr. The Obama administration has also changed the rules on passports for gender change, allowing trans people to change the gender marker on a federal identification document without genital reconstruction surgery.
MIRIAM: He’s made some significant small and symbolic strides. Like the recent Family Medical Leave Act decision. While the media is touting it as an expansion of gay rights, it’s actually just a clarification of an existing 1993 law which already included people parenting non-biological children. It didn’t specify gays and lesbians but we were never excluded. I’m glad he clarified it so folks aren’t getting discriminated against, but let’s not pretend this is a huge victory for LGBT rights. The changes for passports and transgender folks was a big win–which actually came from Secretary Clinton and the State Department.
PAM: What we have seen is that expectations were raised by this president that he refused to use the bully pulpit to lobby for. All of the administrative gains and policies are not permanent, they require any future president to agree with them to remain in place. That doesn’t mean that additional benefits from FMLA aren’t important, but that this administration wasn’t willing to urge Congress to move because he didn’t want to expend the political capital.

Read the rest here.
Colorlines also has a great feature up about the young people building tomorrow’s queer world. Check them out!