2021 Stanford Pride Awards
Each year, Stanford Pride honors members of the Stanford community for their contributions to the LGBTQ+ community. We recognized three outstanding recipients for the Stanford Pride Award of Merit. Read about our 2021 Awardees below. Award recipients were recognized at our October 23, 2021, Stanford Pride Reunion virtual event.
Angel Fabian ‘95
Co-Founder, Mi Vida Loca Collective (aka La Familia de Stanford)
Angel has dedicated their career to connect, advocate for, uplift and celebrate community members of the LGBTQ community, at Stanford and beyond. They are the co-founder of Mi Vida Loca Collective (aka La Familia de Stanford), the first student-led, Latinx social support group at Stanford. With more than 20 years of progressive policy, advocacy, and management experience across a range of public health settings, including community-based organizations, community health centers and public health departments, Angel possesses a strong and unwavering commitment to the intersectional LGBTQ community as a Latinx HIV/AIDS, POC LGBTQI and immigrant rights advocate. They are an inspiration to the Latinx and Two-Spirit communities and were recently featured in Vogue’s article, “How Indigenous Two-Spirits Marked Pride Month This Year,” sharing their Zapotec culture. Their ability to cross boundaries and interconnect identities, and transcend culture, gender, and nationality, to shine a light on the importance and contributions of communities of color in the LGBTQ movement, make Angel an ideal candidate for this honor.
Ernesto Martinez ‘98
La Serenata, Author, Filmmaker
Ernesto Javier Martínez is a queer Latino writer, educator, and filmmaker based in Oregon. His creative work explores Latinx community and culture through the eyes of LGBTQ+ youth. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lambda Literary Award, the Imagen Award (commonly known as the “Latin Golden Globes,” the HBO Latinx Film Award, and two International Latino Book Awards. In 2018, Martínez published When We Love Someone We Sing to Them, the first bilingual children’s book published in the US about a boy who loves a boy. The American Library Association honored it as one of thirteen top children’s books of 2018 with LGBT content. In 2019, he wrote and co-produced a short film entitled La Serenata (“The Serenade”), about two parents who struggle with their Mexican musical tradition when their son requests a love song for another boy. This film premiered in Hollywood, won numerous best film awards, and is currently available on HBO Max. In 2020, Martínez became a Sesame Workshop Writers’ Room Fellow in NYC, where he apprenticed in preschool children’s media and wrote his first animated TV pilot. He is currently a freelance writer for Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and Silvergate Media.
Robert Croonquist ‘70
Professor, Photographer, Activist
Founder: Youth Arts New York
I am nominating Robert Croonquist for your recognition on the 50th anniversary of Gay Pride at Stanford. Before going into his significant contributions to Stanford Pride’s mission, I want to place them in context. Croonquist represents a pioneering generation of gay activism; the movement is much different now but stands on the shoulders of people like him. He was active very early:
He laid the groundwork for the Gay People’s Union in 1970, and the initial organizing meetings were held in the commune where he was living on Ramona Street. He was the first member of that organization to set up a table on White Plaza announcing its existence and mission.
He was a founding member of the San Francisco Radical Faeries in 1975
He worked with Stanford graduate/founding member of the Mattachine Society, Harry Hay, to create and co-lead workshops called Sex Magick, a model that continues to be an important healing tool in the community today.
Long before it became fashionable, Croonquist was a radical “gender-bender”. For five years in the 1970s he lived in a communal house of gay and trans activists at 18th and Castro, working closely with Harvey Milk and the community of artists (the Angels of Light, Kaliflower Commune and Hula Palace) that were defining the modern gay liberation movement. He inherited Martin Worman’s Cockette archives which he donated to the New York Library for the Performing Arts. The collection includes 90 hours of taped interviews, including a deathbed interview with disco star Sylvester James. He was the executive producer of the prize-winning documentary, The Cockettes (2002).
Croonquist’s professional life was in the trenches, an openly gay teacher in the borough of Queens, NY, in a high school populated by immigrants and the BIPOC community. He developed curricula that inventively connected immigrant and BIPOC students to the broad agenda of not only LBGTQ issues but global literature and culture, world peace and environmental sustainability. From that work he founded Youth Arts New York whose signature initiative Hibakusha Stories (www.youthartsnewyork.org, www.hibakushastories.org) brought over 100 atomic bomb survivors to over 45,000 students in New York and worldwide, always making the connection between the oppression of the LGBTQ+, racism, colonialism and militarism. He is a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and is an active member of Rise and Resist and Gays Against Guns.
In 2019, he was led the logistics team for the 2019 Queer Liberation March and Rally on the Great Lawn of Central Park, marking the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion and notably featuring the voices of the transgender and BIPOC communities.
I am glad that your committee can recognize more than one person to embody your broad mission. You may want to recognize others who have contributed financially, legislatively, or creatively, but Robert Croonquist is an ideal person (among others) to recognize on this occasion, the fiftieth anniversary. He helped lay the foundations on which Stanford Pride has flourished.