Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a 16-year-old gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender organization that focuses its resources and energy in the South both as a political and geographic region. On January 29, 2010, Caitlin Breedlove and Paulina Hernandez, co-directors of SONG, recorded an interview for StoryCorps, a nationwide oral history project. The following is an excerpt. Listen to the entire 40-minute recording at SONG’s website, www.southernersonnewground.org.

CB: Primarily, our membership is people from all of the communities we live in from the South—people of color and white folks, working-class folks and middle-class folks, women and trans people, people who deeply love the rural communities they are from just as much as the straight people from those communities love the communities they are from.

We think specifically of one story of a young person who we have known since she was 17 years old; she is from a small coal-mining community in Appalachia. She grew up fighting against the coal-mining companies to save the small community she is from, alongside her parents and everyone she knew. And when you go to the community where she’s from, people will tell you—you will be in the green part of Appalachia—and they will say, “See that part that looks like the Grand Canyon? That’s where they have been strip mining.” And when you look at the water there, it runs this bright-orange color because it’s been poisoned by the coal-mining companies.

So, this young woman came to us and started coming out when she was being mentored by us, and all she has ever wanted to do is go back to the tiny community she is from and carry on the legacy of social justice work that her elders have started. She is currently up north in school because she feels she is still trying to figure out how she can be out as a queer person and come home and do the work she wants to do.

So, when I think about what is SONG’s role, and what is the mandate of an LGBTQ Southern regional organization, I think about people in New Orleans and the “right to return” that people in the Gulf Coast talk about post-Katrina, and I think about how crucial that is and how much we want to be in solidarity with every person in the Gulf Coast’s right to return, and at the same time how critical it is that “right to return” is an idea across the South—that we are from these communities, too, and that as transgender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, we have a right to live lives with dignity and joy on our own terms. And that is why SONG exists: to continue to transform communities that want to stay Southern, that want to stay in our legacies, and stay with the best of Southern traditions and also make it possible for folks like this young woman to be able to come home to the South and do the work that she loves here.

PH: Also, as an organization that was founded by three African-American and three white, Southern feminist-identified lesbians, who are now all between their 50s and 70s, it is really interesting hearing about the struggles that they were politicized through in the South and what that means for folks who are not African-American or white to reflect on. There was a lot of work at that time around gay and lesbian groups to build up social spaces like bars, etc., the idea being that if we could identify each other, that would shift the way we felt about ourselves.

One of the things as we are sitting here at this particular point of reflection and planning for SONG, we are thinking through what the effect is of the choices the elders made to say that we need more than social spaces, we need specific political spaces that include people who do not just see themselves as gay, but as people who engage with their sexualities outside of the box, and really want to talk about the conditions of our lives and how that creates our lives. SONG wants to do both: create those spaces and shift how we are thinking about our lives, and then shift our lives—how this leads to how we see ourselves and our own resiliency to change our own lives.

CB: One of the things that we have realized as well is that we really need to be sharing tools that are also about personal and collective transformation and resiliency; and we have come through a long process to see this as key to our work. The reason why, to be really blunt about it, is that what we see a lot of in the U.S. is an assimilationist strategy, meaning we have to be like straight people in order to have dignity, rights, and respect. I think everyone loses in that model. I think straight people lose, too. Similar to how I feel that as immigrant people, we have to speak English. That is our path to getting rights, respect, to not getting beaten or spit on in the street, and that is too high a price to pay—to have to be people we are not, to have to live lives that aren’t ours in order to get respect. I don’t know how any community can love ourselves or love each other if our goal is to be like some other people in order to be able to have rights and dignity and safety.

This is a lot of what our work comes down to: We can take apart political jargon and different strategies, but underneath that is that SONG stands for our right to be ourselves. As one of our members says, who is an out transwoman on unemployment in a small community in the South, “I love SONG because SONG doesn’t ask me to be somebody I am not. I am a 58-year-old transgender woman who is seen as trans every day, and I want to be part of an organization where I can be who I am.” That is what we stand for: sexual and gender self-determination for individuals and sexual and gender sovereignty for us—meaning collectively we decide who we are, and we decide who we love; we decide how it works. That is part of why I feel so proud in my own journey, how hard I have worked to accept and love myself; I don’t see myself as disconnected from our members.

PH: At some point, every community—ethnic or immigrant community—has the idea that we can be fortified by class, that if you build up an IRA, or build up money, you are protected from racism. It doesn’t matter if you have a PhD. If you are a Black man in America, when the police come knocking, they are still gonna treat you like a Black man. In the LGBTQ community, it is a bit of a wakeup call that it doesn’t matter that much if some LGBTQ [people] have certain rights in certain counties if on the national and international level we are not talking about what it is about us and our lives that limits our abilities to get these rights.

There is a difference between conditions in the U.S. and internationally; people around the rest of the world are trying to figure out how to keep our folks safe and how to keep our office from getting burned down. We have to decide how we are going to approach our responsibility to those conditions, very much like how we have to decide what our position is to “natural disasters” like what is happening in Haiti right now. Absolutely it was a natural disaster, but the unnatural reality underneath that is the rate of poverty in Haiti. That is not a natural disaster; they have been in debt with the International Monetary Fund for years and years. We have to be able to make these connections, and SONG’s membership has pushed to do that. We can’t have these conversations about gender and sexuality isolated from the conditions of the rest of the world; the things that affect our community are the same things that affect global communities—around self-determination, around economics, around debt, and around being connected to institutions that care nothing about our survival.

The global feeling is that maybe Haiti should be apologizing for freeing itself up out of slavery and owing the French government so much money, just like LGBTQ people are supposed to be apologizing, because what? Because we are out? Because your kids are looking at us weird? Because we don’t pass? The real question is “What is it we believe about our self-determination, and what are we willing to do for that?” What we believe about ourselves and about each other. We are at the point where Pride is not enough. Pride is fun—I love Pride. But we have too many working-class SONG members saving their money all year so that they can go to one space a year where they feel validated and beautiful. That’s tragic.

Caitlin Breedlove is a first-generation, white femme queer organizer who lives and builds in the South. She learns primarily from organizing with LGBTQ people in the South across many marginalized communities; particularly close to her heart are struggles and resiliencies of folks in the sex trade, immigrants, incarcerated people and our families, and youth. Paulina Hernandez is a queer femme cha-cha girl, artist, political organizer, and trouble-maker-at-large from Veracrúz, Mexico. This Xicana has a background in farmworker and immigrant rights organizing, youth organizing, anti-violence work, and cultural work. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the young feminist Third Wave Foundation in NYC.