Following the inauguration of Donald Trump, the most anti-LGBTQ+ president ever, Kierra Johnson faced a momentous task — addressing a room of roughly a thousand queer activists about the state of the queer rights movement during the 2025 Creating Change conference.

Johnson, a bisexual Black Southerner who previously served as the executive director for the reproductive justice non-profit URGE, became president of the National LGBTQ Task Force in 2021. LGBTQ Nation asked her to discuss the issues she raised in her address, including what she thinks the movement should do next, how to engage unexpected allies for our cause, and the best ways to care for our community’s mental health.

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LGBTQ Nation: Why did the National LGBTQ Task Force incorporate a Native American land acknowledgment into its opening plenary?

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Kierra Johnson: If anybody understands how important symbols are, the LGBTQ community does…. Symbols are important when people are committed to action and learning in combination with those symbols. Otherwise, it feels hollow.

First of all, it’s in direct response to an ask from our Indigenous community…. One of the things the Task Force has been committed to, if nothing else, is to be responsive to the needs and wants of those who make up this space, who call this space home….

If you look at or listen to our land acknowledgments over [the last three years]… you would see and notice that they’re evolving…. They’re not the same, and that is because we are actively learning, asking elders [to participate and help shape them], we are having conversations about what makes each unique place important.

The action that goes along with it is we’re in active conversation with our Indigenous community; visibility matters, so we’re making sure we are seeing the right representation throughout the conference, either on-stage or through the conference programming after our land acknowledgment.

What we’ve also heard is, “Then we need to welcome you, because this is our land.” So it didn’t end with our land acknowledgment. There was a whole presentation: a blessing that was given, a welcoming and honoring of folks from the community. And [we’re] constantly thinking about, “How do we continue to thread the needle? How are we doing our own education, and how do we inspire other people to do it too?”

During your State of the Movement conversation, you emphasized the importance of fostering intergenerational connections. Generational knowledge gaps exist between social justice movements, especially since society separates people of different ages from one another. But how do we get young people to give a s**t about what old people think?

We have to get people to give a s**t about each other, period…. [Often,] we have better relationships with our phones and our apps and our avatars than we do with real, live flesh and blood, breathing, feeling, thinking people. Because of that, we’re out of community. It’s really hard to think about a deep level of engagement with someone behind your phone…

We also live in a time where we’re really transient. Like, 50 years ago, most people were born and stayed where they were from. That’s just not the case anymore. Like, my grandmother lives in Long Beach, my mother lives in Texas, and I am so far away…. Intergenerational learning used to be in the kitchen, like, at the table, watching The Jeffersons in front of the TV…. {These days,] I don’t contact people I know and love enough that I know have my back…. [So] we have to be that much more intentional.

Part of that is individual work. Like, what are you willing to do for our community? What are you willing to learn? Are you willing to [understand] that you’re not always right? And that [applies to] older people and younger people — we all think we know it all already, and we just don’t.

But it’s also, how do we build cultural and political spaces that actually give people the opportunity to practice this? Because there aren’t a lot of spaces for that… There are organizations that do that community and cultural organizing… but not as much as there used to be.

We just have to be really intentional about building the skill, building the infrastructure and building the time to put our people from across generations together to learn and grow from each other.

The Trump campaign effectively used anti-transgender messaging to reach groups Republicans haven’t always been able to, like Black churchgoers, Latino conservatives, and suburban women. Which communities could the queer community possibly make inroads into?

There are a lot of unusual suspects, and that’s really inspiring for me. For example, we just hired a new faith director, and the work that they’re doing is really about, how do we recognize spiritual identity in ourselves? [How do we] heal from the harm that religion has caused many of us in our spiritual traditions, within family, and also re-contextualize the role that spirituality can have, so that we don’t have to believe that religion automatically means anti-LGBTQ? That’s just not real and not true when that lives when [spirituality] literally lives in so many of us.

We have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid of what our opposition is saying … and talk to our folks. We had the pleasure of partnering with the [National Black Justice Collective] and some other groups… for some research last year, where we were able to research focus groups of Black folks in Atlanta and Philadelphia, asking about their experiences with gender, sexual orientation, and democracy; language, people, what makes them uncomfortable, where they are, who they know.

It was really amazing! So many people hadn’t had a conversation about any of those things. Now, propaganda, things have been thrown at them, like on the radio … on Fox News, or they hear something from their church, but they hadn’t been engaged in conversation.

Through that, it was so exciting to see that — while generally people actually didn’t know anybody trans, or they didn’t think they did — there was all of this room to engage in a conversation. And at the end of the day, nobody wanted to perpetuate an erosion of rights or safety or access to family and community.

We’ve got to get out of shorthand jargon, assumptions about who our people are and who they aren’t, projecting that onto people and actually [start] having real conversations.

Instead of us leading with identity, sometimes leading with an issue can actually build and help us build a broader coalition. When I think about sexual liberation, that’s not just a trans issue, that’s not just a women’s issue, that’s not just a gay man’s issue — it’s all of our issues, right? When you look at how we are being policed, how our bodies are being policed, how our sex is being policed… So when we take it out of identity, and we take it to an issue … there are so many possibilities that avail themselves to us.

You’ve emphasized the importance of taking care of ourselves so that we can continue to contribute to the movement in good stead. But the hardships of capitalism and queerphobia have traumatized many queer people, and quality mental healthcare remains inaccessible for so many. How do we contend with this?

It is an unfortunate reality that we’re all walking in. Part of the role that the Task Force is taking on is: How can we not be complicit in causing new trauma and new harm? So when we’re talking about grace, when we’re talking about creating spaces where people can be vulnerable —you and someone else — that’s like every way for us to contend with the trauma, the hurt, and the pain.

Because if you are giving me grace, all of a sudden, I feel like “I now have a co-conspirator in helping me move through difficult things.” I may hurt you trying to respond to a trauma I have, but because you gave me grace [and] that gives me a space, I’ve been able to get a little bit of that out and start healing from that. It’s not a, “I hurt you, you hurt me. I hurt you. You hurt me.” We break the cycle around that.

It’s a big responsibility, and it’s actually not an easy one because we’ve gotten really comfortable with small hurts, causing small pain in the name of “keeping it real,” justice, being right, or in the name of “Someone doesn’t deserve better than that.” Whatever the reason … it only perpetuates pain that that person pays forward.

[Mental health] is another issue where we have broad allies: There’s a lot to learn about what it means to live with PTSD and survive and thrive through that. That’s actually learning that our people can share with us.

We are in a hostile political environment that’s trying to eradicate hospitable spaces for queer people… not just bars and LGBT centers, but also healthcare spaces and programs. [So], in addition to creating new ways to support our people, we’ve got to really fight for the ones that already exist too.’

I had a conversation with [Black trans activist] Miss Major [Griffin-Gracy] yesterday … and one of our Black trans siblings said, “We got to get back to Basement 101,” meaning we used to just take care of each other in our homes. Like, everything doesn’t have to happen in an institution. We’ve always created ways of taking care of each other in our neighborhoods, in someone’s home, in someone’s backyard… How do we continue to build those networks and fortify those networks, because they’re they’re needed even more now, outside of a formal institution?

During your conversation, you suggested the movement turn its attention to some of the sources of our pain, like Focus on the Family and Heritage Foundation. Can you expand on this idea?

It’s less about engaging with them. It’s more we have to remind ourselves who we’re actually mad at. For example… there’s a lot of scapegoating of young people. The language and narrative is one that, “Young people are ignorant, entitled, don’t care, don’t know their history.”

How is a young person the problem if they didn’t learn any of this from somebody grown? That’s a real fancy way of getting out of responsibility. How do we blame young people for what education, mentorship, and training they didn’t get?

Organizations like the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family actively worked to create a black hole of information for young people. Eroding money that goes into public schools was about reducing capacity and information. Taking curriculum out of schools about LGBTQ+ people and the civil rights movement was about making sure young people aren’t politicized…. There’s a reason kids don’t know, and it was by design.

We’ve got to be careful about how we define what the problem is … [or else] our solutions are going to be off: It’s not fixing young people. It’s getting conservative extremists out of education. Get it … back in control of people who actually care about young people, who actually want to see brilliant minds flourish, who care about building a democracy of citizens that are liberated, critical thinkers, experimental, creative and willing to lean into challenging problems and solve them.

What are good strategies on state and local levels that could become good national strategies if they were scaled up?

Organizations on the ground in Central Florida that, leading up to the election, put together a coalition of LGBTQ+ people to organize for abortion rights…. That’s so logical, and yet, we don’t do that. But they saw an opportunity to do the work at an intersectional and an intersectional way that was also practical, and tangible, and actually made the case for people that, whether you can have an abortion or not, when someone is denied care based on gender alone, we’ve got a problem because guess what: That’s gonna impact us directly and immediately….

We try to grow the coalition, not shrink the coalition… These folks are still thinking, strategizing, and working together to figure out what their next plan is….

New York just passed the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]…. and again, organizers were working with people of color organizations, the NEW Pride Agenda… some reproductive health and rights [organizations too]…. And what they created in that coalition — the strategies, messages, and research they used — are actually going to be shared with other states that are thinking about moving constitutional amendments.

So that’s the other delicious thing: sharing… Sometimes as national organizations, we get … stingy with our time, our money, our name, our people. And I get it because that’s money, right? But we are not gonna get anywhere fast being stingy. We’re gonna have to share, want to share information, want to share strategies. We’re gonna have to share funders.

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