Kay Whitlock is the National Representative for LGBT Issues for the American
Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization working for peace and
demilitarization, human rights, social justice, economic security, and human
rights in the United States and throughout the world.
An experienced activist and organizer in movements for racial, gender, LGBT,
economic, and environmental justice, she has helped to shape and strengthen the
AFSC’s work and witness for LGBT rights and recognition since 1980. Under her
leadership, AFSC has emphasized linking LGBT justice struggles to broader
movements for justice and human rights, and has centralized racial, gender, and
economic justice in AFSC’s own pro-LGBT analysis and organizing. Her longtime
association with AFSC and its spiritually-centered vision of nonviolence is
informed by her own spiritual practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
She is the author of In a Time of Broken Bones: A Call for Dialogue
on Hate Violence and the Limitations of Hate Crimes Legislation, an AFSC
Justice Visions Working Paper (2001) and AFSC's landmark Bridges of Respect:
Creating Support for Lesbian and Gay Youth (1988), the first national
resource guide for adults working with queer youth. She also has authored
numerous articles and essays on a variety of social justice topics that have
been published in various periodicals and anthologies. Her most recent
essay, "Our Enemies, Ourselves: Why Anti-Violence Movements Must Replace the
Dualism of 'Us and Them' with an Ethic of Interdependence," will be
published by Palgrave/Macmillan in the anthology,
Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence,
scheduled for publication in 2004.
Kay also is a former AFSC regional director. She served for several years as
Director of Educational Resources for Planned Parenthood Southeastern
Pennsylvania.
She is a former member and co-chairperson of the board of directors of (what
was then) the National Gay Task Force and former chair of the National NOW
Lesbian Rights Committee.
Born in 1949 and raised in southern Colorado, Kay now lives in Missoula,
Montana with her partner, Phoebe Hunter, and their two cats.
(This biographical statement provided by Kay Whitlock.)