June 2026
by Chyenne Mallinson, LEEAD & ETB: Regional Project Manager

Just Outside the Frame

Tucked into the pen holder at the corner of my desk stands a small pride flag from my first year living in NYC. It sits just outside the frame of my camera, invisible to anyone I meet with unless I were to intentionally pick it up and wave it on screen. Most people on Zoom never see it, but I note it every day. As we celebrate Pride Month, I’ve been thinking about how that little flag mirrors my own experience of queerness.  

I am a queer woman of color, but my queerness is not always immediately legible to others and folks don’t often see it unless I signal it. And signaling itself is more complex and often problematic than it sounds. What people often read as “queer identifiers” or even community-defined signifiers — certain styles, body modifications, aesthetics, mannerisms — are shaped by history, media, harmful stereotypes, and dominant representations of queerness that have centered white LGBTQ+ communities. Often, ideas of queer visibility were not built with people of color in mind; but for myself, of course, I see it every day. 

I never had an official coming out conversation because I never thought it was necessary. I always knew I was queer, and I assumed everyone else knew it too. If there was a question, the answer was “Duh.” I never hid it, I spoke openly about it, and I moved through the world assuming it was obvious. Over time, though, I learned it wasn’t — especially in professional settings.  

In these spaces, even in equity work, visibility shapes what gets noticed. Not because people are intentionally excluding LGBTQ+ perspectives. More often, it’s because what is not immediately visible can quietly become an afterthought. Over time, I’ve come to understand visible queerness in the workplace and across fields as something of a barometer — not for whether people care, but for how intentionally LGBTQ+ experiences are elevated in our work, the field, and our conversations about equity. When queer people are not present or visibly identifiable as so on teams, in organizations, or in the room, LGBTQ+ experiences can quietly become peripheral to the conversation of progress rather than an integral part of an intersectional approach to equity. In fields like evaluation, that can shape what questions get asked, what inequities are considered relevant, what data gets disaggregated, and whose stories get told. 

But visibility comes with its own costs, thus, the paradox of hypervisibility in professional spaces. When identifiably and openly queer people are in the room, even in the most equity-driven spaces, there can be an unspoken expectation that visibility should naturally translate into responsibility; especially when there are only one or two queer people on a team, inclusion becomes something they are expected to carry. The responsibility to raise the question no one else thought to ask; to point out what might be missing from the conversation; to educate, advocate, explain, and represent.  

For queer people of color, that burden rarely exists in isolation. The labor of representation is often layered, carrying not just queerness into the room, but race, culture, gender, lived experience, and the ways those identities shape how systems are experienced. For many, being asked, either explicitly or implicitly, to speak for a community is not new. It is something we have often navigated for much of our lives, carrying the labor of representation tied to race, culture, or ethnicity long before queerness entered the conversation. Visibility can mean being seen, but it can also mean being quietly expected to carry conversations that others feel less equipped to hold. The expectation to become the voice of inclusion can feel familiar, even when it is exhausting. 

In equity work especially, where so many of us care deeply about inclusion, these expectations are often unintentional as they come from good intentions — from wanting to learn, wanting to get it right. There is, however, a difference between being welcomed into a conversation and being expected to hold it on others’ behalf. 

I have found myself thinking about this tension lately. Does it take waving a flag on camera to initiate conversations on LGBTQ+ and intersectional experiences? Does signaling your queerness charge you with being the sole driver of these conversations?  If inclusion only happens when someone visibly queer is in the room, raises their hand, tells their story, or advocates for their community, then we as a field are still relying on visibility rather than intentionality. 

At Expanding the Bench® (ETB), our recent community conversations have inspired us to think more intentionally about not just representation in our network, but in culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE). Our team has been thinking about how we can create more opportunities to learn about CREE in ways that reflect the fullness and complexity of different communities. 

Just as ETB has highlighted other culturally grounded approaches to evaluation, including the 2022 & 2024 learning series on Culturally Responsive Indigenous Evaluation® (CRIE), we believe there is value in creating more opportunities to learn from the diverse ways communities understand equity, culture, and identity through evaluation. Starting this Pride Month, we want to pick that work back up again. Later this summer, ETB is planning a panel conversation exploring CREE in and alongside LGBTQ+ communities, creating space to reflect on what LGBTQ+, community-centered evaluation can and should look like in practice. If this conversation resonates with you — whether through your work, lived experience, scholarship, practice, or curiosity — we invite you to reach out. We are especially interested in connecting with evaluators and practitioners who may be interested in participating in or helping inform the conversation. 

I look forward to shaping this and future conversations at ETB and thinking about how we can continue to be intentional in diverse representation in our community and in CREE. Though my queerness may be easy to miss in meetings or conferences, it is a prominent lens through which I approach this work, and it reminds me that some of the things most worth making space for are not always the things we notice first. Equity work asks us to make space for the stories we do not immediately see, to ask different questions before someone has to raise their hand, and to build communities where people do not have to signal who they are for their experiences to matter.