CedarGardens

I sat down to write this letter three times, and three times I found myself listing what we built: the workshops, the partnerships, the press. That's not this letter. That's the next page.

This one is about you.

Somewhere in the last ten years, more than sixty nights out and over a hundred and fifty rooms full of people happened; talks, workshops, arguments that ran long, questions nobody was brave enough to ask anywhere else. I don't remember most of the agendas anymore. I remember who was in the room. I remember the person who came to their first munch too nervous to make eye contact, and a year later was the one making sure the next nervous newcomer felt welcome. I remember watching people figure out, often for the first time in their lives, that the thing they'd been ashamed of wasn't a flaw to manage, it was just them, and it was allowed to be loved.

We marched every Pride week we could. We sat across the table from LGBT organizations who needed to understand us before they could stand with us, and more often than not, they did. None of that was for the website. It was because the people in this community deserved a world that made a little more room for them, even if we could only carve out a sliver of it.

I've always believed access to this community was a privilege, not a right; that belief hasn't changed. But I think I understated, back then, what the privilege actually was. It was never the privilege of getting in. It was the privilege of getting to know all of you. Of watching people arrive guarded and leave known. Of building something where a person's worst-kept secret could finally be their most ordinary Tuesday.

Some of you found partners here. Some of you found yourselves. Some of you found people to sit with in the ugliest, most frightened parts of figuring out who you are, and that is not a small thing to have given each other.

We're not running events anymore, Lebanon made that impossible, and most of the people who built this with me are scattered across the world now. But nothing that actually mattered about CedarGardens lived in a calendar. It lived in you, and it still does.

If you're reading this and you were part of it, thank you. Truly. A hand cannot clap alone, and for all this time, mine never had to.

— Margrave