The Knights and Orchids Society is Them’s 2022 Now Awards honoree in Politics & Activism. The Now Awards honors 12 LGBTQ+ people who represent the cutting edge of queer culture today; read more here.
As Quentin Bell walks through the newly-acquired space for The Knights and Orchids Society, a non-profit providing free healthcare for Black LGBTQ+ folks throughout Alabama, he points to an empty corner of a small office with a newly built desk. It’s where a ring light and video equipment will go; he says that peer mentors, young people hired to guide new clients and provide free HIV testing, are excited to make videos to help spread word about their mission.
When building out the space, everyone and everything was considered. Child care is essential for staff and clients, so the first finished quarters is a book-lined playroom with a window peering into the main area. The Knights and Orchids Society knows its clients; TKO is Black TGNC folks serving Black TGNC folks, as they like to say. And for its adult clientele, a nearby supply closet houses condoms, emergency contraceptives, binders, tasers, gaffs, and tuck tapes. The bathroom gender markers are about to come down. No need.
The new space in Montgomery, Alabama is just steps from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Bell imagines it to be a safe haven for trans and GNC Alabamians from the harsh realities of a state that is not very good at tending to its citizens’ wellness. Alabama ranks near the bottom of U.S. states when it comes to healthcare access and public health, and in 2019 had the highest percentage of uninsured residents in the country. Hospitals are closing statewide, especially rural hospitals that serve Black residents, and the state ranked 45th for sexual health in 2021, according to the United Health Foundation.
At the same time, Alabama has become an increasingly hostile place for transgender people, especially trans youth. The state made headlines this spring for being the first to make it a felony to provide gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, despite pushback from parents and pediatricians. For adult patients, only three providers offer endocrinological (hormone) care in the entire state, according to the Campaign for Southern Equality, a scarcity that forces adult patients to drive long distances to meet their medical needs. But where state failures and insurance and government assistance stop, the Knights and Orchids Society, whose motto is “nurturing through non-traditional care,” steps in.
While national health coverage remains a conversation that legislators can only breach, TKO covers its patients in full; they never see a bill. Bell says that because TKO works partners with doctors outside the state in Georgia, they would still be able to get youth clients access to gender-affirming treatment despite the ban. They offer free gender-affirming primary care, medical care, STI testing, and endocrinology care, as well as food and housing assistance for Black LGBTQ+ folks in Alabama.
Despite intense media coverage of anti-trans legislation in states like Alabama, Florida, and Texas, the problem is a national one; over 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced in states across the country in 2022, according to the Human Rights Campaign. When it comes to organizing, it’s long been held that the South is not our nation’s burden — rather, it’s a place where solutions are forged. Scholars and activists have long looked to the South as the blueprint for how to mobilize in the face of great adversity. It is home to the civil rights movement, many a workers’ movement, and is often used as a thermometer for culture shifts. With this in mind, the work being done by a group like TKO is more than a lifeline for marginalized queer Alabamians; it could serve as a model for the future of community-organized healthcare in states that are hostile to queer, Black, trans, and other communities.
Bell grew up in a small town outside Selma, Alabama, where his grandmother forced all the grandkids to eat off plates that were broken down by a gendered binary system: blue plates for boys and pink plates for girls. “If you were me and you defied the system, you didn't eat it all,” he says. “You went to bed hungry a lot of nights.” While attending Alabama State University in 2009, a historically Black university in Montgomery, Bell founded Alpha Sigma Omega, a fraternity that is the historical primogenitor to TKO. But the gender binaries of fraternity and sorority culture limited the people who could be involved. At the same time, Bell joined the House of Mysteek, a Southern chosen family akin to those in New York’s ballroom scene.
“My house family saved my life,” Bell says. “Just being around people who got it, who were in the same situation — people who had left home, who were not abandoned but weren't interested in going back home, and had to figure it out.” When several members of the House began to test positive for HIV in 2012, Bell reimagined the fraternity as an organization that ultimately became The Knights and Orchids. In its infancy, the organization and its membership provided housing for runaways and those looking for a new start away from unsupportive families in rural Alabama towns, many of them en route to Atlanta. Bell says he wants to make things easier for LGBTQ+ Alabamians so that they all don’t have to start from square one, hungry and unable to eat from his assigned plate, like he did.
Bell used his first grant from the Transgender Justice Funding Project to incorporate as a non-profit and put on a small conference on HIV testing. They soon began showing up outside clubs, paying people $20 to get tested for HIV. TKO has since grown from a small five person staff in one office in Selma, Alabama, to 15 staffers spanning two offices, with another in the works. They treat dozens of clients with free gender-affirming care, medical and mental health care, and have raised $200,000 for its FAITH services (an acronym for Fast, Affirming, Innovative Testing and Healthcare) to combat the state’s high HIV infection rates. TKO is on Alabama’s HIV epidemic planning board and helped to identify Black trans women as most susceptible to testing positive because of needle sharing for hormone treatment.
But despite big wins for the LGBTQ+ community and increased notoriety in a state often hostile to queer visibility, TKO has seen some backlash. In December, the group faced public threats and homophobic slurs in a hotel lobby where they held their annual retreat. “Our trans youth can't envision a future where they will be safe because instances like this happen far too often and can lead to even worse outcomes,” they wrote in a statement on Facebook.
One of TKO’s peer navigators, Zuriel Hooks, was among those in attendance. Hooks found TKO when she was 17, after calling every other trans-affirming organization in the state looking for help getting hormones. “[TKO] understands where I’m coming from, especially for being a trans-led organization. They don't need the whole story. They just know,” Hooks says. She told Bell she didn’t know if she wanted to continue living had she not found the organization, where she now works to help other people get healthcare and HIV testing.
Hooks’ story is emblematic of the kind of mutual care at the center of TKO’s mission, and why Bell also believes the rest of the country should look to the South for a layout on how to care for one another in these rough times. “The change that happens, it happens when the South is ready for change to happen,” Bell says. “Nothing in this country happens without going through the South first.” TKO’s response to the South’s structural antagonism is to seek out the Black trans people who need care the most and organize care for them for free — an act that, in the process, helps combat what it means to live at the intersection of overlapping oppressions.
It’s a radical way to approach uplifting one’s community. But for Bell and TKO, it’s simply their heritage. “We have the blueprint — the [civil rights] foot soldiers already showed us what to do,” Bell says. “They showed us how to organize.”
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