This event has been postponed! The new date is Tuesday, February 20th, at 6:30 pm!

The Center is proud to bring in the new year with a new Second Tuesday Lecture Series featuring the trail-blazing activist and author Raquel Willis. Willis will sit in conversation with Jordyn Jay to discuss her groundbreaking memoir The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation.

The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division will host this event: room 210 of The LGBT Community Center.

Please note that the Bureau is closed on Tuesdays. We will open at 6:30 PM for this event.

Doors open at 6:30 PM. Event at 7 PM.

$10 Suggested Donation to The Center (register here)

Registration is encouraged, but not required.

Also live-streaming on the Bureau’s YouTube channel:

youtube.com/@bgsqd

The Bureau will offer copies of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation (St. Martin’s Press, 2023, hardcover, $29) for purchase. To reserve a copy please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com with “please reserve a copy of The Risk It Takes to Bloom” in the subject line.

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

ABOUT RAQUEL WILLIS

Raquel Willis is an award-winning activist, journalist, and media strategist dedicated to collective liberation, especially for Black trans folks. She is an executive producer with iHeartMedia’s first-ever LGBTQ+ podcast network, Outspoken, and the host of Afterlives, a podcast centering the lives and legacies of trans folks lost too soon to violence. She is also the author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation.

Raquel has held groundbreaking posts, including director of communications for Ms. Foundation for Women, executive editor of Out magazine, and national organizer for Transgender Law Center. She co-founded Transgender Week of Visibility and Action with civil rights attorney Chase Strangio. She is the president of the Solutions Not Punishments Collaborative’s executive board and serves on the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art board.

She published the GLAAD Media Award-winning “Trans Obituaries Project,” in 2022, she executive-produced and hosted “The Trans Youth Town Hall” with Logo. The work was nominated for the GLAAD Awards and won Gold distinction in the Shorty Awards. She was also honored as a 2023 ADCOLOR Advocate. For a full bio please visit: raquelwillis.com

ABOUT THE RISK IT TAKES TO BLOOM

Born in Augusta, Georgia, to Black Catholic parents, Raquel spent years feeling isolated, even within a loving, close-knit family. There was little access to understanding what it meant to be queer and transgender. It wasn’t until she went to the University of Georgia that she found the LGBTQ+ community, fell in love, and explored her gender for the first time. But the unexpected death of her father forced her to examine her relationship with herself and those she loved. These years of grief, misunderstanding, and hard-won epiphanies seeped into the soil of her life, serving as fertilizer for growth and allowing her to bloom within.

Upon graduation, Raquel entered a career in journalism against the backdrop of the burgeoning Movement for Black Lives, intersectional feminism going mainstream, and unprecedented visibility of the trans community. After hiding her identity as a newspaper reporter, her increasing awareness of the epidemic of violence plaguing trans women of color and the heightened suicide of trans teens inspired her to come out publicly. Within just a few short years of community organizing in Atlanta, Oakland, and New York, Raquel emerged as one of the most formidable Black trans activists in history.

In The Risk It Takes to Bloom, Raquel Willis recounts with passion and candor her experiences straddling the Obama and Trump eras, the possibility of transformation after tragedy, and how complex moments can push us all to take necessary risks and bloom toward collective liberation. For more info visit: raquelwillis.com

Jordyn Jay (she/her/hers) is a visionary working to impact arts and culture by centering the voices and contributions of Black trans femmes. A brilliant and multi-talented change-maker, she is a director, writer, producer, public speaker and community leader.  

Jordyn is the founder and executive director of the BTFA (Black Trans Femmes in the Arts) Collective and the executive producer of BTFA Productions– a worldwide movement that seeks to produce and preserve the artistic innovations and creations of Black trans femmes and address systemic inequality through advocacy and action. During global uprisings and calls for racial justice in June 2020, BTFA alongside the Black Trans Travel Fund, For the Gworls, and the Okra Project raised $1 million in one week to support Black trans protesters and organizations on the ground with support from influential voices including Laverne Cox, Indya Moore, Janet Mock, Charli XCX, Neil Patrick Harris, Troye Sivan, and Hunter Schaffer.

Jordyn is currently based in Brooklyn, New York where she received her master’s degree in Art Politics from New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts and her B.A. in Imagining Abolition – a major she created at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study that focuses on how art can be used as a tool for building a world without police and prisons and prioritizes healing over punishment and disposability. But it was what she learned outside the classroom that counts. The lack of representation and meaningful inclusivity within her program pushed her to study and navigate the world off campus and begin the work of seeking out and protecting Black trans femme lives and contributions.   

Jordyn’s Southern roots have allowed her to blossom into the leader she is today. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, she learned the value of collective care and community at an early age from her large and loving family. A proud graduate of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, which opened in 1922 as a primary school for Black students during The Segregation Era in America, Jordyn credits her experiences there as the gateway to helping her find her voice through theater while navigating and discovering her identity. 

An advocate for real and meaningful social impact, Jordyn is an adamant believer in inspiring systemic and sociopolitical change. She maintains an active role in issues impacting Black trans communities from the criminal legal system to arts and culture. 

Jordyn’s contributions to make an impact on the world have not gone unnoticed. She has been awarded the Octavia St. Laurent Vision of Excellence Award and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute Legacy Award. In 2023, she was selected as an LGBTQ+ Power Player by PoliticsNY, and was elected to the Brooklyn Arts Leadership Council. She has also served on the Innovation, Art, and Technology subcommittee for NYU BeTogether and hosted NYC PrideFest. 

Jordyn has been featured in ESSENCE, Bloomberg Business Insider, Forbes, on The Grio TV, SiriusXM Radio, New York Public Radio, and more. She has led workshops and been a keynote speaker at New York University, Dartmouth University, the Tate Modern, The Ford Foundation, and SXSW. 

She was also featured in the docuseries “Artistic Legacies” by Trans Lash and “Flowers” – a media project by Sage Dolan-Sandrino that celebrates Black trans women in New York City. 

Jordyn not only dreams of Black trans liberation; she is bending the arc of justice to make it real. 

Jordyn enjoys spending time with her family and listening to her favorite artists.