Third spaces where people can gather, organize, and provide support have been critical for LGBTQ+ communities in Germany and the United States. “Building LGBTQ+ Communities in Germany and the United States” participant Baylen Campbell joins this episode of The Zeitgeist to discuss how LGBTQ+ groups can build capital and invest in themselves in order to preserve these spaces, especially as funding gaps and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation threatens to close them. He also discusses best practices in the United States and Germany following the program’s study tours in New York City and Munich.



Guest Host

Eric Langenbacher, AGI Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program

Guests

Baylen Campbell, Director of Programs & Partnerships, Invest Appalachia



Transcript

Eric Langenbacher

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode of The Zeitgeist podcast at the American-German Institute. I’m Eric Langenbacher, the director of the Society, Culture, and Politics program here at AGI. And today’s podcast is entitled, “Queer Economies: Solidarity, Sustainability and the Struggle for Space.” Joining me from the sunny state of Kentucky is Baylen Campbell. Baylen, welcome.

Baylen Campbell

Hey Eric. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. I’m Baylen Campbell, just to go ahead and introduce myself. I live in Hazard, KY, which is where I’m originally from, and I’m the Director of Programs and Partnerships with an organization called Invest Appalachia, which is a blended-capital impact investing platform helping to leverage philanthropic and investment capital into historically underserved communities in my neck of the woods; across West Virginia, Kentucky, the Appalachian counties of Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee.

When we met in New York City in September, the U.S. was bracing for a critical election. By the time we arrived in Munich in March, Trump was in office again, and the AfD had won a major victory in Germany. These political shifts gave new urgency to our visits and conversations and the varying sort of challenges and threats that the queer community is facing in this current political climate.

Eric Langenbacher

Thanks, Baylen. So, amid this backdrop, with these dramatic political shifts in the United States, maybe a little less dramatically, but still important in Germany, we found ourselves asking—this is the second year of our Building LGBTQ+ Communities exchange program—the participants found ourselves asking: How could LGBTQ+ communities maintain economic autonomy? How can they build collective power and protect spaces that are under threat? So, we’re going to explore a lot of these issues through real-world examples from our various site visits, briefings, and discussions in both New York and Munich.

Our first big issue is looking backwards, just for a second, at how queer communities have invested in themselves up until this point in time. This, I think, is a very important issue in this political moment, because we can see that public support is sometimes conditional for the community. We wanted to ask ourselves what’s at stake with variable levels of public support.

I think the first thing to note is that, especially in the United States right now, there’s a lot of political pressure, a lot of funding cuts that are coming from the U.S. government. Actually, the Human Rights Campaign has an excellent overview of the various budget cuts that have been announced or implemented. They estimate that the total financial impact on the LGBTQ+ community is estimated at about $2.67 billion,