What if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honored and valued queer and trans people’s lives, bodies and expertise? What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure and liberation?
LGBTQ+ health care doesn’t look like this today, but it could. This is the care we dream of.
Through a series of essays (by the author and others) and interviews, this book by the editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology The Remedy offers possibilities—grounded in historical examples, present-day experiments, and dreams of the future – for more liberatory and transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. It challenges readers to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and asks what it would look if our health care was rooted in a commitment to the flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. This book is a calling out, a calling in and a call to action. It is a spell of healing and transformation, rooted in love.
Introduction
Queer Alchemy: Perverting the Health Care System, Fighting to Win
Seed
Pleasure as the Baseline: Interview with Dawn Serra
Dear First-Year Medical Student
Putting Yourself on the Line: Interview with Ronica Mukerjee
Do You Feel Empowered By Your Job? And Other Questions Therapists Ask Sex Workers
Revolution Through Health Care: Interview with Anita O’Shea, St. James Infirmary
Dreaming Bigger: Body Liberation and Weight Inclusivity in Medical Care
Surviving Together: Interdependence and Queer Kinship
Sowing Seeds from My Ancestors, Planting Seeds for My Descendants: Interview with Sean Saifa Wall
the seven sacred ways of healing
borrowed wisdom: using lessons from queer history and community in suicide intervention
Ritualizing Queer Care
The Emancipatory Potential of Aging: Interview with Hannah Kia
Hungry for Possibilities: Too Many Beloved Dead, Too Few Elders
Libera me
Put Me in the Living Room and Cover Me in Flowers: Queering Death