By Wesley Spencer and Marty Treinen
WE LIVE INSIDE AN EXTRAORDINARY CREATIVE CULTURE
The scale of the creative community surrounding us in the California desert is easy to underestimate because so much of it happens independently, one studio, theater, gallery, museum, rehearsal room, classroom, performance space, nonprofit, workshop, and creative business at a time. The Coachella Valley alone has identified nearly 200 nonprofit arts-and-culture organizations, while recent open-studio programs have brought together more than 150 artists throughout Valley communities and more than 200 artists across the Joshua Tree and Morongo Basin area.
Those numbers represent only particular organizations and participating artists, not the full creative population. Beyond them are painters, photographers, sculptors, ceramicists, jewelers, writers, actors, musicians, filmmakers, architects, designers, dancers, craftspeople, theater professionals, educators, collectors, patrons, galleries, museums, cultural organizations, and countless others whose work contributes to the identity of this region. It also includes all of those professions, that often don’t consider themselves artists or even creative. However, the creative process is taking an idea, and making it real. And every person or organization gets things done. They are the doers that make everything possible.
Gay artists and creative professionals are deeply woven into that landscape. Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley have become places where all painters, performers, designers, writers, filmmakers, photographers, architects, theater professionals, collectors, business owners, philanthropists, and cultural supporters can be visible participants in community life rather than people expected to remain quietly at its edges.
Alongside that gay presence are Indigenous history, Latino culture, every type of person and profession, agriculture, modernist architecture, hospitality, theater, music, visual art, international migration, tourism, education, and generations of people who came to the desert because they wanted enough freedom to reinvent some part of their lives. It also includes every underserved person or community, often invisible, or ignored. Our uniqueness does not come from one community replacing another; it comes from what happens when many different communities contribute what only they can bring.
OUR GLOBAL CREATIVE FAMILY
What we experience here belongs to something much larger. Gay creative people live and work everywhere, including places where being visible remains difficult or dangerous. Some create in the world’s great cultural capitals, while others work in small towns, rural communities, private studios, schools, theaters, digital spaces, or homes where their creative lives may be known only to a handful of people.
Gay artists and creative people reading this anywhere in the world are part of this conversation. Everyone of our perspective or stories or experience represent a diversity, that can not be measured,. Your art does not have to resemble yours, your culture should not become ours, and your history may be radically different from across the spectrum of personal experiences. That difference is precisely what gives each perspective value and what makes the larger gay and the creative communities an immensely diverse collective conscience. That diversity is our strength.
Gay culture becomes smaller when we reduce it to one lifestyle, one appearance, one politics, or one aesthetic. Its real strength comes from millions of different lives carrying different races, religions, nationalities, languages, professions, generations, economic circumstances, abilities, memories, and experiences. The goal is not sameness; the opportunity is originality, uniqueness and individual perspectives.
WHAT THE AIDS CRISIS TAUGHT US
Our understanding of creativity became intensely personal during the AIDS crisis. Friends became ill, partners died, relationships were disregarded, families were fractured, and people discovered that institutions they assumed existed to protect them could remain indifferent while an entire community was devastated.
Something else happened at the same time. When necessary organizations that did not exist, were created to fill our needs. Caregiving networks appeared because someone chose to care for the sick, fundraising systems emerged because resources were desperately needed, and friends became families when families refused to recognize relationships. Artists, activists, designers, photographers, writers, performers, businesses and community workers developed a visual and cultural language capable of making an ignored catastrophe visible.
Out of that experience came one of the most powerful statements of the era: SILENCE = DEATH. Those words were not merely clever graphic design. They expressed a brutal reality: invisibility could become fatal when governments, institutions, churches, families, employers, media, and communities refused to acknowledge what was happening.
Looking back, we understand that creativity was not something the AIDS movement added after the serious organizing was finished. Creativity was part of our collective experiences. Visual art communicated urgency, photography preserved memory, theater created empathy, design made information understandable, public actions made people visible, fundraising transformed compassion into resources, and entirely new organizations turned isolation into community.
Art did not simply document history. Creative people helped change what happened next.
Gay communities have repeatedly created what existing structures failed to provide. Neighborhoods, bars, bookstores, theaters, galleries, publications, festivals, businesses, charities, political organizations, cultural institutions, and chosen families often grew because people needed somewhere to meet, belong, express themselves, and become visible.
WHAT GAY CREATIVE CULTURE ALREADY KNOWS
Creative work helped give those lives form. Writers found language for experiences people had been taught not to discuss, filmmakers and actors placed gay lives before audiences who might otherwise never encounter them, photographers preserved communities, designers created visual identities that could travel across borders, and musicians, performers, painters, and artists transformed private experience into culture that could be shared.
Nothing about that history means gay people possess a special creativity unavailable to everyone else. Instead, it demonstrates what human creative intelligence can accomplish when circumstances force people to use it deliberately. A need is recognized, something missing is imagined, knowledge is gathered, people with different abilities find one another, and an idea becomes real. That process belongs to everyone.
There is one person that taught me the power of art, to create images that are both explicit, emotionally demanding, and immediate. Mauricio Sasansky’s Nazi Drawings. Now in the National Gallery in DC. Just to give you perspective, these are every bit as powerful as Picasso’s Guernica. And artist who I have a deep respect for.
THE CREATIVE CLASS IS EVERYWHERE
When I speak about the creative class, I mean something much larger than the arts. Artists make the process unusually visible, but creativity is present anywhere people transform possibility into reality.
A chef creates an experience from ingredients, an entrepreneur creates a business from an idea, engineers create solutions, educators create ways of understanding, scientists create knowledge, builders create physical environments, and organizers create systems through which people can work together. Everything surrounding us passed through someone’s imagination before it became real.
That changes the economic value of creativity completely. Business cannot sell what nobody creates, investors cannot finance what nobody imagines, tourism cannot promote a place without experiences worth encountering, and organizations cannot adapt when circumstances change unless somebody can envision another way forward. Creativity is not standing outside the economy asking to be supported; it is one of the forces that creates the economy throughout human history.
BECOME ORIGINAL
Creative culture also teaches us the value of originality. Leonardo da Vinci did not become Leonardo by discovering how to reproduce somebody else’s approved version of success. His importance came from the extraordinary combination of curiosity, observation, experience, knowledge, imagination, discipline, interests, and questions that existed within one human being.
Every person carries another combination. No one else has precisely your history, memories, relationships, failures, successes, culture, abilities, observations, interests, questions, and experiences.
Originality does not mean rejecting everything others have taught us. We learn from one another constantly, and culture, technique, history, knowledge, and experience pass from person to person and
generation to generation. Something becomes original when everything we have encountered passes through our own experience and becomes part of what we create next. That is the power of our diversity.
We have a saying in our household: everyone is walking around in their own movie. That movie changes from moment to moment, shaped by everything we experience along the way. Sometimes we create the story; sometimes people and circumstances enter it uninvited. People or experiences we never would never have chosen. But when we take something from that movie, that experience, give it form, and share it with others, it is no longer entirely ours. It takes on a life of its own. What others see, feel, understand, or discover, belongs to them. That is the gift of creativity: we make something from our experience, make it real, and then give it away.
ORIGINALITY BECOMES POWERFUL THROUGH SERVICE
Difference alone does not automatically create value. Originality becomes consequential when something we uniquely understand or create moves beyond us and enters another person’s life.
A painting can make an emotion visible, performance can create empathy between strangers, a business may solve a problem, food can preserve culture, and a museum can protect memory from disappearing. Education can help someone discover an ability they never knew they possessed, while a creative organization can provide a place where people learn from one another.
Service completes the creative act because another human being becomes part of the reason for creating it. Wesley and I have experienced this directly through our writing, where meeting people throughout the arts and writing about their work gives us an opportunity to help someone else become visible, understood, supported, or discovered. Their creativity has enriched our lives, while our words can sometimes help their work reach another person. That exchange is community.
DIVERSITY IS CREATIVE STRENGTH
Different people bring different knowledge into the room. Someone from another culture may recognize what a lifelong resident overlooks, while a person who has experienced discrimination can see barriers invisible to someone who has never encountered them. Younger generations recognize emerging changes, whereas older people carry experience and memories that disappear if nobody listens.
Creative collaboration works precisely because participants are not identical. A theatrical production would be absurd if the actor, director, writer, stage manager, costume designer, carpenter, electrician, and musician were all expected to perform the same job. Each person is equal in human value but unique in contribution, and the work becomes stronger because those differences are brought together around a shared objective. I have worked in both professional, and civic theater, and this is one of my most enjoyable experiences. The whole production is right there, the story told by every part of the production. And that personal, interconnectedness, is wondrous. But in film while the experience is different for the audience, it is a medium that reaches around the world. It requires only some seating, a screen, projector, and audience, to make it real. But in the current situation, thousands of individuals of exceptionally specific talents and ability, still collaborate, to do one thing. And that is to tell the best possible story, for the audience. A perspective they may not otherwise experience. That is its power of diversity.
Communities become stronger through the same principle. Diversity expands the range of knowledge available to solve a problem, imagine an opportunity, or understand another human being, while sameness narrows those possibilities. That is what we mean when we say we are equal but unique.
WE CANNOT FORGET OUR CHILDREN
Any discussion about creativity, freedom, originality, and human development has to include what we are teaching our children. This subject deserves far more attention than one section can provide, but it cannot be left out. When arts education, the humanities, accurate history, cultural understanding, and meaningful opportunities to create are diminished, we are not simply removing subjects from a curriculum. We are removing some of the experiences through which young people discover who they are, what they value, how other people experience the world, and what they may be capable of becoming.
Creative education develops far more than artistic ability. Making something requires curiosity,
self-motivation, discipline, persistence, judgment, collaboration, problem-solving, confidence, and the willingness to continue when the first attempt fails. Theater teaches people to depend upon one another, music demands practice and listening, visual art develops observation and individual expression, while the humanities and accurate history expose students to lives, cultures, ideas, successes, failures, and perspectives beyond their own. Service to others then gives those abilities purpose by asking young people to consider how what they know and create can contribute to someone besides themselves.
The danger of replacing that depth with sameness is profound. When children are taught primarily to conform, perform prescribed tasks, produce standardized answers, and prepare themselves to satisfy someone else’s definition of success, we risk developing people who know how to function inside systems but have never learned how to imagine alternatives to them. A child whose individuality, curiosity, culture, questions, and creative abilities are continually narrowed may eventually become very good at carrying out somebody else’s vision while having little confidence in creating a vision of their own.
That is why arts and creative education belong at the foundation of human development, not at its margins. Education should prepare young people for work, but it should also prepare them to lead their own lives, understand other people, recognize manipulation, make independent judgments, create relationships and communities, and imagine futures nobody has handed to them. If creativity is our Superpower, then teaching children how to develop it is one of the ways we give them the freedom to help create their own future. Forgetting that has consequences far beyond the classroom.
UNIVERSAL CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE
Universal Creative Intelligence grew from these observations. UCI is not intended to turn everyone into an artist or convince anyone to become somebody else. Its purpose is to help people recognize the creative intelligence they already possess and learn how to use it intentionally. (We know because Wesley and I spent 15 years writing the book on it. Universal Creative Intelligence; How the Arts and Science Propel Human Advancement. That history is thought to expand back, 300,000 years.)
Attention begins the process because we cannot create intelligently without understanding what is happening around us. Learning expands what we know, imagination allows possibilities to emerge, collaboration brings different abilities together, creation makes an idea tangible, and continuous improvement allows us to learn from what happens and begins again.
Anyone can learn this process. Children can develop it, artists can deepen it, entrepreneurs can apply it, organizations can use it, educators can teach it, and communities can build around it. Creativity belongs to no profession, economic class, nation, political party, or sexual orientation because it belongs to humanity itself. The creative culture can help teach it because artists already demonstrate what creative intelligence looks like every day.
Freedom enters this conversation because creativity gives us alternatives. Someone who believes only one future is possible possesses far less freedom than a person capable of observing what exists, questioning assumptions, learning what is necessary, imagining alternatives, and beginning to create another path.
That is what we mean when we say Creativity = Freedom. Permission Not Required. Nobody has to authorize your imagination before it’s engaged. Institutions do not own your curiosity, corporations cannot grant your ability to question, and political movements do not determine whether you are allowed to imagine. That is not freedom,as it limitates our own human development. T
Gay people understand something about that principle because many of the freedoms we possess today exist only because earlier generations stopped waiting for society to declare their lives, relationships, art, families, and communities acceptable enough to exist. They began to demand, no permission required.
Freedom carries responsibility as well as possibility. Becoming original does not require diminishing anyone else. Self-leadership means understanding our choices, recognizing their consequences, and protecting the same freedom for people whose lives may be completely different from our own.
UNIQUE PEOPLE CREATE UNIQUE PLACES
Communities possess originality just as individuals do. The Coachella Valley would lose enormous value if its distinctive combination of gay culture, Indigenous history, Latino culture, architecture, art, theater, music, food, hospitality, landscape, and creative experimentation gradually became indistinguishable from everywhere else.
People travel here because all of the diversity and differences gives our community meaning. Local art, architecture, food, history, performances, businesses, traditions, landscapes, and personalities create experiences that cannot simply be duplicated. Unique places attract unique people, and unique people create places worth experiencing.
The same principle exists around the world. Tokyo should remain Tokyo, Mexico City should remain Mexico City, Sydney should remain Sydney, and a small community that nobody has heard of should have every opportunity to discover and develop what makes it unique. Economic strength does not have to require cultural sameness, because supporting artists, theaters, museums, galleries, creative businesses, distinctive neighborhoods, and unconventional people helps preserve the very qualities that make communities worth remembering.
Our history makes participation impossible to separate from freedom. The AIDS crisis taught many of us what could happen when others were permitted to determine whether our lives, relationships, needs,
and experiences mattered while our communities chose to remain invisible, indifferent, unseen and quiet.
The original SILENCE = DEATH belongs to that particular history and should retain the gravity of what it meant. Its underlying lesson, however, remains important because democracies also depend upon people staying engaged enough to participate in decisions affecting their lives.
Agreement is not required, but attention is. Curiosity, questions, knowledge, and different perspectives all matter because democracy weakens when people withdraw entirely and leave the decisions that shape their lives to others.
That understanding led us to another statement: Silence = Death 2 Democracy. It does not tell anyone what to believe; it asks whether we are going to participate.
Creative intelligence provides a way to do that without demanding sameness. We can observe what is happening, learn what we do not know, listen to people whose experience differs from ours, question assumptions, imagine alternatives, protect one another’s freedom, and participate in creating what comes next.
WHO WE ARE
Wesley and I have spent our lives embedded in the arts. Theater, visual art, museums, architecture, design, photography, film, writing, performance, education, and the people who make those worlds possible have never been subjects we observed from the outside. They are where we have worked, learned, created, built relationships, found community, and discovered much of what we now understand about human creativity.
What those experiences have taught us can be expressed very simply: Creativity is our Superpower. It is not a gift reserved for artists or a talented few, but a fundamental human capability that allows us to observe, learn, imagine, adapt, solve problems, and create something that did not exist before. The creative culture makes that power particularly visible because artists practice it constantly, but the ability
itself belongs to everyone. Understanding how to consciously develop and use that ability is what eventually led us to developing Universal Creative Intelligence.
Being gay is inseparable from that creative life. We belong to a gay artistic and creative community that reaches far beyond Palm Springs, the Coachella Valley, California, or the United States. Across the world, gay artists, actors, writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, architects, dancers, designers, directors, craftspeople, curators, producers, educators, and creative people have used their work to make experience visible, preserve memory, challenge assumptions, create beauty, and sometimes build places where people like us could simply exist openly.
Different histories, languages, countries, cultures, generations, and circumstances separate us, but creativity gives us a remarkable common language. Through art we can say who we are, what we have experienced, what we see, and what we are capable of creating.
Over the years, the arts community has welcomed and encouraged Wesley and me. We have met artists, directors, designers, actors, musicians, museum professionals, arts administrators, educators, cultural organizations, theaters, galleries, patrons, and people whose lives are devoted to making creative work possible. Much of our writing has grown from the need to ensure that what is important, is kept and shared. Encounters with the people we have met and worked with, have created a cultural life that matters to us greatly. We are part of the creative culture, and have moved across that spectrum, because of the opportunities we created, or presented opportunity.
OUR INVITATION
Wesley and I are bringing this work forward because it grew naturally from the lives we have already lived. Our relationship with the arts came first, while our experience as gay men shaped how we understand difference, belonging, resilience, visibility, and the necessity of creating what does not yet exist.
The Coachella Valley and High Desert have given us an extraordinary place from which to begin. Hundreds of artists, scores of cultural organizations, a visible gay community, multiple histories, different cultures, architecture, theater, museums, music, design, film, food, hospitality, and people who continually reinvent themselves already demonstrate what happens when originality is allowed room to grow.
Yet this invitation does not end at the edge of the desert. Gay artists and creative people across the world are part of it, as are artists and arts organizations everywhere. Educators, students, entrepreneurs, cultural institutions, businesses, community organizations, patrons, audiences, and individuals who have never once considered themselves creative also belong in this conversation.
The creative culture already understands something the rest of society urgently needs to remember: what exists today does not have to determine what exists tomorrow. Through learning, imagination, collaboration, creation, and service to others, we possess the ability to participate in shaping what comes next rather than merely accepting it.
Nobody has to become us, and nobody should. The point is to become more completely yourself, discover what only you can contribute, and decide what you are going to create with it.
That is the invitation contained inside Creativity = Freedom. Permission Not Required. Our gay and creative communities already know something about what those words can mean, and now we can place that knowledge in service to everyone.
When the larger question becomes whether we will participate in creating the communities and democracies we want to inhabit, the choice remains ours.
Silence = Death 2 Choose. The Choice Is Yours.
About the Authors
Marty Treinen and D. Wesley Spencer, Ph.D. are writers, educators, arts advocates, columnists for The Palm Springs Tribune, and co-authors of Universal Creative Intelligence: How the Arts and Sciences Propel Human Advancement.
Wesley earned his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, served as Executive Director of the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company, and teaches communication at College of the Desert. Marty is an artrepreneur, arts educator, writer, and designer. Together, their work spans theater, film, visual and performing arts, arts education, human-centered AI, and cultural life throughout the Coachella Valley.
Their work underscores one central idea: creativity is a uniquely human ability and our most important human superpower. Combined with AI as a tool, human creativity can expand what people imagine, create, solve, and accomplish while keeping service to others—the foundation of what it means to be human—at the center of human advancement.
Their goal is to expand awareness of creativity as a foundation of human development and the cultural heritage humanity has built across roughly 300,000 years of human history—and to ensure that technology strengthens rather than diminishes our ability to think, create, choose, and serve others.
You can help support Creativity = Freedom. Silence = Death to Choose. and expand awareness of why protecting human creativity means protecting our freedom to imagine, choose, create, and determine what comes next.
Mt.CreativityEqualsFreedom@gmail.com