Police in San Francisco yesterday announced a sixth suspected victim of a notorious serial killer who sketched his gay male victims before killing them during the 1970s. Police also increased the reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of the serial killer dubbed the Doodler from $200,000 to $250,000.
“As a result of a new investigation, it is believed that Warren Andrews may be the sixth victim of the ‘Doodler,’” the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement released yesterday. “On April 27, 1975, Andrews was a victim of an assault at Land’s End. Andrews was found unconscious and never regained consciousness dying several weeks later. All six (6) victims are believed to be Gay Caucasian males.”
The Doodler is suspected of fatally stabbing at least six gay men between January 1974 and June 1975, although he may be responsible for up to 16 additional murders. The victims’ brutally stabbed bodies were found near bodies of water on Ocean Beach, in Golden Gate Park, and at Land’s End.
Police reportedly have a suspect who was interviewed at the time of the killings and may still be alive today, but need further help from witnesses to make an arrest. They acknowledge that surviving victims’ fear of being outed stopped them from testifying in the case at the time. Two of the survivors lived on the same floor of the Fox Plaza Apartments.
The Doodler is described as a good-looking Black male, six feet tall, and aged 19 to 25 at the time of the killings. He met his victims in bars and diners in the Castro, Polk Gulch, and Tenderloin neighborhoods.
“One of the survivors from the Fox Plaza attacks had met the suspect after the bars closed in July of 1975 at the Truck Stop diner near Market/Church St.,” SFPD wrote. “The suspect was drawing animal figures on a napkin. The suspect commented to the victim that he was attending art school and was studying to be a cartoonist.”
Using information from this survivor, police were able to create a sketch of the Doodler.
“Soon after the initial suspect sketch was released, an anonymous phone call was made by a female to SFPD,” the SFPD continued. “This anonymous caller provided police with a name and a vehicle plate of a suspect. This female called twice within 10 days. We are looking to identify this caller. After this caller contacted SFPD it is believed that at least two different people also contacted SFPD providing the same suspect name. We would also want to speak with these individuals.”
The Doodler left at least three survivors, and two were described by police as a diplomat and as a well-known entertainer.
The five other suspected victims include Gerald Cavanaugh, 49, whose body was found on January 27, 1974, at Ocean Beach; Joseph Stevens, 27, whose body was found on June 25, 1974, in Golden Gate Park’ Klaus Christmann, 31, whose body was found on July 7, 1974, at Ocean Beach; Frederick Capin, 32, whose body was found on May 12, 1975, at Ocean Beach; and Harald Gullberg, 66, whose body was found on June 4, 1975, at Lincoln Park.
For the past 41 years, the Gay Games has served as an inclusive international event for athletes of all genders and sexual orientations, and when it returns this November it will be more inclusive than ever. After decades of convening solely in North America, Europe, and Australia, this “LGBTQ Olympics” will be hosted simultaneously in the cities of Hong Kong and Guadalajara.
“We are energized by this opportunity to organize the first Gay Games in Asia and in Latin America,” announced Sean Fitzgerald, co-president of the Federation of Gay Games. “We are embarking on a mountain of feasibility studies and collaboration between FGG, Hong Kong, and Guadalajara. The passion of these teams will bring to life the vision of Dr. Tom Waddell and the mission of the Gay Games: participation, inclusion, and personal best.”https://www.instagram.com/p/ClG_TVuraf3/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=14&wp=1080&rd=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gaycities.com&rp=%2Farticles%2F68065%2Fgay-games-2023-builds-sanctuary-for-lgbtq-athletes-in-hong-kong-and-guadalajara%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A0%2C%22os%22%3A2452%2C%22ls%22%3A2361%2C%22le%22%3A2361%7D
For those uninitiated in the history of the Gay Games, the aforementioned Waddell was a former Olympic decathlete who co-founded the first Gay Olympics in 1982 which was hosted in the queer mecca of San Francisco. Waddell and the other organizers were forced to rename the event the Gay Games after the International Olympic Committee spanked them with a lawsuit over the use of the word “Olympics.” The legal action has been criticized as potentially being fueled by homophobia in light of the fact that the IOC has allowed the term to be used by other events, such as the Special Olympics. This potential discrimination reflected the bigotry queer competitors faced during the high of the AIDS epidemic and exemplifies the necessity of safe spaces for LGBTQ athletics.
US wrestlers flaunt their medals at Gay Games 2018 in Paris. Photo provided by the Southern California Wrestling Club.
Despite this initial hurdle placed by the IOC, the Gay Games eventually pwn’ed its heteronormative counterpart in 1994. As a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, Gay Games IV was held in New York City and boasted 10,864 athletes, overshadowing the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona which featured only 9,356 participants. GGIV featured gay Olympic diver Greg Louganis as its announcer and Sir Ian McKellan orated its closing address in Yankee Stadium. That year also expanded from its initial 16 sporting events to 31, including flag football, figure skating, and the first-ever internationally sanctioned women’s wrestling. For Andrew Farrell, an Australian wrestler who won a gold medal at the 2018 Gay Games in Paris, these events offer queer athletes not only a venue to compete but also sanctuary.
Photo provided by Andrew Farrell
“There’s a lot of people coming from countries that are not so LGBTQ friendly: the United Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia,” explained Farrell during a 2018 interview with INTO Magazine. “It takes a lot of courage to do that. You’re putting your name out there when your country, and your government, might not necessarily be supportive of that. The fact that they’re still competing so fiercely, I find that very motivating myself, to try to push harder. Everyone put in their best effort, that’s the inspiration for me.”
This respect for fellow queer athletes was echoed by Mark Wussler, a US swimmer from Maui who garnered six gold medals at the Paris Gay Games.
Photo provided by Mark Wussler
“I got a chance to visit with two Ugandan women swimmers,” said Wussler. “They face pretty bad discrimination and even death threats in their home country. I just told them that everyone at the swimming venue was talking about them and was so proud of their courage and determination. We take so much for granted and those of us who struggled many years ago through discrimination, and of course the AIDS crisis, came out strong and resolved to live an open and loving life. But when you hear about the kind of blatant and brutal hatred still present in some countries it really drives home the point on why we have to have these kinds of gatherings.”
Over four decades later, the Gay Games continues to provide safe spaces for queer athletes, now across two continents at once.
A New York City law student has been missing for nearly two weeks, and his brother said his last known location was a gay bar in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.
Jordan Taylor, 29, a first-year law student at the City University of New York, was reported missing by his family on Jan. 8, according to his brother and the New York City Police Department.
According to the NYPD, Taylor was last seen in the borough of Queens, where he resides, on the afternoon of Jan. 6. But his brother, Alton Taylor, told NBC New York that Jordan’s last known location, according to his phone’s location data, was The Q in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, shortly before his phone and wallet were found in two different Manhattan locations.
Alton said the details surrounding Jordan’s disappearance — and the fact that none of his close friends have seen or heard from him in nearly two weeks — are a cause of concern.
“I don’t want to rule out a heinous foul play. Like, I don’t want to think about it, but I can’t rule it out either,” he told NBC New York.
The Church of England will refuse to allow same-sex couples to get married in its churches under proposals set out on Wednesday in which the centuries-old institution said it would stick to its teaching that marriage is between a man and a woman.
The proposals were developed by bishops, who form one of three parts of the Church’s governing body known as the General Synod, after the Church of England’s six-year consultation on sexuality and marriage — among other subjects — and will be put to the General Synod at a meeting next month.
The Church of England is central to the wider Anglican communion, which represents more than 85 million people in over 165 countries.
“Same-sex couples would still not be able to get married in a Church of England church,” the statement said, confirming a BBC report overnight that bishops had refused to support a change in teaching to allow priests to marry gay couples.
Under the proposals, same-sex couples could have a service in which there would be “prayers of dedication, thanksgiving or for God’s blessing on the couple” in church after a civil marriage. Gay marriage was legalized in Britain in 2013.
Still, the prayers would be voluntary for clergy to use and could be used in combinations “reflecting the theological diversity of the Church”, the Church of England said, implying spiritual leaders could choose not to offer such blessings.
“I am under no illusions that what we are proposing today will appear to go too far for some and not nearly far enough for others, but it is my hope that what we have agreed will be received in a spirit of generosity, seeking the common good,” said Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Separately, Church of England bishops will be issuing an apology later this week to LGBTQ people for the “rejection, exclusion and hostility” they have faced in churches, according to the statement.
The Church of England, which was founded in 1534, has been divided for years on how to deal with same-sex marriages, with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activists fighting for the same rights as heterosexual Christians.
Seeking to address the contentious issue, Welby called on the bishops last year to “abound in love for all,” even as he backed the validity of a resolution passed in 1998 that rejected “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture.”
The European Court of Human Rights has ordered Russia to recognise same-sex partnerships, but it’s unlikely Russia will implement protections for queer couples.
The ruling came in response to a years-long fight by three queer couples for legal recognition and protection after they were denied the ability to marry by Russia.
The applicants were originally turned away by registrars on the basis that the Russian Family Code defines marriage as a “voluntary marital union between a man and a woman”.
The court ruled Wednesday (18 January) that Russia had an obligation to make equivalent legal protections to marriage available to same-sex couples under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
In the absence of marriage equality, the court found that Council of Europe member states have an obligation to put in place a “specific legal framework” for the recognition and protection of same-sex couples.
Russia ceased to be a party to the European Convention on Human Rights in September 2022 as a result of its expulsion from the Council of Europe in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
However, the court retains jurisdiction over applications lodged before that date.
Russia argued that extending marriage to same-sex couples would be “contrary to the Russian Constitution and public policy”, and that introducing any other form of legal union would be “unreasonable from a legal perspective”.
LGBTQ+ advocates worldwide have condemned Russia’s continued attack on the queer community. (Getty)
The government submitted to the court that “family in its traditional form was a fundamental value of Russian society” as it’s “intrinsically linked to the aim of preserving and developing the human race”.
However, the court ruled that these arguments weren’t enough to deny the couples their rights.
It also concluded that Russia “overstepped its margin of appreciation and has completely failed to comply with its positive obligation to secure the applicants’ right to respect for their private life and family life”.
Pierre Karleskind, vice president of the LGBTI Intergroup, said “justice is done across the Council of Europe area” because of the ruling.
“This court judgement crystalises what the LGBTIQ community has revindicated for years: that their relationships deserve as much right to legal recognition (and protection) as any other couple,” Karleskind said.
“With this in mind, we will keep advocating for the remaining EU member states to make steadfast progress at national level to respect and implement the court’s interpretation.”
Currently, there are six EU member states – Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia – that do not provide any legal framework for recognition of same-sex relationships.
Advocates said the judgment ‘crystalised’ what the LGBTQ+ community has been saying for years – that queer relationships deserve as much right to legal recognition and protection as other couples. (Getty)
Maria Walsh, who is also a vice president of the LGBTI Intergroup, called the ruling a “glorious day for our community and their restless energy”.
“This judgement can only be deemed a categorical stance on where our European continent stands,” Walsh said.
“It is high time rainbow families get the protection and recognition they deserve, and we will keep pressing to ensure that this judgement will one day be translated into a mandatory recognition of relationships in cross-border cases.”
However, it’s almost certain that Russia will not heed the court’s ruling given it has ignored previous orders on LGBTQ+ issues in the past.
In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia’s ‘LGBTQ+ propaganda’ law is discriminatory, promotes homophobia and violates the European Convention on Human Rights.
The law make it a crime to distribute information about LGBTQ+ identities and people to minors.
Russia ignored the ruling and kept the law in place, even expanding its age limit in December 2022.
After the windows of an Orlando, Fla., LGBTQ+ bar were shot out Wednesday evening, police are characterizing the crime as a bias-motivated attack on the LGBTQ+ business.
District Dive, located in Orlando’s Milk District, posted security video to its Facebook page of a man shooting out windows in the Southern Nights complex. The complex is home to several queer establishments, including District Dive, Southern Craft, and the Southern Nights nightclub. The post on District Dive’s page said the complex “was a target of a suspected hate crime.”
“Please stay safe Orlando,” the company wrote.
The Orlando Police department distributed the video across its own social media channels.
“The Orlando Police Department does not tolerate criminal behavior of any kind,” said Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith in a statement. “Whoever committed this brazen vandalism against our city’s LGBTQ+ businesses will be held accountable.”
In the video, an individual wearing a hoodie, pants and possibly a surgical mask walks up to the complex with a strap hanging over his shoulder. While the perspective on the suspect in the video is obstructed for much of the 2 minutes and 44 seconds of footage, the video captures shots that shatter windows in the building.
The violent act against LGBTQ businesses had Orlando leaders on edge.
“Orlando’s top LGBTQ bar strip has been vandalized,” tweeted Carlos Guillermo Smith, an LGBTQ+ activist and former state lawmaker. “Please be careful out there, ya’ll!”
The worst attack victimizing the LGBTQ+ community in U.S. history occurred in the Florida community in 2016, when a gunman killed 49 at the Pulse nightclub shooting before being killed by police in a standoff.
“We are dismayed at what seems to be a hate crime on another one of our queer spaces. Last night, someone shot out the windows at District Dive—one of our safe spaces,” read a statement from The Dru Project, an LGBTQ+ rights nonprofit launched after the Pulse shooting. “As we learn more, please keep in mind the communities who are continually retraumatized by shootings like this.”
Political leaders also spoke out about the incident.
“Awful and unacceptable,” wrote Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat, on Facebook. “We will do everything we can to find out who did this and remain committed to LGBTQ+ equality and safety for all.”
The only HIV vaccine in a late-stage trial has failed, researchers announced Wednesday, dealing a significant blow to the effort to control the global HIV epidemic and adding to a decadeslong roster of failed attempts.
Known as Mosaico, the trial was the product of a public-private partnership including the U.S. government and the pharmaceutical giant Janssen. It was run out of eight nations in Europe and the Americas, including the U.S., starting in 2019. Researchers enrolled nearly 3,900 men who have sex with men and transgender people, all deemed at substantial risk of HIV.
The leaders of the studydecided to discontinue the mammoth research effort after an independent data and safety monitoring board reviewed the trial’s findings and saw no evidence the vaccine lowered participants’ rate of HIV acquisition.
“It’s obviously disappointing,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who as the long-time head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was an integral partner in the trial, said of the vaccine’s failure. However, he said, “there are a lot of other approaches” early in the HIV-vaccine research pipeline that he finds promising.
“I don’t think that people should give up on the field of the HIV vaccine,” Fauci said.
Fauci previously said he did not want to retire from the NIAID until an HIV vaccine had been proven at least 50% effective — good enough, in his view, for a global rollout. Instead, he retired from his post at the end of last month with this dream unfulfilled.
In addition to NIAID and Janssen, which is a division of Johnson & Johnson, the trial was run by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which is headquartered in the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle, and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command.
Mosaico’s lack of efficacy was not unexpected, experts said, because of the recent failure, announced in August 2021, of a separate clinical trial, called Imbokodo, which tested a similar vaccine among women in Africa. Between the two trials, NIAID spent $56 million, according to an agency spokesperson.
The vaccines testedin both trials used a common cold virus to deliver what are known as mosaic immunogens, which were intended to trigger a robust and protective immune response by including genetic material from a variety of HIV strains prevalent around the world, according to the National Institutes of Health. Mosaico included an additional element intended to broaden the immune response.
Participants in Mosaico, who were between ages 18 and 60, received four injections over 12 months, either of the vaccine or a placebo. The monitoring board found no significant difference in the HIV acquisition rate between the two study groups.
Fauci said that a critical limitation of the Mosaico vaccine was that it elicited what are known as non-neutralizing — as opposed to neutralizing — antibodies against HIV.
“It is becoming clear,” he said, “that vaccines that do not induce neutralizing antibodies are not effective against HIV.”
The critical problem that has bedeviled HIV vaccine research for decades, Fauci noted, is a crucial weakness that the virus already successfully exploits: The natural immune response to infection is not sufficient to thwart the virus.
“So vaccines would actually have to do better than natural infection to be effective,” he said. “That would be a very high bar.”
A decadeslong effort
In 1984, following the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS the previous year, President Ronald Reagan’s health secretary, Margaret Heckler, famously claimed a vaccine for the virus would be available within two years.
In the decades since, there have been nine late-stage clinical trials of HIV vaccines, including Mosaico and Imbokodo, plus one, called PrEPVacc, that is still underway in Africa. However, the vaccine in PrEPVacc is not considered to be on a direct path to licensure if it demonstrates efficacy. Only one of these vaccines has shown any efficacy — and only at a modest level, not considered robust enough for regulatory approval — in a trial conducted in Thailand between 2003 and 2006, the findings of which were published in 2009.
In the years since, a phalanx of global researchers has studied the Thai trial in hopes of developing insights to inform further HIV-vaccine development.
The yearslong effort to design the Imbokodo and Mosaico vaccines was in part grounded in an attempt to build on the modest success of the Thai trial.
“We had hoped that we would see some signal of efficacy from this vaccine,” said Dr. Susan Buchbinder, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who co-led the Mosaico trial. She added that, promisingly, as in the Imbokodo trial, there were no evident concerns about the vaccine’s safety.
Buchbinder said it is too early to determine the reasons behind the Mosaico vaccine’s failure. Her team will be analyzing blood samples from participants over the coming months to investigate. They will also seek to determine if there were any subgroups of participants among whom the vaccine did show any efficacy. As with the Thai trial, the hope is to channel research findings into future HIV vaccine development.
Other HIV prevention tools
Jennifer Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at Kaiser Family Foundation, said the trial’s failure is a “stark reminder of just how elusive an HIV vaccine really is and why this kind of research continues to be important.”
“Fortunately, there are a number of highly effective HIV prevention interventions already,” Kates added. “The challenge is to scale them up to reach all at risk.”
Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, in which people at risk of HIV take antiretroviral medications in advance of potential exposure to the virus, is highly effectiveat preventing infection but remains vastly underutilized in the U.S. and around the world.
Additionally, researchpublishedin the mid-2000s showed that voluntary medical male circumcision lowers the risk of female-to-male HIV acquisition by about 60%. This led to a major effort to promote circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa, home to two-thirds of the HIV cases in the world.
In more recent years, an antiretroviral-infused vaginal ring has proven effective at lowering women’s HIV risk. Initial efforts are underway to introduce it in African nations.
And, of course, there is the old mainstay: condoms.
Globally, an estimated 38.4 million people were living with HIV in 2021, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Some 1.5 million people currently contract the virus annually, a figure that has more than halved since its peak in 1996.
It is at least theoretically possible, although extremely challenging, to bring HIV to heel without a vaccine. Fortunately, successfully treating HIV eliminates the risk of transmitting the virus through sex. So HIV transmission has declined in recent years in large part because of the dramatic scale-up of antiretroviral treatment of the virus, which by 2021 reached 28.7 million people.
Mosaico was particularly challenging to design ethically because of the advent of PrEP, which was first approved in the U.S. in 2012. To prove a vaccine works, researchers must recruit participants who remain at substantial risk of HIV over time. So Mosaico first offered PrEP to those seeking to enroll in the trial and only accepted as participants those who adamantly declined the preventive therapy notwithstanding their risk of HIV.
Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke was sworn into office on January 3, representing the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party. She joins 11 LGBTQ+ state legislators who won their elections in the midterms.
Finke won against challenger Dave Thomas with a 25% margin. She then won the November general election with a whopping 81% of the vote against opponent Trace Johnson. She is the first out trans lawmaker elected to the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and she’s ready to fight back.
Last year more than 300 anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed through state legislatures, and while only a handful made it into law, they have detrimental effects.
Already, a minimum of 58 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced into the US legislature, with about half in Texas alone, according to Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and clinical instructor at Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic. In particular, a slew of anti-trans gender-affirming healthcare bans have been introduced in 11 states, according to PBS News Hour. This life-saving healthcare is already a felony in Alabama, Tennessee, and soon, Arizona (a ban goes into effect in March), while Texas and Oklahoma have attempted to restrict gender-affirming healthcare, according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP).
Nevertheless, Finke remains confident. For the first time in a decade, Minnesota’s government is a trifecta for progress, says Finke. The state’s Democratic Party has a stronghold in the governor’s office, the state Senate and state House of Representatives. For Finke, this means moving LGBTQ+ protections forward with less than a pause.
“There’s excitement around the ability to get things done,” Finke told LGBTQ Nation.
The immediate focuses of the queer caucus chair are banning conversion therapy, creating abortion access, and passing the Trans Refuge Bill into law. The bill seeks to protect trans children and their families from anti-trans laws and violence. State Sen. Scott Dibble (D) joined 21 LGBTQ+ legislators in introducing the Trans Refuge Bill across 19 state legislatures, according to a press release from California state Sen. Scott Weiner’s (D) office.
“It is because we have the trifecta that we can push forward,” said Finke. “We can say: ‘This is a priority for our community and we want it to be heard with an expectation that it will follow through’… at least on the House side; I can’t speak for the Senate.”
For the LGBTQ Victory Fund candidate, running for public office sets a national precedent for securing a safe anti-racist future for LGBTQ+, Black, and Indigenous people in Minnesota. Finke’s action plan to ensure this future is congruent with teamwork and her life spent in the state.
“I was the first trans person I ever met,” she said.
Finke says Minnesota is home to a strong, vocal protest movement that has translated the understanding that the fight for trans lives is a fight for Black lives, a fight for Black trans lives, and a fight for Minnesota’s 11 Indigenous tribal nations.
“I think the success of the trans and LGBTQ movement over the last couple of years has very directly been linked to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and its power in Minnesota,” Finke said. “It’s about being able to recognize what we can do as a queer caucus, but also understanding that the queer caucus needs to be willing to be led by those who are representing those other movements as well.”
Along with Finke, the Minnesota legislature welcomed the first Black women state senators in its 164 years of statehood: Erin Maye Quade, Zaynab Mohamed, and Clare Oumou Verbeten, according to Sahan Journal. Additionally, the three legislators are joined by Indigenous rights activists; state Rep. Alicia Kozlowski of the Objwe tribe is the state’s first two-spirit, nonbinary lawmaker.
“We are mutually dependent on each other because our communities, at the end of the day, are one community,” said Finke.
San Francisco has launched a pilot program that guarantees income for transgender residents.
The Guaranteed Income for Transgender People (GIFT) will provide 55 residents with $1,200 a month for 18 months, including healthcare and financial coaching.
Applications closed in December. Residents will be selected by organizations helping to administer and shape the program, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“By giving low-income trans people the resources to cover the expenses they deem most immediate and important given each person’s unique situation, we are implementing a truly community-centered intervention to combat poverty,” Aria Sa’id told the LA Times. Sa’id is the president of the Transgender District.
Proponents of the program said trans people experience poverty at a higher rate than other Californians. The 2015 U.S. Trans Survey found that 33% of transgender Californians lived in poverty, disproportionate to the state’s poverty level at only 12%, according to the U.S. Census.
“Even with our rich history of trans advocacy, we see that trans San Franciscans experience poverty at exponentially higher rates compared to the general population,” Pau Crego, executive director of the San Francisco Office of Transgender Initiatives, said in a press release about GIFT. “This is especially the case for trans people of color, disabled trans people, trans elders and other trans communities deeply impacted by discrimination.”
Sa’id told The Times that over 3,200 messages were received in response to the program, some of them hate mail, some of them activists.
By the first week of applications opening, Sa’id estimated that the program received 2,000 applications.
“I don’t think we were expecting that response … I’m so grateful we’re able to finally do this,” she said. “And at the same time, we can’t help everyone who has a demonstrated need and I think that’s what makes it bittersweet.”
GIFT is one of several basic income pilot programs in the city. Others are:
Launched in 2020, the Abundant Birth Project provides pregnant Black and Pacific Islander residents with $1,000 per month from the first trimester to two years postpartum.
Launched in 2021, the Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists provides 190 artists with $1,000 per month for 18 months.
San Francisco plans to launch two pilot programs in 2023 for youth, including those transitioning out of the foster care system, The Times reported in November.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s 2018 inauguration was seen as a new dawn not only for the country’s political and economic elite, but for LGBTQ and intersex Zimbabweans and other groups. The LGBTQ and intersex community nevertheless continues to reel from intimidation, harassment and ostracization five years after the late-President Robert Mugabe, who ruled the country with an iron fist, left office.
The 2013 Constitution that is currently in use does not outlaw consensual same-sex sexual relations, but same-sex marriages if one is found engaging in sexual activity that is regarded as illegal. The Zimbabwean government, in other words, does not have a problem with anyone who is part of the LGBTQ and intersex community as long as they do not get married or have sex in public.
Even though the Constitution may appear to tacitly protect LGBTQ and intersex Zimbabweans, their everyday experiences, especially when it comes to the issue of gender-based violence, is vastly different.
“Mainstream dialogue of GBV (gender-based violence) in Zimbabwe has predominantly given salience to the experience of cisgender category of women over LBT women. Little to no conversation has been facilitated on the experiences of LBT women, who are disproportionally affected by GBV. GALZ (Gays And Lesbians of Zimbabwe) has recorded extreme cases of correctional rape, sexual assault and physical assault and intimate partner violence (IPV),” said Samuel Matsikure, programs manager for Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, an LGBTQ and intersex rights group.
According to a study conducted by GALZ in 2021, at least one in three lesbian, bisexual and transgender women experienced violence inflicted based on perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. Gay, bisexual and trans men have also experienced heightened emotional and physical violence, and a lack of accountability exacerbates these experience.
GALZ has also documented cases of intimate partner violence, but the restrictive environment in which it works perpetuates silence around them. Other factors that contribute to this inaction include an unresponsive police force and judicial system and a patriarchal society that does not acknowledge violence between partners of the same sex and ridicules men who report they are survivors of intimate partner violence.
At least 65 percent of people who GALZ interviewed for their 2021 study said they never reported the abuse they experienced for fear of double victimization.
“This is primarily due to the fact that law enforcement is relatively lux to take action and investigate same-sex partner violence and general violence perpetrated on LGBTI people and society at large also turns a blind eye to this calibre of violence. Such attitudes in turn, discourage victims to speak out and report GBV,” said Matsikure.
Matsikure also described the government’s commitments to protect LGBTQ and intersex Zimbabweans through its National Development Strategy as nothing more than lip service.
“The government has indirectly made considerable efforts to protect LGBTI people from all forms of harm and abuse,” said Matsikure. “However, government is yet to fulfill such commitments creating challenges such as, hesitancy of law enforcement agencies to crack down on GBV experienced by LGBTI persons and hesitancy of LGBTI persons to report or speak out against GBV due to fear of blackmail, homophobic backlash, stigma non-recognition of females as perpetrators of IPV. Lack of political will and leadership to address GBV against LGBTI persons. Delays in seeking treatment, there can be significant delays between GBV and presentation to medical care.”
“Moreover, constant threats of deregistration of organizations working on the protection of human rights and LGBTI rights by the State limits the interaction of communities with the law enforcers as same-sex conduct is still criminalized,” added Matsikure. “The perception that the current Constitution outlawed homosexuality hinders some government entities from openly assisting LGBTI persons where GBV or IPV has been reported yet the Constitution only mentions same-sex marriage.”
Trans and Intersex Rising Zimbabwe also said they were working on establishing a safe environment for LGBTQ and intersex Zimbabweans in which they will coexist with the heterosexual community.
TIRZ says it’s working through a an initiative that focuses on three areas: Family and friends, sensitizing people on LGBTQ and intersex issues and building an educational and informational support system that focuses on creating lobby, advocacy, religion and cultural programs. TIRZ hopes these efforts will create common ground and allow dialogues with heterosexual Zimbabweans.
TIRZ Program Director Chihera Meki said LGBTQ and intersex Zimbabweans still face major challenges, despite these efforts.
“Challenges such as gate keepers as well as religious and cultural beliefs have affected the program to reach out to the various communities, to help close the gap on information,” said Chihera.
Daniel Itai is the Washington Blade’s Africa Correspondent.