“Gay cis white men, like myself, have a real obligation to get involved with queer people who are not white men.” From Mission’s LGBTQIA+ issue.
Adam Eli, the man behind the activist group Voices 4, editor-in-chief for Gucci’s Chime for Change zine, and influencer through his mass following on social media, has a direct message: “Queer people anywhere are responsible for queer people everywhere.”
Growing up, Eli was surrounded by supportive family members and friends, unaware of the hardships the queer community faced daily. This all changed in 2016: “Boom, the Orlando Pulse massacre happened. I was totally shocked, I was beside myself.”
Using social media, Eli organized a gathering and a walk to the Stonewall vigil in support of the victims of the shooting. “Thirty people showed up, and this was way before I had any type of following. I found myself, three or four days later, at the LGBT center, at the first Gays Against Guns meeting. Shortly after our first action, I became head of its social media. Life sort of happened from there.”
Eli was hit hard again in 2017, after reading Masha Gessen’s piece for The New Yorker about the gay purges that were happening in Chechnya. “When that article came out, it felt very clear that never again is now,” says Eli. “Governments were rounding people up based on who they were, in a land that my people were chased out of. It sounded like concentration camps. There was a lot of uproar but no action around it. I decided we had to do something.” He met with members of RUSA LGBT, a network of Russian-speaking people from the LGBTQ+ community, including immigrants and asylum seekers, and started planning a huge march in New York.
“I posted that we were going to hold a march and if anyone was interested in helping, they could join our meeting. Every week, our numbers doubled or tripled. When we met to have the debrief after the march, we said, ‘Is this a full-time activist group now?’” It became the cementing of Voices 4, which has only grown and evolved since, and now has chapters in New York, Berlin, and London.
Eli is actively involved with challenging many issues the global LGBTQ+ community has to deal with. “Gay cis white men, like myself, have a real obligation to get involved with queer people who are not white men. I think it’s essential we end nonconsensual intersex surgery on intersex youth, so I’m working with the intersex community to make sure that doctors are not operating on babies that are perfectly healthy and perfectly normal. Another is the epidemic of violence against black trans women in America and all over the world.” The latter situation comes with some shocking statistics. “The average life expectancy of a black trans woman in America is just 35 years old,” Eli tells me. Despite there being mainstream media representation, such as Laverne Cox’s character in Orange Is the New Black, permission for hate crime appears to be filtering down from the top. “I spoke to my mentor, Cathy Merino Thomas, about it,” he says. “She said, ‘The hate is always there, it’s just under the surface. When you hear [it] from the top down, the White House down, it emboldens the hate.”
The power of social media really comes into play with Eli’s work. After all, the first forms of his applied activism were through building followings on its networks. “The great thing about social media is that it changes all the time, and so do we. At the beginning it was during the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, when they were going for abortion, the trans military ban, trans bathrooms. Each one of those decisions prompted an immediate call to action that would need to be planned in nine hours. At the time, I was using social media as my main organizing tool. My rule is don’t post anything unless it’s hopeful or a direct call to action.”
In his role as editor-in-chief for Gucci’s Chime for Change zine, Eli is able to spread the message even further. Distributed around the world and available in seven languages, as well as online, the powerful publication is part of Gucci’s campaign for global unity on the subject of gender equality and to strengthen the standing of those working for this to be achieved. Its second issue focused on the inequalities that are present in Brazil, giving community leaders there a platform to raise their voices. “When I’m looking for contributors, I’m looking for two things,” says Eli. “The first is for voices that are traditionally marginalized, and the second is voices that make a direct call to action, too. Each issue looks at a topic that is not given the platform it deserves and has a direct call to action for the reader to engage with.”
Eli has also gathered his thoughts in The New Queer Conscience, a book due out in June as part of Penguin’s Pocket Change Collective, a series authored by leading activists and change-makers. “It’s a solidification of everything that I believe,” he says. “I argue that, if queer people adopt this idea, they are responsible for one another. It extends to their DNA of what it means to be queer. The worldwill become a better place for everyone—all queer people benefit when we invest in one another.”
For many, activism can be daunting, so what advice would the head of a global activist group give someone who wants to get behind a cause? “The hardest part is that activism can seem really intimidating, but the barrier to entry is really low. I always tell queer people to go to your local LGBT center, or local immigrant support group, and introduce yourself, and the skill you can offer. From there, you’ll be swooped away.”
Eli is an integral part of lifting voices globally both for and within the LGBTQ+ community. Working with numerous people, groups, and organizations, he’s a voice of inspiration and a producer of change for many around the world.
`@adameli on Instagram
Images courtesy of Hunter Abrams.
