At this year’s Pride festival, out of habit I found myself heading to the Connecticut TransAdvocacy Coalition table to chat with Jerimarie Liesegang.
That is one of the strangest things about death — that moment of forgetting that someone is gone, and then quickly remembering.
Liesegang passed in November 2020; had this been in another time — not during a pandemic marked by empty calendar pages — her absence would have been so much more immediately obvious.
The way to know you were at any protest in Greater Hartford was by running into Jerimarie. We met through anti-war actions during the GWB administration, but last week, she was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame primarily for her role as an advocate for transgender rights. She was doing it long before anyone was posting preferred pronouns in their social media bios.
Liesegang’s papers — and the award — are held by the GLBTQ Archives in the Elihu Burritt Library at Central Connecticut State University.
“Social justice” leadership was the theme for all of this year’s inductees, which also included Kica Matos and Teresa C. Younger. (You can view tribute videos for Liesegang, Matos, and Younger)
The ceremony, held at the Riverfront, honored: Enola G. Aird, Pat Baker, Khalilah L. Brown-Dean, Rabbi Donna Berman, Glynda Carr, Callie Heilmann, Marilyn Ondrasik, and Pamela Selders, also, for their work.
Cynicism is easy all too often, but this ceremony, this occasion, pushed pause on that as those being recognized showed sincere respect to one another. If there is growing divisiveness, it was not among those here being honored for their social justice work.
Jane
Oh! I never knew Jerimarie except that she was a regular at the restaurant I was a server at years ago. She was lovely and we all liked waiting on her and her partner. I’m sorry to hear of her death.
Kudos to the women honored here. I look forward to learning more about them and their work.
Richard
Thank you Kerri for this tribute to three remarkable social justice warriors living and working in our communities in Connecticut.
Yes that time of “forgetting that someone is gone.” How many times during the last few months has that happened to me. When I have gone for the phone to talk with Jerimarie about some issue, to run by her my latest project or to say to her, “we must take action on this or that.” Then suddenly remembering she is gone.
I had the honor and the privileged to have worked with her for many years in both the Transgender movement and in the founding of Queers Without Borders. We began QWB when at an anti-war demo a straight leftist said to us, “I thought you “gays” were only interested in marriage. I was taken aback as she was talking to folks who had come out against the war in Vietnam (1965), demonstrated, arrested, teargassed, cops baton upside our heads, protesting the illegal, unjust war.
QWB dedicated itself to a queer perspective on many issues that our members were working in and had been working in for years. We were a group of Anarchists, Socialists, artists, LGBTQI+ and straights, wow we even had a couple of republicans leading one activist to say, “This is the first time I have felt at home in any group.”
Jerimarie’s leadership in this group and within the Trans community will never be forgotten by any of us who knew her, called her comrade, and worked feverishly for that new day when there was true liberation and justice for all.
I was even prouder still the day that I was able to help deliver her archives to CCSU so her contributions to our world would long be remembered.
Jerimarie Liesegang Presente’