Che Gossett

Individual Member

Since childhood, I’ve witnessed and experienced the traumatic neoliberal gutting of social services and welfare, the racialized War on Drugs, the unparalleled expansion of the prison industrial complex and emergence of and loss of loved ones to AIDS related illness. I am also ever inspired by organized resistance and resiliency by impacted communities across the globe – be it the Puerto Rican AIDS activists occupying the San Juan cathedral, or ACT UP Philadelphia’s current campaign for housing justice, or Tracy Bumpus’s dual struggle for trans justice and AIDS activism, or incarcerated AIDS activists demanding services. I believe it is vital for poor, black trans and gender variant communities to organize for self determination and against oppressive violence. I’m a proponent of prison abolition and queer and trans liberation because, along with so many others, I refuse to measure safety through “chains and corpses.”

I have seen how our communities -- of color, queer and trans, poor, drug user, sex worker -- have been impacted in the past and at present, by the prison industrial complex and criminalization. Even as I’ve seen the prison system holding so many communities, bodies and genders captive and policed, I know that our political imagination is free and that it is essential – for survival -- to imagine and enact alternatives to incarceration and criminalization and that the best of movement work grows out of imagination, the ability to speculate “what if” as opposed to being content with “what is.”

In the past I have worked with Critical Resistance, a prison abolitionist organization started in 1998 by Angela Davis and other academics and activists. In Washington DC I was involved with a grassroots campaign to combat prostitution free zones following the release of the Move Along Report. Together with members Penelope Saunders and Elizabeth Nanas of The Best Policy Practices Project and the Desiree Alliance, I co-authored a Report on sex work in United States that was submitted to the United Nations 9th Session of the Universal Periodic Review. As a recipient of the Leeway Art and Change Grant, I am putting together a publication about the impact of HIV on trans communities of color in Pennsylvania. I Recently curated a community driven exhibit at the William Way Community LGBTQ Center commemorating the ten year anniversary of the Philadelphia transgender health conference and organized and moderated a panel, “HIV Criminalization: Community Resistance and Resilience,” at Philadelphia FIGHT Prevention Summit.