Homicides in California jumped 31% last year, making it the deadliest year since 2007, and Black people accounted for nearly one-third of all victims, according to reports released Thursday.
The 2,202 homicides last year were 523 more than in 2019, while the rate increased by a similar margin — from 4.2 to 5.5 homicides per 100,000 people.
That’s the most slayings since 2,258 people were killed in 2007, and the rate is the highest since 2008. Black people make up 6.5% of California’s population but accounted for 31% of all victims last year. Hispanic people accounted for 45%, while 16% were white.
Last year saw such a stark increase in homicides in part because the number and rate of homicides the year before were so low.
California’s 2019 homicide rate was the lowest since 1966, and violent and property crime rates in 2019 generally were among the lowest since the 1960s, four experts from the University of California, Berkeley’s California Policy Lab said in a related review focusing on cities with more than 100,000 people.
California cities generally did better than those in other states that saw bigger per capita increases in homicides and aggravated assaults, experts said.
Yet last year, California had nearly 300 more homicides than the next most deadly year in the last decade — 2016, which had 1,930 slayings, according to annual reports from the state attorney general’s office.
The jump in California homicides comes amid an erratic year for crime, with a less than 1% increase in overall violent crime and a 7.7% drop in property crime during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the state reports.
The pandemic and its accompanying stay-at-home orders and other restrictions led to erratic changes in crime patterns last year, the experts said in a report to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Committee on the Revision of the Penal Code.
“Social dislocations, stresses, and alterations to our collective daily routines due to the pandemic have impacted crime rates in California and across the country,” they said.
Property crime also fell more in California cities compared with others nationwide that reported their rates to the FBI. However, the vehicle theft rate was higher in California cities for reasons the experts could not explain.
They cited reduced social interactions from the stay-at-home orders as the likely reason for drops in robbery, rape and larceny.
From the first U.S. Supreme Court ruling to address homosexuality to the first bisexual “Bachelorette,” here are 10 historic LGBTQ milestones from around the world.
Kathy Kozachenko
First out gay person elected to office in the U.S.
Kathy Kozachenko holds a photo of her son and her partner at her home in Pittsburgh in 2015.Chris Goodney / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Three years before Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, out lesbian Kathy Kozachenko was voted onto the Ann Arbor City Council in Michigan on April 2, 1974.
Kozachenko was just 21 and a student at the University of Michigan, a hotbed of anti-war protests and activism supporting racial justice, women’s rights and other causes.
Her sexual orientation didn’t seem to be an issue with voters, and “gay liberation was not a major issue in the campaign,” Kozachenko said in her victory speech, Bloomberg reported.
“This year we talked about rent control. We talked about the city’s budget. We talked about police priorities, and we had a record of action to run on,” she said at the time.
Kozachenko only served one two-year term and eventually moved to Pittsburgh, where she remained involved in gay activism and met her longtime partner, MaryAnn Geiger.
“I am so proud of all the activists that came after me,” Kozachenko told NBC News last year. “The people that pushed and pushed and pushed for gay marriage, the transgender people that have pushed for their rights … I’m grateful for the chance that I was able to play a small part in this.”
‘Wings’ (1927)
First male-male kiss in a Hollywood movie
Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen during the filming of “Wings” in 1927.Hulton Archive / Getty Images
William A. Wellman’s silent film “Wings,” the first movie to win the Academy Award for best picture, follows Jack (Charles Rogers) and David (Richard Arlen) as they enlist in the Army Air Service during World War I and bond during basic training before being shipped off to France.
While they’re ostensibly romantic rivals for “it girl” Clara Bow, neither “shows as much love for her … as they do for each other,” queer writer Kevin Sessums wrote, according to the LGBT History Project blog.
In the pre-Hays Code film’s climax, Jack accidentally shoots down David, who has commandeered a German biplane. Running to his dying friend’s side, Jack takes David in his arms and begs forgiveness. As the camera zooms in, the two stroke each other’s hair tenderly and Jack declares, “You know there is nothing in the world that means so much to me as your friendship.”
The men share a lingering closed-lip kiss before Jack takes his final breath.
“While the relationship is referred to repeatedly as a friendship, the acting and directing of the film make it obvious that the men’s feelings were romantic,” wrote culture critic and curator Francesca Seravalle. “A swell of romantic string instruments plays in the background as Jack mourns over Dave’s still body. The directing choices made by Wellman humanized both characters and allowed the audience to experience the tragedy without exploiting the perceived exoticness of a relationship between two men.”
One, Inc. v. Olesen
First U.S. Supreme Court ruling to address homosexuality
Founded in 1952, ONE, Inc. was one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the United States and the first to have its own offices.
An accompanying magazine, One Magazine, started publication in 1953 — selling through subscriptions and at Los Angeles newsstands — and is considered the first mass-produced gay publication in America.
In October 1954, L.A. Postmaster Otto K. Olesen refused to deliver the magazine, declaring it “obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy.” ONE sued but lost the case and a subsequent appeal — a panel of federal judges declared “Sappho Remembered,” a lesbian love story that ran in one issue, “nothing more than cheap pornography calculated to promote lesbianism.”
Founding editors Dale Jennings and Don Slater appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which, surprisingly, agreed to hear their case.
On Jan. 13, 1958, without even hearing oral arguments, the justices issued a terse, one-line ruling reversing the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision and affirming that the mere subject of homosexuality was not obscene.
In a Washington Post op-ed in 2014, Brookings Institution fellow Jonathan Rauch called One, Inc. v Olesen “the seminal gay rights case in America — the one that extended First Amendment protection to gay-related speech.”
Marcia Kadish & Tanya McCloskey
First same-sex couple legally married in the United States
Marcia Kadish, left, and Tanya McCloskey after being pronounced wife and wife at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004.Dina Rudick / Boston Globe via Getty Images
On Nov. 18, 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to recognize same-sex marriage when, in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the state Supreme Court ruled it could not “deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.”
“Recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of the same sex will not diminish the validity or dignity of opposite-sex marriage,” wrote Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, “any more than recognizing the right of an individual to marry a person of a different race devalues the marriage of a person who marries someone of her own race.”
The first licenses were issued on May 17, 2004, and McCloskey and Kadish, who had already been together nearly 20 years at that point, picked theirs up a few minutes after midnight. With a waiver that allowed them to skip the traditional three-day waiting period, the women exchanged vows later that morning at Cambridge City Hall.
“We felt we were married already,” Kadish told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2019. “This was just making it legal.”
At least 78 same-sex couples married in Massachusetts that day — the same day President George W. Bush called for a congressional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
“The sacred institution of marriage should not be redefined by a few activist judges,” Bush said in a statement. “All Americans have a right to be heard in this debate.”
It wasn’t until 2015 that McCloskey and Kadish’s union was recognized federally, when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively made same-sex marriage the law of the land in Obergefell v. Hodges.
By that time, McCloskey had been diagnosed with endometrial cancer. The disease spread quickly, and she died on Jan. 6, 2016.
“We wanted to lead by example, not that we were leaders of anything,” Kadish told NPR. “We just wanted to make sure that the world saw the most positive side of being a gay couple.”
One day before the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march in New York, the Windy City hosted the world’s first Pride march on June 27, 1970 — albeit a much smaller one than the Big Apple’s. The half-mile procession officially went from Washington Square Park to the Water Tower at the bustling intersection of Chicago and Michigan avenues, but many participants continued down to the Civic Center plaza (now Daley Plaza).
Once there, about 150 people listened to speeches at the plaza before doing a “chain dance around the Picasso statue as the marchers shouted, ‘Gay power to gay people,’” the Chicago Tribune reported.
Chicago Gay Liberation, which organized the event, chose the date because the Stonewall uprising had started on the last Saturday in June the year prior. The members also wanted to reach the biggest crowd of shoppers on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.
Today, the Chicago Pride Parade takes place on the last Sunday of June, drawing more than 800,000 people to North Halsted Street, long known as “Boystown.”
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
First out LGBTQ prime minister
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir speaks with the media after winning the elections on April 25, 2009 in Reykjavik. Olivier Morin / AFP via Getty Images
While gay finance minister Per-Kristian Foss was briefly in charge of Norway in 2002 when both the prime minister and foreign minister were traveling abroad, Iceland’s Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is the world’s first openly LGBTQ elected head of state.
A former flight attendant, Jóhanna was first elected to the Althingi (Iceland’s parliament) in 1978 as part of the Social Democratic Party. Throughout her career, she has also served as deputy speaker of the Althingi, vice chair of the SDP and minister of social affairs.
On Feb. 1, 2009, Jóhanna was formally sworn in as Iceland’s first female prime minister and the first out LGBTQ world leader in modern history. She served from 2009 to 2013, steering the country’s economy “back on solid footing” after the massive financial crisis, according to Britannica, with the country’s GDP growing 3 percent in both 2011 and 2012.
She and girlfriend Jónína Leósdóttir entered into a civil union in 2002. In 2010, when Iceland recognized same-sex marriage midway through Jóhanna’s tenure, the pair became one the first same-sex married couples in the country.
Society for Human Rights
First officially recognized gay rights group in the U.S.
German immigrant Henry Gerber launched the Society for Human Rights out of his Chicago home in 1924 and received an official charter from the state of Illinois, making it the first incorporated group devoted to gay rights in the U.S.
Stationed in his former homeland during World War I, Gerber witnessed Berlin’s thriving gay subculture and was influenced by the work of pioneering sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld.
Returning to the States, he took a job with the post office and founded the society out of his apartment at 1710 N. Crilly Court in Chicago’s Old Town Triangle neighborhood.
But the organization lasted less than a year, disbanding in 1925 after police raids on both a member’s home and Gerber’s apartment. Gerber was fired from the post office and eventually moved to New York, where he continued advocating for gay rights until his death in 1972.
In 2015, Gerber’s Chicago home was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service.
Renée Richards
First transgender tennis player to compete in the U.S. Open
Dr. Renée Richards reaches for a backhanded return during a match with Australia’s Lesley Hunt in the $100,000 Women’s Professional Tennis Tournament at Walter Brown Arena.Bettmann / Bettmann Archive
Renée Richards was set to play in the 1976 U.S. Open until officials learned she was assigned male at birth and attempted to ban her from competing.
Richards had been a tennis prodigy from a young age, playing in the men’s Open several times and even making the semifinals in 1972. A successful ophthalmologist, she medically transitioned in 1975 and began living as Renée Richards (the name Renée meaning “reborn”).
She kept a fairly low profile — entering a 1976 competition as Renée Clark — but her transition was “outed” in a local news report by San Diego reporter Dick Carlson, father of Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. Fans rooted against her, with shirts reading “Go away, Renee,” and late-night talk show hosts made crude jokes.
When Richards entered the Tennis Week Open in 1976, 25 of the 32 women in the competition withdrew.
To keep Richards off the court, the United States Tennis Association started demanding a chromosome test for all female players. She challenged that policy in a case that went before the New York Supreme Court.
Mirroring arguments made by groups seeking to ban transgender athletes today, the USTA argued it was trying to maintain “fairness” in the face of “as many as 10,000 transsexuals in the United States and many more female impersonators or imposters” who would be eager to snatch “millions of dollars of prize money.”
Billie Jean King, who had played doubles with Richards, testified that she “does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors in the sport of tennis.”
In a landmark victory, the court ruled in Richards’ favor.
“When an individual such as plaintiff, a successful physician, a husband and father, finds it necessary for [her] own mental sanity to undergo a sex reassignment, the unfounded fears and misconceptions of defendants must give way to the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female,” Judge Alfred Ascione wrote in the majority opinion.
Two weeks later, Richards played in the 1977 U.S. Open, where she lost to Wimbledon champ Virginia Wade in the first round. She did reach the doubles finals with Betty Ann Stuart, but the pair lost to Betty Stöve and a fiery new upstart named Martina Navratilova.
Four years later, Renée Richards retired from professional tennis at age 47. She continued her thriving ophthalmology practice and even coached Navratilova to two wins at Wimbledon.
Karl M. Baer
First person to surgically transition
Born in 1885 to a Jewish family in Arolsen, Germany, Baer was assigned female at birth, though the midwife told his father the baby’s body had “such strange” characteristics it was impossible to determine the gender.
In his 1907 autobiography, “Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years,” published under the pseudonym N.O. Body, Baer wrote about being ostracized at school and feeling ill at ease in his assigned sex.
While he is often referred to as transgender, today Baer would more accurately be considered intersex.
“I was born as a boy and raised as a girl,” he wrote. “One may raise a healthy boy in as womanish manner as one wishes and a female creature in as mannish; never will this cause their senses to remain forever reversed.”
In 1904, Baer moved to Hamburg to work as a social worker with the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. It was there that he began living as a man.
“I introduced myself as a man, never as a woman,” Baer wrote. “What am I really? Am I a man? Oh God, no. It would be an indescribable delight if I were. But miracles don’t happen anymore these days.”
Two years later, Baer was in a trolley accident in Berlin. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors realized his ID listed him as female despite his presenting as male. They connected him with Magnus Hirschfeld, who diagnosed him as “a man who was mistakenly identified as a woman.”
With a permit from the Prussian Interior Ministry, Baer underwent a multistage gender confirmation procedure, Haaretz reported, though the exact details of the surgery are unknown. He was released from the hospital in December 1906 with a medical certificate identifying him as male. The following year, court clerks in Arolsen issued him a new birth certificate.
Others had transitioned socially before, but Baer “was unusual in that he used medical technology and surgical means to change his gender,” transgender historian Iris Rachamimov told Haaretz.
Brooke Blurton
First bisexual “Bachelorette”
Brooke Blurton on June 19, 2019 in Perth, Australia.Faith Moran / GC Images
Since “The Bachelor” debuted on ABC in 2002, the marital-minded franchise has spawned multiple spinoff series and over 30 international editions. But it wasn’t until the upcoming season seven of “The Bachelorette Australia” that producers tapped an out member of the LGBTQ community to headline the show: 26-year-old Brooke Blurton, who is bisexual.
For the first time in the franchise’s history, the star will choose among both men and women during the rose ceremony.
“I am not too sure if Australia is ready for it,” Blurton, who previously appeared on the Down Under versions of “The Bachelor” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” told The Daily Telegraph. “I certainly am. If it makes people feel uncomfortable in any way, I really challenge them to think about why it does.”
Blurton, a Noongar Yamatji woman from Western Australia, will also be the first Indigenous woman on the show.
“We are a nation of people from so many different backgrounds, so many different cultures and so many different experiences, yet we all have one thing in common — we all want to be loved in a way that is meaningful to us,” “Bachelorette” host Osher Günsberg said in a statement. “I can’t wait to get started on helping our Bachelorette Brooke find that kind of love.”
Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth will welcome an artwork featuring casts of the faces of 850 trans people.
For the artwork, 850 Improntas (850 Imprints), Mexican artist Teresa Margolles will cast the faces of 850 trans people in London and beyond.
The proposed sculpture would highlight people whose “lives are often overlooked”, many of them sex workers, forming one of the world’s highest-profile public art commissions.
The casts will be arranged around the fourth plinth to create a Tzompantli, a skull rack from Mesoamerican civilisations used to display the remains of war captives or sacrifice victims.
Due to London’s weather, Margolles expects the casts to wear away and eventually disintegrate, leaving behind “a kind of anti-monument”, she told the Guardian.
The current artwork featured at Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth is Heather Phillipson’s The End – a giant replica of whipped cream topped with a cherry, a fly and a drone – which will be on display until September 2022.
Following that will be a sculpture by Samson Kambalu, which is inspired by a 1914 photo of African independence hero and preacher John Chilembwe with English coloniser John Chorley. The sculpture will highlight Chilembwe, making him larger-than-life while Chorley remains life-size, who is wearing a hat in an act of defiance of a colonial rule that forbade Africans from wearing hats in front of white people.
Kambalu and Margolles’ artworks were chosen by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group after a public vote of nearly 17,500 people.
Ekow Eshun, the chair of the group, said it received more public votes than ever.
A gay dad has emphatically shut down homophobes who think queer people shouldn’t be parents after his son qualified for the Olympics.
Jerry Windle is the proud father of Jordan Windle, a 22-year-old diver who recently qualified for the men’s diving team for the Tokyo Olympics.
Tragically, both of Jordan’s biological parents died when he was just a baby. Jerry later adopted him in Cambodia and nursed him back to health after he had suffered from malnutrition, scabies and intestinal parasites.
Jordan later started diving at the age of seven – and he is now set to achieve a lifelong dream of representing the United States at the Olympics.
“Although there have been some people who didn’t think a gay person could raise a well-balanced, mentally healthy child or should be allowed to raise children; our story is definitive proof that that assumption is purely wrong and is a fallacy,” Jerry told Queerty.
“Jordan is a humble, kind, generous, and nurturing human being who knows and believes all humans are created equal and every human being deserves to be happy, to love and be loved unconditionally – PERIOD.
For the most part, the diving community has been incredibly supportive of our family. In fact, I’ve had many of Jordan’s friends tell him that he had the best dad in the world – and I suppose I’m one of the ‘cool dads’!” he added.
Gay dad Jerry Windle reflected on the sacrifices his son made to achieve his dream
Elsewhere in the interview, Jerry reflected on the personal sacrifices Jordan has made to get to where he is today.
“He has worked tirelessly for 15 years chasing his dream; he has given up high school dances, prom, football games, homecoming, etc, to achieve his goal.
“I have never pushed Jordan in his sport. This has been his journey, and I am so proud to have been able to give him the opportunity, and to be there to support him.
“I never wanted Jordan to feel pressure from me as many athletes do. I’ve always supported his decisions as it relates to his journey chasing the Olympic Dream.”
Efforts to erase LGBTQ sex education topics from public school curriculum are growing in GOP-led state legislatures and sweeping moves are tightening in Arizona, Tennessee, Idaho, and Missouri. These policymakers would rather punish LGBTQ people for being who they are than provide them with information and educational resources to live healthy, successful lives. In what has become our nation’s latest culture war, it’s disheartening to know that LGBTQ youth stand to lose the most.
Already, there’s no national mandate for sexual education, and for the few states that do offer it, LGBTQ topics are disregarded or degraded. Non-profit organization Sex Ed For Social Change, states, “nine states require educators to portray homosexuality in a negative manner or do not allow them to speak about LGBTQ individuals.” This points to the dismal state of LGBTQ sexual education as-is. Additional efforts to hide this information will only further disempower queer youth.
One of the ways I can resist these recent efforts is by sharing my story of what I didn’t learn in sex ed. This article is a continuation of the first.
1. Pleasure can come in multiple forms.
For many people, sexual education de-emphasizes pleasure and emphasizes risk. Youth lose sight of the benefits that a healthy sex life can provide, and are unable to visualize the many ways they are able to please themselves and meet their needs for intimacy, play, and self-expression. There are also many ways that people can receive pleasure–polyamory, phone sex, adult toys, and more. Ethical Slut offers new ways of being in relationship with individuals. It’s the bible for non-traditional relationships. COVID-19 and our fear of physical touching taught us the power of phone sex, and these are learned lessons we can continue to carry with us. And with adult toys, there is a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. Do not, for example, use silicone lube on silicone toys, because the silicone of the lube can break down the toy’s material. Always use water-based lube on silicone toys.
2. How to give consent & How to say no
We may have at least been taught that consent is important, but we don’t learn the nuances of communication when we’re in the moment. As I’ve grown older, I realized that “I’m getting tired,” or “I have an early morning tomorrow” are indirect ways a potential sexual partner may revoke consent. It’s also important to understand that at any point, for any reason, a person can revoke consent. Even if we’ve begun ripping off each other’s clothes voraciously, any person can later decide that they no longer want to continue. It is vulnerable receive rejection, and it’s also extremely vulnerable to tell someone you’re no longer interested. It takes maturity to acknowledge that the best shared sexual experience comes from both partners being super, super, super excited about being together. Simply put, your experience won’t reach its full potential when your partner’s experience isn’t the most pleasurable. Sometimes it pays to wait for the right moment. And if just the thought of rejecting someone or hearing rejection scares you or angers you, please, please deeply consider choosing to not engage in sexual activity until you’re more comfortable navigating the level of communication needed to protect yourself and others. This video explains it succinctly:
The irony is that even if GOP politicians are unsuccessful in their attempts to further limit LGBTQ sexual health education, the mere discussion of the topic is enough to impact the sex lives of queer youth. Consider a 2020 Trevor report that found that “86% of LGBTQ youth said that recent politics have negatively impacted their well-being.” If we don’t feel safe, we’re not likely to fully realize our sexual potential. That’s because mental health is sexual health. No wonder so many drugs that impact our brain health also have sexual side effects. Mental health also determines if we believe we are worthy of sex and healthy sexual relationships.
4. You get to decide what sex means to you
I believe I lost my virginity the moment I had oral sex with my first partner. Because this person is still in my life as a friend, he once retorted, “We didn’t have sex.” To some people (e.g. Bill Clinton), I have realized that oral sex really isn’t sex, but to me it is. In fact, I don’t even think orgasming is necessary for sex to have happened. This happens to be my definition, and I believe it’s just as valid as the individuals who have more conservative interpretations of sex. Because I find sex to be such an intimate, personal experience I want to affirm young readers that they are allowed to determine what sex means to them–especially since as queer people the way we have sex is often explained within a heteronormative context which doesn’t work for everyone.
Trying to give readers a sex education in two 1,000-word personal essays is impossible. These thoughts are just my own experience, and it’s likely there are many other things you could add to this list as well. We can’t go back and time and give ourselves the sex education we needed, but we can continue forward remaining curious and doing all that we can to empower ourselves now. The topics in this two-part series only start the conversation. Continue following the links, questioning, and discovering your body.
The night of 9 September, 1982 started off like any other evening for Declan Flynn.
He went to Belton’s Pub in Donnycarney, Dublin with a friend – an establishment that was just a short walk from his home.
At 11.45pm that night, Flynn left the pub and set off on his walk home through Dublin’s Fairview Park, a well-known meeting spot for gay men. He stopped off at the Fairview Grill on his way home where he met with a male friend. Before continuing his journey, his friend kissed him on the cheek.
Shortly afterwards, he was violently beaten to within an inch of his life by a group of “vigilante” teenage boys who wanted to remove queer people from the park.
At around 1.45am, a badly-beaten Flynn was discovered in the park, with paramedics arriving on the scene just minutes later. He died shortly afterwards in Blanchardstown Hospital.
He was just 31-years-old.
Flynn’s death sent shockwaves through Ireland’s LGBT+ community – but anger reached a crescendo when the boys responsible for his death went before the courts.
One of the boys admitted that they went to the park as part of a “queer bashing” mission, boasting about having “battered about 20 steamers”.
“We used to grab them. If they hit back we gave it to them,” said Robert Alan Armstrong, then aged 18.
Despite this, all five boys walked free, with Mr Justice Seán Gannon telling them that Flynn’s killing “could never be regarded as murder”.
Gannon told the court: “One thing that has come to my mind is that there is no element of correction that is required. All of you come from good homes and experienced care and affection.”
Heartbreak in Ireland’s LGBT+ community quickly turned to fury – a rage that was compounded when the teenage killers held a “victory march” in Dublin after walking away with suspended sentences.
Flynn’s death galvanised the modern Pride movement in Ireland as LGBT+ people rose up and demanded that Irish society treat them with the respect they deserved. Between 400 and 800 queer people took to the streets shortly after the boys were given suspended sentences, marching from Liberty Hall through the city to Fairview Park in protest.
“When the judge let them off with suspended manslaughter sentences, essentially what it said to us was that a gay man’s life had no value,” Tonie Walsh, curator of the Irish Queer Archive, told drag queen Panti Bliss on her radio show Pantisocracy.
That march, Walsh said, was “the first large-scale massing of lesbians and gay men in Ireland”.
“We were angry and fearful at the same time. And the only good thing that came out of all that misery was we funnelled all that anger into Ireland’s first proper Pride parade three months later, when 150 of us walked down newly pedestrianised Grafton Street.”
On 25 June, 1983, protesters marched through the streets from Stephen’s Green to the General Post Office (GPO), where Cathal Ó Ciarragáin, Tonie Walsh and Joni Crone addressed the crowd.
In her speech, Crone delivered a satirical queer re-working of the 1916 proclamation of independence, written by Irish revolutionaries and read in the same spot many years before.
It was a moment of protest, anger and visibility — and it marked a radical shift in queer activism in Ireland.
In an interview with Una Mullally for her book In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland, LGBT+ rights campaigner Izzy Kamikaze said: “We were the people who organised the Fairview Park march after the killing, which is the thing that people say was ‘The Irish Stonewall’. It was.”
Ireland at the time was a staunchly Catholic country and it was a cold, unrelentingly cruel place for queer people to exist.
Since then, things have changed drastically. Gay sex was finally decriminalised in 1993. In 2015, marriage equality was legalised and the Gender Recognition Act was finally passed, giving some trans people legal recognition for the first time.
None of those changes would have happened without the tireless, painstaking work done by LGBT+ activists who spent years marching through the streets, demanding change.
When marriage equality finally became a reality in 2015, activists decorated a footbridge in Fairview Park in memory of Declan Flynn, showing that the legacy of his shocking death will never be forgotten.
Almost 40 years on, Flynn remains a vital figure in Ireland’s Pride movement – even if he never lived to see LGBT+ equality.
An already married couple are planning a beautiful “re-wedding” after one spouse came out as a trans woman.
Jae and Rayna Harvey, of Somerset, England, first got married in 2018 in Texas, where Jae is from, but shortly after the wedding Rayna came out as a trans woman.
Rayna told The Mirror that she had been suppressing her true self since she was 11 years old, and that she felt hugely “liberated” after coming out while on their honeymoon in Wiltshire.
The couple are now planning a “re-wedding” to celebrate their love now that Rayna is out, and Jae said: “There’s a bit of a disconnect when we think back to our first wedding as I feel, ‘Well, Ray wasn’t there?’ and I want her in my wedding.
“What I want more than anything is for her family to see her walk down the aisle and for her to have her day – I got to have mine with all my bells and whistles, so now it’s her turn.”
Rayna said that since coming out as trans, she has received “absolutely incredible support” from everyone in her life, including her 93-year-old nan, who buys her “granddaughter” cards on special occasions.
Jae added that at the “re-wedding”, set to take place in Somerset’s Quantock Hills next September, both brides will be “wearing beautiful black dresses” as part of “an all-black and white theme with white, pink and red roses” symbolising rebirth.
In a message to Jae recently shared on Instagram, Rayna said: “Wife, words will never be able to explain how much of a difference you’ve made to my life, I owe most of who I am to you and the time you invested to teach me and to help me get where I want to be.
“From doing my photoshoots, helping me with what goes together clothes wise, holding my hand and reassuring me, to just loving me and being my wife, you’ve got it all, and I’m so so lucky to be loved by you.
“Here’s to another lifetime of love, laughs and happiness.”
A single gay man who said he’s “always dreamed” of a big family has just adopted his sixth child with a disability.
Ben Carpenter, 37, from Huddersfield worked in the care sector before he adopted his first child when he was just 21 years old.
A single gay man who said he’s “always dreamed” of a big family has just adopted his sixth child with a disability.
Ben Carpenter, 37, from Huddersfield worked in the care sector before he adopted his first child when he was just 21 years old.
Adopting children who had disabilities and additional mental and physical needs was important to him, he said, because they “were the most vulnerable and the ones that were most in need of a loving and caring home”.
In 2015, the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) estimatedthat while 25 per cent of all looked-after children have a disability, this number skyrockets to 40 per cent for children waiting on the adoption register.
His first child Jack, who is now 14, has autism, and soon Ben started his family he adopted Ruby, now 11, who has complex needs.
I had a lot to prove at such a young age,” he said.
“I needed to show that I was mature enough and could offer these kids what they needed.”
After adopting Ruby, Ben was asked by the adoption agency whether he would adopt his daughter’s biological sister Lily, who is deaf.
His fourth child was six-year-old Joseph, who has Down’s syndrome, and his fifth child was Teddy, who had Cornelia de Lange syndrome, a rare genetic disorder.
Tragically, Teddy passed away from sepsis in November, 2019, which was unrelated to his disability.
Ben said: “I was devastated and I felt guilty for a while because I kept wondering if there was something I could have done to fix it.
“Before Teddy passed away, I had been contacted to see if I would consider another child. It was a little boy with severe brain issues.
“I had said yes, but when Teddy passed I needed to put the process on hold to allow myself to grieve.”
Last year, although still grieving his son, Ben said: “I realised that this little boy also needed me.”
In April of that year, the gay dad adopted his sixth child, Louis, whose needs to use a wheelchair because of his disability.
He explained: “I had always dreamed about having a big family and I am so happy that my kids are a part of it and that they have so many siblings.
“I often sit and imagine them all at each other’s weddings.
“They are all so supportive of each other’s needs and I am so proud that I have created a happy, loving and stable environment for them to grow up in.
“As much as I have changed their life, they have also changed mine.”
Ben is currently raising money for a multi-sensory room, which “will help the children with sensory issues, developmental disabilities and learning difficulties”, via JustGiving.
A transgender teen’s physical artwork and non-fungible tokens netted $2.16 million at auction at Christie’s on Wednesday.
“Hello, i’m Victor (FEWOCiOUS) and This Is My Life” included five lots by 18-year-old Victor Langlois, aka FEWOCiOUS, a rising star in the increasingly popular — and lucrative — world of NFT art.
An NFT is a blockchain-powered unit of data that authenticates ownership of digital objects — images, videos, songs, even tweets.
Each lot represents a year of Langlois’ life between the ages of 14 and 18, as he began to understand his gender identity, transitioned and moved from Las Vegas to Seattle.
The series includes a physical painting, a video artwork sold exclusively as an NFT and a collection of physical and NFT doodles, drawings and journal entries from the corresponding year.
Upon request, Langlois will deliver the physical painting to the collector in a custom suitcase, Christie’s said in a statement, “an ode to how he transported his earliest drawings and paintings, when leaving behind his past in pursuit of a brighter future.”
The series reflects a traumatic period in Langlois’ life, amid what he describes as an abusive upbringing. After running away from home at age 12, he was raised by his grandmother, a single mom from El Salvador with three jobs and four kids.
“I think she struggled so much that she just wanted security,” he told Christie’s. “To see me wanting to pursue art, she was like, ‘What? Be a lawyer.’ Which I understand. But it hurt when she would say, ‘Your art is ugly and that’s why you can’t do it.'”
Langlois began drawing art on his iPad, he told Decrypt, because he wasn’t allowed paint. The first piece in “Hello, I’m Victor” is titled “Year 1, Age 14 — It Hurts to Hide.”
Last year, he began selling digital works on the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway: He earned $25,000 for “Moment i Fell in Love” in November, enough to fund his move to Seattle, and rang in New Year’s 2021 with the NFT drop “Over-Analyzing Again,” which brought in $35,000.
Since getting into digital art barely a year ago, Langlois has earned just under $18 million. According to Christie’s, he’s also the youngest artist to have work sold through the legendary auction house.
“He went all out on this project and bared his beautiful soul for the world,” Christie’s digital art specialist Noah Davis said in a statement. “I hope his success shines bright for other young creative people who might be struggling with similar issues of identity and acceptance.”
On June 23, the first day of the auction, demand was so high it crashed the Christie’s website, Esquire reported. That success is particularly poignant, Langlois said, because too often trans artists are overlooked.
“Thank you so much for believing in me and my journey. It means the world,” he said in a tearful Instagram video Wednesday. “I put my everything into this, and I was so nervous to come out and to tell everyone who I am.”
The seven-figure sale is also a sign of NFTs’ growing influence among auction houses and the art world in general: Sales of NFTs topped $2 billion in the first quarter of 2021, CNBC reported, with twice as many buyers as sellers.
In March, Christie’s set a record for digital art with the $69 million sale of “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS,” an NFT by multimedia artist Beeple.
“I think NFTs are the future,” Langlois told Reuters. “If you’re posting your art and sharing it with the world digitally, I think to offer a way for collectors to own it as a digital asset is just the next step.”
Just as the queer community has been at the forefront of many artistic movements, LGBTQ artists are quickly adopting the NFT model: In April, former YouTuber Chris Crocker transformed their infamous “Leave Britney Alone” video into an NFT that earned $44,000.
The day before Langlois’ auction closed, The Queenly NFT, which bills itself as “the first cryptogallery for queer creators,” held its launch party at the former site of Andy Warhol’s Factory in Union Square in Manhattan, New York.
The inaugural collection includes more than 90 pieces — including works by trans singer Mila Jam, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” stars Manila Luzon and Bob the Drag Queen, gay nightlife photographer Wilsonmodels and lesbian photographer Lola Flash, whose work was just added to the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Brent Lomas, a New York drag performer also known as Ruby Powers, said he developed Queenly as a place for queer artists to get proper credit and compensation for their work, with LGBTQ-allied nonprofit organizations receiving a donation for every sale.
“Queer creators belong in every single space, and we deserve to take up space,” Lomas said. “They’re the ones creating the most explosive and powerful moments with their art. They’re the pioneers, showing people the world in a new way.”
This isn’t just a new kind of art, he added; it’s a new kind of patronage.
“Not every queer artist is going to have access to a place like Christie’s,” Lomas said. “Art should be democratizing, and NFTs allow artists to be in control of their work.”
In 2014, Deondre Moore, who was 19 at the time, decided to get an HIV test while he and his friends were at a nightclub in Houston.
Moore wanted his friends to get tested, “so I knew that the best way to do so was to lead by example and do my test first,” he said. He was tested earlier that year, and had recently been in what he thought was a monogamous relationship with a man he was in love with, so he wasn’t worried about the results.
“They tested me for HIV, I knew it would come back negative,” he said. “Went to the back, ready to hear my results, and he said, ‘Your test came back positive.’”
Moore said he “made up a whole scenario” in his head about why he thought the test result was wrong. But just over a week later, a doctor at the student health clinic at Sam Houston State University, where he was a freshman, confirmed the result.
“The doctor walked in, and very quickly got it out of the way. And he said, ‘Mr. Moore, I’m sorry to tell you, but our test confirmed that you do have HIV,’” he recalled. “What I heard the doctor say was, ‘Yeah, you are going to die.’”
Now 26, Moore takes just one pill a day — an antiretroviral treatment that makes the virus undetectable and untransmittable to others. It’s not a cure, but it means that, unlike a few decades ago, people like Moore can live long, healthy lives.
Treatment for HIV has come a long way since June 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published its first scientific report describing the disease now known as AIDS in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But advocates say there’s still more work to be done. Stigma surrounding HIV is persistent, and the virus disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men of color, particularly Black men, due to inequality in a variety of areas.
Advocates want to see better health education in schools, better access to health care and, ultimately, an end to the epidemic.
A lack of education — and more HIV cases among young people
Moore’s mother, Kathleen Wingate, said that she didn’t personally know anyone who was living with HIV prior to her son’s diagnosis, so she didn’t know anything about it. Going to his doctor’s appointments with him helped a lot, she said.
The doctor explained to her that she couldn’t contract HIV from hugging her son, kissing him or sharing food and drinks with him.
“And I always thought, ‘Oh, if he touches me … If somebody touches you, you’re going to get it.’ I’ve heard that,” Wingate said. But the doctor told her that if Moore took one pill every day for the rest of his life, he could live to 90 or 100 years old.
Misinformation and stigma persist in part because of poor sex education across the country, said J. Maurice McCants-Pearsall, director of HIV and health equity at Human Rights Campaign.
He noted that young people ages 13 to 24 are overrepresented in new HIV diagnoses, with the age group making up 21 percent of the category in 2018, according to the CDC. Young gay and bisexual men account for 83 percent of all new diagnoses in the age group, and young Black gay and bisexual men make up 42 percent of new diagnoses among young queer men.
“And then we have to ask the question, well, why is that?” McCants-Pearsall said. “Well, there’s a direct correlation with a lack of sexual health education and HIV in young folks between the ages of 13 and 24. That’s undeniable.”
He said HIV’s impact on Black and brown people is also due to social determinants of health, which he said aren’t being addressed for communities of color. “It’s not just enough to give someone a blue magical pill and say, ‘Oh, this is going to prevent you from contracting HIV,’” he said. “No, we have to have comprehensive health care for folks, then address all their needs from mental health to behavioral health services, to increased access to medical treatment and/or prevention services … equal access to educational, employment opportunities, housing.”
Legislation also plays a role. Thirty-seven states criminalize exposing someone to HIV, according to the CDC. McCants-Pearsall said 11 states have laws that make it a felony to spit or bite someone if you have HIV, “even though we know the science tells us that it is not possible to transmit HIV through saliva.”
Twenty-five states also criminalize one or more behaviors that pose low risks for HIV transmission, he said. The penalties for violating these laws can include prison time: 18 impose sentences of up to 10 years, seven states impose sentences of 11 to 20 years, and five states impose a sentence of 20 years “and this is not based off of behavior motivated by intent to harm,” McCants-Pearsall said.
“This is based off of you not disclosing your status or merely the perceived exposure to HIV, and that’s ridiculous, totally ridiculous,” he said.
Ending the epidemic
Thom Kam, 65, was diagnosed with HIV in 1992. He used all natural and alternative therapies to boost his immune system until 1996, when he was hospitalized and officially had AIDS. At that time, the result of a six-month study showed that a combination of three drugs was effective at containing HIV.
“And I did that regimen eight hours every day around the clock on an empty stomach for three years, which was 4,000 plus doses without missing a single one,” he said. “But I knew how lucky I was. I knew how lucky I was to actually be able to do that … really grateful. And so I did and embraced it for myself and for all the other guys who hadn’t had the opportunity.”
In the ‘80s and the ‘90s, he said, he never thought it would get to this point, when one pill a day can make HIV undetectable. “I didn’t know if we could or not,” Kam said. “It was one big dark tunnel, and there was no light at the end.”
Treatments have improved, but Moore said HIV has been around for 40 years, and there’s no cure or vaccine. He added that about a year and a half into the Covid-19 pandemic, however, multiple vaccines exist.
“I think it just speaks to who’s mostly affected, and who was mostly affected then,” he said. Because the HIV epidemic disproportionately affected queer men, and Black and brown people, “no one cared, no one listened,” he said.
But that is not a view that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, shared.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was a leading researcher during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, said the fact that there’s a Covid-19 vaccine and no HIV vaccine is “a scientific issue” and “has nothing to do with effort.”
“We have spent literally billions of dollars on an HIV vaccine. No doubt,” he told NBC News in response to a question in May. What makes a vaccine successful is when the body makes an adequate immune response to a pathogen to clear it and prevent the person from being infected with the same pathogen again.
“That completely is different for HIV, because for reasons we still can’t explain, the body does not make a good immune response against HIV,” he said. “And that’s the reason why we never see clearance of the virus from the body of someone who’s been infected spontaneously.”
As advocates work to end the epidemic or wait for a cure, they continue to fight misconceptions. Among the most common is that HIV is a death sentence, and it is not, McCants-Pearsall said. Another is that if a person is HIV positive, it means “they did something wrong.”
“No one did anything wrong,” he said. “We have free choice. I can love who I want to love, how I want to love them, whenever I want to love them. There’s no shame in that. I did nothing wrong.”
