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The Care We Dream Of
Liberatory & Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health
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.
Contributors
Zena Sharman
Zena Sharman (she/her) is a writer, speaker, strategist, and LGBTQ+ health advocate. Zena edited the Lambda Literary Award–winning anthology The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and winning anthology The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care, and coedited the Lambda Award–nominated anthology Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, which was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association. She regularly speaks on LGBTQ+ health to audiences of health care providers, students, and community members at universities and conferences across North America. A PhD-trained health researcher, Zena has worked in strategic leadership roles in the health research sector for over a decade. Her resumé also includes party thrower, cabaret host, go-go dancer for a queer punk band, campus radio DJ, and elementary school public speaking champion. You can learn more about Zena and her work at zenasharman.com.
