Biography

Eliel Cruz is a history-making, award-winning organizer, speaker, and writer. As an advocacy media strategist, he’s led police accountability, anti-violence, and LGBTQ advocacy campaigns. He’s a columnist with Gay Times Magazine, writing an organizing and justice-focused column titled Let’s Create Some Good In The World.

He’s a co-founder and communications lead of Gender Liberation Movement (GLM), an emergent and innovative grassroots and volunteer-run national collective that builds direct action, media, and policy interventions centering bodily autonomy, self-determination, the pursuit of fulfillment, and collectivism in the face of gender-based sociopolitical threats. In September of 2024, GLM organized the Gender Liberation March bringing together the fights for medical access to abortion and gender affirming care together while highlighting the ways gender is a throughline for much of the current political and cultural attacks. 

Cruz is a co-organizer for the Brooklyn Liberation March: An Action for Black Trans Lives, which drew an estimated 20,000 people in June 2020, and the Brooklyn Liberation March: An Action for Trans Youth in 2021. Eliel was honored alongside the co-organizers of Brooklyn Liberation with a Stonewall Community Foundation Vision Award. He was recognized in Out Magazine’s #Out100 list for both his work as the former Director of Communications at the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), and for his pivotal activism in pursuing justice for Layleen Polanco, a 27-year-old Afro-Latinx trans woman who died in solitary confinement on Rikers Island in June 2019.

Eliel has spoken at universities and conferences across the country on issues pertaining to the LGBTQ community and media representation, as well as faith and sexuality. Speaking engagements include Harvard Law School, University of Texas at Austin, MSU Denver, Suffolk University, University of Georgia, Texas A&M, University of Florida, Bowdoin College, New York University, Middlebury College, University of Colorado in Boulder, and more.

His advocacy work has appeared in print on the September issue of Vogue, the front page of The New York Times, and magazines such as Another Man, Gay Times, Garage, and New York Magazine, as well as in digital publications like Dazed, Vox, Seventeen, Buzzfeed, and more. Eliel’s writing can be seen in The Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Mic News, The Advocate, Teen Vogue, HuffPost, The Daily Dot, Everyday Feminism, Sojourners, Details, GQ, Quartz, Rolling Stone, them., Shondaland, The New York Times, and many other outlets. He is represented by Ayesha Pande Literary. 

He’s also a fixture in New York City nightlife for the last decade, hosting and producing some of the best queer parties. Eliel is a storyteller. He believes in using the privileges afforded to him and his platform to create space for others to be able to share theirs.