In partnership with the Commonwealth Club, The Connection at the San Francisco Community Health Center, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, GAPA Theatre will host a three-session series of intergenerational conversations with LGBTQ Asians and Pacific Islanders and their allies.
The sessions will include esteemed panelists who are community leaders, activists, artists, and educators. The conversations will include our QTAPI stories and experiences of the dual pandemics of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19; our histories as Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S.; our past and current role in community organizing and the political process; as well as other issues that are part of the current cultural and political shifts and relevant to our experiences QTAPI individuals.
Funded by the CA Humanities whose mission is “to connect Californians to ideas and one another in order to understand our shared heritage and diverse cultures, inspire civic participation, and shape our future”. That is the shared vision for these conversations, and it is to that end that GAPA Theatre’s “Hearts and Minds” program continues its work in making sure our QTAPI stories continue to be told.
About the Speakers
James Coleman was elected to the South San Francisco City Council in 2020, becoming the city’s youngest and first openly LGBTQ+ council member at the age of 21. He is a lifelong resident of South San Francisco, attending K-12 public school in the city. After graduating, James went on to Harvard University to study human developmental and regenerative biology, with a minor in government. Compelled by the COVID pandemic, nationwide protests against police brutality, and the intensifying climate crisis, Coleman ran a grassroots campaign for city council in his hometown to help bring about the change he wanted to see in his community. He is passionate about improving early childhood care and education, addressing climate change, and making South City a safe, affordable and enjoyable place to live. Before his election to the city council, James worked at a neuroscience lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has also been an organizer involved with the Action for Climate Emergency, the Harvard Undergraduates for Environmental Justice, Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, and Harvard College YDSA.
Valli Kalei Kanuha Ph.D., is a teaching professor and the assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Washington. She was born and raised in a rural town in Hawai'i in the 1950s. She is the daughter of a Native Hawaiian father and Nisei mother. Dr. Kanuha considers herself a critical, indigenous, feminist, activist-practitioner scholar with a focus on gender violence against women and children, and the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender and sexual identity. For the past 45 years, she has worked as a community-based researcher and consultant with organizations in Hawai'i and the continental United States, and lectures widely on violence against women and social justice issues. Her research and community interests include using indigenous, culturally based interventions for family and domestic violence; intimate violence in women's same-sex and queer relationships; and alternative, community-based justice innovations to address interpersonal and state violence, including critiques of carceral systems, transformative and restorative justice, and abolition feminism.
Sammie Ablaza Wills is an enthusiastic, queer, non-binary Pilipinx organizer passionate about supporting people in reclaiming their inherent power and dignity. Growing up in a hustling class immigrant household, Wills' political journey started with witnessing xenophobia against their family, fighting budget cuts in public schools, and learning about trans Pilipinos fighting colonization. Wills is the outgoing executive director of APIENC, a grassroots organization building power for transgender and queer Asian and Pacific Islander people in the Bay Area, where they originally started as a youth summer organizer. In their current role, Wills supports hundreds of community members to organize for rights, build intergenerational connections, and heal for trans justice. Alongside organizing work, Sammie is a death doula and community archivist.
Willy Wilkinson, M.P.H., is an award-winning writer, public health consultant, and cultural competency trainer who has been advocating for marginalized populations since the early days of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. He is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning book Born on the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency, which illuminates trans experience from a Chinese American and mixed heritage perspective, and transforms the memoir genre into a cultural competency tool. Over the past four decades, Willy has organized queer and trans communities for connection, visibility and health-care access. Willy is the recipient of a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Award and the Transgender Law Center Vanguard Award, and was the first trans recipient of the Asian and Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community Phoenix Award. He lives in Oakland, California on Ohlone land with his creative, adventurous partner and three clever kids in elementary, middle and high school. Learn more at www.willywilkinson.com.