Passing It Forward: Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk

Abstract

In this moment of racial reckoning throughout the united States, how are the voices of older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals being captured and stored? While large collections of archives exist curating LGBTQ+ local, regional, and national artifacts, far too few of those collections are digitized, fewer are oneonone interviews (where respondents are allowed to be heard in their own words), and even fewer are oneonone interviews with older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals. Th is project— Passing It Forward— seeks to fi ll that gap by conducting 150 oneonone interviews, via Zoom, from January 2021 thru June 2021, with this very unique population. Th e interview protocol gathered information about the respondents’ background, professional and political activism, as well as their insights on prescribing a more inclusive future for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and their intersections. Within this collection of papers, some of the undergraduate and graduate students who collected the data then wrote these articles exploring a plethora of research questions. Because the researchers tended to be one— or two, and sometimes three— generations younger than the person they interviewed, this project will provide a venue to allow these changemakers to educate and inspire. So then, how do racial and sexual orientation identity enhance or inhibit the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) changemakers? For this target population, three specifi c areas were investigated: