From The Advocate Magazine and Partnership with Glad, this is LGBTQ and A.

I'm Jeffrey Masters, and for a while I've been watching as social justice slideshows have taken over Instagram.

It kind of seems like everyone is becoming an activist. And I don't think

this is bad by any means, but it does make it more difficult to know who, in addition to posting

on social media, is also doing more traditional forms of activism. Who is doing work on the ground,

attending protests, planning actions, who is engaging the appropriate

parties behind the scenes to try to achieve certain things? Or am I just wrong? And this is all

activism and that's okay. You know, I'm not the first person to say this, but there is a

performative aspect of social media that has caused us to become more obsessed with appearing to be good people

and less obsessed with actually being good people. Good people there can be defined in any number

of ways. So that is all to say that I do not know exactly how I feel about this new form of

activism, and you will hear that in today's interview with Adam Eli.

Adam is an activist, a community organizer, and he clarified a lot for me, helping me to reframe

how I think about social media. Adam is also the author of the book, The New Queer Conscience,

and he really takes a global

view when it comes to his work. The thesis of everything he does is that queer people

anywhere are responsible for queer people everywhere. I learned a lot from Adam, and I think

you will too. So let's hear it.

I'm excited to talk to you because I am so fascinated by this rise of Instagram activism.

And I don't mean that in a pejorative way.

But it does complicate or change how I think about what activism is or isn't. So I wonder if you can start off by talking about how you personally define activism and how that definition has changed with social media?

So I'll enter the first part first.

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