Our Mission
Queer Crescent imagines futures where LGBTQIA+ Muslims are building possibilities towards collective liberation. Our work is shaped by resisting gendered violence through cultural organizing, base-building, and defining Muslimness as an expansive and racialized identity.
Our Story
Muslims are a diverse community in the U.S. representing over 3 million people with varied identities across race, ethnicity, class, ability, sexual orientation and gender identity. And yet when our population is surveyed by research centers such as Pew and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, data about LGBTQ Muslims is not collected or written about. As people belonging to two groups often assumed to be profoundly different or even incompatible, LGBTQ Muslims have been made invisible as minorities within a minority.
Aiming to address this erasure, Queer Crescent, in partnership with the University of Chicago, recently concluded the largest survey of LGBTQ Muslims in the U.S. The survey, Presencing Ourselves, is a comprehensive needs assessment of 681 individuals with questions spanning various demographics and life domains, including immigration, relationships to the police state and surveillance, religiosity, healthcare experiences, sexual health and violence, and belonging. With this data, we now have more information to create actionable paths forward for organizers, activists, healers, and researchers in their work to improve the lives of LGBTQ Muslims.
The survey’s key findings: 20% of respondents face houselessness; Nearly 1 in 3 believes they have been discriminated against or mistreated by a medical provider for being Muslim or being LGBTQ; Over 3 in 4 participants reported not feeling safe around or reporting to the police, immigration officers, and/or the Department of Homeland Security; 76% avoid religious or spiritual communities for fear of being discriminated against; Over 90% reported facing stigmas in discussions of sexual education, reproductive services, and/or sexual assault in their Muslims communities.
Our survey illustrates that LGBTQ Muslims face deep challenges related to narratives of belonging. This echos national LGBTQ statistics around mental health reported by the 2022 Trevor Project stating that “45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. Nearly 1 in 5 transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide and LGBTQ youth of color reported higher rates than their white peers.”
These conditions are further compounded by LGBTQ attacks sweeping the country such as censorship of books, limits on intersectional school curriculums, erosion of access to reproductive and gender affirming care. This hostile landscape is culturally and legally dangerous for multiply marginalized Muslims. Additionally, this context is made worse by mainstream LGBTQ equality organizations who often perpetuate islamophobia and racist tropes about Muslims when defending LGBTQ rights, as well as Muslim organizations unwilling to address or even recognize LGBTQ issues as part of their progressive agendas.
Queer Crescent is unique with a grounded commitment to a healing justice and transformative organizing praxis. For us, this reflects the simultaneous work of creating collective healing while organizing against the conditions that reproduce violence on the queer Muslim body. This allows us to heal alongside our organizing, providing the internal and external resources to break generational trauma and build rooted connections with each other–to get free.