GLAD is focused on ensuring that legal strategies to advance LGBTQ+ equity and equality acknowledge intersecting oppressions and advance interlocking social movements, particularly movements for racial justice.

GLAD’s work focuses on both harm reduction within systems that disproportionately target and harm LGBTQ+ people of color as well as the imperative to reform, dismantle and create alternatives to the systems themselves.  LGBTQ+ youth of color are over-disciplined in school, disproportionately targeted by police, and disproportionately represented in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. LGBTQ+ adults of color are disproportionately represented and face exceptionally brutal treatment in our systems of incarceration. The HIV epidemic continues to disproportionally harm communities of color, especially gay men of color, who lack equal access to life-saving prophylactic medications such as PrEP.

GLAD challenges discriminatory systems, policies, and practices; engages in intentional, sustained partnerships with LGBTQ communities of color; and works to build and maintain coalitions with allied social justice movements.