The Red Door is a Black queer cultural project and community reimagining, rooted in rest, pleasure and collective care. Part un-conference, part living art installation and part community effort, The Red Door creates space to imagine new possibilities together.
Founded by tia marie, The Red Door grew from years of creating spaces around sexuality, culture, education and liberation, and from a desire to make room for something less prescribed. At its center is a question: What's possible when there is enough room to rest and daydream?
The un-conference is part of that reimagining. Instead of deciding everything before people arrive, The Red Door leaves room for who comes to shape what happens. Workshops, art, services and offerings create a foundation, with open space for people to bring their own ideas, practices, conversations and possibilities.
Workers are at the center, alongside artists, healers, organizers, cultural workers, educators and community members whose lives, labor, knowledge and imaginations are essential to the project.
The Red Door is meant to change. From year to year, the people will change. The questions will change. The world will change. So The Red Door will change, too.
The inaugural Red Door un-conference, Rest & Radical Daydreaming, takes place October 9–10, 2026
ABOUT
These are living guidelines. The Red Door is shaped by the needs of the community. As those needs shift, the ways care, access, safety and accountability are practiced may shift with them. These guidelines are meant to breathe, respond and expand alongside the community while remaining rooted in the values at the heart of The Red Door.
The Red Door Community Guidlines
1. Release the carceral system from the imagination. The Red Door practices ways of being in community that do not require people to become police, investigators, judges, juries or jailers to each other. Instead, community members can listen, believe people about their boundaries, interrupt harm, offer care and ask what support is needed. Accountability still has consequences. The Red Door is not practicing community without consequences. The Red Door is practicing what accountability, safety, care and repair can look like when punishment is not the only possibility that can be imagined.
2. Respect consent. Attendees are expected to use discernment, to ask first and listen to the answer, and to actively practice self-consent. Consent is ongoing, specific and can change at any moment.
3. Protect people's privacy. Outing, doxxing, or sharing another person's legal name, occupation, identity, personal information or business without permission is not permitted. Ask before photographing or recording anyone. Attendance at The Red Door does not constitute consent to being documented.
4. Remember who the space centers. The Red Door centers workers. Being welcomed into the community does not mean an attendee becomes the center of the community.
5. Respect people's bodies, names, pronouns, identities, relationships and boundaries. Worker antagonism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, fatphobia, ableism and drug phobia have no place at The Red Door.
6. Practice harm reduction. People have different relationships with substances, sobriety, sex, risk, medication and care. Community members are expected to move without shame or pressure.
7. Rest is participation. Sitting down, leaving early, arriving late, taking a nap, skipping a workshop or finding the shade are all forms of participation. Productivity does not need to be performed at The Red Door.
8. Care for the land. Attendees are expected to clean up after themselves, respect the farm, honor boundaries and leave spaces ready for the people coming after them.
9. Respect community safety decisions. When an attendee is directed to stop an interaction, give someone space, leave an area or speak with the safety team, that direction is expected to be followed.
People can and will get put out.
The Red Door's commitment to non-carceral community care does not mean an absence of action. Violating consent, compromising another person's privacy, harassment, threatening behavior, transphobia, worker antagonism, racism, homophobia, fatphobia, ableism, repeatedly crossing boundaries, interfering with community safety, or otherwise seriously impacting the safety and care of the gathering may result in removal.