Jan 28, 2025
This commentary is by HB Lozito of Brattleboro. They are the executive director of Out in the Open, an organization that works to build rural LGBTQ+ community, visibility, knowledge and power.Earlier this month, as my partner and I were driving up to Bellows Falls for a performance by the fabulous Toussaint St. Negritude, hosted by the fabulous Wendy Levy (now of the Rockingham Free Public Library), we listened to an episode of Radio Lab where they were talking about an organ within our bodies, the interstitium, and the process by which Western scientists recognized it only within the last few years.Here this incredible organ has been, since we have existed, likely within us the whole time and yet we’ve been looking past it, explaining it away and being wrong the whole time while doing so. While trying to understand how diseases spread through our cells, scientists finally noticed, in 2018, this fibrous tube-y structure that encased many of our vital organs. A miraculous structure that for centuries, was thought to be just a dense wall of collagen (nothing wrong with collagen! We love you collagen!) or most often outright disregarded by Western doctors.  The interstitium is fractal, made up of tiny tubes creating a larger organ that mimics itself as you zoom out, weaving a connected network that is everywhere throughout our bodies. The organ is itself supported by yet another complex and sophisticated network of other connective tissues. It absorbs shocks to our systems. Its interstitial fluid is a critical part of dispatching white blood cells, the community organizers of our biology, to fight infections. It is core to our existence. The more we listened to the show the more I got thinking about LGBTQ+ people. And about us as the interstitium.The interstitium has always been here. Known of course, to itself and to surrounding tissues but many people are newly cognizant of its brilliance. Our recent recognition of our dear interstitium has opened new possibilities, helped us understand ourselves in new ways, cracked open the wonder of the human experience, and begun to answer lifesaving questions.Some of those who are just learning about trans and LGBQ+ people want to say that we are new but we know that we are ancient. Like the interstitium, we have been here since humans have been here. In 2017, Guilford, Vermont’s very own Emmy-Award-winning gay filmmaker, John Scagliotti, made a feature length documentary called “Before Homosexuals” about ancient LGBTQ+ history. I had the pleasure of working with John on this film and learned a ton about our community’s ancient history and the breadcrumbs we’ve left each other throughout time demonstrating our existence.  Our rural LGBTQ+ communities are held together by incredible networks of communication, mutual support and strength. We see this in our own work at Out in the Open, in the thousands of rural LGBTQ+ people we work with annually, in peer-led support spaces, in the tens of thousands of mutual aid dollars we have raised and distributed to rural LGBTQ+ Vermonters. And we see that in our own experiences of the community outside of our organization every day in chat threads, in phone calls, in witnessing LGBTQ+ people support each other and our whole communities through disasters like the 2023 & 2024 flooding here in Vermont, and so much more. We are foundational to human life and society. Our existence opens new possibilities. We have always known each other and our brilliance is finally beginning to be known, seen, and felt by others.  We exist. Regardless of what anyone says, we are here. We have a value unto ourselves, not only as part of a network, not only in relation to how we support the whole, not only in our functionality but by virtue of our very being. I, perhaps like many of you, have been feeling a bit run down by the everpresent tide pushing against local, national, and global struggles for liberation lately. Reduced in my own imagining of what can be when faced with what currently is. Understanding the world through analogy while tapping into my own curiosity and sense of wonder are powerful tools for me in finding strength, inspiration, and energy to continue building the world we want to see; a world that works for all of us.Thinking about these connections ignites my sense of possibility, which I need in periods like this one, where we are told that so much is and should be impossible. This connection with what’s inside of me and inside of all of us is helping me find my resolve this week. It’s helping me be at home within myself this week. So I can be at home within the world this week. It helps me remember that I am exactly who and where I need to be in order to imagine and participate in building where we’re going next together. Maybe it can do something similar for you, too.Sending all of us, and all of our interstitiums, lots of love, strength and power. We’re here to be in all of it together.Read the story on VTDigger here: HB Lozito: Interstitial inspiration. ...read more read less
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