This month we celebrate our sixth year as a collective project and one and a half years since our 3-in-1 anthology Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion was released into the world. To celebrate we are reflecting on our accomplishments and day dreaming about what happens next.
Since we launched the first book series in October of 2010 through to today, Karma Chávez, Yasmin Nair, and Ryan Conrad from the Against Equality collective have given over sixty public talks, workshops, and panel presentations. We’ve travelled as far as New Zealand and the UK and as near as our own communities in Madison WI, Chicago IL, and Lewiston, ME.
We’ve also been able to distribute 5,149 of Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion as of August 1st 2015, including 300 at no cost to LGBT prisoners thanks to our partnership with LGBT Books to Prisoners in Madison, and 1 copy to a multilingual library for the first Kurdish university in Rojava, Mesopotamia Academy of Social Sciences. We’ve also discovered that we have books in at least 150 libraries throughout the world including the US, Canada, England, Scotland, Denmark, the Netherlands, South Africa, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Australia. Apparently we’ve been getting around pretty well! If you’re wondering if your state has a copy of the book in at least one of their libraries, check out the handy map!
Also, thanks to our partnership with AK Press we’ve also made a small bit of money, something that is quite new to us as we functioned on credit card debt for the entire first five years of our existence as a project. With this money we’ve been able to purchase 300 books from AK Press to give to the LGBT Books to Prisoners project. In turn we’ve been able to send $900 to the LGBT Books to Prisoners project to help cover their operating costs and for the packaging and shipping of our books. In addition to this we also donated $500 to the Prisoner Correspondence Project to help them cover the costs of postage for their prisoner newsletter that let’s prisoners know who to write for their free copy of our book. We also made a $200 donation to Outside the Frame: A Queers for Palestine Film Festival. Our general operating procedure has been that money sitting in bank accounts doesn’t do much good for our struggling movements and that we should be putting our resources to use immediately when we have the means to do so. We expect a little more income from this project in December when our bi-annual royalties arrive, so we’ll keep y’all updated on what projects we are redistributing our resources to!
All the pink states and provinces have at least one library with our book! If your state or province isn’t pink, considering requesting a copy at your local library!
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