The Values of the Movement

These past few weeks I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what draws people to be involved in the LGBT movement and to what degree. What is it that keeps all of us working so hard toward our vision of equality day after day, whether we are lucky enough to be "gay for pay" or whether we spend our time volunteering for our favorite organization? I've been asking the staff and the trustees at the Triangle Foundation and random friends and family about this for the past few weeks and I'd like to share some of their responses. For some people there was one specific incident that caused them to want to devote their life to making the world better for LGBT people. For others, there is an unyielding yearning for fairness and safety that keeps them going.

When I asked my co-workers and friends about what they value, in relation to why they do the work they do, I got a wide variety of answers: safety for friends; search for true equality for everyone; acceptance instead of tolerance; sexual freedom; reproductive rights; education; community; anti-violence; peaceful resolution; connectedness; compassion; prevention instead of reaction; relationships; diversity; inclusion; protecting people who can't protect themselves; admitting when we need help; creating safe communities where we can live and raise families; honesty; integrity; leaving the world better than we found it. I could certainly find it in myself to wholeheartedly agree with each of these sentiments. And this is just a sampling of the responses. Personally, I find myself pulled, almost called, to do this work based on several values that run deep through my core:

1) A sense of personal integrity: I do not hide who I am and I do not want my government or my society to expect me to hide.
2) A desire for sexual rights and freedoms: Everyone should be free to live, love, explore their sexuality and set up their family unit as they and the other consenting adults involved in them see fit. These relationships should be viewed as equal to the relationships of heterosexual people in all regards: marriage, adoption, tax benefits, social security benefits, etc.
3) A commitment to non-violence: I think people should be protected from violence in all forms and that groups of people should not be used as social punching bags by the dominant culture.
4) An awed respect for the broad spectrum of possibilities that exist in the human experience and what it means to be a part of that and to interact with other people in their experiences.

The question begging to be asked next was where do these values lead us? What do they lead us to do? How do they form our personal lives and interactions? How do they form and influence the actions of the Triangle Foundation? How do these values get transferred into the way our organizations work with each other? How do they influence our movement as a whole? Do our values always lead us or do some of them get misplaced in the daily grind?

I don't have all of the answers to these questions, but I'll be thinking about them and you may be reading about them in future blogs. For now, feel free to leave your comments and join in the discussion. What are your values? What leads you to be involved in the LGBT Movement? What issues are you committed to? Why?

What I do have, is a general beginning to what I think drives the staff and board and volunteers at the Triangle Foundation. Not to replace our Mission Statement or our Vision statement, which you can find on our website, but to enrich the way we think about our roles and our jobs. And, to keep us going through the times that we receive hate mail, the days that we field particularly difficult calls from victims of hate crimes and the years that we face demoralizing legislation that still, despite our best efforts, gets passed.

The beginning of THE VISION:

From the grounding values of love, respect, freedom and equality

Motivated by friends, family and personal experiences,

the Triangle Foundation strives to abate isolation, fear and hatred

by pushing our society and government toward a goal
of personal rights and freedoms, compassionate acceptance and personal responsibility.