Activists have demanded that the next debate moderator grill Mike Pence on the Trump administration’s homophobia and transphobia, after LGBT+ rights went unmentioned during the first presidential debate.
The messy and hostile debate amounted to 90 minutes of insults and accusations peppered with constant interruptions from the president, who refused to abide by moderator Christ Wallace’s rules.
On October 7, the vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will take place, moderated by USA Today journalist Susan Page.
But activists are determined that the second debate will not overlook LGBT+ issues.ADVERTISING
In a letter to Page, 13 LGBT+ rights groups “implored” her to address queer rights, as it would “do our nation and community a disservice to exclude these issues as a part of the conversation”.
The letter from rights groups, including Human Rights Campaign, LGBTQ Victory Fund and Media Matters, said: “In the midst of this pandemic, President Trump and Vice President Pence put forward a rule limiting LGBTQ people’s access to health care by eliminating LGBTQ non-discrimination protections from the Affordable Care Act.
“Hate-fuelled violence is on the rise, and so far this year 30 transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed, putting us on track for the deadliest year on record for the transgender community.
“A majority of those lost are Black and Latinx transgender women who live at the intersection of racism, misogyny, and transphobia — all of which have been fomented and exacerbated by Trump, Pence, and their allies.
“LGBTQ children are dealing with higher instances of bullying in schools, all while Secretary DeVos offers fewer methods of recourse against those bullies.”
Voters, of whom one in 10 identify as LGBT+ according to recent data from NBC, need to be aware of the anti-LGBT+ views held by Pence and the wider Trump administration, the letter insisted.
“Vice president Mike Pence and senator Kamala Harris have deeply divergent records on equality that should be highlighted for Americans… In 2016, presidential and vice-presidential debate moderators did not ask candidates a single question about LGBTQ issues across four debates.
“You have the opportunity to change that and address the issues our community faces in this trying time.”
A mother is threatening to sue an Indiana school district, claiming that her gay daughter was singled out by staff and subjected to “humiliating” homophobic bullying.
Melissa Hart has filed a formal complaint against the administration of Charlestown High School, alleging “discrimination, failing to protect a student from bullying and violation of students rights.”
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She claims her 17-year-old daughter faced multiple instances of homophobic discrimination and bullying at the hands of a teacher and an administrator.
Speaking to the News and Tribune, Hart listed multiple occasions where the teacher “humiliated” the teen in front of other students by making “inappropriate and derogatory comments” related to her sexuality.
It began after Hart’s daughter started dating another female student, she says. The couple would “hold hands like normal teenagers,” and while there are school policies against public displays of affection, she believes her daughter was targeted specifically because they are a same-sex couple.
One day when the teen was late to class, the teacher reportedly told her in front of the class: “You wouldn’t be late if you hadn’t been kissing and hugging on that girl.”
The following week Hart’s daughter skipped that teacher’s class, citing their comments as the reason.
The school administrator found the couple hiding in a bathroom and shouted at them: “Get your s**t and get your gay asses out of there.”
The girl’s mother heard the comments as she had been listening on speaker phone. She remained on the line as two school officials questioned her daughter, asking if she was in a romantic relationship with the other student, and if they had been having intimate relations.
The questions made the girl “feel uncomfortable and isolated as she was forced to answer questions about the fact she identifies as a lesbian,” the mother said.
It wasn’t the first time the girls had been quizzed on their relationship: weeks earlier, school officials raised complaints from teachers and students about the pair holding hands.
Hart asked the school why her daughter was being singled out, and was told that the Charlestown community isn’t ready to deal with same-sex relationships.
“I told him, ‘She has rights, my daughter does have rights,’” Hart said, to which she alleges he responded, ‘No ma’am, she doesn’t.’”
The mother has tried to rectify the situation with the school, but feels the only solutions they’ve proposed involve “mov[ing] my kid around,” either to other classes or other schools.
“Let me be clear, this is homophobic discrimination plain and simple,” Hart told the Tribune.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13296932562903654?pubid=ld-5883-3439&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinknews.co.uk&rid=www.pinknews.co.uk&width=572
“You do not have the right to interrogate my daughter regarding her sexual orientation. [The school official] should be ashamed of himself for targeting my daughter with his homophobic remarks in front of her and the entire class.
“The CHS administration should be ashamed of themselves for condoning, promoting, and participating in this behaviour.”
At least 13 member states if the United Nations still criminalise trans people, while others weaponise morality laws to persecute the community, a report published Wednesday (30 September) found.
Nigeria, Oman and Lebanon were ranked by LGBT+ rights group ILGA World as holding among the world’s most brutal transphobic legislation.
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“It is a difficult time for trans communities globally,” said ILGA World Trans Steering Committee chair Jabu Pereira in the Trans Legal Mapping Report, which assessed gender law across the 143 UN member states and 19 other jurisdictions.
The report warned: “In every region of the world where we have been documenting legal gender recognition, regressions have occurred.”
As many member states of the United Nations make leaps in trans rights, others continue to criminalise.
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The report’s authors reflected on the patchwork of progress the world has seen when it comes to trans rights.
As much as Britain and Hungary, among many more, have seen trans rights stalled or whittled away, others, such as Belgium and France, have seen leaps made. Particular leaps in non-binary rights were also recorded in the last two years.
While the following member states of the United Nations, they found, continue to criminalise trans people: Brunei, the Gambia, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malawi, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, South Sudan, Tonga and the United Arab Emirates.
Moreover, researchers said that the criminalisation of trans people can happen through “seemingly innocuous laws, such as those related to public spaces”.
From laws over loitering to “public nuisances”, these policies police trans people and constrict how they can live their lives – “just as damaging”, the researchers said.
“Some of the more shining nations when it comes to legal gender recognition are based in the global south, such as Argentina,” Pereira said, referring to how the country introduced self-identification for trans people changing the gender markers on official documents in 2012.
‘Uncertainty, backlash and attacks’: The last two years of trans rights have been some of the hardest.
Since 2018, they stressed, trans rights have been “marked by uncertainty, backlash and attacks”.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13296932562903654?pubid=ld-5883-3439&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinknews.co.uk&rid=www.pinknews.co.uk&width=572
“Gender ideology, in the form of conservative positioning around the fixity of ‘biological’ sex, the emergence [of] trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and right-wing politicians positing LGBT rights against national identities, have all had detrimental effects on our communities.”
A great toll on trans rights indeed. Researchers contrasted trans rights organisations, many running on threadbare budgets, to well-funded and well-resourced anti-trans groups.
And the level of anti-trans vitriol in Britain, the researchers said, has even been “exhorted to many of the other Commonwealth countries”.
Across three years, Britain has seen proposed reforms to Gender Recognition Act – the bedrock of gender recognition law – dogged by transphobic media coverage and powerful lobbying groups.
As much as countless polls have shown such views do not represent Britons as a whole, the transphobic playbook of inflamed, freewheeling misinformation worked. The reforms were scrapped by ministers this month.
Through Britain’s trans rights remained stymied, the researchers shone a light on the array of countries and states which have, since 2017, moved to a de-medicalised self-ID model.
“Australia (more states), Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, France, Greece, Luxembourg, and Portugal,” they said. All of which, surprise surprise, are fairing far better for doing so.
Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump’s anti-LGBT+ secretary of state, was denied an audience with the Pope after the Vatican condemned his use of “religious freedom” for political gain.
Last year, Mike Pompeo created the Commission on Unalienable Rights to undercut the US government’s existing human rights laws, with the commission supposedly based on “natural law”.
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Pompeo claimed the body is necessary because different rights have “come into tension with one another”, but it soon became clear that “religious freedom” would be at the top of the hierarchy.
But despite his apparent passion for religion, when Pompeo paid a visit to the Vatican this week, he was unceremoniously rejected for a meeting with the Pope.ADVERTISING
According to Reuters, on Wednesday (30 September), the day before he was set to meet with Vatican officials, Pompeo spoke at the US embassy to the Holy See and denounced China’s record on religious freedom.
In an article and series of tweets in September, Pompeo criticised the Catholic Church for working with Beijing to appoint Chinese bishops, claiming Vatican officials were putting their “moral authority at risk”.
Following his speech, the Vatican said Pompeo had requested an audience with Pope Francis, and received an emphatic “no”.
Secretary of state cardinal Pietro Parolin told Reuters: “Yes, he asked. But the Pope had already said clearly that political figures are not received in election periods. That is the reason.”
Parolin said Pompeo’s public criticism of the Vatican had come as a “surprise” before his visit.
Parolin was asked if the secretary of state’s focus on religious freedom, which is simultaneously used to suppress LGBT+ rights, was being used for political gain in the US.
He said: “Some have interpreted it this way. That the comments were above all for domestic political use.
“I don’t have proof of this but certainly, this is one way of looking at it.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a lesbian, announced Thursday she has filed felony charges against conservative hoaxers Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman — who have a history of deceit and unscrupulous dealings — for misleading robocalls discouraging Michigan residents from voting by mail.
Nessel said in a statement the robocalls, which were made in Black-majority areas around Detroit, go above and beyond those “flooding our cell phones and landlines each day” in a battleground state for the 2020 election.
“Any effort to interfere with, intimidate or intentionally mislead Michigan voters will be met with swift and severe consequences,” Nessel said in a statement. “This effort specifically targeted minority voters in an attempt to deter them from voting in the November election.”
The message discouraging voting by mail, Nessel said, “poses grave consequences for our democracy and the principles upon which it was built.”
“Michigan voters are entitled to a full, free and fair election in November and my office will not hesitate to pursue those who jeopardize that,” Nessel.
Wohl, 22, and Burkman, 54, are charged with four felony counts: One count of intimidating voters under election law; one count of conspiracy to commit an election law violation; one count of using a computer to commit to intimidate voters against election law; and using a computer to commit a crime of conspiracy.
The two face five years in prison and/or a $1,000 fine for intimidating voters, plus a $10,000 fine for conspiracy to commit that crime, while they face an additional seven years in prison and/or $5,000 for using a computer to commit those crimes, according to the charging papers.
The charges were filed Thursday in the 36th District Court in Detroit, where a judge found probable cause to support them, according to the Associated Press. Arraignment is pending for Wohl and Burkman.
Nessel said her office intends to work with local law enforcement if needed to secure the appearance of each defendant in Michigan, although it’s too early to say if formal extradition will be needed or if the two will voluntarily present themselves.
The robocalls allegedly created and funded by Wohl and Burkman, Nessel said, were targeted at nearly 12,000 residents in the Detroit-area urban in late August. The attorney general had previously warned Michigan residents of the calls at that time.
An audio recording of the robocall provided by Nessel’s office features a caller who sounds like a Black female who claims to be associated with an organization founded by Burkman and Wohl.
The caller, in a false claim according to Nessel’s office, tells people mail-in voting will allow their personal information to become part of a database used by police to track down old warrants and by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts.
“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man,” the caller warns. “Stay safe and be aware of vote by mail.”
The caller also says, in another false claim according to Nessel’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use mail-in voting information to track people for mandatory vaccines.
But the calls aren’t limited to Michigan. In working with state attorneys general in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, the Michigan attorney general found other states reported similar robocalls — around 85,000 made nationally — to urban areas with significant minority populations, according to a news statement.
Claims made in the call against mail-in voting are consistent with dubious complaints from President Trump, who has said publicly the system is rife with fraud, despite assurances from experts the voting system is sound.
Trump, who has suggested he wouldn’t accept the results of an election decided by mail-in ballots, has said explicitly said he’d might have to take up the results in the federal court. Trump also said declined to say he’d allow for a peaceful transition of power as result of the election.
Both Wohl — who has been banned for life from Twitter, but still communicates via his Instagram account and has an OnlyFans page — and Burkman have a long history of nefarious dealings aimed at protecting Trump and getting him re-elected.
An attempt to smear FBI investigator Robert Mueller with false sexual harassment charges was exposed, as well as a similar attempt to defame Anthony Fauci. The two made dubious accusations in the Democratic primary about against sexual impropriety against female candidates Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
Wohl and Burkman also reportedly sought to get a male student to make up charges Pete Buttigieg had sexually assaulted them, but the effort was exposed by the Daily Beast and went no where.
The Washington Blade has reached out to Wohl for comment on the charges. Burkman couldn’t be reached for a request to comment.
In August, Wohl said they suspected “leftist pranksters” were behind the robocalls because recipients were shown a caller ID that was Burkman’s mobile number, according to the AP. Burkman was quoted as saying the situation is “a joke” and threatening to sue for defamation.
A gay man and his straight, female friend can be in a “conjugal relationship” that is legally recognised by Canadian courts thanks to a groundbreaking new ruling.
The decision, which involves a gay refugee to Canada and a straight woman he met at university overseas, expands the legal definition of what a loving couple can look like.
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The two close friends, identified as AP and AM, had unprotected sex on a trip and the woman became pregnant. When the baby was born they decided to commit to each other and raise their child as a family unit, in spite of their sexualities.
However, when the gay man tried to sponsor the woman and their child to join him in Canada, their case was blocked by immigration officials who said their bond didn’t meet the definition of a conjugal relationship.
Earlier this month the couple were granted an appeal, with federal court justice Janet M Fuhrer calling the previous decision closed-minded and biased against the mixed-orientation couple.
The couple don’t have to fit a ‘traditional marital model’, court rules.
Ordering a review of the case, the federal court said that the Immigration Appeal Division (IAD) “was not open to the possibility of a loving, mixed-orientation relationship centred on the concept of a joint family unit meeting the statutory criteria, regardless of the degree of sexual intimacy.”
The judge stated that the IAD had committed an “egregious error” in presuming they were unable to meet the sexual component of the partnership.
“Couples are not required to fit precisely the traditional marital model to demonstrate that the relationship is ‘conjugal,’” her ruling says.
“I find the fact of their different sexual orientations does not foreclose the possibility of AP and AM establishing that they are in a committed relationship of some permanence.”
The appeals division asked multiple questions about the pair’s sexual relationship, and the ruling suggests they appeared fixated on whether or not their families knew about their sex life, even though AM’s parents considered them to be a couple.
Fuhrer noted that the two did have difficulties with sex, but AP said their sexual interactions could “be solved with sex toys or applications,” feeling it was about whether “you (are) getting all the richness of feelings or … having sex with who you love.”
The couple’s lawyer, Athena Portokalidis, said it’s rare for the court to call a tribunal decision-maker “biased” outright.
“The fact that this case even exists speaks to the fact that there’s doubt [about these relationships]. It’s 2020 and society has become more accepting of different forms of relationships. It is time the law catches up,” she told CTV News.
“Our first and second commandment for ourselves as we ministered with people with AIDS,” Fr. Bernard Lynch, an openly gay, Irish Catholic priest, author, activist and founder of the first AIDS ministry in New York City in 1982, said in a FaceTime interview, “was thou shalt not bullshit anyone!”
Lynch, who holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and theology from Fordham University and New York Theological Seminary, recalled what it was like to live during the height of the AIDS epidemic. “It’s hard to even begin to imagine what it was like if you weren’t there,” he said. “Gay men were queer-bashed. The Pink Panthers protected them. People with AIDS would be in the hospital, and the staff wouldn’t feed them – they were so homophobic and afraid they would get AIDS.”
Lynch is one of 31 icons being celebrated this October during LGBT History Month. The other icons being honored (national, international, living and dead) are from many walks of life – from politicians to clergy to writers – and time periods – from ancient Greece to 19th century in the United States to present day Russia.
The icons range from poets (Sappho) to activists (Moscow Pride founder Nikolay Alexeyev and transgender rights activist Felicia Elizondo) to elected officials (Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s first openly gay, first Black, female mayor). (For a complete list and bios of all 31 of this year’s icons as well as resources for educators, go to: lgbthistorymonth.com.)
Beginning on Oct. 1, a different icon will be featured on the site. A 30-second video featuring a different LGBT icon will appear on the site daily. Before Oct. 1 and after Oct. 31, a two-and-a-half-minute overview video of all 31 icons will be on display.
History helps us to learn from the past. Stories from history inspire and encourage us to act in the present. Yet, many of us who are queer have only recently started to become informed about the history of our community.
Since 2006, the Equality Forum has spearheaded LGBT History Month in October. “In 1994, Rodney Wilson, a Missouri high school teacher, believed a month should be dedicated to the celebration and teaching of gay and lesbian history, and gathered other teachers and community leaders,” according to Equality Forum’s website.
The idea was endorsed by GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Education Association and other organizations. In 2006, Equality Forum, according to its website, “assumed responsibility for content, promotion and resources for LGBT History Month.” The Equality Forum is a national and international LGBT civil rights organization with an educational focus.
“I grew up in Central Pennsylvania,” Malcolm Lazin, 76, Equality Forum executive director, said in a phone interview. “There was a very negative view of anyone who was gay when I was growing up. Everybody was deep in the closet.”
As was the case with others interviewed for this article, Lazin learned nothing about LGBT history when he was growing up. “In 2006, when we launched Gay and Lesbian History Month [later renamed LGBT History Month], our minority was the only group in the world not taught its history at home, in schools or religious institutions,” Lazin said.
Over the past 15 years, more than 400 “icons” (31 per year) have been celebrated during LGBT History Month. Icons honored previously during LGBT History Month range from James Baldwin to Tallulah Bankhead to Barbara Gittings, widely regarded as the mother of the LGBT civil rights movement, to Alexander the Great to Billie Holiday to economist John Maynard Keynes to Billie Jean King to trailblazing transgender, gay rights and AIDS activist Marsha P. Johnson. The Blade’s Lou Chibbaro Jr. was honored as an icon in 2019.
The LGBT History Month 2020 and 15th Anniversary launch was held on Sept. 30. At the event, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Jess O’Connell, one of this year’s 31 LGBT History Month icons, who was the first openly LGBT Democratic National Committee CEO, received awards. Lightfoot received the Equality Forum’s 25th Annual International Role Model Award. O’Connell received the 6th Annual Frank Kameny Award.
“It was conservative in all the ways you would expect when I was growing up in Arizona,” O’Connell said in a phone interview.
O’Connell didn’t learn about gay history as a high school student in the 1980s. But, from early on, she was exposed to all kinds of diversity. “I was raised by a Black father and white mother,” O’Connell said, “I had an aunt in California who was gay.”
One of the first times that she grieved was when a family friend died from AIDS. “I learned that love comes in many different forms,” O’Connell said.
LGBT rights along with issues of racial and economic inequality were part of her everyday life. Her first job was in AIDS activism. In 2000, she was the first female director of AIDS Walk Colorado, a Colorado AIDS Project program. “The COVID-19 pandemic is triggering to me,” said O’Connell, who served as a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. “With AIDS, I saw the devastation that occurs when the government pretends a disease doesn’t exist.”
There are some similarities between COVID-19 and AIDS, Lynch said. In the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, people didn’t know how it was spread and people died from it. As with COVID, there was fear of contagion and of death. “But, no other disease has the stigma of AIDS,” Lynch said. “The stigma is still there today. It’s rooted in the unease that so many have with sexuality.”
Young queer men were trying to face the fact that they would die from AIDS before they had any idea of the meaning of their lives, he said. One lesson in dealing with COVID-19 that can be learned from the history of the AIDS epidemic is “compassion,” Lynch said. “During the epidemic, friends and lovers fed, visited, and cared for people with AIDS. Even when no one else would. You didn’t think about it – it was the thing to do.”
Theater can help us to connect to our LGBTQ history. “The great thing about theater,” Moisés Kaufman, an award-winning theater director and playwright, emailed the Blade, “is that it allows audiences to have several types of intimacy with the LGBTQ characters in history.”
They can see the play, and be in the room with the living actors as they encounter our ancestry, said Kaufman, one of this year’s 31 LGBT History Month icons.
“Our history is made by other LGBTQ people who had to survive in perilous and forbidding times,” he added. “I’ve been fortunate to be able to learn from them.”
His groundbreaking play “The Laramie Project,” inspired by the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard has generated worldwide empathy and dialogue around LGBTQ hate crimes. Actors “get to experience our ancestors first hand,” Kaufman said, “They get to inhabit their humanity.”
History tells the stories of LGBTQ pioneers and helps us tell our own stories. Rabbi Deborah Waxman, one of this year’s 31 LGBT History Month icons, is herself a pioneer. Waxman is the first woman and the first lesbian to lead a Jewish seminary and national congregational union. She serves as president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and of Reconstructing Judaism, the leading organization of the Reconstructionist movement.
There were no role models for being lesbian or being a woman, let alone an openly lesbian rabbi when Waxman was growing up. “I just knew I didn’t want to kiss boys,” Waxman said in a telephone interview.
Waxman didn’t come out until she was into her 20s. When she said she wanted to be a rabbi, her mother was worried. Because, at that time, there were so few women rabbis. “When I came out to my Mom, she was really worried. She said, ‘It was hard enough being a woman,’” Waxman said. “How would I ever be a rabbi as not only a woman but a lesbian?”
Years later, when she was installed in her leadership positions, Waxman told her Mom, “It worked out OK.”
Her parents were immensely proud, she said.
Waxman is keenly aware that she’s often a pioneer. Frequently, she’s the only woman and only queer person during national conversations among leaders about religious matters. “I try to do it with humility,” she said. “Storytelling helps us make our way through the world, she added.
Gold Coast, one of West Hollywood’s most popular gay bars, has closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, its co-owner confirmed Thursday (24 September).
With many queer bars already in decline or having to permanently shut amid the coronavirus pandemic across the globe, the 8228 Santa Monica Boulevard bar has become the fourth queer bar in the area to shutter due to COVID-19.
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Writing in a Facebook post announcing its closure, co-owner Bryan Worl lamented the loss of what was a “home” to much of west Hollywood’s queer community as well as the bar’s own staffers.
“We do not have a choice,” he said. “We have fought and tried everything in our power to keep this bar and dealing with pressure from very, very selfish and heartless people.”
Rage and Flaming Saddles are also among the bars to be closed. All three were owned by real estate mogul Monte Overstreet, a gay man who earned the rightful nickname of “The king of Boystown” among locals, according to WeHoville.ADVERTISING
Gym Bar, the other bar to have been closed, was owned by Elias Shokrian.
‘This is heartbreaking for all and especially the employees,’ says co-owner.
Bob Hastings opened Gold Coast in 1981. Throughout the decades, the bar became popular for its down-to-earth, family-like vibe and price-friendly drinks.
Worl, who had been Hasting’s partner in the enterprise for 26 years, reflected on the bar’s staffers: “They were so loyal and worked so hard.
“I can’t even start with the customers right now and what unconditional love you gave to this little neighbourhood dive bar.”
He added: “If you want to stop by and say hi or come in for a quick pic or last goodbye… I feel a lot of people would like that.
“A lot of people called the GC home, and we just want everyone to have a chance to say goodbye.”
Gay bar Gold Coast was known for its iconic annual Red Dress Party.
Many years ago, two Gold Coast bartenders, Mark Ferguson and Yves-Claude, made a vow, in classic gallows humour.
The two men were living with HIV and constantly in and out of the hospital due to the lack of treatment at the time. They vowed that when one of them died, the other would show up at the memorial service in a red dress.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13296932562903654?pubid=ld-5883-3439&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinknews.co.uk&rid=www.pinknews.co.uk&width=572
Mark Ferguson died from HIV-related complications in 1997. And Yves-Claude happened to be out of town.
But he kept his vow and took it to the next level. Yves-Claude decided to celebrate his friend and co-worker’s life with a party at Gold Coast at which everyone was invited to wear a red dress.
Subsequently, the Red Dress Party has been held at Gold Coast in July ever since. And staffers hope it will hopefully be celebrated somewhere else to remember the history that Gold Coast has harboured for so many years.
Officers found Mia Green, a Philadelphia resident, shot in the neck in the passenger’s seat of a car driven by Abdullah lbn El-Amin Jaamia when he was stopped Monday morning for running a stop sign, a police statement said.
During the traffic stop, Jaamia, 28, “exited the front driver’s door and approached Police stating that his passenger was shot.”
Officers then provided a police escort as Jaamia drove Green to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 8:30 a.m.
Upon further investigation, Jaamia was charged with murder and related offenses on Tuesday, police said.
Authorities did not provide details surrounding the investigation, possible motive and arrest, or specify the relationship between the suspect and victim. It was not immediately clear if Jaamia has a lawyer.
“We know that the loss of yet another trans community member of color is especially painful, no matter the circumstances,” the city said. “This latest act of violence against a member of our community is a somber reminder of the epidemic of violence against trans individuals.”
Green’s death shows “there is much work to be done in the pursuit of full equality, respect, and justice for us all,” the statement said.
Across the U.S., there has been “surge of violence against transgender people,” according to the National Center for Transgender Equality.
“In just seven months, the number of transgender people suspected of being murdered in 2020 has surpassed the total for all of 2019,” the center wrote in an August blog post, prior to Green’s death.
There have been at least 29 instances of fatal violence against trans and gender nonconforming people in the U.S. this year, with most of the victims being Black and Latinx transgender women, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Earlier this year, the remains of Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, a Black transgender woman, were discovered in the city’s Schuylkill River, and police declared her death a murder.
San Diego’s professional soccer team walked off the field during a match that it was winning on Wednesday after an opposing team member allegedly hurled a homophobic slur at an openly gay player.
The San Diego Loyal SC said a member of Phoenix Rising “used a homophobic slur directed at Collin Martin.”
Phoenix Rising said in a statement that it is “investigating the claim of a homophobic slur being used by one its players who has vehemently denied these allegations. Phoenix Rising stands with the USL in rejecting and punishing any homophobic behavior.”
The United Soccer League also said it is looking into the alleged bigotry.
“Foul and abusive language of any type has absolutely no place in our society and will not be tolerated in USL matches,” the league wrote in a statement late Wednesday. “An investigation is currently underway to determine the facts surrounding the incident and more information will be provided as soon as it is available.”
“We don’t even want to recognize being a part of a match where these types of actions take place,” the San Diego team’s chairman, Andrew Vassiliadis, said in a statement at the time. “The Loyal in our name is symbolic of the diversity in our community and as a club we will not stand for this.”
The team’s head coach, Landon Donovan, said that the past week since the Sept. 23 incident has been difficult for the team.
“I understand that most people watching from afar probably don’t really get it, but we’ve been living it,” he said. The club made a vow “that we would not stand for bigotry, homophobic slurs, things that don’t belong in our game.”
He acknowledged that forfeiting Wednesday’s match would likely mean the Loyal SC would not make the playoffs, but, he said, “There are more important things in life, and we have to stick up for what we believe in.”