Kay Whitlock

Kay Whitlock is the National Representative for LGBT Issues for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization working for peace and demilitarization, human rights, social justice, economic security, and human rights in the United States and throughout the world.  

An experienced activist and organizer in movements for racial, gender, LGBT, economic, and environmental justice, she has helped to shape and strengthen the AFSC’s work and witness for LGBT rights and recognition since 1980. Under her leadership, AFSC has emphasized linking LGBT justice struggles to broader movements for justice and human rights, and has centralized racial, gender, and economic justice in AFSC’s own pro-LGBT analysis and organizing. Her longtime association with AFSC and its spiritually-centered vision of nonviolence is informed by her own spiritual practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. 

She is the author of In a Time of Broken Bones:  A Call for Dialogue on Hate Violence and the Limitations of Hate Crimes Legislation, an AFSC Justice Visions Working Paper (2001) and AFSC's landmark Bridges of Respect: Creating Support for Lesbian and Gay Youth (1988), the first national resource guide for adults working with queer youth. She also has authored numerous articles and essays on a variety of social justice topics that have been published in various periodicals and anthologies.  Her most recent essay, "Our Enemies, Ourselves: Why Anti-Violence Movements Must Replace the Dualism of  'Us and Them' with an Ethic of Interdependence," will be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in the anthology, Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, scheduled for publication in 2004.

Kay also is a former AFSC regional director. She served for several years as Director of Educational Resources for Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania.

She is a former member and co-chairperson of the board of directors of (what was then) the National Gay Task Force and former chair of the National NOW Lesbian Rights Committee. 

Born in 1949 and raised in southern Colorado, Kay now lives in Missoula, Montana with her partner, Phoebe Hunter, and their two cats.  

(This biographical statement provided by Kay Whitlock.)

Biography Date: January, 2004

Know Kay Whitlock? Tell us your experience.
(All entries are reviewed by the LGBT-RAN office before posting.)