The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory & Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health

Edited By Zena Sharman

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 tranformation, rooted in love.