Colin Robinson

Colin Robinson (he/him), a Trinidad-born activist, writer, and visionary organizer, was a globally recognized thought leader on sexuality, gender, power, and justice in the Caribbean. He served as Director of Imagination at CAISO: Sex & Gender Justice and led the organization from its founding in 2009, helping to shape Trinidad and Tobago’s national LGBTI advocacy landscape. Across more than four decades, his work spanned regional coalition-building, including revitalizing the Caribbean Forum for Liberation & Acceptance of Genders and Sexualities, as well as advancing HIV policy, leadership development, and cultural production throughout the Caribbean and diaspora.

In 2011, he spearheaded the revitalization of the Caribbean Forum for Liberation & Acceptance of Genders and Sexualities, a 21-year-old regional LGBTI coalition, and developed its academy to train emerging Caribbean activists as transformational leaders. In 2018, he was appointed by the Inter-American Development Bank’s Trinidad and Tobago country office to its NextGen board of changemakers, where he spearheaded a project to develop a shared facility to support the management needs of smaller civil society organizations.

Robinson’s career encompassed decades of health justice advocacy, including HIV policy and training work with the Offices of the Prime Minister and the Chief Personnel Officer, the Ministry of Labor, and the University of the West Indies Faculty of Medical Sciences. He served on the boards of the Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV and AIDS and the New York City Board of Education AIDS Advisory Council, and spent nine years in public policy and management roles at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the largest HIV response organization in the United States. In 2017, the Office of the Prime Minister had him physically ejected from the re-launch of the National AIDS Coordinating Committee after he challenged its lack of representation.

He led pioneering organizing work in LGBTI communities of color in the United States, including service on government planning and advisory bodies while living as an undocumented immigrant for over a decade. Robinson co-founded the Audre Lorde Project, an organizing center, and co-chaired the board of directors of OutRight International. He produced the 1988 issue of “Other Countries: Black Gay Voices,” a literary journal that received the U.S. Council of Literary Magazines and Presses seed award, and conceived “Think Again,” a 2003 essay collection by AIDS Project Los Angeles and the New York State Black Gay Network that reexamined HIV prevention. In 1998 and subsequent years, while leading Caribbean Pride, he helped bring a soca Big Truck to the Manhattan LGBTI Pride parade and organized a historic 1999 reading of diasporic Caribbean LGBTI writers. In 2000, he was selected as Grand Marshal for the Brooklyn Pride Parade.

Robinson’s poetry appeared in the 2016 collection “You Have You Father Hard Head,” in “Lessons,” a 1996 work by Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence dance company, and in film collaborations with Sekou Charles (Riding Boundaries, 2011) and Marlon Riggs (Anthem, 1990). He co-edited the 2015 “Firing the Canon” special issue of “Moko: Caribbean Arts & Letters,” and his reflections on global advocacy against dancehall “murder music” appeared in the 2009 Caribbean Review of Gender Studies. He served as a field producer for Riggs’s landmark 1989 documentary “Tongues Untied,” and created the first three of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s “A Day Without Art” responses to World AIDS Day (1989–1991). He also developed several programs throughout the 1980s and 1990s that brought the work of Other Countries writers into gay bars and nightclubs, elite academic institutions, and an emerging performance circuit. Since 2014, he has written a newspaper column in Sunday Newsday focused on bodies and nationhood.

Robinson held degrees in anthropology and management from New York University and the New School’s Milano School.

In 2019, he was honored as part of the “Queer Caribbeans of NYC” exhibition by the Caribbean Equality Project, recognizing his enduring impact on Caribbean LGBTQ+ visibility, storytelling, and community organizing in New York City and beyond. Robinson passed away in 2021, leaving behind a profound legacy that continues to shape movements for justice and liberation.