Yasmin Nair's Living Expenses

Dear friends and supporters,

I’m writing to ask you to support my fundraising campaign to assist with rent and urgent living costs.

Due to several ongoing challenges, including health problems that have compromised my mobility and the state of journalism and the writing world, I’ve fallen behind many months on my rent.  My very generous and patient landlord has made it clear that I need to  start to catch up on my overdue balance by April 1 if I’m to stay on.  Meeting my goal within the next month will help me stay in the apartment and help provide some stability for the coming year.

Your support will:

• Help me establish much-needed stability as I continue to pursue my writing career. I’ve consistently produced work that has explored facets and perspectives that very few have explored in public discourse.  That has meant taking critical, nuanced, and incisive positions on matters like immigration, sex work, and queer politics.  The principles I uphold in my writing are followed through in my activism, which includes serving as the (unpaid) Policy Director of Gender JUST, where I work hard to keep the organisation running after steering it through a challenging rough patch.  As a co-founder of Against Equality, I've been part of a collective which challenges the mainstream while pushing for alternatives to marriage, prison, and the military.

• Focus on getting more paid projects. As a journalist, I’ve covered the Chicago queer scene for Windy City Times and my work has appeared in numerous journals, publications, and anthologies. Besides event-reporting and book reviewing,  my series of interviews and hard-hitting analyses of Howard Brown Health Center was the earliest and the most detailed coverage on that institution.  This year, I’ve already been commissioned and/or had interest shown in several projects, including one on queers and sex offender registries and another on immigration.  An exciting new series of long interviews with prominent writers and activists is also forthcoming.   Unfortunately, the publishing world has lagged in valuing the labour of writers, and I’ve been amongst those challenging the current model.  Some publishers, like Tracy Baim at Windy City Times, are working with innovative funding strategies, but times are still rough.  My current appeal is part of this larger context,and I encourage you to consider ways to resist this volatile and often exploitative system.

• Give me some breathing space so that I can finally begin to shop around my book project, Strange Love: Neoliberalism and Affect!