About

My name is Rose Decleyre Haack, and I am a writer and designer from the Chicagoland area.

As a queer trans woman, my life is defined by locked doors. Opportunities that are available to me in theory, but remain perpetually out of reach in practice. Gatekept by people with more money and power than I, or they, would ever know what to do with, and which they gleefully spend on keeping me, and anyone like me, out.

I am a firm believer that the only way forward for us, is to build our own spaces. Our own culture, our own communities, our own businesses. In this way, we serve not only as our own shield and shelter, but a beacon for all those like us out there, who have not yet found a place where they belong. Who do not yet believe that such a place could even exist. No one is coming to save us. We have to save each other.

This is what motivates me to make art. We deserve to see our experiences reflected in the world around us. We deserve to have someone we can point to and say,

“There I am. There, I could be. I am not alone. I never was.”

Today, we mourn the elders that we never had the chance to meet, because they were taken from us. Tomorrow, we can be there for those that come after. That they do not need to mourn that absence, as we have. Art is an arrow flung into the future. A message in a bottle, floating off into the sunset, to be discovered by someone we will never know, in a time we will not have a chance to see. What they take from it, is ultimately their business. Our art matters because we matter.