‘Black queer femmes need to be the center of everyone’s advocacy,’ says Ben Louis, an organizer of PDXQueerFront
Ben Louis is a 17-year-old non-binary individual living in Portland. They are passionate about advocacy and journalism, often blending both together.
My name is Ben Louis. I am a 17-year-old nonbinary individual, state abolitionist and soon-to-be Portland Public Schools (PPS) dropout. I’m a youth organizer and protester, on a path of creating a mutual aid organization.
When I was 15, I got an internship working with Stand for Children, an educational nonprofit that focuses on policy work and empowering student voices to create change within school environments. The Stand for Children fellowship program opened so many doors for me. I received policy training, leadership skills and a start in the world of organizing, all thanks to my mentor Elona Wilson, who encouraged me to pursue this.
In the beginning of the George Floyd uprising, I became involved with regular protesting and local mutual aid groups. From this I learned that I needed to center Black voices and life in everything I do — specifically Black queer voices and lives. It was hard to realize that I was white before I was queer, but this is the truth. My whiteness is what people see before anything. And that is privilege. White queer people have a responsibility to redistribute their wealth and relative material comfort to BIPOC queer folk, and that is something we as a group must realize collectively. Our queerness does not negate or take away from our white privilege.
From this realization, I got to thinking about making a queer support group centered on the most oppressed in our community, Black trans and nonbinary femmes. Black queer femmes need to be the center of everyone’s advocacy — full stop.
I had been playing around with the idea of making a mutual aid group since last fall, but there were so many personal factors getting in the way of my aspirations. Being involved in the protesting community and attending school did not leave me a lot of time for anything else. Enter Mesa, my lovely friend who helped come up with the idea that would eventually be an organization.
Our first decision was being horizontally organized. Horizontal organization is a model of organizing in which no one is in charge. Everyone has equal say. This leadership method is used in many revolutionary movements because it stands in antithesis to capitalist models of organizing.
Then we decided on the name PDXQueerFront. We felt as if this summed up the presence we wanted to build. This led to our mission statement: We are committed to supporting queer youth in Portland, with a focus on BIPOC trans and nonbinary femmes. This is our reason for existence as an organization.
We started to brainstorm the launch and reached out to BIPOC queer youth organizers who might want to get involved. We wanted to start this, but we didn’t want to run it. It’s a voice for all of us, a platform to change our community and remake the world as we see it.
We launched Jan. 7 and quickly gained around 800 followers by posting informational graphics. People were really responding to this idea. I immediately started reaching out to BIPOC queer organizers to join our team and lead this platform.
The first person I reached out to was Danny Cage, former Portland City Council candidate Teressa Raiford’s youth campaign organizer. He is someone I hold a lot of respect for, because organizing while attending high school is no easy feat. With his vast network in the community and amazing knowledge of organizing, I knew PDXQueerFront was off to a good start.
“I want this group to empower young BIPOC and the next generation,” Cage told me. “I want to create a safe space for people to be comfortable, because not everyone has that space.”
Danny and I talk a lot about issues within the protesting community. One of our biggest, and critical ones for PDXQueerFront, is that youth organizers are constantly overshadowed and used in the name of “activism,” Cage said.
“Young people are not given the credit we deserve,” he said. “We saw this discrediting behavior from groups like Rose City Justice at the start of the massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year. I think generally … young people are not taken seriously, and their experiences are dismissed. I think this is very harmful, especially with BIPOC and queer youth, because it also dismisses their experiences.”
He is absolutely right. Youth activists are not taken seriously. We are at best props for larger movements. Nothing is more frustrating than that.
PDXQueerFront is here to change that. We refuse to be taken lightly, to be discredited or disregarded, and in Danny’s own words, “I think young people want change, and we know we have to speak up and demand it. We demand change now (because) as the youngest generation, we are inheriting what is left of the world.”
I reached out to many Black queer femmes that I knew personally to be a voice in this organization. A lot of amazing young Black queer activists are on our team, and this is something that every organization needs. Create that space. Give people platforms.
It isn’t my intention to have PDXQueerFront be something I control. Because I am a white queer person, I cannot speak for BIPOC queer folk. I can use my privilege to support, to bring awareness, to redistribute, but this is not for me. It would be extremely detrimental of me to run an organization committed to uplifting BIPOC queer people as a white person.
By uplifting the most marginalized in our society, we can set the foundations not just for equality but equity for everyone. That is the goal of PDXQueerFront. We are a drop in the bucket, but given time, I truly believe we can discover our revolutionary potential. Already we are redistributing money, giving out care packages and supplies, and organizing for the queer community.
Our community has been so generous. We’ve already raised thousands of dollars for redistribution because of regular people chipping in what they can. We also couldn’t do this without all the already established mutual aid and BLM (Black Lives Matter) organizations here in Portland. Mutual aid fosters more mutual aid, and it continues in this nature of passing on kindness and empathy.
I’m writing this in hopes that others take on organizing in their lives. Imagine what you could do. Imagine what we all could do if we committed our resources to mutual aid, Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty. Change has to happen somewhere, somehow, against all odds.
As I’m writing this, I have made the decision to drop out of PPS so I can commit to full-time organizing. At the end of the day, I had to decide what was more important to me, and mutual aid is where I ended up. I’m so much happier for it.
Commit to change. Join PDXQueerFront, join the movements for Black liberation, for Indigenous sovereignty, so that we can have true equity for BIPOC queer people.
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