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Alexandra Billings is an AIDS and LGBTQ Activist who argues for the equality of the LGBTQ community and urges others to use their voices to create change within the LGBTQ community. In 2016, Billings was awarded the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award, which recognizes outstanding members of the LGBTQ community who live openly and freely in the public eye. After receiving the award, Billings thanked the audience, but also said, “I look around and I see you all and I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you’re here, and I have to say something to you I think you look great, you look swell and it’s wonderful that you’re here eating the chicken it’s delightful but I must tell you that we have to do something more than sit and speak and talk to our neighbors and eat great food and put on fancy clothes.” She challenges the audience to use their voices to speak loudly in order to create change and ultimately, equality for the LGBTQ community. In 2017, Transparent, the hit TV show Billings stars in, won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Comedy Series. When accepting the award on behalf of the cast, Billings urges the audience to talk to people who disagree with their beliefs in order to spark conversation and create change instead of staying complacent. Specifically, she calls out the older LGBTQ generation and asks them to guide the younger LGBTQ generation because they will be the ones continuing the fight for equality in the Future. When delivering the commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of California State, Long Beach in 2015, Billings once again emphasized the importance of voice when she told the students that it is their job is to speak loud, big, and wide in order to spread their voices.

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