Recently, my team traveled to Washington, D.C., for the first run-through of our upcoming expansion of Project Liberate, a leadership development initiative equipping Liberators with the knowledge, skills, relationships, and resources to become advocates and change-makers in their communities. The program is launching in the historic city of Montgomery, Ala. As a Black, gay man, the significance of the city’s legacy as home to critical civil rights movements, and today, its growing rates of new HIV diagnoses, both weighed heavily on my mind. 

I felt honored that, as a nonprofit based in Texas with a small yet mighty team of six Black and queer advocates, we were invited to our nation’s capital to dream up new ways to create change throughout the South. As we worked through what this next chapter would require, I kept thinking about the city around us. Washington has always inspired my work, as a city rooted in Black and queer advocacy. It is a place where people have brought local struggles before the nation and ultimately gained the world’s attention to make meaningful changes. 

I thought of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., coming from Atlanta to this city and standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, sharing a dream that belonged to far more people than those gathered before him. 

I thought of the AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed, telling the stories of those whom society had tried to erase, for all to finally see on the National Mall, each panel insisting that a life lost to HIV be remembered.

Neither movement began in Washington. People carried their grief, courage, and solutions for a better future from their small cities across the country. When they came together, the nation could no longer look away.

That history inspires me as Project Liberate grows from Houston to Montgomery, and I work to ensure the South gets the resources and recognition it deserves. The South is too often characterized by stereotypes or inaccurate portrayals. The truth is, the South is diverse, home to some of the most diverse cities in our nation, and more importantly, home to Black and LGBTQIA+ communities that do not wish to pack up and leave when things get tough. 

We are here. We are building families, businesses, organizations, networks of care, and solutions. We know our communities’ strengths and the barriers they face. Yet the people with that knowledge are often the least likely to receive the sustained investment they need to turn an idea into lasting change.

Project Liberate exists to change that. Through leadership development, entrepreneurship, coalition building, and community action, it invests in the people, not the problem. It does so by supporting those we call Liberators: leaders ready to improve health access in the places they know and love. In Houston, where the program has worked for four years, we have helped launch nearly 100 Black-owned or queer-owned nonprofits and businesses with a social purpose. Montgomery is our next opportunity to invest in local leadership, and we hope to keep growing throughout the South until the day comes that we are no longer disproportionately impacted by HIV.

Montgomery is a fitting home for this next chapter. Its place in the Civil Rights Movement reminds us that Southern communities have never waited for someone elsewhere to give them permission to lead. Local, everyday people organized, took risks, brought their issues, along with their solutions, to the feet of the Capitol’s steps, and moved the country forward. Today’s Liberators deserve the chance to build their own legacy, one that meets the needs of their communities now.

D.C. can bring movements together and help turn local action into national change. But the opportunity to learn should run both ways. As our work expands across the South, I want people here to learn from the leaders doing this work in Houston, Montgomery, and the cities that follow. They have knowledge that national conversations need. They have the solutions; they just need the support. So I ask readers in the capital to resist writing off the South. Invest in them. Support their leaders. Partner with them. Listen when they tell you what health access requires in the places they call home.

Our visit to Washington helped us prepare for Montgomery, but it also reminded me why we are doing this work in the first place. Because the movements we are building now, alongside the Liberators with a stake in their communities, have the power to one day bring their ideas and changes to the national stage that is Washington, D.C., and change the world. 

Ian L. Haddock is founder of The Normal Anomaly Initiative.

The liquor was flowing, the dice were rolling and the women were plentiful. Down on 14th Street in the U Street corridor in 1946, at Club Madre, your thirst could be quenched and your vices satisfied. At the center of it all was a large, dark-skinned woman whose taste for mink, money, and power made her larcenous — and legendary.

Look at photos of Odessa Madre, clothed head-to-toe in fur, hair freshly curled, and her eyes dared you to question her prowess. Her mischievous smile suggested she knew something you didn’t. Here was one of the most successful women in Washington, D.C. — and yet most Washingtonians have never heard of her. Why?

Madre was a big-time numbers runner during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ’50s, when the illegal lottery was booming. For Black Washingtonians, the underground lottery offered a chance to get ahead economically when segregation made legitimate financial advancement nearly impossible. Those who ran the game always seemed to be making money — and Madre was one of the most successful, with the hustle, resources and smarts to become one of the richest women in the city. Yet she nearly became a footnote in D.C. history, remembered mostly by a small plaque on U Street where her mugshot is captioned: “This was D.C.’s Al Capone.”

Why does someone like her nearly disappear from history? And when someone is erased — what is lost?

Madre graduated from Dunbar High School, the segregated school for African Americans renowned for producing students who went on to earn advanced degrees and returned to teach. The expectation was that if you looked and spoke the “right” way, a respectable job — teaching, civil service — awaited. Those jobs were also often reserved for women who fit a certain mold. As Professor Sharon Harley writes in “Sister Circle: Black Women and Work,” Madre’s turn to criminal life was fueled in part by “deep feelings of rejection by the Washington color-conscious Black middle class.” She didn’t fit the mold. So she built her own path.

She aligned herself with people she was never supposed to befriend — Italian and Irish men who ran the city’s underworld — and turned selling moonshine into a calling card. Childhood friends who became police officers looked out for her, and she looked out for them.

Madre never married and had no interest in men. She kept a steady crew of attractive women close, and accounts suggest she had relationships with women — relationships that would hardly have been acknowledged publicly at the time. Her rejection of the era’s social expectations meant she was never bound by a marriage that could have curbed her ambition, or a divorce that could have wrecked her financially. Her independence gave her a level of control over her life that few women of her era experienced.

Eventually, police stings, betrayals and a government eager to legalize the lottery for itself squeezed the life out of the underground game. Madre’s luck ran out. She died penniless — her funeral paid for by street friends and a detective or two who had quietly admired her hustle for years.

Why does any of this matter? Because it’s a clear-eyed look at what it takes to chase the American Dream when the front door is locked. History can be ugly — but sanitizing it doesn’t make it less true.

Odessa Madre was a criminal, entrepreneur, hustler, queer woman, Dunbar graduate, numbers runner, wealthy Black woman, friend to police, lawbreaker and product of segregation — all at once. 

Her story is a reminder that the truth about Jim Crow, and who survived it and how, is more complicated — and more honest — than any diluted version of history could be.

My documentary, “Odessa’s Reign,” is an attempt to give her the fuller portrait she never received in her lifetime. Madre’s path challenges us to think about identity, place and memory: who gets remembered, and why their stories matter.

Robin Hamilton is a filmmaker and journalist and director of ‘Odessa’s Reign.’ There will be a screening and community conversation, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: The Story of Odessa Madre,’ on Friday, Oct. 30 at Busboys and Poets at 14th and V streets, 6-8:30 p.m. Learn more at www.aroundrobin.com.

Editor’s note: Chandreyi Guharay is the global advocacy officer for Walking the Talk. She spoke with queer activists from around the world at World Pride 2026 in Amsterdam about the impact of shrinking aid.

Queer activists and Dutch NGOs gathered at Amsterdam City Hall as part of “Building Bridges,” a World Pride 2026 visitor program for LGBTIQ+ community leaders run by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and COC Nederland.

Pride is every day, everywhere

Although we were in Amsterdam, the work back home never stops for activists. Enkhmaa Enkhbold, executive director of the LGBT Center in Mongolia, excused themself a couple of times to check their phone.

“We’re organizing Pride in Mongolia, and it’s happening in two weeks,” they explained.

Among many other things, their organization drives policy advocacy and movement building for LGBTIQ+ rights, and helps queer people facing persecution find a safe way out.

John Mathenge Mukaburu is also doing the daily work of resistance. His organization HOYMAS in Kenya runs clinics across three counties, serving almost 20,000 patients from key populations, including gay and bisexual men and sex workers. In Nigeria, Cosmas Osinachi Ihenacho-Herbert, program director at Obodo, shared how they are changing the narrative by elevating the leading role queer people play in shaping art and culture across the country and the African continent.

And in Vietnam, Nguyễn Diệu Anh co-founded Yêu-nữ (Women Living Wicked), a sapphic collective that hosts regular gatherings where women have a place to find joy and each other. Whether it’s healthcare, protection, culture or belonging, these efforts keep communities alive. Still, they have never been properly funded.

Less funding, more backlash 

As an advocate for gender equality and a queer activist myself, I know how much LGBTIQ+ movements do with so little. Even before the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the funding cuts across other major donor countries, just $.04 cents of every $100 in Official Development Assistance (ODA) went to queer communities. Now even that is rapidly disappearing. And what little there is doesn’t land evenly. As trans activist Marcela Morales from Asociación Lambda in Guatemala emphasized: “Most of the funding goes to gay men’s and trans women’s organizations. Very little reaches organizations of trans men and LBQ women.”

But this isn’t just about money. The same politics driving these cuts are shrinking civic space everywhere. Anti-rights actors are growing richer and bolder, finding new ways to target LGBTIQ+ people, as my colleague Jordan Dittmar has written. Queer and feminist activists defend the right to protest, to speak and love freely, to put care for people and the planet at the center and to decide over our own bodies and lives. And yet our rights are always the easiest target, and our funding the first to be cut. We are the canary in the coal mine, and everyone else’s freedoms are never far behind. That should worry all of us.

A lifeline built on solidarity

Bessy Ferrera was a trans activist from Honduras who fought for the rights of trans people, sex workers and people living with HIV, and whose life was violently cut short in 2019. A year later, Hivos established the Bessy Ferrera Emergency Fund in her name. It offers fast, practical help to LGBTIQ+ activists facing threats because of their work, from medical and legal costs to security and relocation. Since 2022, it has helped nearly 100 people and organizations around the world.

When I mentioned the fund to Ribal Maatouk, national chairperson of the LGBTIQ+ Task Force in Lebanon, he told me he already knew it well. Through Israel’s devastating invasion and war, the Task Force, alongside its member organizations, notably specialized local LGBTIQ+ CSOs, have continued to provide humanitarian support to queer people.

“From all the funding initiatives, the Bessy Ferrera Fund was the most easily accessible for our community, allowing for a faster deployment of emergency support than other organizations,” he said. “I need to give credit where it’s due.”

Hope for the long haul

Emergency funds provide a vital lifeline during a crisis, but activists and their movements also need lasting support. For Cosmas, the lesson is hopeful: governments change with elections, and funding changes with them, but movements can outlast both. For activists in the Global South, that has often been the reality.

“Maybe the question is not how we survive this crisis,” he said, “But how we build a movement infrastructure that’s strong enough for us to thrive through whatever comes next.”

He also sees an opening: with the U.S. stepping back, the Netherlands could once again be the champion of gender equality and LGBTIQ+ rights it used to be. With a new Dutch government in place, there are signs of greater political will, and now is the moment to turn it into funding.

What comes after the parade

The activists I met have been holding their communities together, standing alongside feminist and queer movements everywhere to defend rights and freedoms for all. As we often say in the gender equality movement, imagine what they could do with the right support. Solidarity beyond the parade means that governments, funders and allies invest in queer aspirations.

Chandreyi Guharay is a Nicaraguan-Indian gender justice specialist by training, and — in Sara Ahmed’s words — a feminist killjoy by political choice. She’s the Global Advocacy Officer at Walking the Talk/Hivos, weaving together strategic advocacy, policy analysis and coalition-building for gender equality financing. She’s previously worked with Oxfam, Plan International, She Decides, CIVICUS, and Share-Net on research, organizational development and political education. Outside of work, you’ll find her co-conspiring with Feministas en Holanda, a decolonial grassroots collective of Latin American people in the Netherlands, where she is a community organizer around anti-racist and migrant justice struggles.