Meet Obama Leaders supporting the global LGBTQIA+ community

PLUHO, People Like Us Hang Out! is a grassroots LGBTQ+ organization in Malaysia that focuses on LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy, awareness raising, and community strengthening. Founded in 2016, PLUHO has pioneered and led multiple community initiatives and services addressing the systemic oppression faced by LGBTQIA+ communities in Malaysia. This includes The BlueBird Project: a volunteer-run LGBTQIA+ affirming mental health referral service, Rumah Angkat: an inclusive emergency shelter, and Keluarga Qu: an initiative to connect with parents of LGBTQIA+ people. Most of these initiatives have ceased operations due to funding constraints, staff burnouts, and other structural barriers. However, this hasn’t stopped my commitment to providing a safe and inclusive space for LGBTQIA+ people in Malaysia.. I believe in the power of meaningful inclusion and that the beauty of diversity should be celebrated.

From my experience as an LGBTQIA+ leader, I’ve learned that the situation for LGBTQIA+ people and other marginalized communities in Malaysia will not improve without advocacy. Most of the issues we face are rooted in systemic oppression, cultural discrimination, and marginalization. For too long, LGBTQIA+ people have existed and survived underground, at the margins of society. It is PLUHO’s mission to challenge the status quo, our core focus over the last three years.

The leaders program has definitely widened my perspective and understanding of what value-based leadership meant. As someone who has been an activist in a country that oppresses LGBTQIA+ people, the conversation around values often stops at superficial and aspirational levels. The program provided me the tools and opportunity to reflect on my personal values, explore whether they align with the organization’s values, and further identify conflicts and dissonance. Knowing what my values are, and why it is important to practice them, grounds me as an activist, and provides clarity with my approach and attitude towards activism.

The longer that I am in activism, the more I understand that LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy will always be a battleground for most of the queer people in this world. There is no space for absolute safety and refuge. I am hoping to empower more queer people to understand our issues, and become educated on our basic human rights. Only when there are enough of us to create, defend and protect spaces for other queer people, we can then equip ourselves with the resilience we need in this long battle. Social change takes time and effort, I am privileged to be part of it. It is also where I derive joy from: knowing that I am not alone in this, and that I can offer the same wisdom to the next queer people I meet. Joy is knowing that you are not alone.

My work has spanned so many different focus areas over the last 10 years. I would characterize my work to be in the space of movement building, people activation, and coalition building. The primary focus in Los Angeles right now is bringing folks together around different issue areas in ways that they may not have been engaged with in the past. I’m thinking about how sectors can collaboratively work with one another, can share their learning models with each other, and also identify bright spots where those collaborations work.

As someone who felt like I didn’t have a voice growing up—not because of my family, but because I didn’t understand who I was—I was constantly trying to build a bridge between my Asian and Latino identities, especially as a Central American. Adding the layer of being queer pushed me further into that search for understanding.

I was also moved up two grades in school, which meant needing to mature quickly and be taken seriously in rooms where I was often the youngest. That journey of finding my voice shaped my work: asking who you are, why you’re here, and how you  can connect authentically.

Because of the Obama Leaders Program, I feel immense joy that I’ll be able to activate others and share the powerful learnings I’ve gained.

Previously, I led the Digital Equity Los Angeles Coalition, a group of nearly 100 organizations working to close the digital divide, not just by providing devices, but by focusing on infrastructure and equitable broadband deployment. We brought sectors like education, health, immigration, economic mobility, and environmental justice together to help communities thrive.

Oftentimes my experience has been that I am walking into a room and immediately scanning for safety. I'm monitoring myself—how much of myself can I show up in this space as? And this program actually did the opposite for me. I didn’t feel like I had to walk in and scan the room for my safety. I actually could scan the room for others like me, without concern that my safety was at stake—safety being my emotional safety or my mental safety.

Connecting with other queer folks in the space also gave me a chance to understand what the queer experience looks like from across the country. I have an understanding of what it looks like for me, and even to some extent California. But the queer experience has a lot of breadth. Being able to engage and share conversation around our experiences and what we've had to navigate in our lives and the way that we still engage in changemaking work that has actually allowed me to not have queer be the center of the conversation, but that it's just who we are as humans and we can engage in some really powerful collaborative dialogue.

Queer folks want the same things as everyone else: to fulfill the same fundamentally human instinct to love, to belong, and to make meaning in one's life with another. And over time, and with a little bit of work, we see that our fellow citizens get better at recognizing the completeness of our common humanity and at admitting more people as equal members of our communities.

I’m working for a future where all queer Australians feel free to realize the full promise of their lives, where life’s ordinary joys are not merely within our reach, but where our communities encourage their attainment, much as they would for anyone else.

And although it won’t have been right to have suffered for our differences, I hope that in time queer folks will also be able to look upon our hardships and realize that it is us who have understood our world and its sharp edges in ways that others never will, and that these experiences will become wellsprings of compassion and justice for others.