I’m sending care and love on behalf of justseeds toward the queer&trans migrant warriors and families that lost their lives this morning in Orlando and the LGBTQ community at large, and also muslim communities affected by the distorted stories of islamophobia that the media will spin. I want to know a world before lead was spun into bullets, and before guns became a tool toward actualizing homophobic, transphobic, anti-black&brown, and anti-migrant systemic violence, before these destructive systems ever became imaginable to the human heart. I want to celebrate the ways queerness and queer community is a gift to this world. The way a nightclub, or a queer gathering behind closed doors of a home, the arms of a lover–is the only sanctuary possible when this world robs us of one.

What I do know, is that when an empire fearful of love and all it’s forms is engineered, someday, the Earth will remind us that the forest, the desert and the ocean has been queer for billions of years before heteronormativity ever gave itself a name. Every bullet will be reduced to the queer sand it came from.

What can you do to help?

Donate to the Pulse Tragedy Community Fund a GoFundMe organized by Orlando LGBTQ organizations working together such as: MBA, Hope and Help, Two Spirit Health, Zebra Coalition, Rollins, and various other LGBTQ organizations throughout Central Florida. They are raising money to coordinate an emergency hotline and grief counselors on site at The Center, located at 942 N Mills Avenue.

You can support LGBTQ organizations like The Audre Lorde Project.

You can learn about trans liberation by checking out our friend, Micah Bazant’s Trans Life & Liberation Art Series, that feature’s a new piece every Tuesday.

EDIT: ** I know this is a very incomplete list. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment or email jess@jessxchen.com and I can add to it!