Mohamed Q. Amin (he/they) is an Indo-Caribbean, queer, and Muslim immigrant rights activist. He is a native of Guyana, who currently resides in Richmond Hill, Queens. On the eve of the 2013 NYC Pride Parade, Amin, his partner, and his siblings survived a vicious attack for being members of the LGBTQ+ community in their Caribbean-centric southeast Queens neighborhood. In 2015, in response to the anti-LGBTQ hate violence, he founded the Caribbean Equality Project (CEP), a non-profit organization that advocates for Caribbean LGBTQ+ voices in New York City. His transnational advocacy and community organizing are rooted in gender equity, racial justice, dismantling and decolonizing systems of oppression, healing, and ending anti-LGBTQ hate violence in the Caribbean diaspora.
Amin is a survivor, a cultural producer, and the director of My Truth, My Story, CEP’s multimedia oral history documentary series that curates “coming-out” narratives of queer & TGNC people of Caribbean heritage in the diaspora. Grounded in the power of storytelling, the archive of stories reveals struggles with suicide, mental health, family acceptance and rejection, the intersection of religion and sexual orientation, and HIV/AIDS.
As an intersectional community organizer, political activator, and coalition leader, Amin has been profiled in many media outlets, including Gay City News, Mashable, Vice, them, the Gotham Gazette, the Queens Eagle, the Queens Public Library Digital Archives, Caribbean Life newspaper, and the West Indian newspaper.
In 2015, Amin became the first Indo-Caribbean LGBTQ activist featured on BRIC TV, an award-winning cable network in Brooklyn. Following the horrific Pulse nightclub shooting, Amin’s relentless advocacy to uplift queer Muslim voices was recognized with a proclamation from the New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito at the 2016 NYC Council Eid ul-Fitr Celebration. That same year, he received a Citation of Honor from the Queens Borough President Melinda Katz and New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm at the 2016 Queens Borough Hall LGBTQ Pride Month Celebration. In 2017, Amin was honored with a proclamation by New York State Senator James Sanders Jr. to recognize his leadership, community organizing, and fearless advocacy in New York State’s 10th Senate District.
In 2018, Amin co-organized Breaking Silences, the first international Caribbean LGBTQ conference in Toronto, Canada. In 2019, he was selected as a New York State ambassador for World Pride, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion in NYC. That same year, he was honored by Gay City News with an Impact Award for his work with the Caribbean Equality Project, the first for a Caribbean LGBTQ immigrant organizer in New York City. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Amin curated Queer Caribbeans of NYC | Stonewall 50, the first-ever multimedia historical retrospective showcase of the racial and cultural intersections of Caribbean LGBTQ immigrants’ activism in New York City. The exhibition and archive documented 30 years of Caribbean LGBTQ rights organizing with an extensive repository of never-before-seen photographs, news footage, artifacts, and oral histories with well-respected Caribbean LGBTQ rights advocates. As part of the Queens Museum’s Year of Uncertainty, Amin curated Live Pridefully: Love and Resilience within Pandemics, an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrated queer and trans Caribbean resilience through a racial justice lens, while fostering critical conversations related to pride, migration, surviving colliding pandemics, and coming out narratives. Portraits of Caribbean LGBTQ+ immigrants anchored the exhibition, with oral Afro and Indo-Caribbean migrant histories and stories driven to construct healing through storytelling, embodied resilience, and intersectional dialogue on postcolonial belonging, anti-Asian hate violence, and Black trans liberation.
Amin has organized and led countless LGBTQ educational community engagement forums, participated in panel discussions, and conducted informative presentations at New York City public schools and community organizations to break the silence on Caribbean LGBTQ issues.
Amin is a graduate of the New York City Anti-Violence Project’s Community Leadership Institute and Speaker’s Bureau: Intensive Organizing Training. Amin holds a B.A. in Economics, has over 14 years of management experience in retail banking and financial literacy program development in immigrant communities, and is currently pursuing a master’s in Mental Health Counseling at his alma mater, Queens College.
Williams is also a 2017 Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellow, and 2017 recipient of the Bronx Council on the Arts’s Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) award, and he is currently participating in the 2020 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.
