Biography
Drew Heckman
What do you do? I began my advocacy at home by founding the Queer Nebraska Youth Network, which provided social events, confidential online discussion, and connections to resources to over 1,000 LGBTQ+ young people. I later became the Human Rights Campaign’s first-ever Nebraska Field Organizer, leading the state’s work to change laws, policies, hearts, and minds. After law and policy school on the East Coast, I returned to the Midwest to join the LGBTQ Immigrant Rights Initiative at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago. Representing LGBTQ+ asylum seekers from West Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean, I helped clients achieve release from detention and permanent immigration relief in the United States. As a Senior Engagement Officer at Rainbow Railroad, I oversee the Community Support Teams program in the U.S., the Queer Refugee Internship program, the Rainbow Housing Drive, and the Community Access Fund, all of which exist to empower and uplift LGBQTI+ refugees, asylum seekers, and other queer and trans migrants.
How did the GNSS concentration shape your career? Double-concentrating in Gender & Sexuality Studies alongside Sociology gave me the tools to understand how ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality are continuously defined and redefined socially, politically, and personally. I credit the GNSS department for helping me realize how much of what I had been taught about the world was just “a copy of a copy of a copy for which there is no original.” Though initially a destabilizing realization, I’ve learned that there is so much creative potential in that reality. We can design our relationships, our communities, and our societies according to principles we actually care about—like equity, justice, and human dignity, rather than power, control, or extraction. Per Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.”