“We can impose beauty on our future.” This is the grounding quote from Lorraine Hansberry that shaped an ancestral-themed check-in the LGBTQ Center of Durham held in August. A Durham-based queer facilitator then guided staff and board members through an exercise where we explored what that meant to us in the context of the LGBTQ Center.
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Read more of our 2026 Pride coverage below. This post will be updated throughout the week leading up to Pride: Durham, NC.
As I reflected, the exercise triggered a somber montage of joyful moments tinted with worry and uncertainty. Furloughs, budget cuts, executive orders, transphobia, hate crimes, fascism—this had been my reality as a member of the LGBTQ Center of Durham’s leadership over the past three years. The center, like the people it serves, has been through so many moments of vulnerability and institutional trauma that the idea of a beautiful future seemed nearly delusional. This is why the word “impose” made so much sense to me. As a Black queer woman in the 20th century, Hansberry, a civil rights activist, had no choice but to impose beauty on a future that was most likely to be grim and hideous for a person like her. Black people, queer people, and marginalized people throughout history had nothing to demonstrate that a future—left at the hands of fate—could be anything beautiful.
That montage of survival and sorrow clouding joyful moments of celebration and resilience looms because my recollection of my time at the center is not distant from the narrative of working-class queer people as a whole; our stories are a narrative of what it means to survive instead of what it means to thrive.
The LGBTQ Center of Durham and all people of oppressed classes deserve to thrive. We deserve more than just relief from grief; we deserve joy. We deserve more than just a day free of tears; we deserve to smile. We deserve more than just the minimum; we deserve abundance. We deserve more than just freedom to exist; we deserve liberation from the constraints of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. We deserve to host celebrations without fear of hate crimes. We deserve community support without the community fearing sanctions for being associated with us. We deserve to form solidarity with Black liberation and Palestinian self-determination, without fearing for our funding. We deserve for love, beauty, and bliss to be a reality and not a fantasy. We deserve to dance, worship, grieve, and dream without constraints.
As you’ll read in the stories that follow, the LGBTQ Center of Durham provides a space where youth, families, and elders can see themselves and be themselves without apology. For that to continue, for the beautiful future to exist, we depend on our community for funds, support, love, and security. In my final year as chair of the center’s board of directors, I am so proud to be part of an institution that continues to impose beauty on its future. I have grown to love parts of myself and my community that I never knew to appreciate.
A queer Black woman named Lorraine Hansberry brought us this grounding mantra. Let us honor her by supporting the center in imposing beauty: a future where we thrive, not just survive.
Desmera Gatewood is a neurodivergent, Black, nonbinary writer and organization-development practitioner. They serve on the board of the LGBTQ Center of Durham.
Read more of our 2026 Pride coverage below. This post will be updated throughout the week leading up to Pride: Durham, NC.
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