I love Southerners On New Ground for their fighting spirit.  Caitlin Breedlove, Paulina Hernandez, Kai Barrow, and Roberto Tijerina tell it like it is in The Day After, their ferocious response to North Carolina’s voters passing the noxious Amendment 1 yesterday 61% – 39%.    It’s short (2:45) & intense, just like queerfit.  What’s this got to do with our dumbbell/barbell drive? Lots.

One of my favorite gyms, Crossfit Virtuosity in New York City, has a phrase that’s always written on the whiteboard:

Weight ↑ 

Weights go up, always. You want to get stronger, then pick up a heavier dumbbell.  This is obvious, but left to our own devices, we rarely do it.  What people tend to do is pick a dumbbell and stick with it.  After a while, it becomes their own personal dumbbell. They develop a full out relationship with that dumbbell. They do push presses with 15 pound dumbbells, and that’s what they become, a 15 pound dumbbell push presser.

And so it is in our ongoing fight to get free.  We learn to do a press conference, so we do another one.  We learn to file a certain kind of lawsuit, so we keep filing the same lawsuit.  We organize a certain way, so we keep doing it that way.  And…how’s that working out?

What I hear SONG saying in their morning after response is that the way they fought Amendment 1 in NC did not win the popular majority, but it moved us closer to queer liberation.  People who loaded in – including Atlantans who got their boots on over to the NC ground – got to practice a higher level of organizing.  What’s important about SONG is that, as an movement institution, it holds the space that can let us practice higher and higher level organizing. Weights go up.

In queerfit, we want to have enough heavy stuff so everyone, no matter where they start, can keep to the maxim, Weight ↑.  We’re not interested in just getting good at pushing the same weight. We want to get stronger.  Dig out those dumbbells and drop them off at Charis Books or at our 10:00 Saturday morning workout in the greenspace next to the Inman Park/Reynoldstown MARTA station.  And do squats as you watch that video.