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I had only just heard of the organization days ago. I spoke with an activist that wanted to relocate to Washington State to join the organization. Below is a copy of what the organization has to say about this closure. Beyond the Plus There are new notes @social@social.beyondtheplus.org We regret to inform everyone that Beyond the Plus is shutting down operations. Due to ongoing and future safety concerns, members voted to cease operations of the org effective immediately. (It might take us a bit to get everything taken fully offline.) I founded this organization because I wanted to help people. I wanted to reach out to those who didn't already have community and offer them safe spaces where they could meet others and beat loneliness. I thought the community was ready for something public, but I guess I was wrong. I still want to help people who are closeted, but if the answer isn't public organizations then I think the only thing is to set an example and inspire people to fix their loneliness on their own. Bt+ may be gone, but our message lives on. People in our community need to form in-person connections, only then will we achieve the acceptance we all want so badly. We all want our Stonewall, but Stonewall happened before gay rights organizations, not the other way around. Maybe someday something like Bt+ can exist again, but only once our people are organized and ready to literally fight for their rights, just as queer people did back then. People want their safety guaranteed, but the truth is that it never can be in in-person spaces. If we want our rights then we all need to brave unsafe scenarios, be smart about how we handle them, and stick together. The best safety we will ever have is in numbers; if we are all side-by-side then we can protect ourselves from whatever threats come our way. But if we stay divided and stay in online spaces where we know we can't be hurt, then we will never know progress. Our acceptance will not come through arguments online, social media websites, and public organizations. It'll start with genuine, in-person community, just as it did for every other marginalized group that came before us. It is our duty, if we want to see our acceptance, to play a part in that. Whether here in Washington, or across the world. Ally K There are new notes @ally@social.allykotetsu.com Here is the timeline of events that affected Bt+'s eventual downfall. In December we started receiving attention on Soyjak Party. One of our staff got doxxed and a bunch of people on there started giving death threats to our staff. Vi and I chose to ignore it, but our other staff wanted us to take measures to ensure their safety, mainly shutting down the website. Vi and I did not want to do this, because we felt the danger there wasn't credible, that shutting down the website wouldn't stop it, and that it wasn't fair to do something that would affect all of our members just because of publicity that we knew we would attract all along One of our staff members wanted us to tell our members about the soyjak thing, but I didn't think it was necessary. They were only going after staff so I thought that telling people would freak them out beyond reason. Though eventually people found out on their own and felt betrayed that we had not disclosed that information to them, which hurt a lot of the trust that had been built between staff and members. From there on our event attendance declined significantly and our new membership rate dropped to 0. I concede that I should have told people what was going on, I just didn't think at the time that that was a positive thing to do, but here we are. One staff left because they got doxxed. (Which happened because i asked what name they wanted to use for the staff page and they chose to use their full legal name.) One of our staff made it an ultimatum that if we didn't shut down the website, they were gonna leave. I told them we could talk about it at our next meeting but they made it an ultimatum that I alone had to respond to. I chose not to, so they left, leaving vi and I the only remaining staff. From there on the ex staff member pressured us to shut down the org, citing member safety a concern. Apparently, people in the local community were getting impatient with our existence, and said ex staff heard someone say something about how if BT+ wasn't gonna go away then they were gonna push us out of the city. During our January social, a local community member found out event information (I assume from a current member they were friends with) and came to the social to yell at us about how we needed to shutdown. They presented information I was not aware of signifying that our members were in danger, and also presented the threat that Bt+ was going to garner news attention and lead to trump sending ICE to Seattle. After that we decided we would let our members vote on the future of the org, and once we told them everthina that was aoina on they no londer felt safe. no londer trusted us. and decided that public. in-person organization like us wasn't how they wanted things done. We held a vote, and the only people to vote to stay public were a good friend of mine and one other member. Anyone else who voted to stay public had never actually come to any of our events in the first place so I discounted their votes. Everyone else wanted us to shutdown. And so here we are I feel like a lot of this happened because of my mistakes, but I also felt like it was inevitable. I thought people were going to be able to be brave when stuff like this happened, but it didn't turn out that way, maybe because I didn't tell them all of the apparent danger. I saw the soyjak party thing as a joke and I didn't want to pay it any attention, but others felt differently, which is something I didn't expect would happen. In any case, I don't see this as anyone's fault. The truth is that our people are not ready to literally fight for our rights, and we only will have them when people are. That won't happen overnight I was going to shut things down at the end of the month, but said ex staff member kept pressuring me to do it right away. Eventually I caved in because I was already planning for Bt+ to go away and nobody else had voted yet, so it didn't seem to make much of a difference. There's some group in Seattle called CAT HOUSE, which has been described to me as a queer "gang", "discord server", and "underground railroad." Supposedly the higher ups in that org wanted nothing but for Bt+ to go away, and said ex staff made it sound like they would do anything to make that happen. The only reason they hadn't yet supposedly was because some local community members were able to get them to hold off on the promise that I was eventually going to shut things down, but apparently when the news coverage hit they ran out of patience and the threat of them doing violence against me became a realistic one I expected a lot to happen because of Bt+, what I did not expect was that queer people would act not on hatred of us, but on fear of fascism. And instead of trying to work together they wanted to erase us from existence. And what I expected less was that the local radqueers were going to side with them rather than stay by our side. But that is how things went. |