Out In CT - Regina Dyton

Regina S. Dyton, MSW, is Chairperson of the City of Hartford Commission on LGBT Issues.  She is employed full time as the Program Manager of the Aetna Foundation Children’s Center, a clinic at St. Francis Hospital & Medical Center that provides diagnostic and therapeutic services to children who allege sexual abuse. Ms. Dyton is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of CT School of Social Work.   Ms. Dyton brings over 25 years of community activism and anti-oppression work to her endeavors, which currently include membership in Queers Without Borders and CT Trans Advocacy Coalition. 

Regina has worked with diverse communities including Latino, African American, Native American, GLBTQ, Asian American, low- income women and youth. 

Her accomplishments include:

• 1989-2006 -Founder and President of R.S. Dyton Associates, a consulting firm dedicated to the self-definition and self-determination of all oppressed peoples.
• 2002-2003-Trainer with the Women of Color Fundraising Institute in Boston MA, where she taught women of color in community based advocacy organizations how to raise funds and write proposals.
• Conducted the first research paper on the HIV/AIDS Education Needs of Native Americans and Asian Americans in CT for the CT Department of Health in 1995.  Based in her belief that people and communities know their own needs better than researchers and “experts”, she began this task by partnering with the CT Indian Council and Khmer Health Advocates (a Cambodian Health Advocacy organization).
• 1999-2002-Deputy Director of Asian Family Services, an outpatient mental health clinic serving traumatized survivors of the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.  Ms. Dyton was instrumental in securing grants to fund this organization, including a $1.5 million federal grant to develop and implement culturally competent services.  She also utilized her well developed network to introduce and develop collaboration for program development and community organizing with other community based organizations serving diverse oppressed peoples.
• 1998-2003-Consultant and then Interim Executive Director of Project 100 Community Center, serving Greater Hartford’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities.  Regina developed and administered services targeted to low-income, urban racial and ethnic minority youth who must deal with the multiple oppressions of homophobia, racism and poverty.  She founded FACE (Featuring All Colors and Ethnicities) in 2002.  This group organized Hartford Public School students who were being harassed and abused by students and some staff.  The 2002 “Stand With CeCe’ campaign exposed the practice of some administrators and teachers advising sexual minority students to drop out of high school. 
• 1989-1992-As Coordinator of the Regional Care Team of the AIDS Ministries Program of CT, Regina organized and developed the most diverse team of volunteers in CT to provide non-medical in-home care for people in the end stages of AIDS.  She also established 12 Teens for AIDS Prevention sites in the state of CT, based in a variety of churches throughout the state.  Her programs won several awards including the J.C. Penny “Golden Rule” Award and the CT-DPH AIDS Division.
• 1989-1999-Regina played a major role in the development and modifying of the Family Literacy Program of Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford.  As a founding member of the North End Literacy Committee, she helped diversify the formerly almost exclusively white/suburban reading tutor pool to include urban racial and ethnic minorities and to establish over a dozen small-group reading sites in local community organizations and churches.  This Program received the “Best New Program in State” Award from Literacy Volunteers of CT.
• Regina has provided pro-bono and low cost grant writing and organizational development services to help many small and new community based organizations secure start up and crucial program funds.  These organizations include, Citizens for Quality Sickle Cell Care, The CT Coalition of Refugees and Immigrants/Vietnamese Mutual Assistance Organization, The Western Pequot Nation, Warriors for Real Welfare Reform, Project 100 Community Center and the CT. Trans-Advocacy Coalition and others.

Regina received her MSW from the University of CT School of Social Work in 1997, with a concentration in Community Organizing.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Regina Dyton.  I identify myself as an out, African-American, lesbian, Buddhist, mother and activist [laughter].  I've lived with my partner, Kimberly, for the last, I think, eighteen years.  We've been officially married in our eyes (we didn’t do the state marriage) for sixteen years.  (We) have three children between us:  the youngest is nineteen, the others are grown and gone ---- and two grandchildren, eight and five, a nine month old pit bull named Keeva.  I keep saying that if the world wasn’t so full of injustice that got me foaming at the mouth and running out into it, Regina would indeed be at home making biscuits.

I think is very relevant to my life that I was born in 1953 in rural Kentucky, which was then rural segregated Kentucky, and my family moved when I was still an infant to Trenton, New Jersey, where I grew up in a blue collar, working neighborhood.  And I was bused every day from K through 12, twelve miles away to an upper middle-class white suburban school district.  And so I think it's very relevant that I grew up in three places at once because we returned to Kentucky every summer.

One of my favorite Kentucky times was Sunday mornings getting ready for church.  And I remember being about five ----four or five --- years old, my grandmother, her sisters, my aunts and cousins would all gather in her bedroom (we kicked my grandfather out) and they'd all be getting dressed together doing their last minute things.  And I remember looking up at my aunts, and they’re all big, broad women with great big breasts, and looking at their bras.  They’d all be in their bras and half slips before they put their dresses on.  And they had those bras you ordered from Sears & Roebuck or Montgomery Ward that had these stitches of concentric circles all around them.  They had lots of cleavage and then they would take a can of Pond’s talcum powder and put it down in the cleavage.

And I remember just going, “Oh, I can't wait to have a big old bra like that and I can just put something down in it.”  And I remember when they turned around that their butts look like big, upside-down Valentine's and they were just all juicy.  All of my uncles were so proud of what big butts their women had.  That meant that they were good farmers and good providers. They’d often slap them on the backside and say, “Oh, when I married her, she was just a skinny little heifer ---- there wasn’t hardly nothin’ to her.”  And I just wanted to be like that.  I thought they were beautiful.  I don't know if that's different, anything different, from a heterosexual little girl.

Before going to kindergarten, my mother, who’d grown up in segregated Kentucky, gave me, like, a summer's worth of censorship, of things I should not talk about because white people wouldn’t understand and would therefore think we were ignorant.  She said, “Don’t talk about pig feet, don’t talk about collard greens, don’t say we shout in church,” this, that and the other.  She censored my father from singing the blues.

It was horrible [laughter].

She also taught me that I had to be perfect and that if I was perfect and had good manners and was smart and was clean and was neat and was quiet, that white people wouldn’t be prejudiced any more.  [Laughter]  So went to kindergarten with the weight of that on my shoulders.

By the time I was an adolescent I was clearly aware of being in love with two particular girlfriends and we wrote love letters, absolute love letters ---- wrote poetry to one another.  We were one another's all-in-all, were going to run away and live together.  And an every once in awhile I’d have some kind of an erotic urge toward them, but my first thought would be, “Oh my God, that would scare her so badly.”

My mother suspected it and she kind of challenged that suspicion when I was a teenager, but she was it was really scared to say much of anything at all, so nothing happened.  So when I came out to her as an adult I had been married, divorced and had two children.  And she gave me a few warnings, you know, that it would be hard ---- not to say anything.  I pulled the black card ---- I compared it to: “Well, we’re black …. so you struggle, you do this, you do that and I’m prepared.”  I really did feel like growing up black, the time I did, prepared me to be queer.  I was like, “What else you got?  Bring it on!”

So at the end of the discussion the mother gave a great black grandmother response.  She said, “Well, I got my grandchildren ---- you just go on and do whatever you need to do.” [Laughter]

And so then she was very accepting ---- very accepting of my partner of sixteen years, you know, welcomed her to the family.  We did a commitment ceremony, she came with my stepfather ---- was, you know, just all good and nice.   She challenged her own brother in Kentucky, who told her that she shouldn't go to that thing, you know.  She told him off and said, “That’s my blood you’ talkin’ about . . . .”  So that’s what’s up with those allies ---- those black mothers.  You’ve just got to bring ‘em up.   You see, I don’t think she’d stand up in her church and tell the preacher off, but she’ll tell her brother off in a minute.

You can find so many black mamas, sitting on the porch, who love their gay sons to death and if you say anything about him she’ll probably jump off the porch and smack you ---- unless she's in church, where she’ll say amen.  And that same son is probably leading the choir and saying amen as they call him an abomination.  And so my vision really is seeing communities-of-color where we create space, spiritual space, all kinds of space, to love ourselves wholly, because it hurts so much when you're not doing that and I think you have to practice a lifetime to do it.  I want my mother and Miss Daisy and Miss Alice and all the women sitting on the porch to talk about “how is Regina and Kim's anniversary” the same way they would my brother and his wife.

I have two major objectives in my life.  One has to take my entire self wherever I go. That gets challenged a lot.  Sometimes just being who you are, without trying to start a fight, is perceived as an act of defiance.  The other is to daily expand the meaning of the term “my people.”  And in that I don't see LGBT issues as really separate from just issues for humanity.  And I've been, you know, criticized for that, “Just stick to the queer stuff.”

The challenge I see in Connecticut, for all the progress we have made:  One is to . . . . there's no reason that we don't have a transgender rights. And the L, G and B people should have been pushing it ---- insisting upon it.  Those are our ancestors.  Those are our leaders.  Those are the, you know, the starters of all kinds of LGBT rights actions, from Stonewall and before Stonewall and on.  If we were in our right minds we’d have a huge shrine, a transgender shrine.  Those were the people who were never able to hide.

We are communities, so more and more we say that out loud and I think that's important to acknowledge.  You know, certainly politically or when it comes to votes and stuff like that, it's good to gather people together based on interests, but at the same time we’re a small enough group as queer people that we'd never be able to carry a vote without being able to bring allies into it.

I think that people have identified communities because we need them.  I think we emotionally need them.  Politically, spiritually ---- I can think of all these reasons why we shouldn't have so many separate broken-down identities.  You know, for instance, I think it would be much better politically if we were all together focused on economic justice, rather than the various identity things.  So I think there are just so many more issues than marriage and civil rights, and we have this untrue stereotype of who LGBT people are ----that we're all upper income, no children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I believe it's at a really, really good intent and really good will that mainstream largely white organizations seek to diversify and go out and to bring in people-of-color ---- really, really good intent.  The first time they identify with an oppressed group is the realization of a varied gender identification or sexual orientation ---- when they come out to themselves.  And then, of course, they want to be with that group and create community.  And then they see somebody like me (or somebody less like me, with less education, less money and all that) and want to say, “C'mon, we’re your people.”

What they're not realizing is that for people with strong ethnic identity, grown up in it, they were born belonging to a people.  And that belonging, though it had certain . . . always had stipulations, like I don't be queer [laughter], but that belonging tells you without words, all your life, that it will buffer and protect you from the larger dominant white world.  And that it will comfort you when you have to go out into it and you’re battered by it, that (as) soon as the bus or your car or wherever your driving hits that line and you’re in your neighborhood ---- it smells right, it sounds right, the couch is going to sink just right beneath you, the people are just going to drop by and talk and it's going be great, it’s going to be alright.  So when white folks are then inviting you back out of that, it’s real scary to go over there. So we live these schizophrenic lives of, “Okay, I'll be black or I’ll be Puerto Rican or I’ll be East Indian over here at home and it’s real good.  Except, I'll be queer over there and I'm not really sure where I am.

I just think it's really important as we try to create safe spaces and diverse communities for LGBT people and for all folks who are different, to know how to, or learn how to, support and to NOT be in charge.  I think those of us who play any role in the dominant culture, one of our most important lessons is to not always need to be right and not be in charge.