What
if you could trust in getting the health care you need in ways that
felt good and helped you thrive? What if the health system honoured
and valued queer and trans people's lives, bodies, and expertise?
What if LGBTQ+ communities led and organized our own health care as a
form of mutual aid? What if every aspect of our health care was
rooted in a commitment to our healing, pleasure, and liberation?
LGBTQ+
health care doesn't look like this today, but it could. This is the
care we dream of.
The
Care We Dream Of
is not quite an essay collection, and not quite an anthology.
Instead, it's a hybrid kind of book that weaves together the author's
essays on topics like queering health and healing, transforming the
health system, kinship, aging, and death, alongside stories, poetry
and non-fiction pieces by Alexander McClelland and Zoe Dodd, Blyth
Barnow, Carly Boyce, jaye simpson, Jillian Christmas, Joshua Wales,
Kai Cheng Thom, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Sand C. Chang.
The book also includes interviews with activists, health care workers
and researchers whose work offers insights into what liberatory and
transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health can look like in practice.
Interviewees include Anita "Durt" O'Shea (of St. James
Infirmary), Dawn Serra, Hannah Kia, Ronica Mukerjee, and Sean Saifa
Wall.
The
Care We Dream Of
offers possibilities - grounded in historical examples, present-day
experiments, and dreams of the future - for more liberatory and
transformative approaches to LGBTQ+ health and healing. It challenges
readers to think differently about LGBTQ+ health and asks what it
would look like if our health care were rooted in a commitment to the
flourishing and liberation of all LGBTQ+ people. This book is a
calling out, a out, a calling in, and a call to action. It is a spell
of healing and transformation, rooted in love.