Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) has signed an education bill that includes several anti-LGBTQ+ policies.
S.F. 496 bans instruction on LGBTQ+ identities through sixth grade and requires schools to out trans youth to their parents. It also bans all books containing sex acts from school classrooms and libraries, which will undoubtedly lead to the banning of several LGBTQ+ books.
And despite the fact that Iowa has already banned gender-affirming care for trans youth, the bill explicitly establishes that parents and guardians have “the fundamental, constitutionally protected right, to make decisions affecting [their] child, including decisions related to the minor child’s medical care….”
The section clarifies that it does not authorize parents and guardians to “engage in conduct that is unlawful,” and as such, parents of trans youth still do not have the right to seek gender-affirming care for their kids.
Democrats and LGBTQ+ rights groups have blasted the bill.
“We need all Iowa trans kids to know, LGBTQ kids to know, that you belong here,” House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst (D), reportedly said as the legislative session came to a close.
After Reynold’s signed the bill, the Iowa Senate Democrats tweeted that the law seeks to “ban books and marginalize kids just because they’re different.”
“Censorship and singling out LGBTQ Iowans is wrong for kids, and wrong for our state,” the tweet concluded.
Courtney Reyes, the executive director of One Iowa, said in a statement that the law “will harm an already vulnerable group of children and will benefit no one.”
The bill was part of a slate of education bills signed by Reynolds last week. In a statement, she said the state has “secured transformational education reform that puts parents in the driver’s seat, eliminates burdensome regulations on public schools, provides flexibility to raise teacher salaries, and empowers teachers to prepare our kids for their future.”
“Education is the great equalizer and everyone involved – parents, educators, our children – deserves an environment where they can thrive,” she said.
Reynolds has made her anti-trans views a cornerstone of her tenure. She has also made “parental control” a centerpiece of her public messaging, claiming a far-left “woke” agenda is threatening the health and well-being of the state’s children.
While campaigning for reelection in 2022, she aired a TV spot highlighting what she called her values of faith, freedom, and hard work.
“Here in Iowa,” she declared, “we know right from wrong, boys from girls.”
At the end of March this year, Reynolds signed two bills targeting trans youth. One forbids minors from accessing puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy and forces trans teens currently receiving gender-affirming care to de-transition. It also threatens the professional licenses of any medical practitioners who provide such care. Studies show that gender-affirming care is safe, reversible, and essential to trans people’s overall well-being.
The other prohibits people from using school restrooms that don’t correspond with the gender a person was assigned at birth.
Last year, Reynolds also signed an anti-trans sports ban.
Months after the war to end all wars came to a close in 1918, a German researcher named Magnus Hirschfeld opened his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology) in Berlin, the world’s first academic institution devoted to the study of sexuality.
He bought the building from the defeated government of the Free State of Prussia in the leafy Tiergarten district. It would house a research library and a large archive with tens of thousands of volumes; a marriage and sex counseling office; a museum of sexual artifacts; medical exam rooms; and a lecture hall.
Hirschfeld, who was openly gay and Jewish, would occupy a building next door that he later acquired. The institute became a gathering place for colleagues, patients, and friends who were both. Christopher Isherwood, Margaret Sanger, André Gide and Nehru were honored guests. The Soviets were repeat visitors.
Fourteen years later — and 90 years ago this month — it was sacked by Nazi youth, a milestone in the construction of the Nazi state, and a harbinger of an even more devastating conflict to come.
On May 6, 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi-dominated German Student League marched to the Institute and sacked it while a brass band played. Hirschfeld was in Switzerland at the time and later watched newsreel footage in Paris of his beloved Institut destroyed.
What volumes the Nazi youth — and later that afternoon, the SA, the Nazi paramilitary wing — didn’t destroy were hauled out of the building four nights later and thrown atop the enormous bonfire of books at Opernplatz, the most iconic of the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s. A bronze bust of Hirschfeld from his Institut was set atop the pyre.
The tens of thousands of books, papers, research documents, films and photographs represented decades of work by Hirschfeld and his colleagues, reaching back to Hirschfeld’s visit to the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, where he first encountered a gay subculture similar to what he’d experienced in Berlin. So began a career dedicated to the study of, and advocacy for, sexual minorities of all kinds.
While Hirschfeld is best known to history for his Institut and the enormity of its loss, he first gained international fame in turn of the century Germany testifying as an expert witness in a libel case involving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s close friend, the politically powerful Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, who was accused of having a sexual relationship with a German general, Kuno von Moltke.
Hirschfeld famously testified he could confirm Moltke was gay, there was nothing wrong with it, and that “homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love.”
He represented everything the Nazis would come to loathe.
Ninety years after Hitler began building his National Socialist state by tearing down the work of enlightened scholars like Hirschfeld, LGBTQ Nation spoke with Jonathan Friedman, Director of Free Expression and Education Programs for PEN America, to find out what lessons an authoritarian leader and his devoted followers from the past can teach us about the power of censorship today.
LGBTQ NATION: What does it say about Nazi tactics that they started their intellectual purge at a gay academic institution?
Jonathan Friedman: When we think about the Second World War, we sometimes forget what a multifaceted assault the Nazi regime was propagating. It was really never about only one group of people that was being targeted. It was many. It was people being targeted for religion, for ethnicity, for race, for their professions, for their political beliefs and their organizing for their sexual orientation. And, to some extent, for their gender, even at a time when maybe those weren’t the words that people used.
And so it’s astounding, I think, to reflect on what was lost, but then also, in an interesting way, in which historical chapters are now being highlighted in ways that we may have not been aware of before this one book burning, and the destruction of the Institute. It reminds us of the violence with which it began.
LGBTQ NATION: What parallels do you see in the tactics of that authoritarian regime with groups like Moms for Liberty?
JF: For many people, the drastic spread of this movement to totally erase certain identities from books in schools seems certainly of a similar vein, in the sense that both are tactics of erasure. I think a lot of the time right now, people want to downplay what’s happening. They say, “Well, if you can buy it on Amazon, it’s not a book ban,” or, “If you can get permission from a parent to go into a backroom in a library, then it’s not really banned.”
But the truth is, on the road to total censorship, there are many steps. It can be a ladder, a sliding scale. It does not happen that we go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning, and now we’re in an authoritarian country. It can be a slide, a kind of daily normalization, or routinization, of state censorship. It’s something people come to expect and come to live with. And when I speak to teachers and librarians around the country in places where these issues are intense right now, they do feel like they’re already living under McCarthyism.
LGBTQ NATION:What does the sacking of the Institute in Berlin have in common with the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida?
JF: I would say that both are cut from the same cloth, in the sense that they start from a place of intolerance, and they’re trying to weaponize that intolerance to spread misunderstanding, disinformation, marginalization, and to empower one group of people over others.
And you know, the reality is that in the United States right now, in Florida — anywhere — we’re actually living at a time of a kind of blossoming of freedom of expression, gender expression and sexuality. In fact, there has been so much circulation of ideas and information and identity that more people feel more affirmed in who they are today. And these tactics are undeniably an effort to push those identities back in the closet, to make people more uncomfortable in their bodies once again.
That might not start with book burnings. It might not start with closing of institutes. But where does it start? I think it starts with laws like Don’t Say Gay in Florida.
LGBTQ NATION:It’s like the definition of reactionary.
JF: It’s the very definition of a reactionary.
LGBTQ NATION:What characteristics do you think National Socialism and Christian Nationalism have in common?
JF: The common ideology I see would be a kind of supremacist notion that one group of people ought to be able to control society for everybody else, ought to be in positions of power, and ought to be able to keep anyone — any group of people that didn’t have historic power — at the margins. That’s a degree of commonality.
LGBTQ NATION: What do you think the ultimate aim of groups like Moms for Liberty is? What’s driving them?
JF: I think you can’t deny that there is a degree of political opportunism at work in all of this, where a particular movement is trying to galvanize people to the polls. You know, a lot of this intensified after the election of Governor Youngkin in Virginia in 2021. It has continued to have very clear political elements in both the involvement of some politicians in local school board affairs and in the passage of more and more laws.
So you can’t really distinguish anymore in a lot of states between the book bans that might be pushed by a group of local parents who are associated with Moms for Liberty and the laws that they’re taking advantage of, which are being promoted and passed in state houses in order to make that local activism easier. There’s a fundamental connection.
It’s not clear, I would say, what their ultimate aims are, beyond perhaps an effort to destroy public education.
LGBTQ NATION: How should writers today respond to censorship, and what lessons can they learn from what happened in Nazi Germany?
JF: I think we are seeing more and more solidarity. I think we’re seeing more people come together to speak out. But it’s already clear, in the second year of this, that it’s attacking more and more writers. So if censorship hasn’t come for your books yet, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to.
In a lot of places, censorship works in a chilling manner. And so people get more and more cautious. They want to restrict more and more content. They see concerning content in more and more places. And so there’s this whole effort to move the Overton windowaround how people think that libraries and schools should operate, from places that champion open inquiry and opportunities to learn about the world, to places where there are questions that one cannot ask, identities that one cannot learn about, histories that cannot be discussed.
That’s what’s so troubling, and so alarming, about the spread of this movement in our country.
Over the last year, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Utah — four states bordering New Mexico — have all banned gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Meanwhile, New Mexico passed two laws ensuring that such care will remain legal statewide and that no government entities will ever help another state prosecute someone who obtains or provides that care.
As a result, New Mexico is quickly becoming a refugee state for those escaping their state’s anti-trans policies. That creates a unique challenge for the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRCNM). The Albuquerque-based center is the state’s only brick-and-mortar center run by trans people, for trans people.
“We’re geographically situated in between states that are struggling with treating people like human beings and allowing folks to have the bodily autonomy to take care of themselves in whatever way suits them best,” TGRCNM’s executive director T. Michael Trimm tells LGBTQ Nation. “So folks are fleeing here in droves.”
It’s difficult to quantify how many trans people have migrated to avoid trans healthcare bans. At least 17 states nationwide have passed laws restricting or banning such care for minors. Other states have also recently passed laws denying trans people restroom access, sports teams, and pronouns matching their gender identities.
While Republican legislators claim such laws are necessary to protect children from “indoctrination” and harm, opponents accuse the GOP of inserting itself between families and doctors as part of its larger culture war on queer people, leaving some no choice but to flee their home states.
New Mexico’s laws mimic those of California, Minnesota, and other “sanctuary states” which promise to protect the right to gender-affirming healthcare for youth and their families. As a result, out-of-state immigrants have increasingly sought help at TGRCNM, turning the Center into a sort of “trans Ellis Island,” Trimm says, referring to the New York center in the early 1900s that processed European immigrants and refugees.
The influx is challenging the TGRCNM to meet additional people’s needs in an already under-resourced state, Trimm adds.
Statistics suggest that trans newcomers may suffer from higher rates of poverty, familial rejection, workplace discrimination, and other oppressions that result in increased houselessness, food insecurity, and poor healthcare. As such, some newcomers may need a lot of assistance to establish new lives.
While many larger cities in surrounding states have LGBTQ+ centers with programs to help trans folks, the nearest centers focusing solely on trans people are located in Missouri and California, both over 800 miles away, leaving TGRCNM as the only nearby option for untold numbers of trans people seeking support.
“We do not feel equipped to handle the needs of these folks,” Adrien Lawyer, TGRCNM’s co-founder tells LGBTQ Nation. Trimm adds, “This is incredibly overwhelming and has continued to stretch the limits of our capacity.”
A room inside the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico. Credit: TRCNM
The TGRCNM already offers “direct services” for trans people in need, including a drop-in center three days a week that provides showers, washers and dryers, prepared meals, an open donation clothes closet, a computer lab, a lending library, and workers who can help people access food benefits, healthcare (including STI testing, needle-exchange, and mental health counselors), legal services, as well as housing and employment assistance.
The center also offers statewide services, including assisting with name changes on government ID documents, providing trans body shaping items (like binders and gaffes), an online directory and referral for trans-friendly healthcare providers, a support program for incarcerated trans people, and also nine weekly in-person and online support groups for trans people of color, children, parents, partners, and others who live inside and outside of the state.
“We have grown so much since we started in 2007, but one of our challenges remains finding and sustaining the funding to do the statewide work that we set out to do here,” Lawyer says.
Trimm agrees.
“New Mexico isn’t the most resourced state, yet we are offering the most protections for folks,” he says. “Funding would allow us to further serve the people already in our state, who may be unintentionally harmed by the influx of [transgender and non-conforming] refugees who come to the state, occupying housing, which raises market rent for everyone.”
Lawyer says TGRCNM’s immediate mission is “to not let people die here in our local community,” but he adds that the Center doesn’t just “want to just be trying to patch up people’s bullet holes with band-aids all the time” either. The Center wants to keep shifting the state’s culture towards valuing trans lives.
Doing this requires progressive legislation to ensure that trans people will be able to thrive in peace throughout the state. Recently passed legislation has made New Mexico “the safest state in the country for LGBTQ people,” according to Marshall Martinez, executive director of Equality New Mexico.
This year alone, New Mexico passed House Bill 207, which added gender identity to anti-discrimination and hate crime laws; House Bill 31, which made it easier for trans people to legally change their names; House Bill 7, which forbids anyone from restricting access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care; and Senate Bill 13 is a “shield law” that forbids the government from assisting with any out-of-state investigations into people who provide or receive such care.
The latter two laws are especially important since Texas and other states have threatened to prosecute doctors and parents for “child abuse” if they help kids access such care. Similar laws also threaten anyone who assists in obtaining an abortion.
Martinez says New Mexico’s trans-inclusive laws passed thanks to a strong, cooperative coalition consisting of Equality New Mexico, the TRCNM, local Planned Parenthood affiliates, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the reproductive justice organization Bold Futures New Mexico, the healthcare access advocacy group Strong Families New Mexico, and a “ton of other groups.”
The coalition’s organizations regularly communicate with each other every day, he says. Throughout the year, they make sure one another’s issues are represented at meetings with community and political leaders across the vast state. Each organization also uses its pre-existing relationships with legislators to educate lawmakers about one another’s key issues, gradually introducing leaders to lawmakers over time.
These groups all share a common enemy, Martinez notes: conservatives who hate LGBTQ+ people — they’re the same ones who want to dictate people’s medical decisions, he says. As such, it made sense for the coalition members to support healthcare legislation that bundled abortion access with access for gender-affirming care.
“These are the only two health care procedures being criminalized,” Martinez says. “At the end of the day in New Mexico, either you believe that a patient can make decisions about their health care and their body or you don’t. And if you believe that, then you must believe it about everything.”
“Liberation is bodily autonomy, and bodily autonomy is the same regardless of whose body it is and what decisions you’re trying to make,” he continues. “The ability to decide whether or not I take hormones to transition my gender is equally as important as the decision I or my partner or sibling may make about having or not having children…. [It’s] the same level of bodily autonomy as being able to sue the cops when they harm you [or] violate your civil rights… which is the same as being able to make an adult decision about using cannabis.”
Under this reasoning, the coalition has helped pass other progressive laws, including ones that will enable residents to purchase a state health insurance option, enable cannabis entrepreneurs of color to benefit first from legalized sales, remove “qualified immunity” protections from abusive cops, and repeal older anti-abortion and anti-sodomy laws. Martinez doesn’t see these all as individual policy changes so much as the victories of a movement that has been successful on multiple fronts.
Granted, New Mexico’s Democratic-leaning electorate differentiates it from other states in ways that could make this strategy difficult to replicate elsewhere. New Mexico has a pro-LGBTQ+ governor, Michelle Lynn Lujan Grisham (D), and its legislature has been controlled by Democrats for almost all of the last 30 years. Its population of just over two million — 30% of which is non-white, including 21 indigenous sovereign nations — has helped Democratic presidential candidates win seven of the last eight elections.
I am deeply honored and humbled to continue serving our beautiful state as governor of New Mexico.
As I begin my second term, I will continue doing the work to ensure that the next fifty years are the greatest and most prosperous in New Mexico history – progress is our destiny. pic.twitter.com/0PPKDpHLAS— Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (@GovMLG) January 3, 2023
But Martinez says the state’s progressive victories at least disprove the idea that religious people of color are among the most conservative. “It has proven to be incredibly untrue amongst Hispanic, Latino, and indigenous Catholics across the country,” he says.
“People in New Mexico have been learning how to live with people of different cultural and religious values and backgrounds for 200 years,” he adds. “And at the end of the day, our values have always been that we love accept and affirm our neighbors, even when we don’t understand or agree with.”
He encourages advocacy organizations in larger states not to operate from a territorial and scarcity model, one that sees other progressive causes as a potential drain on an organization’s resources or influence. In New Mexico, he says, progressive groups inquire about one another’s legislation, asking how each can help apply equal pressure on legislators over a wide range of issues. Over the years, such coalition building has made it so that New Mexican lawmakers don’t pursue bad laws, he says.
It’s likely that the state’s trans protections will eventually be legally challenged by conservatives either inside or outside of its borders. But Martinez remains confident that the laws will withstand legal challenges, especially with a broad coalition supporting them.
“We’re not doing something radically new by protecting trans people,” he says. “We’re doing what we’ve always done, which is protect people from hatred and discrimination because that’s a New Mexican value.”
A new study from a market research firm in Austin, Texas reveals where in the U.S. the most people are questioning their sexuality.
The unlikely answer is ruby red, religiously conservative Utah, a finding that earns the Mormon enclave the title “most closeted” among the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
This year, the state has become an epicenter of Republican-fueled anti-LGBTQ+ vitriol.
“The evolution of social attitudes around sexual orientation and gender identity over the last two decades has been profound,” Cultural Currents Institute writes in a memo accompanying the study, which examined Google Trends data from 2004 to 2023.
The deep dive uncovered “a staggering 1300% increase in specific searches that may indicate that a user is questioning their sexual identity.”
CCI mined data for five search terms: “am I gay,” “am I lesbian,” “am I trans,” “how to come out,” and “nonbinary,” finding a significant upward trend among all the terms, with the results in some states more pronounced than others.
The top five states for “am I gay” were Utah, Iowa, Indiana, West Virginia, and New Hampshire.
Utah, a red state with the country’s largest Mormon population, topped the search list for three of the terms: “am I gay,” “am I lesbian,” and “am I trans.”
The state’s top spots “might indicate a significant underlying questioning of identity among its internet users,” writes CCI, “possibly driven by the conflict between personal feelings and societal expectations.”
The firm describes this tension as “common” in Utah, where recent data revealed a surge in searches for “VPN,” an internet workaround employed after the website PornHub was blocked in the state.
Total search volume for the five terms combined shows a remarkable jump in the last two years, coinciding with the far-right’s campaign targeting the LGBTQ+ community with legislative bans on gender-affirming care, drag performance and other discriminatory measures, and efforts of groups like Moms for Liberty, LibsofTikTok and Gays Against Groomers directed at school boards, libraries and local governments.
Utah was the first state to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth in 2023. The law is on hold pending a court challenge.
The top five states for the search term “am I lesbian” were Utah, Connecticut, Kentucky, Washington, and Colorado.
“Am I trans,” was most popular in Utah, Kentucky, Colorado, Michigan, and Washington.
A collection of five deep red states topped the list for the search term “how to come out,” including Oklahoma, West Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Kentucky, a result that “could indicate a more challenging environment for self-disclosure of identity,” according to the study authors.
The search for “nonbinary” yielded a broader ideological mix of states, including Vermont, Oregon, Maine, Montana, and Washington.
The LGBTQ+ organization Human Rights Campaign (HRC) kicked Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch off the top of its corporate equality index (CEI), citing the company’s tepid response to the Dylan Mulvaney backlash.
“When we saw the company working with Dylan, that was a good sign. It was a sign of inclusion,” HRC senior vice president of programs, research, and training Jay Brown told CNN. “What we were really disturbed by was the company’s reaction once the backlash started happening.”
There are approximately 3 million Dashers who are the public face and main workforce of DoorDash who are not considered in the CEI because DoorDash doesn’t consider them employees.
On April 1, Mulvaney posted a 50-second video to Instagram showing off some custom Bud Light cans with her face on them, a part of a brand partnership with the beer company.
But Anheuser-Busch’s weak response to the backlash led to anger among LGBTQ+ people as well. The company released a statement in April saying that it “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people… We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.” And Anheuser-Busch CEO Michel Doukeris downplayed the partnership on a call with investors this month, saying: “We will continue to learn, meet the moment in time, all be stronger and we work tirelessly to do what we do best: Bring people together over a beer and creating a future of more cheers.”
Meanwhile, Mulvaney said she was “having trouble sleeping” after becoming the target of so much hatred for the past month and a half, leading to criticism that Anheuser-Busch left her out to dry. Some LGBTQ+ people – including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) and several bars in Chicago – have been boycotting Anheuser-Busch as a result of their response to the controversy.
And now HRC is jumping into the fray.
HRC’s Brown said that the beer company’s lackluster response couldn’t have come at a worse time, as transgender equality is being targeted in state legislatures across the country. He said that he asked Anheuser-Busch to at least release a statement in support of Mulvaney and transgender people, offer inclusion training to executives, and listen to LGBTQ+ employees, but the company hasn’t done any of those things. In fact, two of the marketing executives who worked on the Mulvaney partnership have been put on leave, which many on the right are claiming as a victory of their Bud Light boycott.
After asking to at least talk to someone at the company, Brown sent a letter informing Anheuser-Busch that they were losing their 100% rating on CEI, which rates the “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality.”
HRC has been maintaining the CEI since 2002, when it rated policies for gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees, and has expanded it in the last two decades to include evaluations of transgender employee policies, partner benefits, and how a corporation supports an inclusive culture outside of its own workplace.
HRC gave a 100% rating to the Fox Corporation until last year when it got demoted due to Fox News’s coverage of LGBTQ+ issues.
On May 4th, 2022, Sultan Popal*, a 32-year-old gay Afghan man became a victim of a string of violent attacks against the country’s LGBTQ+ community. He was taken to a guest house by the Taliban where he was beaten and raped until the early hours of the morning. When he managed to escape, he called his friend, another gay man, who urged him to come to his house in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
For the next two months, Popal stayed hidden at his friend’s home, where he had to take strict measures so that he couldn’t be traced by the Taliban.
“I changed my [phone] number, my WhatsApp number, I changed my Facebook profile,” Popal told LGBTQ Nation. “And several times, I changed my location, often to my aunt’s home, my uncle’s home, my cousin’s home, my sister’s home…every week I changed my locations.”
Popal’s situation isn’t an isolated case in today’s Afghanistan.
According to a 2022 report by Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International.LGBTQ+ Afghans have faced an “increasingly desperate situation” and grave threats to their safety and lives since the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021. After almost two years, life for LGBTQ+ people in the country continues to deteriorate.
Nemat Sadat, a gay Afghan-American activist and executive director of an organization that helps relocate LGBTQ+ Afghans, spoke with LGBTQ Nation about the monetary help his organization, Roshaniya, extended to Bilal, a gay man who was beaten with power cables and electrocuted by the Taliban at a safe house in October 2021.
“They hit him with these paddles, so his entire buttocks, the skin just all came off, and all you could see was flesh. After being stuck in the house for 20 days, he somehow snuck out of the house through a window and then contacted different organizations, pleaded for help but nobody did anything, nobody responded to him. We immediately sent money for him, $300. $100 for food, $100 to get him a passport, $100 for him to get a visa for Pakistan.”
The community suffers today under Taliban rule, but that is not the only battle they have to fight. In their homes, they face further danger from their own families.
“When the Taliban come to people’s homes, they ask them to hand over [their] LGBT people,” Sadat explained, “and so a lot of families, out of fear, especially in very conservative, rural areas, will go ahead and murder their sons or their daughters or transgender child out of worry that if the Taliban catches them then they would all be complicit in protecting this LGBT child.”
Saeed Behesht*, a 26-year-old gay man, spoke to LGBTQ Nation and reminisced about his friend, Lama, who was pressured by her family to marry once they discovered homosexual content on her phone. Upon her refusal, her brothers murdered her.
A powerful protest to wake up the world
On February 1st 2023, around a dozen people from Behesht Collective, an LGBTQ+ rights group in Afghanistan, assembled at a private residence to bring the world’s attention to the risk the community faces under the Taliban and to hold an online protest of the silence from the United States regarding the community’s plight.
Sadat is disappointed by the lack of effort made by the US to protect the LGBTQ+ community in Afghanistan. According to him, “the United States is most at fault for the predicament of LGBT in Afghanistan.” He emphasized that the community was left to suffer at the hands of the Taliban after the US withdrawal with no value given to their safety or amnesty.
“[The United States] had so much influence over the Afghan Government that they could have pressured the Afghan government to recognize the rights [of LGBTQ+ people]. And then, once they did a peace deal with the Taliban, they didn’t even consider amnesty for the LGBT people…they basically handed over the whole country to the Taliban. So, LGBT people had to go into hiding and have been [tortured] and suffering since then.”
Currently, Sadat spends his days figuring out which countries would welcome Afghanistan’s LGBTQ+ community. His GoFundMe has raised more than $38,000 to evacuate more than 800 people and rebuild their lives in a neighboring country.
“Most of the money has been spent to provide evacuation support, to get the documents that they need for leaving the country or humanitarian relief,” he explained.
After the protest in February, Saeed and Popal knew that staying behind in Afghanistan was no longer an option. Along with a few other members of the Behesht Collective, they managed to move to Iran on a three-month visa. But Saeed still does not feel safe.
“Iran is an Islamic country and dangerous for the LGBT community,” he says. “We are always staying at home; sometimes, our friends shop for food. Many of us have depression. We are crying because we don’t have any future [here].”
LGBTQ Nation spoke with Popal and Saeed over video call on April 17th. Popal switched on his video camera to show the two-bedroom apartment in Tehran that they share with seven other people, all members of the Behesht Collective. The space is crammed, with the main lounge and corridors used as sleeping spaces. Mattresses are strewn across the congested areas.
“We have too many problems [here] because it’s not normal,” Saeed says.
This group of seven people has survived the past few months in Tehran due to the funds provided by Behesht Collective. Although many have searched for employment in the new country, they are met with an unwelcoming attitude from employers who do not prefer to hire Afghans.
“I sent my CV to a restaurant in Tehran, and they called me for an interview. When I went to the restaurant, the director of the restaurant told me that you are Afghan and we cannot hire you in this position,” Popal said.
Even if they manage to get work, most of them are underpaid, subjected to poor working conditions and even sexually exploited.
Noor, a transgender person and member of the Behesht Collective, left Afghanistan in late 2022 to settle in Tehran and eventually began working at a carpentry workshop. Now, he works for 14 hours a day and earns four million tomans a month, amounting to roughly $75. At night, he sleeps at the workshop due to a lack of finances. “I have nowhere to go and I have to stay here. I don’t have a proper place to sleep. I don’t even have a proper blanket or mattress,” he told LGBTQ Nation.
The owner of the workshop used to beat him, but now, sexual exploitation has become a normal occurrence. “Since he found out that I am trans and I have nowhere to go and I have to sleep in the carpentry workshop at night, he has raped me more than 15 times,” Noor said. “I tried to commit suicide several times, but I haven’t succeeded.”
Sadat agrees that working in Iran for the community is equitable to being “an indentured servant there for the foreseeable future.”
“They will hire you to work in a cement factory or as a construction worker and really the most menial, the most difficult jobs. They will give you food and a place to stay but ask you to stay here like a hostage and pay you $100/month.”
A bleak future
“We don’t want to go back to Afghanistan,” Saeed says, determined to stay away. But the challenge is far from over yet. Visas for Iran expire after three months. Saeed and Popal remain clueless about their future.
Relocation for the LGBTQ+ community, especially to Afghanistan’s neighboring countries is a temporary relief, but it can never be a permanent solution.
“[In Iran], you have to keep renewing your visa,” Sadat explained. “If your visa time runs out, you are illegal and you can be deported back. There is also a refugee loophole as Pakistan, Iran, and even Turkey do not register Afghan Refugees. Sadat is currently considering Rwanda for the community’s relocation and long-term settlement.
“In Rwanda, they have a real UNHCR system where we can register people and they get a refugee card. There’s a pathway to expedite that into a refugee asylum case or they can even register at other organizations like the Red Cross.”
Sadat does not feel hopeful for the rights of LGBTQ+ Afghans while the Taliban are still in charge. “I think when the Taliban are in power, it is not going to get better, only going to deteriorate…in the last one and half years, the situation has dramatically worsened. There has been an escalation of violence.”
The community’s demand in Afghanistan is simple: to live a life of dignity, free from the oppression they are subjected to on a daily basis.
“We staged a powerful protest claiming the right to live; that’s it,” Sadat said. “We just want to live, have the chance to even breathe without being suffocated by the Taliban.”
Another Florida town has canceled an upcoming Pride event after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed several anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law this week.
On Wednesday, Tampa Pride announced that it had canceled its annual Pride on the River festival citing H.B. 1438, an anti-drag law signed by the governor earlier the same day, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
H.B. 1438 is one of five anti-LGBTQ+ bills signed into law by DeSantis this week in what Equality Florida senior political director Joe Saunders called the largest slate of anti-LGBTQ+ bills to be signed in a single legislative session in Florida’s history. The new law allows state boards to revoke the business licenses of any venues that allow minors to see “an adult live performance.” While the text of the bill does not mention drag, a handout from the governor’s Wednesday news conference stated that drag shows are considered adult live performances “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” NBC affiliate WFLA reports.
In past years, Tampa’s outdoor, family-friendly Pride on the River event featured fireworks, drag brunches, and drag performances along the downtown Tampa Riverwalk. For the September 2023 event, organizers aimed to create an adults-only area where drag performances could take place, as they had for their Pride parade in March but were unable to find a location that could be fenced off, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
“We just said, you know what, we are afraid if we did go through with this [DeSantis] would come in with his Gestapo… not Tampa Police, because we’re working with them, but maybe another group, and they’d all just pull the plug on it,” said Tampa Pride president Carrie West.
West noted that people travel to Tampa for the event, which has in the past featured appearances by RuPaul’s Drag Race alums like Alyssa Edwards, Ra’Jah O’Hara, and Jiggly Caliente. According to West, past festivals have attracted 15,000 to 20,000 visitors to the area. Tampa Pride will lose nearly $100,000 by canceling, and the city will no longer economically benefit from the festival or its sponsors, WFLA reports.
“It’s disappointing to hear Tampa Pride on the River is canceled,” said Tampa Mayor Jane Castor. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Tampa is and always will be an inclusive, diverse, and welcoming community.”
Organizers said that the Tampa Pride Parade is still scheduled to take place next spring, and they plan to bring back Pride on the River in 2024.
The festival isn’t the only Florida Pride event to be canceled this year. Last month, a Pride organization in St. Lucie, Florida, was forced to cancel its parade and restrict its festival to ages 21 and up in anticipation of DeSantis signing the anti-drag bill.
Meanwhile, Pride organizations across the country have had to re-think their events or cancel them altogether as Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states have introduced bills aimed at banning drag shows.
In Hanover Township in New Jersey, the Board of Education passed a policy Tuesday requiring school staff to notify parents of their children’s sexual orientation, classifying it along with substance and alcohol use, firearms, and “unlawful activity” as a threat to students’ well-being.
New Jersey’s attorney general is suing.
The kindergarten through eighth-grade district serves about 1,300 students in Whippany and Cedar Knolls in Morris County.
“Enacting a policy that has teachers policing their schools to out LGBTQ+ students is a disconcerting return to tactics used to criminalize sexual orientation and gender identity,” Jeanne LoCicero, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, told NJ.com. “It targets students based on their LGBTQ+ status and cannot stand.”
“We will always stand up for the LGBTQ+ community here in New Jersey and look forward to presenting our arguments in court in this matter,” AG Matthew J. Platkin said in a statement. He joined Sundeep Iyer, Director of the Division on Civil Rights, to file an emergency motion in Superior Court to enjoin the new policy.
“We are extremely proud of the contributions LGBTQ+ students make to our classrooms and our communities,” Platkin added, “and we remain committed to protecting them from discrimination in our schools.”
Platkin’s complaint argues the board’s policy violates the state’s Law Against Discrimination because it requires parental notification for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer students but not for their peers.
The attorney general’s office quotes from the new policy requiring all school staff to “immediately, fully and accurately inform a student’s parent(s) whenever such staff member is made aware of, directly or indirectly, any facts or circumstances that may have a material impact on the student’s physical and/or mental health, safety and/or social/emotional well-being,” including a student’s “sexuality,” “sexual orientation,” “transitioning,” and “gender identity or expression.”
In a statement, the Hanover Township board claimed the requirement doesn’t target students based on a protected status. Under the Law Against Discrimination, sexual orientation and gender identity or expression are protected statuses.
The attorney general’s complaint also argues that the policy would put students’ safety and mental health put at risk, and that it goes against guidance from the New Jersey Department of Education, which protects students’ confidentiality and privacy.
“The purpose of this policy is to involve the parents in the lives of their children,” the board’s attorney, Matthew Giacobbe, told the Daily Record. “They’re participating and not having people other than themselves make judgment calls on their child.”
The board’s statement added: “The Hanover Township Board of Education believes that parents need to be fully informed of all material issues that could impact their children so that they – as parents – can provide the proper care and support for their children.”
A Democratic organization has censured a Texas state Democrat who voted in favor of two anti-LGBTQ+ bills.
Texas State Rep. Shawn Thierry (D) recently voted in support of HB 900, a bill to ban LGBTQ+-themed books from schools. She was also one of four state Democrats to vote in favor of SB 14, a bill to ban trans youth from accessing gender-affirming healthcare.
The new rules could be selectively enforced against trans and nonbinary employees, some fear.
SB 14 would ban trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The bill would require trans teens who are currently undergoing treatment to de-transition, and it would punish doctors who provide such care by revoking their medical licenses.
Thierry was one of four Democratic representatives to vote in favor of SB 14. The other three were Reps. Harold Dutton, Tracy King, and Abel Herrero.
In a three-page statement explaining her vote, she claimed that no studies have shown the long-term effects of puberty blockers and HRT on young people, even though these reversible medications have been used on non-trans children to treat rare cancers for decades.
Her statement also highlighted the potential side effects of such medications and claimed that unnamed studies from “European countries” have shown that trans minors’ rates of suicide and depression aren’t improved by hormonal treatment.
Her position is in opposition to the findings of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric Association, who have all found that age-appropriate gender-affirming care is safe, evidence-based, and medically necessary to the well-being of trans youth.
“While many of my constituents encouraged me to vote in favor of this legislation, hostile activists have made nasty political threats to influence my vote against the bill. These personal even racist attacks on me as an African American woman are neither productive or persuasive,” Thierry wrote.
Responding to Thierry’s votes, the Meyerland Area Democrats Club of Houston, Texas, an organization that promotes Democratic candidates and policies, voted to censure her in a 13-7 vote on May 15.
“Rep. Thierry campaigned on being an ally to the LGBTQ+ community,” the club wrote in a statement about its censure. “Yet she has supported legislation which will harm this community and doesn’t ally with democratic principles.”
The club said that HB 900 would ban books under “a vague and constitutionally dubious rating system that will create layers of bureaucracy, cost, and red tape” and will disproportionately target LGBTQ+, indigenous, and non-white authors for censorship, marginalizing queer kids and educators in the process.
Mentioning SB 14, the club wrote, “Not only will her vote for this dangerous legislation hurt her constituents, but she has already harmed transgender Texans by spreading misinformation that is not backed by science.”
Progressive state groups like the Texas Freedom Network and the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have signaled that they’re prepared to file lawsuits if the two above bills become law. The two are among the 141 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in Texas during its 2023 legislative session.
Editor’s note: This article mentions suicide. If you need to talk to someone now, call the Trans Lifeline at 1-877-565-8860. It’s staffed by trans people, for trans people. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for LGBTQ youth at 1-866-488-7386. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
Two men have been arrested in connection with the cold-blooded murder of a Black gay teenager who was shot and left burning on freight train tracks in Brooklyn, New York in February.
Isiah Baez, 19, was taken into custody by the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Thursday (11 May) and charged with murder, criminal possession of a weapon and tampering with physical evidence in the murder of 19-year-old DeAndre Matthews.
Baez is the second person to be arrested for the killing of Matthews. His accomplice Remy McPrecia, 24, was arrested on 4 May and charged with concealing a corpse and evidence tampering.
Following news of the arrest, Matthews’ mother, Danielle Matthews, told News 12 the Bronx that Baez “deserves any and everything that he gets”.
“He deserves every day to rot in that jail,” she said.
DeAndre studied criminal justice at SUNY Broome Community College and he was paying his way through school by working at Buggy Service Center, where pushchairs are repaired and cleaned. His mother described him as a “beautiful soul”.
“He was just a beautiful soul. He was a great kid. Never had police contact. First in my family to go to college. He was amazing.”
Matthews was last seen on 6 February. On the day of his disappearance, he left work and went home to borrow his mother’s car to go out.
His mother’s Jeep Cherokee was found burned the next day, leading to the discovery of his body.
Police found him dead from a gunshot wound to the head, with “significant burn wounds throughout his body”, lying on train tracks close to Brooklyn College. Matthews also showed signs of smoke inhalation, police said.
The police are yet to establish a motive for the murder of Matthews, although they found evidence that Baez and DeAndre had been communicating for a year and pictures of the two of them were on Matthews’ phone.
His mother told Daily News that she believes her son was killed because Baez was “hiding his true identity”.
Matthews’ sister, Dajanae Gillespie, told NBC New York that his murder was likely due to his sexuality.
“He was gay. And I feel as if this could’ve been a hate crime. I want to know why [the killer] did it. What was the reason?
“DeAndre wasn’t a violent person. This wasn’t for retaliation. He wasn’t in the streets,” she said.
Anyone who has witnessed or experienced a hate crime is urged to call the police on 101, Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or visit theTrue Vision website. In an emergency, always dial 999.
