FOR OUR YOUTH!
A LIVING LEGACY: The Benita Ramsey House
By Kevin E. Taylor
Project Legacy is a public-private partnership between the Housing Authority of the County of Riverside and TruEvolution. TruEvolution’s simple yet powerful mission is to fight for health equity and racial justice to advance the quality of life and human dignity for LGBTQ+ people. Upon completion, Project Legacy will provide 49 beds of permanent supportive housing, a fitness center, career center, and wrap-around services, all available on one campus.
Among the people whose names will live on these buildings as we support our LGBTQIA+ youth is the name Benita Ramsey. The Rev. Benita Ramsey is an elder with Unity Fellowship Church Movement, Inc., pastoring the church in the Riverside/Inland Empire communities. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Rainbow Pride Youth Alliance. Each of these craftsman-style bungalows will be personified by iconic representations in the community, both living and departed. Three will be named after living LGBTQ+ leaders and icons present: Reverend Benita Ramsey, George M. Johnson, and Twiggy Pucci Garçon. The remaining two residences, the James Baldwin House and the Marsha P. Johnson House, will enshrine two historical figures in the LGBTQ+ community whom many have learned from and continue to honor. These are her words at the ribbon-cutting/grand opening:
“I stand here tonight in deep gratitude for this honor and recognition through the naming of The Benita Ramsey House. To the TruEvolution staff, board & volunteers, I am humbled by your acknowledgment of the spirit of giving, service and entrepreneurship fostered through the seeds of my great great great grandmother, Susie Pate, my grandfather, Gonzalee, Twitty, and my parents, the late Bishop Jonathan and Evelyn Ramsey. You have literally lifted the spirit energy of my ancestors, whose broad shoulders I stand on when you name my name and place it alongside James Baldwin, Marsha P Johnson, Twiggy Pucci Garcon, George
Johnson. I am grateful. 1 Peter 4:10-11 says that ‘Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be lifted up.’ God, the creator of the universe, has called us all to be part of its work to bring justice and kindness to creation. Project Legacy, Gabriel Maldonado and team have answered that call. What a joy and privilege it is to be connected to you and it. This is just the beginning. The work of the pursuit of freedom and equality remains, the road ahead is challenging, too, and we’re grateful that the divine spirit is with us. We are not done yet. Lord, help us to embrace your calling for our lives with equal parts fervor, wisdom, and humility.”
Located in a region with diverse communities, the Inland Empire disproportionately experiences health inequities, disparities in access to care, lack of affordable housing, chronic homelessness, and language barriers. Project Legacy is an exciting new endeavor that addresses several of these social determinants of health and is the only Project Homekey site that will predominantly serve the LGBTQ+ community. Specifically, 80% of those living in the Project Legacy housing program will identify as LGBTQ+, including those living with HIV, youth transitioning out of the foster care system, and senior citizens.
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LADYJAM — Church N The Hood!
By Kevin E. Taylor
Rev. LaDana Clark aka LADYJAM is a minister of the gospel, radio DJ and hip-hop artist. As we celebrate 50 YEARS OF HIP-HOP in 2023, LADYJAM is going on the Naked In The Spirit tour, to bring her message of love and community through outreach to the world. She started in her home base, upstate NY (Oneonta, NY, several hours outside hip-hop NYC), and she’s bringing together youth and young adults and messengers who are trying to reach them, without walls! Rev. Clark has been doing this great work for a long time, attracting young people not interested in conventional church, though they’re drawn to the assembling of people! LADYJAM dubs herself The HipHop4Life Pastor, who dares to lead ChurchNTheHood! She preaches a message of Spiritual, Educational, Economic and Personal Empowerment, while reminding us all that WE ARE ALL GOD’S CHILDREN!
@CHURCHNTHEHOOD.ORG
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YOUNG, GIFTED, BLACK AND UNAPOLOGETIC!
Tahir Register
TheBlackMedia: No Gossip! No Rumors! No Negativity!
Being is not a choice. My existence is not a choice. My existence is not a threat to you. I am not a threat to you. I am not your enemy.
We all have different beliefs and there are a lot of people who believe that I am perverted, an abomination, that I deserve to be burned in the eternal hell fire for eternity. And that I am doomed for hell and that I am destroying the Black community and that my mere existence is impeding on their choice, their life, their laws, their comfortability within the United States, within the world. It is not. I am not.
And no matter what you believe, the fact is people like me–a naturally androgynous, but also pansexual Black man–I exist. I exist! So your beliefs don’t actually matter here considering my existence is something I didn’t choose. I’m here. I am just here.
A lot of people believe that being is a choice. It is not. And so if you’re being gay or being bisexual or pansexual or being trans, somehow people believe that somewhere along the line, we decided that this is the life that we wanted to live. One of the most aggravating things in the world is when people say to me “I don’t agree with your lifestyle.” As if I’m some yachters who just takes yachts across the sea with wine and a floozy of women and men that just decide that we’re going to be yachters. Being is not a lifestyle. You can choose a lifestyle. You cannot choose your sexuality. I would like to do a test: if you believe you can choose your sexuality, close your eyes with me. And whatever you are, if you’re heterosexual, which is typically the people who believe that, close your eyes if you’re heterosexual. Close your eyes if you’re bisexual, close your eyes if you’re gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary, whatever you identity as, close your eyes and on the count of 3, I want you to choose a different sexuality: 1, 2, 3! Are you gay? Are you straight? Have you made a choice?
Throughout my life, I’ve been called all types of things–faggot, sissy, bitch, homo (even though I’m not) and I’m still here! I’m still trying to thrive in a world where people use Christianity to cast me out and as a devout myself, whose only ever believed in Jesus Christ and never not believed, who loves Jesus Christ so much and preaches the gospel…you know “deny thy Father on Earth, get denied by the pearly gates when you”…you know the script. I do my due diligence with the Lord. So, it’s so interesting to me that these so-called Christians are so ready for me to be in hell and burn that it makes you wonder who exactly are THEY worshiping. And we can go back and forth about scriptures from the Bible. But I have no interest in that. Not because I want to ignore the Word, but I am aware of what the Word is and I’m aware who wrote it. I’m aware of what Divine Inspiration is. I’m aware of the purpose of the Bible. I’m fully aware of what the New Testament is. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve gone to church half of my life and Bible Study and all those kinds of things. I know Christ. I know God. I know The Word. I know who God created me to be, who God created trans people to be. I knew when I was a child, and you can argue with yourself about that, but I knew. And you know what’s funny–so did my parents, as most good parents do.
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Fighting For Jamaica
By Khavor DeMario Brown
Youth Arise JA, Unity Fellowship Jamaica Ministries
There can be no conversation about sustainable development without the investment of children and youth, without the education of youth. When we think of the investment, what really is the investment!? The investment is education, and the education has to be tailored to cultivate independence and not necessarily reliance, not necessarily dependence. We have to implore the young mind to develop capacity, to develop skill sets to be independent; to become creators and changers within and of themselves, thus creating new cycles. You can’t break toxic intergenerational cycles, like poverty, and not create positive ones.
So in the process of education–you’re educating the youth–which is a form of investment, you are breaking cycles and at the same time, you are creating new cycles – so as to have a long-term return on that investment – sustainable development. It is sort of a breaking, dismantling and creating in the same breath, in the same process. That’s what we focus on at Youth Arise. In terms of Unity Fellowship Movement Ministries, we have a safe house here, particularly for LGBT youth, who have experienced alienation, marginalization from family, community, AND church. It provides support systems. Some people call it compensation. Some people would call it all sorts of psychological notions, but what better space is needed in the absence of love and care from family!? What better way to fill those gaps and mitigate against the voids that come with being rejected?! When I think about youth, a lot of LGBT youth have experienced a lack of parental love–because they are same-gender-loving — and we sort of provide the necessary life skills, self-care and well-being, i.e. “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose in life?” Self-actualization to help a young person who would have been hated by their mother, by their father, to help them along their journey. To help them to love themselves. To help them to be able to identify love. The Safe House provides all of that for LGBT young people who have been alienated, ostracized, rejected and made homeless because of their sexuality.
When you think about life and resources from a Jamaican context, Jamaica has a lot of social issues and the central theme, or a prevailing issue that connects every issue to another issue is poverty. Poverty results in violence and crime. It results in lack of employment, lack of progress and lack of development, especially in Third World countries. It is the mother of all the issues. The best way to eradicate poverty is to develop the youth, to make an investment in the lives of youth who may be experiencing poverty or born into it. Basically that is what I do, as a practitioner. My niche is to center youth into the context of a lot of conversations around development, educational development, more immediately life skills. Life skills are not taught in schools–financial literacy, legal literacy, compassion, entrepreneurship, conflict resolution, mediation. Of course education is very European, it goes back to colonizing. Life skills development is a form of decolonial education, in terms of equipping young people. I believe that people should invest, people should give their expertise to give young people the opportunity to break toxic generational cycles of poverty. Why do people need to invest in youth? It is self-explanatory. To break cycles. What better way to educate young people as to not pass on inherited or to not even inherit past generational cycles.
