This year, them. is honoring Mariah Moore and the House of Tulip as part of our annual Now List, our awards for LGBTQ+ visionaries. The House of Tulip, which Moore co-founded with Milan Nicole Sherry amid the pandemic last summer, works to provide housing solutions for trans and gender non-conforming people in Louisiana. On June 21, the organization celebrated its one-year anniversary with a summer celebration featuring appearances from artists such as Indya Moore and Yves. Below, them. contributor Michael Love Michael speaks with Moore about her vital work and her vision for trans Lousianans.
Mariah Moore is proof that few have mobilized for change last year as powerfully as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
As the co-founder and co-director of House of Tulip alongside Milan Nicole Sherry, Moore has spent the pandemic actively “building an inheritance for trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) community in Louisiana,” as her organization’s website states.
The House of Tulip, founded in New Orleans last June, creates housing solutions and pathways to home ownership for TGNC people, all while connecting them to employment and educational opportunities. Moore says the House of Tulip — whose name comes from an acronym for “Trans United Leading Intersectional Progress” — was born out of a mutual aid collective established by her and other community leaders to assist those affected by COVID-19.
“At the time, we were all in this huge state of shock, because none of us had ever experienced anything like this in our lifetime,” Moore tells them. “We were already a vulnerable community of people before this experience, but those making minimum wage, or even without a living wage, or community members engaged in sex work, or those who were undocumented — they were dealing with this uncertainly the most.”
As Moore and other organizers collaborated to raise crisis relief funds, George Floyd was murdered and the nation erupted in spirited protest. At the same time, the murders of Black trans women and gender non-conforming people hit an all-time national high in 2020, with 44 deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign — the most violent year on record since HRC began tracking anti-trans hate crimes in 2013. Plus, the Trump administration was doing everything it could to roll back trans protections, especially in the housing sector. Last July, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters to deny transgender people access to single-sex shelters.
“Every single day, it was something new and terrible,” Moore says of the time. “Nobody is making sure that those of us [who are] most vulnerable are really taken care of. So, we were collecting data about people’s greatest needs, and we realized that how we redistribute wealth within our own community could impact how we were taken care of.”
Within a month of fundraising online, House of Tulip had collected $20,000 in donations — money that Moore says went right back into the community, covering essentials including phone bills, electricity bills, groceries, and medication. This support helped Moore and Sherry realize that bigger things were possible.
“I said to her, ‘We could really do something with this and it could be transformative,’ and we started talking about housing [solutions], and what it would look like to provide that,” Moore says.
The fundraiser ended up exceeding its original $400,000 goal last year, enabling House of Tulip to buy a property that they plan to transform into four housing units for trans and gender non-conforming people in New Orleans. Donations toward that goal came from famous supporters like Janet Mock and members of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. But the ones that touched Moore the most were the smallest gifts.
