Gayle Rubin to be honored at Creating Change Conference
Community leaders Gloria Allen, Lisbeth Melendez Rivera, Javier Hernandez, and Gayle Rubin will all be honored at the 33rd annual Creating Change Conference. Held virtually from January 28-31, the conference will include four plenary sessions, 16 day-long institutes, and 48 workshop and caucus sessions.
The four day event, run by the National LGBTQ Task Force, is a space for learning, connecting, and growing as LGBTQ activists, leaders, allies, and changemakers from across the nation join together. For the first time in its 33 year history, The Creating Change Conference will hold all day long institutes, workshops, keynotes, and caucus sessions online.
Each year, several coveted awards are presented to a diverse group of individuals making a difference for the LGBTQ+ community.
Anthropologist, theorist, and writer Gayle Rubin will be honored with The Leather Leadership Award for her work and studies within the Leather community. In 1992 Gayle Rubin was presented the Pantheon of Leather Forebearer Award and she has numerous other accolades.
The following is excerpted from Wikipedia:
In 1978 Rubin moved to San Francisco to begin studies of the gay male Leather subculture, seeking to examine a minority sexual practice neither from a clinical perspective nor through the lens of individual psychology but rather as an anthropologist studying a contemporary community.
Rubin was a member of Cardea, a women's discussion group within a San Francisco BDSM organization called the Society of Janus; Cardea existed from 1977 to 1978 before discontinuing. A core of lesbian members of Cardea, including Rubin, Pat Califia (who identified as a lesbian at the time), and sixteen others, were inspired to start Samois on June 13, 1978, as an exclusively lesbian BDSM group. Samois was a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983, and was the first lesbian BDSM group in the United States. In 1984 Rubin cofounded The Outcasts, a social and educational organization for women interested in BDSM with other women, also based in San Francisco. That organization was disbanded in the mid-1990s; its successor organization The Exiles is still active.
In the field of public history, Rubin was a member of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, a private study group founded in 1978 whose members included Allan Berube, Estelle Freedman and Amber Hollibaugh. Rubin also was a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society (originally known as the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Historical Society), established in 1985. Arguing the need for well-maintained historical archives for sexual minorities, Rubin has written that "queer life is full of examples of fabulous explosions that left little or no detectable trace.... Those who fail to secure the transmission of their histories are doomed to forget them."
She became the first woman to judge a major national gay male leather title contest in 1991, when she judged the Mr. Drummer contest. This contest was associated with Drummer magazine, which was based in San Francisco.
The San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley consists of four works of art along Ringold Alley honoring the Leather subculture; it opened in 2017. One of the works of art is a black granite stone etched with, among other things, a narrative by Rubin. Rubin was an important member of the community advisory group that was consulted to develop the designs of the works of art.
The above is merely the tip of the iceberg. Go to the Wikipedia link below to see the rest.
Detailed bio at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayle_Rubin
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