ChangeMakers: Rox Anderson creates spaces for queer health and liberation

In celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, throughout June MPR News is featuring stories about transgender and nonbinary Minnesotans making an impact. See more at mprnews.org/changemakers.

Roxanne Anderson wears many hats — figuratively and literally.

Anderson, who goes by Rox, is the director for the Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition. They host two community radio shows, serve as artistic director for a production company they co-founded, and are spearheading Our Space, a campaign to create a LGBTQ+ community center in Minnesota. (This is a non-exhaustive list of things they do.)

They also rock an array of statement hats, most often a snapback or a fedora which they said is probably their favorite.

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"You can wear it to the club or you can wear it to church. You can show up at the kids’ ballpark with your fedora on. I feel like a fedora is kind of an all-purpose hat that kind of goes with anything," Rox smiles.

Rox is perhaps best known for helping build the Power to the People stage at the Pride festival in Minneapolis and operating the now-closed Café Southside, once described as a "radical community hub" for queer Black and brown people.

But they’ve played a part in numerous LGBTQ+ organizations and happenings across Minneapolis over decades — organizing around HIV/AIDS prevention, advocating for mental health care and culturally responsive housing for queer youth, amplifying trans voices — always with the goal of creating safer spaces for the most marginalized people.

Rox talks a lot about space. A space for weddings and funerals. Space to connect with all the needed social services. To find joy and health. Best practices on such spaces were their research focus as a 2018 Bush Fellow.

It's part of what brought them to Minneapolis in the first place. In 1991, they said the city offered opportunity — a stability in jobs for Black people and a welcoming community of friends.

"I think mostly we chose Minneapolis because we had people here and I think that that's the same thing as an LGBT center. People go places where they're loved, where people will care for them, where people are excited to see them," they said.

Editor's note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I am mid-50s. Genderqueer, dyke. I'm a parent. I'm an activist and organizer who's really interested in our liberation, ensuring that we have access to health and health care and fun.

I was born in Anderson, Indiana, where I was adopted into a white family who raised me very lovingly and gave me all the things that I needed. When I was in eighth grade or so, we moved to very rural Spencer, Indiana. I think that the population there's about 2,000. The impact for me growing up in that was a lot of racism, a lot of misogyny — the Ku Klux Klan literally rallied in their full regalia at one of the three stop lights in town.

My mom often went to the school to advocate for us, often tried to have those courageous conversations about, you know, what it means to be followed in the store. My parents were activists and organizers. They did stuff around tenants rights, they showed up for civil rights movement stuff, union stuff. I think that I have a little bit of that thing in me already from just being raised.

While that time in Indiana was really hard — I got called [the N-word] every day — it also formulated my drive. It empowered, encouraged, lubricated my drive to ensure my freedom and the freedom of people that are around me, that liberation of our spirit.

You can walk into any new city build from this point on in your life and there will be a gender-neutral bathroom. I think most people take that for granted and they don't know the amount of work that went into that.

That when MTHC [Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition] started, there were two doctors in the whole state that would write a prescription for your hormones.

We are actually one of three states in all of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, that don't have an LGBT center. We have an enormous amount of LGBT folks here in the state, but we don't have any formalized place for folks to go and hang out. Most of the LGBT-serving organizations don't even really have a lobby or a hangout place where people can connect and collaborate and cause good trouble.

Right now, most of our LGBT organizations spend between $300 and $5,000 a month on rent. When you start talking about 10 or 11 or 12 organizations that are all kind of doing that work in a really siloed way, including paying rent, they have no equity. They have no voting. They have no real investment in self or the folks that they serve. So my idea is to work with those LGBT-serving organizations so we’re collectively organizing our rent into a space that we own.

This is really an attempt to include organizations like the Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition, like POC Pride, like OutFront Minnesota, like Quorum, like the Queer Equity Institute, really just ensuring that when I walk into that space, I can connect with all the LGBT-serving organizations at one time in one space. And then I can get the resources that I need, kind of a one-stop shop. As far as I know, there are no LGBT-serving organizations in the Twin Cities metro area where folks can just walk in. You have to get buzzed in or you have to have an appointment, somebody has come and let you in.

And so we want to create this environment that's welcoming, that has reception that I can walk into anytime of the day or night, and somebody's going to be there to greet me and get me access to the resources that I need.

I think that that's going to be more and more important as more folks are moving here. All the LGBT-serving organizations are already taxed to our gills and now we have this kind of influx of folks moving to the state.

Our Space is in that process of still gaining supporters, gathering volunteers and really looking at the kind of nitty gritty of space building. We talk a lot about, ‘we just need a space,’ but we don't just need a space, we need the right space.

I think anybody who was impacted by this organization will attest to the same thing: District 202, which was kind of the premier LGBT center and did a lot to inform and provide guidelines for a bunch of other LGBT community centers across the country. [Reporter note: Founded in 1991, District 202 in the Loring Park neighborhood of Minneapolis closed its physical space in 2009.]

It was an organization and programming that was driven by young people. They had their own board process. They had their own financial impacts and access to that information. Everybody can relate to this place of, ‘I walk into a place and people know me and I have safety in that.’ We've even seen that tried to be replicated in the retail space through Starbucks and other places that call your name. That impact of belonging is profound. And I learned that at District 202.

The reason I haven't let go on it for 20 years is because I see what happened to those young people who were at that community center. They are running organizations serving LGBT folks. They are elected officials. They're the CEOs and the [executive directors] of organizations that serve marginalized people. I see them every day at meetings. They're running stuff. And I think that's because there is liberation in being inside of a space where people care about you.

Oh, there's so many, so many. I'll start locally: of course [Minneapolis City Council] President [Andrea] Jenkins. Not just because she's president Jenkins, but because of all the things that she did before she became president Jenkins. And that doesn't mean that I always agree with her. That doesn't mean that I think she's 100 percent right all the time. But what it does mean is that her body of work is so deep that — and I consider myself a very good friend of hers — I don't know how deep it goes.

Laverne Cox is a hero of mine, not because "Orange is the New Black" was the thing that it was, but because of the way that she fiercely showed up for CeCe McDonald.

CeCe McDonald is also a huge and profound hero. The audacity to stand up and say, ‘You are not going to take my life, I am not going to allow white supremacy to win’? I just really can't even fathom or comprehend what CeCe endured.

I would say Baki Baki Baki. Hilde Edwards is also doing amazing and profound stuff.

Whatever young people come out of the program called TIGERRS, they're all going to be superstars. TIGERRS is a youth program, specifically for trans and gender expansive young people that came out of the Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition. They're having a place where they go, where they get love, where they get support, where they get to draw, where they get to make forts and dream and, you know, go pick flowers and do things that kids are supposed to do.

And then I think there's young people inside of our GSAs, inside of Out4Good and Out For Equity, that are doing amazing things.

It has absolutely nothing to do with organizing. It's really about connecting with my son. I think the thing that I'm most proud of is raising a Black man who cares about himself and his community and wants to learn and explore.

That we don't need some of these LGBT-serving organizations because we don't have to keep fighting for our rights, our liberation. We don't have to keep fighting discrimination. That we just kind of like work ourselves out of a job.

That's huge and lofty. I think a more realistic answer is that trans folks continue to have access to those histories that makes us so fierce, and make people want to imitate us and copy us, and be afraid of us, because like, nobody's afraid of anything that's weak. So the fact that people are afraid of trans people, kind of just enumerates our strengths to me.