Interviewees

Krystal Campbell-McDaniel (left) and Tiffany McDaniel (right) are co-owners of Alibis.

Angel Hamilton is an entertainer and regular event host at Alibis.

Natalie Colton is a bartender at Alibis.

Tom Goodwin is a patron at Alibis.

Deborah Edel is one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a not-for-profit, all volunteer run organization founded in 1974.  Deborah now serves as the organization’s treasurer and is a member of the coordinating committee.  Deborah is a licensed clinical social worker. Now retired, Deborah initially worked in the field of mental health in the Psycho-Educational Clinic at Coney Island Hospital for over 25 years and then moved to Mary McDowell Friends School as the director of Admissions and head of the Counseling Support staff, where she helped build the school from a small k-3 program to an excellent k-12 program for youngsters with Learning Disabilities. Though officially retired, while “snowbirding” in Arizona, Deborah continues to use her social work training as a volunteer at a Legal Clinic in Tucson which is working to fight for the rights of border crossers threatened with deportation.

Flavia Rando, PhD, a long-time lesbian activist, was a member of Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians. She is an art historian who teaches Lesbian, Women’s and Gender Studies. She was co-editor of, We’re Here: Gay and Lesbian Presence in Art, the first in the discipline; co-chair of the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association; and a founding member of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation Visual Arts Committee. Flavia is a coordinator of the Lesbian Herstory Archives where she inaugurated the Lesbian Studies Institute. She and the Archives Graphics Committee curated By the Force of Our Presence: Highlights From the Lesbian Herstory Archives, celebrating the Archives’ 45^th Anniversary. Recently, she taught “Classic Lesbian Theorizing,” for a CLAGS (Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY) Seminar in the City and she has taught, “Lesbian Lives” at SAGE. Her essay, “To Transform Consciousness,” appears in Art After Stonewall.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is a member of the coordinating committee at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. She is a separatist, zinester, archivist, writer, and black-dyke-participant of intentional, community-specific, collective spaces. A collective member of WOW Café Theater as producer of women of color theater, namely, Rivers of Honey. Shawn is a Librarian appointed as Assistant Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY. From (the people’s republic of) Brooklyn, Shawn founded the Queer Housing Nacional List, and has since purchased a home designated for queer women of color (QWOC) with her wife in the Bronx. A board member of Fire & Ink, a national organization for LGBT writers of African descent, and founder of Lambey Press, independently publishing QWOC; Shawn is a co-editor of a special issue of Sinister Wisdom focused on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

Rachel Corbman, earned a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stony Brook University in May 2019 and is currently a visiting assistant professor at Wake Forest University. Her current project, Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-89, is a history of the conflicts that shaped women’s studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Conferencing on the Edge won the CLAGS fellowship award for a dissertation, first book, or second book in LGBTQ Studies, and portions of this project have been published in Feminist Formations and GLQ.

Graciela Sánchez is a co-founder of the Esperanza and now serves as the Executive Director. She follows in the footsteps of her mother and abuelitas, strong neighborhood women of color cultural workers and activists of San Antonio. As a Buena Gente of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, a community-based cultural arts/social justice organization, Graciela works with staff and community to develop programs that culturally ground working class and poor people of color, queer people and women, individuals who are survivors of cultural genocide. Facilitating conversations on issues of colonization, genocide, power, violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia among others, Graciela works with community members to develop and curate programs such as CineMujer, Uprooted: Tierra, Gente, y Cultura, Palestinians and Other Occupied Peoples, as well as organize gente to challenge oppressive laws in San Antonio, the United States and the world.

Susana Segura, a staff members at the Esperanza, has been organizing in the Westside community since 1988. Her work has been with social service agencies, labor organizations, health awareness services and cultural arts groups but always grassroots organizing. With the demolition of La Gloria, a historic building, she started working alongside community to preserve the working class neighborhoods while making sure not to gentrify the barrio. She is currently working with Esperanza Peace and Justice Center to restore Lerma’s Nite Club, the longest running live conjunto music venue in the country, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. As an organizer she is involved in campaigns of social, economic and environmental justice struggles centered around people of color, the working class and the LGBTQ community.

Amanda Haas is a writer and a former staff member of the Esperanza. She has over 15 years experience in both the program and administrative sides of various non-profit organizations, and her areas of expertise include arts and culture, social justice/advocacy, and direct service organizations. Her past employers include the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, The Children’s Shelter, Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas, and the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

Saakred is a former staff member of the Esperanza. Saakred is also a musician whose work has been featured in San Antonio, regionally & nationally including at The Empire Theater, Navajo Nation Museum, Maverick Music Fest, Luminaria Arts Festival, Stargazer Fest & more. Saakred has shared bills with experimental duo Coco Rosie, California-based duo Prayers Copenhagen’s Iceage & as a supporting act for Venezuelan singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart.

Micia Mosely, PhD, a comedian and educator who earned her Ph.D. in education from U.C. Berkeley, keeps audiences learning & laughing in a variety of contexts and venues. Mosely’s one-woman show, “Where My Girls At?” (an off-Broadway comedy about Black lesbians) was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award (Best Solo Performance). She began her career teaching high school social studies in San Francisco and went on to work as a coach with The National Equity Project and a National Training Specialist with The Posse Foundation. Mosely’s research and practice focuses on equity, race, and urban education. Mosely spends the majority of her time as the founding Executive Director of The Black Teacher Project, an organization committed to recruiting, developing and sustaining Black teachers for schools in the United States.

Julia Havard is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley in the Performance Studies program with a designated emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her scholarly, activist, and performance work deals with sexual culture as a site of world-building, embedded in intersecting experiences of race, gender, queerness, and disability. She is a disabled white queer femme and practicing dancer. Julia is currently writing her dissertation on queer burlesque practices and pedagogy. She has presented work at Performance Studies international, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the American Society for Theater Research. Her chapter “#WhyIStayed: Virtual Survivor-Centered Spaces for Transformation and Abolishing Partner Violence” was recently published in the anthology #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (2019). She is co-editing a forthcoming issue of the journal Radical Teacher on anti-oppressive pedagogy in the composition classroom (Fall 2019).

Gaelle Voltaire is a WOW Member.

Cece Suazo is an actress, director & playwright. She was a member of the first WP & Public Theater Trans Lab. Some of her New York theater credits include: Incongurence (New York Theater Workshop), This Ability (Beckett Theater), Translations (Liberation Theater), O, Earth (Workshop/Foundry Theater), Friends Of Dorothy (Shooting Lobster & Wow Cafe Theater), and Verdi’s Othello (Regina Opera Company). Her television appearances included: OLTL (ABC TV), “Your pretty face is going to hell” (Adultswim Network), “Girlhattan” (Karmaloop Network), and “CityKids” (Jim Henson/ABC TV). Her proudest production is her sons Jahiem and Cesar.

Lorraine LaPrade can best be described as a “Jack(ie) of all trades.” She is a newby librarian, performance artist, and self-defense instructor. She holds a M.S. in Library Science from Long Island University, CW Post, and a M.A. in Women’s Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

Justine Renson is the author of Leaving The Light — and loving it: how I woke up, wisened up and walked away from the cult of my birth. She is committed to women’s empowerment and helping other women who feel trapped or stuck in their lives.

Jasmina Sinanović teaches at the Communications, Arts and Sciences Department at the Bronx Community College and Anthropology, Gender Studies and International Studies Department at the City College, and works as the Director of Development and Finance at the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) by day and is a performing/theatre artist by night. Their research interests are in queer, performance and postcolonial theory as well as the study of the idea of Balkanism. They hold an M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from Stony Brook University and M.A. in Theatre from CUNY.

Sharon Jane Smith is a writer, performer, musician, and co-owner of the beloved East Village antique shop A Repeat Performance.

Sarita Covington (& Sunshine) is a multi-disciplinary artist/ activist from Harlem. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. She is co-founder of Company Cypher, an arts organization dedicated to transforming the conversation about race and skin tone prejudice by using theatre and hip-hop education to build community. She co-founded ACRE (Artists Co-Creating Real Equity), an organizing body that works closely with grassroots community organizers the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond to provide Understanding & Undoing Racism/ Community Organizing Workshops for artists and cultural workers. She is also a collaborating artist with social impact organization B3W Performance Group, who are currently working on an international project called Forgiveness.

Miriam Eusebio is a director, actor, prop maker, writer, and peaceful warrior for art and life. Her work spans genres from classical to new work, solo to ensemble. She loves the making of theater in all its aspects.

Maria Bauman-Morales is a NY-based “Bessie” award winning (Outstanding Performance, skeleton architecture) multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer. She creates bold and intimate artworks for her company, MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence. Maria is a 2018-19 UBW Choreographic Center Fellowship Candidate, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance. She is also a co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), undoing racism in arts fields, and was recently honored with a 2019 BAX Arts in Progress award for that work.

Jacquetta Szathmari is a New York-based comedy writer, performer, producer, and contrarian. She is also the co-host and co-producer of the comedy podcast Hey You Know It.

Red Durkin is a stand-up comedian, writer, and activist. She was voted the 2013 MOTHA Performer of the Year, has toured extensively as part of the Tranny Roadshow, performed at Camp Trans and the Transgender Leadership Summit and was a member of the Fully Functional Cabaret. She was the managing editor of PrettyQueer.com. She has written numerous zines, was featured in the final issue of Punk Planet magazine and is a contributor to Topside Press’s The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard. She is also the creator of the Trans Ladies Picnics.

Bryn Nieboer is a host of Trans Ladies Picnics and the owner and lead engineer of the electronic instrument company, Eternal Research. She is also the host of the leftist comedy podcast Beep Beep Lettuce and a bassist and vocalist in the bands Stay Inside and Vyy.

Jen Jack Gieseking, PhD, is an urban cultural geographer, feminist and queer theorist, environmental psychologist, and American Studies scholar. He is engaged in research on co-productions of space and identity in digital and material environments, with a focus on sexual and gender identities. Jack’s work pays special attention to how such productions support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice. Their second book project, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008, is forthcoming from NYU Press. He is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Jack uses both they/them/theirs and he/him/his pronouns.