AUTHOR: M. DATE: 9:23:00 PM ----- BODY:

Tonight I went to the first of a series of four sessions of Boston's City-Wide Dialogues on Racial and Ethnic Diversity. They pull these (ethnically and racially diverse) groups of people together for facilitated conversations about the real stuff. This series is specifically for LGBT (that's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender for the uninitiated) people who want to talk about race. Good idea. Long overdue. Very apropos for me at this moment in particular. I dragged my ass out the door tonight, cranky already about having something besides I. or the gym taking up my night, but propelling myself by thinking, with more than a touch of self-righteousness, "I'm doing this for my future kid." I should also preface this by saying that, as a professional facilitator and trainer, I am - wait for it - a TERRIBLE trainee. I fidget. I whisper. I doodle and space out. I criticize the facilitator's inability to control the always-present person-who-can't-shut-up. I get irritated when the agenda is not posted, and when it's posted, I'm irritated if they don't stick to the times. So you know what it means for me to say that the facilitators were excellent. There were 11 of us, of various colors, plus the 2 facilitators. It was refreshingly free of the much-dreaded "Tell us about a time when you were oppressed because of your [fill in pick-on-able quality here]. Now, emote! Really tell us how you felt!" kinds of exercises I remember from college orientation. We laughed a lot. We had real conversations. We talked about the city itself, and how it can be pretty damn unfriendly, and how that contributes to segregation. We talked about who we are and what we each bring to the table. We talked about who would be at our house if we invited the 20 people we're closest to over, and we talked about why. Towards the end, one woman, a board member for a newish Latino LGBT organization, told us about the organization's recent Miss Gay Latina pageant. This year the winner was a Salvadoran drag queen. And here's the really fun part: the local Salvadoran paper and community center made a HUGE deal out of this. They were thrilled. It was all about hometown pride. What hope I get from her story.

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