By Charlie Kolodziej
“The first core tenant is silliness,” said Lelia Woods of their Artistic Alphabet Mafia (TAAM), a LGBTQ+ crafting group for Covid-cautious queers. “I think the second is creating as inclusive of a space as possible.”
When Woods first moved to Chicago in the fall of 2021, they initially had a hard time finding spaces that were inclusive of both their queer and neurodivergent identities. They began dreaming of a group that would welcome folks who had been feeling similarly left-out of more mainstream LGBTQ+ events. “Every event that I do now, is a space that I wish existed when I moved to Chicago,” said Woods.
At the time, Woods was staying in a co-living community, an experience that taught them the tools they needed to actively build and sustain community bonds. One of TAAM’s more popular events, a queer community potluck, started in Wood’s co-living household as the group’s evening meals. After moving out, Woods knew they wanted to continue the event in some fashion. They hosted their first official TAAM event, a puppet-themed tea party, at Comfort Station in May of last year.
The Artistic Alphabet Mafia now hosts three monthly events: their queer crafting potluck, a book swap and a sketching field trip where the group visits different Chicago area sites for drawing inspiration, such as the Chicago Cultural Center or the Lincoln Park Zoo. For the group’s last event in May, they went on a tour of Graceland Cemetery with the Chicago Mushroom Club, a group dedicated to educating Chicagoans about their mycological neighbors.
“Creating spaces that feel like they’re a glitch in reality is something that Chicago’s incredibly good at. Like the fact that there’s an entire comedy troupe that’s rat-themed. There’s the Puppetqueers group.” said Woods. “My brain will just come up with a random idea like, ‘What if we did figure drawing in a sideshow-themed ice cream shop?,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s gonna happen.’” So the group went to Sideshow Gelato for carnival-themed sketchiness.
Depending on the event, attendance ranges from a tight knit group of ten folks to upwards of fifty crafty queers in one space, with folks coming from across Chicagoland. At the group’s last queer crafting potluck in May, two Naperville teens, Emma and Segi, made the long trip on public-transit to attend the event, their first LGBTQ+ social gathering outside of Pride.
“I just was looking for queer events online, and this one popped up…so I dragged them with me,” Emma said.
Emma spent the event working on a charm bracelet, and Segi made an armband in the colors of the Palestinian flag. TAAM also partnered with Out of the Closet Charity to provide a rack of gender-inclusive clothes for attendees to take home free of charge.
Part of having an inclusive space for everyone also means creating a Covid-cautious environment. Most of Alphabet Mafia’s events are mask-required and feature air filtration units as well as a mix of indoor and outdoor spaces. Woods chooses venues with low external stimuli paired with calming music for neurodivergent accessibility. “If I’m feeling overwhelmed, probably somebody else is feeling overwhelmed,” said Woods, who is themselves on the autism spectrum.
More spaces for neurodivergent, disabled, and Covid-cautious folks to socialize are beginning to pop up in the city, in part thanks to a major shift in the way LGBTQ+ organizers are thinking about their events, said Woods. Parallel Play is one such fellow organization hosting #mask4mask mixers for the Covid-cauitous LGBTQ+ community. Their Pride month Dilly Dally party will be held at Andersonville’s Raygun on June 15.
“I think that a lot of disabled people feel really hopeless right now, because it takes time to create spaces that don’t exist currently,” Woods added. “Even though COVID has been around for a minute, I think people are realizing this is here to stay and we need to permanently alter the way we’re organizing for us to not all be disabled or die.”
Woods hopes to shift the focus of TAAM to larger scale events that maintain the vibe and values of the more intimate meetups. That includes creating more opportunities for larger-scale collaborative art projects like drag events, TAMM’s upcoming “Rainbow Runway” fashion show or the community queer-quilting project the group completed last year.
TAAM’s Pride month schedule is a little shorter given that just about every LGBTQ+-affiliated group in the city is hosting programming this month, said Woods. The group is however planning to host a queer animation screening with the digital animation gallery Corrupted Frames. The “Big Emotions” show takes place Saturday, June 22, 6-8 p.m. at The Brewed in Logan Square.
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