The White House announced Thursday that President Joe Biden has nominated Catherine Lhamon to serve as the Assistant Secretary of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.
Lhamon currently serves as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity at the White House, where she manages the President’s equity policy portfolio. She is a former attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) and served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2017 to 2021.
She has also served as Legal Affairs Secretary to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Her portfolio at Education, where she previously served in the same position under former President Barack Obama, will include LGBTQ rights, sexual misconduct and racial discrimination in the nation’s K-12 schools, universities and colleges. Lhamon was Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, to which President Obama nominated her and the Senate confirmed her in 2013.
“I am thrilled that President Biden is nominating Catherine Lhamon to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Catherine has devoted her career to ensuring equity is at the core of all her work,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement released by his office Thursday.
“She has a strong record of fighting for communities of color and underserved communities, whether as the current Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, the former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, or as a civil rights educator at Georgetown University. We are thrilled to have Catherine serving as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and know she will continue to fight for fairness, equity, and justice for all of America’s students.”
Lhamon has also litigated civil rights cases at National Center for Youth Law, Public Counsel Law Center, and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. Lhamon taught federal civil rights appeals at Georgetown University Law Center in the Appellate Litigation Program and clerked for the Honorable William A. Norris on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
“Catherine Lhamon is the right choice to lead the Department of Education’s civil rights division at such a critical time for the country and the agency. There is much work to do in order to roll back the harmful policies and legacies of Betsy DeVos, from her attacks on transgender students to her unconscionable revocation of discriminatory discipline guidance and rewrite of Title IX rules,” Adele Kimmel, Director of the Students’ Civil Rights Project at Public Justice told the Blade in an email.
“During her previous tenure in the same job, Catherine embraced equality, enforced Title IX and ensured students had an ally inside the federal government. She will do so again, and the Senate should move to quickly confirm her so she can begin the work of restoring the Department’s commitment to protecting the civil rights and dignity of students and implementing the Biden Administration’s pledge to undo the damage that DeVos has done,” Kimmel added.
Born in Virginia and raised in California, Lhamon graduated from Amherst College and Yale Law School. Lhamon and her husband and two daughters are transitioning between California and Maryland.
New York City’s annual Pride celebration, which began 51 years ago as a defiant commemoration of an anti-police uprising and has evolved into a city-sanctioned equality jamboree, will take steps to reduce the presence of law enforcement at its events.
Starting this year, police and corrections officers will also not be allowed to participate as a group in the annual Pride march until at least 2025. The ban includes the Gay Officers Action League, an organization of L.G.B.T.Q. police, which announced the news in a statement on Friday night.
The New York Police Department will also be asked to stay a block away from the edge of all in-person events, including the march. Heritage of Pride, which organizes events, will instead turn to private companies for security and safety, calling police officers in emergencies only when necessary, they said.
NYC Pride announces new policies to address the presence of law enforcement and NYPD at Pride events in New York.
NYC Pride seeks to create safer spaces for the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities at a time when violence against marginalized groups, specifically BIPOC and trans communities, has continued to escalate.
The sense of safety that law enforcement is meant to provide can instead be threatening, and at times dangerous, to those in our community who are most often targeted with excessive force and/or without reason.
NYC Pride is unwilling to contribute in any way to creating an atmosphere of fear or harm for members of the community.
The steps being taken by the organization challenge law enforcement to acknowledge their harm and to correct course moving forward, in hopes of making an impactful change.
Effective immediately, NYC Pride will ban corrections and law enforcement exhibitors at NYC Pride events until 2025.
At that time their participation will be reviewed by the Community Relations and Diversity, Accessibility, and Inclusion committees, as well as the Executive Board.
In the meantime, NYC Pride will transition to providing increased community-based security and first responders, while simultaneously taking steps to reduce NYPD presence at events.
Officials at Bucknell University, located in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, condemned a “horrific” incident in which LGBTQ students were harassed at an affinity house last week, according to a statement released by the school on Friday.
The incident took place on Thursday at Tower House: Fran’s House, an affinity house that provides LGBTQ-friendly, gender-neutral housing for Bucknell students.
The letter, signed by university President John Bravman, Provost Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, and Associate Provost for Equity and Inclusive Excellence Nikki Young, explains that a group of male students approached the residence, which formerly housed Tau Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity no longer recognized by the school.
It goes on to say “these men allegedly harassed and intimidated the residents of Tower House while attempting to enter the building.”
“It is clear from multiple accounts that the students violated the physical space and, far more importantly, the residents’ sense of place and security. Further, it is equally clear that Bucknell Public Safety’s response to the incident was lacking in myriad ways,” the letter reads.
The school will not only investigate the students’ actions and submit a report to the Bucknell administration for swift and appropriate consequences, but an outside firm will investigate the school’s Public Safety department’s response to the incident and will implement “corrective and disciplinary measures as appropriate.”
The letter does not identify the students who were victims or the aggressors involved in the incident.
“Many in our community have come together to offer support to the residents of Tower House. This support includes counseling and academic support that may be necessary during finals week,” the letter reads.
In the letter, the school vowed to continue to hold conversations with Fran’s House affinity group students about the future of their housing needs.
Friday, May 21 6:00–7:30 p.m. PDT Online program Free | $5 suggested donation
Author, historian and OutHistory.org founder Jonathan Ned Katz will discuss his new book, The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams (Chicago Review Press, 2021) the story of the daring Jewish lesbian activist Eve Adams. Drawing on startling evidence while carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams. Born into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912 and befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. In 1925 she risked it all to write and publish a book entitled Lesbian Love, presenting brief portraits of two dozen women (Katz’s book also reprints the long-lost-text of Lesbian Love). Adams’s bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), leading to her surveillance and arrest. In a case that pitted immigration officials, the New York City police, and a biased informer against her, Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene work and of attempting sex with a policewoman deployed to entrap her. Jailed and deported back to Europe, Adams was ultimately murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Register online here.
Monday, May 24 6:00–8:00 p.m. PDT Online program Free
In this event organized by City Lights Booksellers, author Sarah Schulman will discuss her new book Let the Record Show(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) with Marc Stein, a historian of LGBTQ history at San Francisco State University. Twenty years in the making, Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP New York and American AIDS activism. Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today’s activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration—and long-overdue reassessment—of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining with her characteristic rigor and bite how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world. Register online here.
Friday, June 4 6:00–7:30 p.m. PDT Online program Free | $5 suggested donation
In the first event of our new program series “Mighty Reels,” we’ll be screening a selection of video footage of San Francisco Pride celebrations from years past, drawn from the GLBT Historical Society’s archives. The footage allows us to trace the evolution of Pride over the past half-century, bearing witness to the annual display of joy, performance art, social commentary and community-building. Historian and GLBT Historical Society founding member Gerard Koskovich will lead a conversation interpreting and exploring the clips after the screening. Koskovich was also the co-curator of the society’s 2020 exhibition about the first decade of Pride, Labor of Love: The Birth of San Francisco Pride.
Highlighting home movies, drag performances, amateur documentaries, and interviews with queer history-makers, “Mighty Reels” is a quarterly program series that provides an intimate look at the LGBTQ past straight from the camera lens. Each program in the series features a screening of footage from the archives, followed by a discussion with historians, community members and activists on the significance of these images. Register online here.
Join us on Saturday, May 22, 2021 from 2-4pm for the third of three virtual North Bay LGBTQI Families 2021 Symposium workshops!
These spring workshops align with our Symposium theme of Build, Protect, Advocate, and our final workshop (“Advocate”) will cover intersectional school advocacy. Our panel will include:
Please know that through this event we intend to offer a safe and supportive space for our LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC community members. Hate speech or disrespectful conduct of any kind will not be tolerated, and any participant displaying conduct of this nature will be removed from the event immediately.
Does culture breed character, or does character breed culture? Ellen reflects the tension of this question.
Does culture breed character, or does character breed culture? Ellen reflects the tension of this question, as, arguably, do we all. The answer is not either/or but both/and. Scorned and — literally — canceled after coming out as a lesbian on her hit sitcom, “Ellen,” in April 1997, Ellen fought for years to rebuild her career. And 2003 proved to be transformative: She voiced the widely adored character of Dory in Disney’s “Finding Nemo,” released in May, and later that year, on Sept. 8, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” had its inaugural episode.
That Ellen’s coming out served as a watershed cultural moment cannot be overestimated. “It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far,” President Barack Obama said as he awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, “just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages … just how important it was, not just to the LGBT community but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister, challenge our own assumptions, to remind us that we have more in common than we realize.”
Before Ellen, LGBT representation in entertainment could best be described as the “celluloid closet,” to evoke both Vito Russo’s 1981 book and, later, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary of the same name. During the 1980s and ’90s, the LGBT community was synonymous with death and disease as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the nation and the globe. The ’90s brought sweeping federal legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which both restricted civil rights and sent the message that discriminating against the LGBT community was legal and permissible.
The context for Ellen’s coming out is essential to comprehending its significance. The year before that episode aired, in 1996, Olympian Greg Louganis’ admission that he had HIV at the time of his diving board incident was met with media sensationalism and gay panic; the year after, 1998, Matthew Shepard was tortured and murdered in Colorado.
With network TV’s national audience, Ellen had the opportunity to change how people thought about and related to gay people. She endeavored — quite successfully — to humanize the gay community through the logic of equality and, specifically, the language of sameness. Ellen, like all gay people, was just like you. As Obama remarked, she “could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister.”
She endeavored — quite successfully — to humanize the gay community through the logic of equality and, specifically, the language of sameness.
And it cannot be over emphasized how much sameness mattered in September 2003, as then-President George W. Bush declared Iraq to be the “central front” in the “war on terror.” It was a time of “us” versus “them.” And Ellen was intent on showing how gay people — gay, god-fearing Americans like her — were very much a part of the “us.”
Likeness fosters likability. Ellen cultivated this through her “Be Kind” motto and her character, which became the living embodiment of this motto. To be welcomed into the homes of millions of Americans — especially the key daytime demographic of straight women — Ellen had to look the part.
The right kind of lesbian is the innocuous one: not too femme and not too masculine. Like Rachel Maddow, the other lesbian welcomed into millions of homes in the evening, Ellen gave the mainstream nonthreatening androgyny — but with just the right touch of lipstick.
This relatability is something that Ellen addresses in her aptly titled Netflix special, “Relatable,” in 2018. But as BuzzFeed’s Shannon Keating so smartly observes, it is this push for relatability — clearly tied to ratings — that trapped “Ellen in a prison of her own making.”
The consequential irony of humanizing the gay community for Ellen is that she could not be human — fallible and flawed — herself. As she commented in her interview with “TODAY” show host Savannah Guthrie this week, sexism influences this likability bind, as it does for all women. There is no room for error. There are few, if any, second chances — especially considering that her show is her “second chance,” of sorts. And she has spoken variously, including in “Relatable,” about how the “Be Kind” motto has ultimately boxed her in: “I cannot do anything unkind now, ever. … I have bad days, but I can’t do the things you do because I’m the ‘Be Kind’ girl.”
But an entire generation has passed since “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” premiered. And visibility as a tactic for acceptance, for any marginalized community, is no longer enough. Responsibility for social problems is often placed onto “systems,” yet the fact is that systems are made and managed by privileged people like Ellen, whose actions empower those very systems.
The visibility that Ellen, among countless others, helped usher in is no longer the endgame. And neither is respectability, as Keating observes: “[W]holesome respectability, of universality, of ‘gay people are just like you’ — has fallen out of favor these days with certain more radical groups within the LGBT community.” Autostraddle’s Heather Hogan similarly writes that “calls for civility have most often been used to silence the oppressed … kindness is not justice,” and “being nice isn’t enough.”
Hogan elaborates that “what Ellen has continued to refuse to understand, however, is that … it is not enough to simply publicly wish we could all get along. We can’t. Not because we’re mean, but because we’re arguing about the literal humanity of oppressed people who have suffered — and continue to suffer — endless, compounded violence rooted in white supremacy.”
The culture has changed.
But Ellen hasn’t.
Entering the third decade of the 21st century, ours is a culture where a character based on kindness and likeness rings hollow like T.S. Eliot’s modern man, “stuffed,” corrupt and complicit.
Our culture has moved into an era of authenticity and accountability — a movement heavily resisted by those who cry “cancel culture.” Societal resistance to change is not surprising. But what is surprising is how Ellen has acted (behind the scenes) during this time of cultural change. The past year’s allegations and revelations (which, for industry insiders and queer people with any connection to the community have heard rumors about for years) suggest Ellen’s kindness was a fiction masquerading as authenticity all along.
For example, in her recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which she announced the end of her show, Ellen demonstrates her unwillingness to take responsibility for her behavior, which contributed to the show’s toxic environment. The criticism “was all so stupid,” she said, adding that she “didn’t want to address it” because she “had no platform.”
This is odd, considering that Ellen not only has a following in the millions across several social media channels, she also has own own digital publishing platform, EllenTube.
Instead of acknowledging the power and access she has to take responsibility for her own actions and the actions of her deputies, she doubled down on victimization: “[A]ll I cared about was spreading kindness and compassion, and everything I stand for was being attacked. So, it destroyed me, honestly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. And it makes me really sad that there’s so much joy out there from negativity. It’s a culture now where there are just mean people, and it’s so foreign to me that people get joy out of that.”
A Miami gay bar was sent vile abuse after conservative influencer and Donald Trump fanatic Angela Stanton-King posted a foul-mouthed video criticising a drag show.
In April, Stanton-King posted a video on social media while watching a family-friendly drag show at The Palace in Miami’s South Beach.
Her video shows two young children approaching the drag queen performing to Madonna, before getting on stage and innocently dancing with her.
In the video Stanton-King said: “Why in the hell have these people got these little bitty-a*s kids at this f**king drag show?”
The Palace began receiving violent threats online.
Thomas Donall, owner of the iconic LGBT+ venue, told Local10 that one in particular stood out: “I hope y’all end up like Pulse.”
Donall said: “It’s really difficult for us and heart-wrenching… I mean it just makes me… really sick to my stomach.”
“It was all innocent fun for the girls,” he added. “I mean they were posing with a Madonna show.”
Angela Stanton-King previously spent two years in prison over federal conspiracy charges for her role in a car theft ring but was pardoned by Donald Trump in February 2020.
She also tried to challenge the late John Lewis for his seat in the Georgia House of Representatives, but failed spectacularly with less that 15 per cent of the vote.
Stanton-King, who is viciously anti-trans, has spoken publicly multiple times about her own trans daughter.
Last month, she exploded in a hate-filled tirade over an episode of Dr Phil, after she was invited onto the show to “have a chance to settle your dispute and find a resolution” with her daughter.
Although the episode has not yet aired, Stanton-King took to social media to rant: “F**k Dr Phil. F**k his motherf*****g wife.
“F**k goddamn Paramount studios. F**k all you other crazy dumba*s sons of b*****s that think a d**k is somehow magically turned into a p***y.”
The Department of Homeland Security released a new terrorism bulletin on Friday, warning that far-right extremists are likely to consider attacking protests against police brutality.
The bulletin, issued through the National Terrorism Advisory System, says that domestic violent extremists and white supremacists have been looking for “civil disorder” as an opportunity to commit violent acts “in furtherance of ideological objectives.”
That includes targeting protests about “racial justice grievances and police use of force concerns, potentially targeting protestors perceived to be ideological opponents,” the bulletin reads.
This is the second threat bulletin DHS has issued in 2021 regarding the threat from far-right extremists.
In January, after the Capitol insurrection, DHS issued a warning saying that the Jan. 6 attack had “emboldened” white supremacist extremists and that the threat of violent attacks would likely remain high throughout the year. That’s led to a sprawling DOJ investigation into the matter, as FBI agents continue to pore over video from the attack to try to identify rioters.
Since then, the Biden administration has said that it will make combatting domestic violent extremism a priority. That has thus far come in the form of DHS initiatives aimed at increasing prevention and detection of those who might be willing to commit acts of political violence.
The FBI also released a report on Friday about the threat from domestic violent extremists, saying that the bureau arrested 846 people for domestic terrorism-related crimes between 2015 and 2019.
The bureau also said that, over the same time period, it had produced more than 4,000 domestic terrorism-related intelligence products.
The DHS bulletin centers the role of the internet in motivating domestic terrorists, noting that random people online can call for violence against politicians and “perceived ideologically-opposed individuals” and find an audience receptive to those demands.
That becomes more difficult when combined with the spread of encrypted messaging apps, and with the fact that many potential terrorists are either acting alone or in very small groups of people.
“The use of encrypted messaging by lone offenders and small violent extremist cells may obscure operational indicators that provide specific warning of a pending act of violence,” the report reads.
DHS also warned about the ongoing potential for foreign countries to pour gasoline on pre-existing domestic flare-ups. The bulletin singles out anti-Asian hate crimes as one such issue, saying that foreign nations had been “amplifying calls for violence targeting persons of Asian descent.”
The COVID-19 pandemic also plays a big role in the bulletin. DHS says that the country opening up may give extremists more targets, and also states that media outlets connected to the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments had been boosting conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines.
A British man accused of leading a neo-Nazi group with a rabid anti-LGBTQ stance has outed himself as bisexual amid court proceedings.
Prosecutors allege that Andrew Dymock, 23, from Bath, served as a leader and mentor for the System Resistance Network (SRN), a neo-Nazi group. Lawyers in the case also claim that Dymock authored several manifestos for the group, including one titled “Homosexuality: the Eternal Social Menace.” The article declares that queer people “are simply degenerate and must be purged from society for the greater good”.
Police arrested Dymock in 2018 at Gatwick Airport as he tried to smuggle right-wing propaganda to the United States. Charges against him stem from 2017 and 2018 for disseminating hateful propaganda on the SRN website and Twitter account.
The BBC reports that prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward referred to SRN as anti-Semitic, and presented material that was part of “an agenda against the LGBT community.” Prosecutors also presented two video clips, one showing masked men–one of whom is allegedly Dymock–encouraging viewers to “join your local Nazis.” Another showed two masked men putting up anti-gay posters and stickers in a neighborhood just prior to a Pride event.
As a strange coda to all this evidence, jurors also heard recordings of a police interview with Dymock, in which he actually comes out himself.
“I am bisexual but lean towards being homosexual,” Dymock says in the recording. Also of note: Dymock wore a pride flag pin on his lapel during the court appearance.
Andrew Dymock stands accused of five counts of encouraging terrorism, four of disseminating terrorist publications, two of terrorist fundraising, one of possessing material useful to a terrorist, one of possessing racially inflammatory material, one of stirring up racial hatred, and one of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation. He has denied all charges.
Since the tragic events of 9/11 and the abrupt halt to travel that followed, about every 10 years, the tourism industry is knocked back on its heels. The economic meltdown of 2008 and 2009 was even worse on the travel industry than 2001. And the pandemic is a once-a-century calamity exacerbated by the very things that make travel so enriching: large in-person events, meeting new friends at a hotel lounge, slaloming through a crowded bar in a far-flung city.
The travel industry rebooted before, and it will bounce back again soon. And if history is any guide, LGBTQ travelers will lead the way.
Roger Dow, president and CEO of U.S. Travel Association, the Washington, D.C.-based organization representing all segments of travel in America, says, “Gays lead, and the rest follow. They’re adventurous and like new experiences. They have a penchant for travel far greater than their heterosexual counterparts. They travel more and spend more when they travel. They’re the darlings of the travel industry when it comes to spending and dollars.”
Recent history has demonstrated that LGBTQ travelers — especially those in dual-income-no-child households — are always among the first to travel after social and economic crises. Following 9/11 and again after the 2008/2009 financial crisis, destinations, hospitality companies and travel brands noticed that LGBTQ travelers were prioritizing tourism over other purchase decisions, helping fill airplanes, hotels and, restaurants and animating destinations. So, they began to market to this segment in earnest.
Smart travel marketers will note that this is happening again now. We see — anecdotally and with the support of research by Community Marketing, Inc., Harris Interactive and IGLTA — that this segment travels in higher proportions and intends to book and execute travel in greater proportions than their non-LGBTQ counterparts.
Queer travelers tend to have more disposable income and time to spend it, helping fill destinations and hotels, especially during the quieter periods when kids are in school. Being among the first to travel safely, this resilient segment grants permission to others that they can return to travel safely. The LGBTQ segment has always been disproportionately present in online platforms, which provide a safer way to meet and interact with others in an otherwise potentially anti-LGBTQ world.
They also help achieve travel marketers’ goals by experiencing more, creating social media content and generating buzz.
The segment displays intense loyalty to brands that welcome and include them. There are also surprising halo effects: By signaling welcome to this group, marketers send a sign of inclusiveness to other overlooked and marginalized segments, like Black and LatinX travelers, and the family and friends of queer people are also positively motivated by outreach to LGBTQ people. Finally, these messages resonate strongly with millennial and Gen Z audiences who plan their travel — as well as plot their careers — to destinations and at hospitality brands whose missions align with their more inclusive values.
The segment has also demonstrated a strong affinity for cruises of all sorts, including all-gay or all-lesbian cruises, LGBTQ groups on mainstream cruises, and simply joining mainstream cruises as a same-sex couple or in small friend groups. While cruise vacations are still on a pandemic-induced pause in the U.S., cruise companies — including Carnival, Celebrity, Cunard, Uniworld and the brand-new Virgin Voyages — have all firmly established LGBTQ travelers as a core segment.
“National Travel and Tourism Week takes on special significance this year as we look ahead to recovery following the most challenging year this industry has experienced,” says Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line and national chair of the U.S. Travel Association. “Across the country, we are recognizing travel’s value, and the long-standing support of the LGBTQ community will help accelerate our rebound. I know that for Carnival, we pride ourselves on an inclusive atmosphere where every guest is appreciated, and we look forward to welcoming them back as soon as possible.”
One reason queer travelers are uniquely suited to help power the return of travel during this crisis has to do with their decades of experience living under the ever-looming shadow of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, during which they learned the importance of risk mitigation for the good of all. Wearing masks to protect yourself and others resonates with a community that understands the importance of condoms and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
According to Randle Roper, co-founder and CEO of VACAYA Full-Ship and Full-Resort LGBT+Vacations, “[Our] guests showed incredible resilience by traveling safely during the pandemic, and they proved they could adapt to live with health protocols that would keep each other and their loved ones back home safe.”
Travel safety is organically entwined with the LGBTQ community’s DNA. In 70+ countries, many popular with LGBTQ travelers, homosexuality is criminalized. That includes 11 countries in which death is the punishment meted out for those convicted of homosexuality and other “crimes” of sexual and gender non-conformity.
While travelers would be spared the harsh treatments locals may suffer, they nonetheless have a great deal to consider when traveling. Same-sex couples still receive awkward and uncomfortable service when checking into hotels with a single bed on the reservation or even simply existing in places where everyone’s assumed to be heterosexual. When a lesbian boards a plane with her legally married wife and their legally adopted children, they could land in a destination where their marriage license is void and their legal guardianship of their kids is in question. Trans and non-binary travelers, especially those oF color, may encounter challenges including lack of safe bathroom access, awkward encounters at TSA security and even outright hostility and worse in any public setting. In the face of all this, queer people still explore and have a lot to teach the rest of the world about how to travel with intent and joy while maintaining their own safety and that of the community around them.
LGBTQ travelers can also show the world how best to support the tourism and hospitality industries in ways that also strengthen their own communities. “LGBTQ consumers have the power to make change and support LGBTQ-friendly companies and destinations by choosing to spend their travel dollars with those that support our community,” says Jeff Guaracino, co-author of the “Handbook of LGBT Tourism and Hospitality.” “LGBTQ-owned hotels, bed and breakfasts, tour companies, bars and restaurants, festivals and destinations have been especially hard hit by COVID, and as a community, we can support LGBTQ-owned and friendly businesses and their employees by spending our travel dollars with them first.”
LGBTQ tour companies and travel agents have a direct connection to queer travelers and report strong interest in and bookings of travel. According to Robert Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Out Adventures, “After [releasing] our entire tour schedule through the end of 2022, we saw our largest month of sales in our 12-year history.”
Kelli Carpenter, co-founder of R Family Vacations, adds, “Our highest sales have come from our river cruise products and international tour business, showing that travelers are ready to explore the world again.”
VACAYA’s Roper has seen extremely robust sales over the past several months — including selling out their Antarctica Cruise. “With a starting price of around $25,000 per room, that was our best sign yet that our community members are ready to break free from their cages and return to travel,” he says.
Robert Geller, founder of FabStayz, agrees: “Pent-up demand is visible, palpable and quantifiable.”
NYC-based Ed Salvato is a freelance travel writer, instructor at NYU and the University of Texas at Austin’s NYC Center, and an LGBTQ tourism marketing consultant.
