Russian lawmakers have moved to outlaw adoption by people from countries where gender-affirming care is legal.
Russian language outlet Zona Media reports that the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly, has unanimously approved a bill that would prohibit the adoption of Russian children by citizens of foreign countries where gender transition is allowed.
Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin said the bill was aimed at protecting children who can’t protect themselves, characterizing “the West’s policy towards children” as “destructive.”
“It is necessary to do everything so that new generations of our citizens grow up oriented toward traditional family values,” Volodin wrote in a Telegram post.
Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning transgender individuals from receiving gender-affirming care, changing their gender in official documents and public records, fostering or adopting children, and legally marrying.
But the new bill’s authors warned that while the Russian state can prevent transgender people from adopting Russian children at the time of adoption and on Russian soil, it cannot stop foreign parents from transitioning or receiving gender-affirming care in their home countries following adoption. Worse, according to the bill’s authors, adoptive parents can “change the gender of the adopted child” once safely back in their home country.
State Duma deputies noted that the bill is aimed at preventing members of the LGBTQ+ community from adopting Russian children and that it also effectively bans adoption by citizens of NATO member states.
The bill, which will have to be signed into law by Putin, is just the latest in Russia’s ongoing crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. In 2013, the Russian president signed a law banning so-called LGBTQ+ “propaganda” in the presence of minors. That same year, Putin signed a law prohibiting adoption of Russian children by same-sex foreign couples whose homeland recognizes their union as marriage, as well as by single people or unmarried couples from those countries.
In late 2022, Putin signed a new law expanding the country’s definition of what constitutes LGBTQ+ “propaganda” to include any “promotion” of homosexuality in public, online, or in media. The law also bans the “demonstration” of homosexuality to children. The 2022 law effectively outlaws any public expression of LGBTQ+ life in Russia.
Last November, the Russian Supreme Court declared the “international LGBT social movement” an “extremist organization,” effectively giving authorities wide latitude to arrest and prosecute members of the LGBTQ+ community. In the year since the court’s decree, there have been multiple raids on LGBTQ+ bars and other establishments in cities across Russia, and multiple people have been arrested and charged under the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
A teacher in the U.K. has been banned from the profession indefinitely for outing a transgender student on social media.
According to The Daily Mail, in May 2023, a whistleblower alerted the unnamed Manchester school where 54-year-old Camilla Hannan had been teaching since 2001 that Hannan had posted offensive and anti-trans sentiments on X, then known as Twitter. In one of her posts, Hannan even outed a transgender student by name.
“Where I teach we have gender identity policy,” Hannan wrote in one post alongside an eye-roll emoji. “It’s a load of nonsensical rubbish, as you’d imagine.”
In another post, Hannan wrote that she taught a student who had changed their pronouns, going so far as to include the student’s name in her post. “I worry about what the next steps will be,” she wrote.
“Where I teach the trans kids are untouchable,” she wrote in another post. “They get everything they ask for and everyone staff and other students alike, is petrified of upsetting them. They don’t seem oppressed to me more like oppressors tbh.”
In two other posts, she seemed to suggest a link between autism and being transgender, writing that her autistic students “are all plastered with trans flags and badges, without exception.”
Studies that have shown that transgender and nonbinary people are more likely to be autistic than cisgender people have been misused to fuel the anti-trans, ableist narrative that there is something “wrong” with transgender and nonbinary people and that their gender identity is the result of mental illness. Some trans and nonbinary people on the spectrum suggest that the real connection is that autistic people are less likely to feel a need to conform to social pressures around gender.
TheManchester Evening News reports that in August of this year, Hannan admitted to writing the posts. A Teaching Regulation Agency misconduct hearing was held to address the matter, and in September a panel found that she had shared the private medical information of the student named in her post without the student’s knowledge or consent. The panel noted that she had also “repeatedly misgendered” the student.
A report on the panel said that it had found that Hannan “had a deep-seated attitude, and that, whilst she was entitled to have that attitude and hold the views that she did, it was not acceptable for her to have posted these on social media in a way that was damaging to the profession, the School, pupils and in particular” the student she outed. The panel said that Hannan’s behavior was incompatible with a teacher’s duty to be a role model for students and the wider community.
According to the Manchester Evening News, Hannan blamed her posts on her frustration with her workload and admitted that she had exercised “poor judgment.” In a statement, she said that she does “not bear trans people any malice or ill will” and she respects “their right to live as they please, and to ask others to refer to them by names and pronouns of their choice,” the Daily Mail reported. However, she added that she was concerned about so-called “gender ideology” — a clear anti-trans dog whistle — in schools.
But according to the Manchester Evening News, the panel noted that Hannan’s remorse seemed to be “somewhat self-serving.” They said that the fact that she believed her posts were anonymous suggested that her remorse “stemmed from being caught, rather than from reflections on her own behavior.”
The panel banned Hannan from teaching indefinitely. She will have the opportunity to appeal the decision in two years.
A Georgia man convicted of murdering a transgender woman is on the run after jumping bail during his trial.
Davonte Fore, 26, was convicted along with accomplice JaQuan Brooks, 25, on October 4 of Malice Murder, two counts of Felony Murder, Aggravated Assault, Possession of a Firearm by a Convicted Felon, and Possession of a Firearm during the Commission of a Felony for the June 2021 murder of 25-year-old Skyler Gilmore.
According to a press release from the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, DeKalb County Police officers found Gilmore unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the torso in her Stone Mountain, Georgia, apartment in the early morning hours of June 4, 2021, after receiving a 911 call from a female friend reporting that the 25-year-old had been shot.
The friend told police that she had been on the phone with Gilmore when Gilmore told her she had to hang up to let someone into the front gate of her apartment complex. Gilmore later called the woman back and told her she’d been shot. The friend went to Gilmore’s apartment, where she called 911.
The friend told investigators that Gilmore was a transgender woman and had been involved in “survival sex,” which the DA’s press release describes as a form of sex work involving “sex in exchange for basic necessities like food or shelter.”
Investigators were able to link Fore’s phone number to multiple calls and text messages on Gilmore’s phone in the hour leading up to her murder, including one text in which she provided the code for her apartment complex’s front gate. They were also able to identify Fore and Brooks as the driver and passenger of a car entering the apartment complex shortly before the shooting via surveillance video. Detectives say Fore and Brooks were members of a local gang and had been ordered to kill Gilmore for sleeping with another gang member.
Fore was arrested in November 2022 but was released on bond this past February over the objections of state prosecutors. At some point during the trial, Fore failed to return to court and is now considered a fugitive. Brooks was taken into custody following the October guilty verdict.
“This is why our office works hard to get bonds denied in cases like this, but it’s not our decision to grant bond,” Jacques Spencer, Supervising Investigator in the Homicide and Gangs Unit at the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, told Fox 5 Atlanta.
Gilmore’s father, Chauncey Gilmore, told Fox 5 that Fore is “a bad guy” and that he hopes he’s caught.
“Personally, I don’t think that he’s supposed to have been out on a $25,000 bond on a murder case, but he was, and I understand that, but I’m hoping that the people get him, and they get him fast,” Gilmore said.
“Our focus is getting him in custody,” Spencer said. “We feel that he’s a danger to society and also the victim’s family deserves to be able to face him in court when he is sentenced for what he did.”
According to prosecutors, Fore has ties to California, and authorities are asking anyone with information about his whereabouts to contact the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office Fugitive Unit at 404-298-8132 but warned not to approach him as Fore is considered dangerous.
Several small business owners in Lancaster, Ohio, say they saw an increase in new customers after a local anti-LGBTQ+ group tried to start a boycott campaign against them.
According to local NBC affiliate WCMH, the group Fairfield County Conservatives began circulating a list of local small businesses on social media following two September city council meetings at which members protested drag performances hosted during Lancaster’s family-friendly Pride celebration the same month. Members characterized the events as “pornographic,” an anti-LGBTQ+ tactic that has become all too common in recent years.
Fairfield County Conservatives member Chuck Burgoon, who is also the executive director of Fairfield Family Forum, told WCMH that the group’s list was meant to inform the community about businesses that have supported The Rainbow Alliance of Fairfield County, a local LGBTQ+ group that hosted the Pride events.
“None of us have called for anyone to boycott these businesses; we were just trying to figure out who was supporting [the events],” Burgoon said. “Our downtown has suffered greatly, and it has come back now. We don’t want to lose that again, so we haven’t called for anybody to boycott anyone.”
But the owners of businesses on the list aren’t buying it. Brandon Love, owner of gift shop Bewilderment argues that the list was always meant to discourage people from patronizing the businesses on it. He claims to have seen posters slandering his shop around town, while Teresa Speakman, whose Mud Gallery was not on the list, says she’s seen Fairfield County Conservatives members taking photos and videos of businesses in downtown Lancaster with pro-LGBTQ+ signage and merchandise.
Love thinks that if Fairfield County Conservatives “are going to launch a boycott, they need to stand by it.”
If the group had intended to launch a boycott, their efforts apparently backfired.
“We’ve probably had at least 200 people who have never been to Lancaster that have come to town to support the boycotted businesses,” Love said. “People from, not just Columbus, but out of state have been visiting us on the daily now, and so it’s definitely something I didn’t expect.”
Speakman, an LGBTQ+ ally who displays a Pride flag at her gallery, said she’s also seen increased support. “I’ve had people come in here and say, ‘Oh, thank you for your flag, your rainbow flag, thank you for being here. Thank you for being a safe space,’” she told WCMH. “I’m always interested in building community, and I’m an ally of anyone that needs a safe space.”
Love has even responded to Fairfield County Conservatives’ list with his own, comprised of many of the same businesses on the anti-LGBTQ+ groups as well as others that are either LGBTQ+-owned or supportive.
“Brandon took their boycott list and made another list public that said, ‘Hey, these are actually businesses that you do want to support,” Speakman explained. “So, it was kind of turned around to being shared and shared and shared, and has brought me a lot more people that have found me.”
“I’ve been boycotted before as a queer-owned business, I think Ohio’s just kind of sick of their rhetoric and tired of being a hateful state,” said Love. “It’s just not true, this is our home, too. We’re queer people, we’re here, we have communities, we have businesses.”
At the same time, Burgoon and other members of Fairfield County Conservatives continue to push for the Lancaster city council to adopt a measure banning “adult cabaret performances.” According to WCMH, the measure would be similar to House Bill 245, a Republican-backed bill introduced in July 2023 that opponents say would amount to a state-wide ban on drag performances in public spaces.
During testimony before the Ohio House Criminal Justice Committee in June, Democrats questioned why the bill would be necessary when local laws address lewd behavior.
But for members of Fairfield County Conservatives, those existing laws don’t go far enough. At a September 23 city council meeting, members of the group shared a screenshot from a video taken during a September 14 Lancaster Pride event showing a drag performer with their legs splayed open. Lancaster city law director Stephanie Hall argued that while she considered the image “tasteless,” the performer did not break any laws.
“The video from that night shows the performer in question was in that position for a split second while performing a dance routine. Dance, like speech, is an expression that is protected,” Hall said, according to WCMH.
Fairfield County Conservatives member Robert Knisley said this was why the group is “pursuing a legislative solution.”
Police in Moscow raided two gay clubs last weekend, detaining over 50 people, in what Novaya Gazeta Europe described as the continued escalation of the Russian government’s crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community.
Photos and video from the raids was posted on pro-Russia Telegram channels MSK1 and SHOT on October 12 showing masked police storming into downtown Moscow club Central Station, forcing shouting at patrons and forcing them to lie on the ground. One clip shows officers searching people, with one cop violently kicking a detainee’s leg.
Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that the club was holding a Friday, October 11, event marking National Coming Out Day. Police stormed the venue at around 1 a.m. on Saturday morning under the pretext of fighting “drug trafficking.” A photo on MSK1 and a video on SHOT show one clubgoer who appears to have been forced to empty their bag, the contents laid out on the floor.
According to Novaya Gazeta, about 200 people were at Central Station at the time of the raid. It’s unclear where the more than 50 people taken into custody were being detained.
Police also raided another popular central Moscow LGBTQ+ venue, Three Monkeys, which is reportedly managed by the same owners as Central Station.
The raids follow what one post on SHOT reportedly described as “civilian complaints.” An October 7 post on the channel included photos and video of drag performers at Three Monkeys, with Moscow locals reportedly complaining of “all sorts of naughty things” and “Half-naked men dressed as women dance around the stage, and the guy guests [kissing] each other freely.”
The same day, another pro-Russia Telegram channel posted video of drag shows at Central Station in which performers allegedly mocked the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The channel wrote that the venue, along with Three Monkeys, should be shut down for “discrediting the Russian army,” according to Novaya Gazeta.
As the outlet noted, last weekend’s raids are just the latest in Russia’s continued crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community. Since the country’s Supreme Court declared the “international LGBT social movement” an “extremist organization” last November, there have been multiple raids on LGBTQ+ bars and other establishments in cities across Russia, and multiple people have been arrestedand charged under the country’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Following a similar raid on a nightclub in the city of Orenburg in March, the venue’s art director and administrator were both charged with being members of an “extremist organization.” The case was reportedly the first of its kind since the Russian Supreme Court’s ruling.
According to Novaya Gazeta, this is not the first time Central Station has been targeted. The venue was briefly forced to close in 2014 following violent attacks in the wake of Russia’s 2013 law banning so-called “gay propaganda” in the presence of children. The club’s St. Petersburg location was forced to close late last year.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is going all in to get out the vote for the Harris-Walz campaign.
This week, the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality Votes PAC announced the launch of a seven-figure digital ad campaign aimed at mobilizing pro-LGBTQ+ voters in four key battleground states in the remaining weeks before the November 5 election. Combined with separate campaigns aimed at getting out the vote generally and supporting Democratic Senate candidates, Equality Votes PAC is spending $2 million to safeguard LGBTQ+ rights in the upcoming election.
The campaign, according to an October 9 press release from the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, will present a clear contrast between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s long-time support for LGBTQ+ rights and former president Donald Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.
The campaign’s streaming video, radio and display ads will run in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all key battleground states that will determine the election’s outcome.
The goal, according to HRC, is to reach the 1.5 million “Equality Voters” in these four states who are not habitual voters in each election cycle.
“Equality Voters,” according to the organization, include members of the LGBTQ+ community and allies who prioritize LGBTQ+ equality when voting. These voters are younger, more racially diverse, and include more women than the general voting population. Equality Voters played a key role in electing President Joe Biden in 2020 and in preventing the projected “red wave” that would have given Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and a larger majority in the House of Representatives during the 2022 midterms.
But, the organization says, one-third of these Equality Voters are “at risk of not voting in 2024 or at risk of voting for a third-party candidate for president.”
The campaign’s battleground state ads are aimed at getting them to show up to vote for Harris instead.
“This election is going to come down to the smallest of margins, but the difference between an equality champion like Kamala Harris in the White House or another reign of terror from Donald Trump couldn’t be greater,” HRC’s Equality Votes PAC chief strategist Guy Cecil said in a statement.
Equality Voters, Cecil said, “will once again make the difference in battleground states across the country.”
“With the rise in anti-LGBTQ+ attacks and the threat of the Trump-Vance Project 2025 agenda on the horizon, the stakes for this election could not be higher,” said Cecil. “We must elect Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and equality champions across the country who will protect and advance our fundamental freedoms.”
Equality Votes PAC is also running ads supporting “pro-equality” Senate candidates like Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. A separate national campaign consisting of two ads urges pro-LGBTQ+ voters to get to the polls on November 5.
HRC also kicked off its 10 Days of Action campaign Thursday, with a rally in Philadelphia featuring Gwen Walz, the wife of Harris’ running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. As The Advocate reported, the 10 Days of Action campaign urges Equality Voters to participate in more than 160 planned actions across multiple states, including phone banking, canvassing, digital outreach, and community organizing to get out the vote for the Harris-Walz campaign.
“With so much at stake for LGBTQ+ Americans, we are not taking a single vote for granted. LGBTQ+ Americans deserve leaders who will champion our freedoms — like Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz,” the Harris campaign’s National LGBTQ engagement director Sam Alleman said in a statement. “Over the next 10 days, we will knock doors, make calls, and rally communities across this country to send the clear message that when we show up, equality wins.”
A Virginia man charged with attacking men he believed to be gay while posing as a police officer has been acquitted.
On September 27, a U.S. District Court jury in Washington D.C. found 50-year-old Michael Thomas Pruden not guilty on five counts of assault on federal land, one count of impersonating a federal officer, and a hate crimes sentencing designation, the Washington Bladereported.
According to a federal indictment handed down in June 2022, Pruden frequented D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park – which is reportedly a well-known cruising spot for men seeking sex with other men – after nightfall on multiple occasions. Federal prosecutors believe that Pruden sought out men who were cruising other men and approached them with a flashlight that he shined in their faces while giving them “police-style commands, and spraying them with a chemical irritant.”
Pruden was arrested in July 2022 and charged with attacking five men in the same manner. Victims testified that Pruden identified himself as either a police officer or a park security guard, The Blade reported.
Prosecutors argued that each of the victims who testified at trial had identified Pruden as their attacker when presented with an array of photos that included pictures of other men.
However, Pruden’s lead attorney Alexis Morgan Gardner argued that Pruden had been misidentified by the victims who testified, noting that Pruden himself is a gay man who frequented Meridian Hill Park. Gardner argued that the victims’ testimony conflicted with their statements to police and FBI agents. But prosecutors noted that the victims’ statements were made two years prior and any inconsistencies in their testimony did not change the overall evidence in the case.
This is the second time Pruden has been acquitted of a similar crime. In September 2021, he was found not guilty by a jury in Virginia in a separate case in which prosecutors said he attacked two men in Alexandria’s Daingerfield Island Park, pepper-spraying both and hitting one in the head with a stick after shouting “I’m a cop” and pretending to talk into a police radio. Court records reportedly indicate the Daingerfield Island Park attack occurred five days before the fifth victim in the Meridian Hill Park case was assaulted.
Two San Francisco city supervisors are trying to make it easier for new gay bathhouses to open in the city.
Last week, Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the historically gay Castro neighborhood, introduced legislation that would repeal the San Francisco Police Department’s Article 26. According to local Fox affiliate KTVU, the section of the city’s police code puts the burden of permitting new bathhouses on the SFPD.
“We’ve come a long way on the way to bring back gay bathhouses to San Francisco,” Mandelman, who is gay, told KTVU. “It’s encouraging that there are entrepreneurs who are actually trying to open these venues, although it is frustrating that we keep finding new barriers in their way.”
Article 26, Mandelman said, is the reason some potential business owners have spent months waiting for the SFPD to issue permits so they can open gay bathhouses in the city.
Mandelman’s ordinance would also repeal regulations passed at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s that required bathhouses in San Francisco to maintain a daily register of patrons and prohibited locked doors in the venues. Mandelman’s office said that the crackdown on gay bathhouses in the ’80s contributed to the stigma around HIV/AIDS.
“Opening a new business in San Francisco is difficult enough,” Joel Aguero, owner of Castro Baths, said. “Supervisor Mandelman and his office are removing a significant blocker to the permit process, accelerating the opening of Castro Baths, and supporting the growing community of would-be bathhouse operators and attendees who seek to revive San Francisco’s once-thriving bathhouse culture.”
Mandelman previously passed legislation to do away with ’80s era health code restrictions affecting gay bathhouses in 2020, and in 2022 he passed legislation allowing bathhouses to open in LGBTQ+ neighborhoods like the Castro and the Tenderloin.
“I’m thankful to Supervisor Mandelman for his leadership in removing outdated barriers to reopen bathhouses in San Francisco,” said city supervisor Matt Dorsey, who co-sponsored Mandelman’s ordinance.
“The South of Market neighborhood I represent has a long and storied history with these establishments. With hindsight, we now know that restrictions adopted decades ago at [the] advent of the AIDS crisis likely deprived at-risk communities of sex-positive spaces where information about safer sex practices might have saved lives.”
Dorsey, who is also gay and the only openly HIV-positive member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, noted that with advancements in HIV prevention and treatment like antiretroviral therapy and PrEP, “It’s past time for anti-bathhouse restrictions to go.”
A Nigerian distributor of independent gay romance films is fighting to get its YouTube channel back.
Earlier this month, Omeleme TV launched an online petition aimed at getting YouTube to reinstate its original account after the streaming platform removed its channel, claiming Omeleme TV had violated its policy “on spam, deceptive practices and scams.”
But in its petition, Omeleme TV argued it has never violated YouTube’s policies and has “always complied with their rules and regulations accordingly.”
An Omeleme TV spokesperson, who wished to remain anonymous,told The Washington Blade that YouTube has not indicated “the main issue” that resulted in its deplatforming.
In its petition, Omeleme TV notes that “same-sex love is often denied and shrouded in taboo” in Nigeria, where homosexuality is illegal and same-sex relationships are punishable by up to 14 years in prison under the country’s Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act. “Deleting our YouTube page is basically shutting [out] the voice of the queer folks in the region,” the petition states.
As the Washington Blade notes, Omeleme TV launched its YouTube channel last September. At its peak, the channel reportedly had over 5,000 subscribers and had been monetized.
Its first film, Nearly All Men, directed by Akpos Otubuere, was initially posted in October 2023. By November 4, 2023, the film had garnered 5,500 views according to a post on the channel’s official Instagram account. This past June, the channel premiered its second film, Pieces of Love, which received over 500,000 views in 24 hours, according to a June 22 Instagram post. A screenshot posted on August 2 appears to show that the film had reached 101,000 views.
The following day, nearly 10 months after Nearly All Men went live on YouTube, a post on Omeleme TV’s Instagram page stated that the channel’s operators had chosen to remove the film after the platform “flagged a particular score.”
The channel’s spokesperson told the Washington Blade that Omeleme TV faced an initial copyright claim over a song in one of its films. In the process of settling the copyright issue, they discovered that Nearly All Men had not, in fact, been monetized. According to the Blade, the channel pulled the film and reuploaded it with a new original song.
It’s unclear when this version of the film was posted or how long it remained on YouTube, but on August 15, a post on the channel’s Instagram stated that “after back and forth with YouTube” over the platform’s policies on adult content, Nearly All Men would be reposted the following day, “BUT, the 18+ scenes in the movie will be up soonest in the next few days [sic].”
Omeleme TV’s spokesperson told TheWashington Blade that YouTube flagged the film again on August 18. “This time they claimed it is not ad friendly, but it does not affect the channel and that we can only earn and be viewed by premium subscribers,” they said.
On September 3, Omeleme TV posted another update on Instagram, indicating that Nearly All Men had been flagged several times. Rather than edit scenes out of the film, Omeleme TV announced that Nearly All Men would return to its channel as a “premium” members-only video due to scenes containing nudity.
“We are sincerely sorry that it’s not open to everyone,” the channel wrote in another September 3 post. “Like we said earlier YouTube is strict on nudity and editing out those scenes entirely from the film jeopardizes the aim/purpose of the entire film.”
A September 6 post announced that the film was once again live for premium subscribers.
Two days later, on September 8, Omeleme TV reported via their Instagram account that their channel had been removed from YouTube. A screenshot posted on their @nearlyallmen X account indicates that the platform removed the channel for allegedly violating its policy “on spam, deceptive practices and scams.”
In a September 10 response to the @nearlyallmen X account, @TeamYouTube noted that Omeleme TV had “already appealed & received an email outlining the final decision” not to reinstate the channel.
“We know it wasn’t the outcome you were hoping for, but there’s nothing more we can do on our end as these decisions are made very carefully,” the @TeamYouTube account wrote.
The Omeleme TV spokesperson told the Washington Blade that YouTube “did not in any way specify the actual violation or spam.” They also noted that YouTube had never once given the channel a “strike.” The platform issues “strikes” to channels for a second violation of its policies following an initial warning for a first violation.
Under its “Community Guidelines strike basics,” the platform does note that it “may remove content for reasons other than Community Guidelines violations. For example, a first-party privacy complaint or a court order. In these cases, your channel won’t get a strike.” It also notes that in certain instances “a single case of severe abuse will result in channel termination without warning.”
Omeleme TV has since launched a new YouTube channel, though it has only uploaded Pieces of Love and the trailer for Nearly All Men so far. And with only 98 subscribers, its reach has been drastically reduced and falls far short of the 1,000 subscribers required before it can monetize its content.
And it continues to fight to have its original channel restored. In its petition, which 170 signatures toward its 200 goal, Omeleme TV says that it plays a crucial role in normalizing same-sex relationships, “providing visibility and affirmation for LGBTQ+ individuals, both young and old,” in Nigeria.
“YouTube remains our major source for distribution of these films to queer folks all over the world,” the channel’s spokesperson told the Blade. They continue to believe that YouTube has somehow made a mistake, that the platform, “being a safe space for filmmakers all over the world, will do the right thing by restoring our channel for their esteemed viewers.”
Citing a 2021 Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research study, which found that only four percent of small businesses in the U.S. are owned by queer entrepreneurs, out Supervisor Rafael Mandelman applauded Transgender District for addressing the disparity “by providing valuable support to trans entrepreneurs, who face significant barriers when following their small business dreams.”
Since its inception in 2020, Tenderloin-based Transgender District’s Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program has helped 37 trans and nonbinary people launch businesses. The annual four-month program provides webinars, mentorship, one-on-one coaching, and more, all free of charge to participants, as well as a $10,000 seed grant to those who finish.
Mandelman went on to praise some of the program’s graduates, who have gone on “to pursue a wide variety of business endeavors.”
“Thanks to support from the district, program graduate Jessica Lamb founded Open Doors HR, an LGBTQ+ and AAPI-led HR team. Avery Zeus started a catering company, Concept Kitchen, which works to create community through food, providing meals for many LGBTQ+ [individuals],” he said.
Carlo Gomez Arteaga, co-executive director of Transgender District along with Breonna McCree, accepted the honor Wednesday, surrounded by participants in the 2024 program as well as Transgender District program director Sam Favela, and members of the San Francisco Office of Transgender Initiatives, including Transgender District co-founder Honey Mahogany.
“Our programs are vital,” Arteaga said, noting that of the four percent figure cited by Mandelman “an even smaller percentage of those are trans-led or nonbinary-led businesses.”
“So we really want to uplift the importance of what this funding and these opportunities mean for our community,” he continued, “especially during these years where we’re ‘otherized’ and many in our community are criminalized for just existing when we just want dignity and the ability to have civil rights and liberties as anyone else in the U.S.”
Arteaga noted that San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, which provides funding for the program, has been “instrumental in helping us not only further the ideas into fruition of our entrepreneurs but also funding the next stages of what that looks like for us.”
Arteaga went on to highlight the confidence Transgender District’s program builds in its graduates as well as the importance of “the leadership of a city like San Francisco that can work towards expanding the tapestry of what our community businesses look like, and extending that opportunity to our community’s most vulnerable and marginalized residents.”
As The Bay Area Reporter noted, the 2024 Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program is already well underway, concluding next month. Mandelman recognized participants in this year’s program present at City Hall on Wednesday, telling them, “I am so excited to watch you thrive and, in turn, contribute to San Francisco’s vibrant small business community.”
