Throughout the month we pay tribute to the Fund's five co-founders ELAS, all lesbian feminist activists. The ELAS Fund was founded 18 years ago by Amalia E. Fischer P., Izabel Cristina Ferreira, Madalena Guilhon, Neusa das Dores Pereira and Raquel Martins Silva. Each week in August we feature one of them on our social media (check out the Facebook and Instagram).

 

We also published an interview with KK Verdade, executive coordinator of the ELAS Fund and lesbian feminist activist. For KK, "having been founded by lesbian women gives the ELAS Fund an extra sensitivity. When the organization looks at the field of discrimination against women, it has an extra sensitivity, which was a gift, a legacy from the lesbian founders."

 

KK Verdade has a long relationship with the ELAS Fund: she got to know the ELAS Fund when she was a member of Coturno de Vênus - Associação Lésbica Feminista de Brasília, which was a supported group. After that, she was a member of the ELAS Fund Board, was a program manager and since 2014 has been the executive coordinator.

 

Celebrating the Day of Lesbian Visibility, KK talked about her career as an activist, the relationship between the ELAS Fund and the lesbian women's movement and the current moment of rearticulation and strengthening of this movement in the country:

"We have already transformed a lot in terms of lesbian visibility and cultural transformation, but from the point of view of public policies there is still a lot to be achieved, a lot of work to be done. From the point of view of academic production, the lesbian movement has a lot to contribute, with gender and feminist studies, etc. There is still a lot to invest in this field. I've seen more and more lesbian writers and thinkers, I've seen various collectives springing up all over Brazil, not just in the capital, but in the interior of the country".

 

"It's really a moment of rearticulation of the movement. And even though we call it the 'lesbian women's movement', we see that there are many different lesbian identities being mobilized, there are many ways of being lesbian: you can be lesbian and be a woman, you can be lesbian and not be a woman, lesbian and black, lesbian and young, lesbian and from the countryside and the forest, lesbian and indigenous, there are many political subjects within this lesbian identity that is being rearticulated in this century," says KK.