Despite nationwide rollbacks in LGBTQ+ rights, Kierra Johnson, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, recently declared, “We are winning!” before laying out the three pillars that she believes will support the sustained future of LGBTQ+ movement.

“They’re not redistricting and or redrawing these new red lines because our f**king vote doesn’t matter,” she said during her State of the Movement discussion at the Creating Change conference last month. “It matters so much.”

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“The real power is the people,” she continued. “If you don’t have the people, you ain’t got no power — not for real for real.” She then noted that the power wielded by the queer community in the past has allowed it to achieve marriage equality, workplace protections, same-sex adoption, and more.

Johnson noted the palpable feeling of “exhaustion, sadness, confusion, and hopelessness” among committed LGBTQ+ activists and organizers nationwide while also acknowledging their “love, joy, and generosity.”

She then said that the Task Force envisions a “democratically and economically just society, where people of all genders and orientations thrive, with belonging, self-determination, and bodily autonomy” before laying out the three pillars necessary for the LGBTQ+ movement’s future:

• Democracy: providing a robust political education that includes voting and protest rights as well as strategies in collective organizing.
  
• Economy: Meeting people’s basic human needs through interdependence in secure housing, food access, a clean environment, and personal dignity.
  
• Care: building infrastructure where people can heal, move without fear, and where young people can ask questions without fear of violence.

Effectively pursuing these social policies will require alignment among “leadership pipelines, political education, narrative strategy, and trusted institutions,” she said, noting that the anti-LGBTQ+ movement has expanded its outreach to K-12 students, leading to extremist youth recruitment programs.

People within the LGBTQ+ movement have historically neglected communities outside of the LGBTQ+ experience, she said, as well as people who have had different sets of values that neither political party focuses on.

“There were few places where people felt smart enough, progressive enough, or safe enough to be vulnerable to ask dumb questions,” she said, which closed the invitation to “political education and relationship building.”

The movement’s perfectionism over the last 20 years, she added, has limited who deserves a seat at the table and has treated high sociocultural competence as a requirement rather than a muscle worked on daily.

Alternatively, she argued for leaning into “ouch moments” — which include discomfort, vulnerability, and not always getting it right — and suggested moving away from the sole strategy of divestment (economic boycotts and civil non-participation), as many people don’t have the option to simply opt out. Everyone shouldn’t be trying to play the same role, and such strategies don’t make “harm disappear” on their own, she said.

She then issued a call to action for the movement to lean into “principled struggle,” which centers actions taken in “strategy and intention.”

“What will sustain us is what always has,” she said. “People in place, grounded in care, committed to shared power and willing to struggle together with integrity.”

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