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I’ll never forget how I felt the time I put on a Quinceañera dress. The night before my sister’s celebration I sneaked into her room and put on her shiny white dress with dozens of bright pink 6-inch roses sewn all over. I was 8 years old, and this was my dream. The lavish dress was obviously large enough to cover me completely from head to toe, but I didn’t care. I looked into the mirror, twirled, and danced for several minutes and pretended it was the day of my Quince. I also tried on the 3-inch heels that matched the color of the roses, even though my small feet kept slipping out with every step. Those brief five to seven minutes gave me great joy and satisfaction and that is when I realized I was a bit different than most kids my age.

At the start of this past Pride Month, I was scrolling through Instagram when a video popped up in my feed that stopped me in my tracks – it was a cute animated short with a voiceover reciting a quote from a LGBTQ+ activist, educator and writer, Alexander Leon:
“Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we’ve created to protect us.”
Leon tweeted this back in 2020, and it quickly went viral, many connecting with his message of the collective experience of LGBTQ+ folx navigating through (one could say surviving) childhood by self-editing, putting on masks and personas, trying to reconcile conflicting identities, and the long, hard journey toward authenticity.

My name is Stuart Huggins and I am the manager of The Center Community Food Bank. It’s my pleasure to share an anecdote from my experience in this role, the impact we have, the service we provide and the impact we have in our community.
I was at my desk late one afternoon when the telephone rang. It was a gentleman named Curt. Curt was calling from Kansas City on behalf of a dear friend who lived in the Coachella Valley. When he lived here, he became friends with Denise. According to Curt, Denise was living on the margins and had little access to food. He asked if we could be of help to her. Her situation seemed dire.

July marks National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, a time dedicated to shining a spotlight on the mental health challenges faced by underrepresented communities. Established in honor of Bebe Moore Campbell, this observance aims to raise awareness about mental health disparities among minorities and promote equitable access to mental health care. Among these communities, LGBTQ+ individuals, particularly those from minority backgrounds, face unique mental health challenges that require targeted support and intervention.

Pride is an adaptive response to shame.To grow up queer in America is to grow up under the shadow of shame. From our first moments, we are barraged with implicit and explicit messages of heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and patriarchal hierarchy. When a young person feels urges to deviate from standard gender or sexual expression, frequently the resulting emotion is a guttural sense of misalignment with one’s community. This is shame, and its voice can sound threatening to our very existence, like self-hatred, like unrelenting “what-ifs”, and it can stick with us well into old age.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as we take this time to discuss and reflect on mental wellbeing, it’s important that we carry with compassion and intention the language we speak into the world. Our choice of words has remarkable power – a power to uplift or to tear down, to heal or to harm. It is our decision to use words either as a balm or a weapon.