The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed an Orthodox Jewish university in New York to deny official recognition to an LGBTQ student group, the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a brief order granted an emergency request made by Yeshiva University, which claims that recognizing the group would be contrary to its sincere religious beliefs. Sotomayor has responsibility for emergency applications arising from New York.
The dispute is the latest clash between religious rights and LGBTQ rights to reach the high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Friday’s decision puts on hold a decision by a New York state judge, who ruled in June that the university was bound by the New York City Human Rights Law, which bars discrimination based on sexual orientation. The university argues that it is a religious institution and therefore should be exempted from the law. Requiring it to endorse the group would be a “clear violation” of its rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, the university argues. Sotomayor said the lower court ruling would remain on hold “pending further order” of the Supreme Court, suggesting the court could issue a more detailed order in the coming days.
“Yeshiva shouldn’t have been forced to go all the way to the Supreme Court to receive such a commonsense ruling in favor of its First Amendment rights. We are grateful that Justice Sotomayor stepped in to protect Yeshiva’s religious liberty in this case,” said Eric Baxter, a lawyer at the religious liberty legal advocacy group Becket, which is representing Yeshiva.
The Pride Alliance group, which first sought recognition in 2019, sued in April 2021, saying the university was required to grant its request because it is a place of public accommodation that is covered by the anti-discrimination law.
Katherine Rosenfeld, a lawyer for Pride Alliance, said Friday that the group “remains committed to creating a space space for LGBTQ students” on campus and would await final action from the Supreme Court.
Yeshiva, which describes itself in court papers as “a deeply religious Jewish university,” has said that officials concluded after consulting with Jewish religious scholars that an official LGBTQ club would be inconsistent with its religious values. The university was founded in 1897 for religious purposes and says it maintains that character even as it expanded its educational scope to include secular programs.
The New York City anti-discrimination law includes an exemption for religious organizations, but Manhattan-based Judge Lynn Kotler concluded that Yeshiva did not meet the relevant criteria.
Pride Alliance, joined by four individual plaintiffs, said in its response that the university’s request was premature and questioned whether there was an emergency that warranted Supreme Court intervention. All the university would be required to do if the judge’s order was allowed to go into effect is provide the group access to the same facilities that 87 other groups already receive, the group’s lawyers said.
Kotler’s ruling “does not touch the university’s well-established right to express to all students its sincerely held beliefs,” the lawyers said in court papers. They noted that a LGBTQ club has existed within the university’s law school for decades and that the university’s student bill of rights says that the New York human rights law applies to students.
Members of Pride Alliance have said that they are planning events backing LGBTQ rights for the coming weeks, including some timed around Jewish holidays.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority has strongly backed religious rights in recent cases, including several in its last term that ended in June. Among those rulings, the court ruled in favor of a high school football coach who led prayers on the field after games, sparking concerns from school officials that his actions could be viewed as government endorsement of religion as prohibited under the First Amendment.
The court, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, has also weighed several cases pitting LGBTQ rights against religious rights, ruling in 2021 in favor of a Catholic Church-affiliated agency that Philadelphia had barred from participating in its foster care services because the group refused to place children with same-sex couples. In 2018, the court ruled in favor of a conservative Christian baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Along similar lines, the justices are set to hear oral arguments this fall in a case involving a web designer from Colorado who wants the court to rule that, based on her evangelical Christian beliefs, she does not have to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. The court is currently on its summer recess, with the new term set to start in October.
Though public support for pro-LGBTQ policies is at an all-time high, many queer people living in the South report that a caregiver tried to change their LGBTQ identity, a new survey found.
More than half, or about 58%, of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in 13 Southern states reported that a parent or caregiver tried to change or repress their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to a survey published this week by the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South.
Some groups were more likely to report experiencing such efforts: More than two-thirds of transgender participants (68.7%) and participants of color (67.5%) reported experiencing these efforts, compared to 50.8% of cisgender participants and 57.4% of white participants. Younger LGBTQ Southerners, those ages 18-24, were also more likely to report that a caregiver tried to change or repress their identity (64.4%) compared to those 25 and older (51.1%).
The Campaign for Southern Equality partnered with Campus Pride, which advocates for LGBTQ inclusivity and safety at U.S. colleges and universities, to survey 4,146 LGBTQ Southerners in the fall of 2021. The new survey’s questions covered family, faith, education and health.
Austin H. Johnson, the director of the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Research & Policy Center and an assistant professor of sociology at Kenyon College, said in a statement that the dominant narrative emerging from the survey data “is that thousands of individuals throughout the South are not getting the social support they need and deserve at home, in schools, and in their communities.”
“This lack of support and inclusion is disempowering and may cause detrimental harm to their mental and physical wellbeing, especially when that lack of support gets compounded with clear, state-sponsored discrimination such as the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws,” he stated.
Among the other data, the survey found that more than two-thirds (68.82%) of respondents who identified as spiritual or religious reported that they were alienated or discouraged from participating in their faith community due to their LGBTQ identity.
More than one-third (33.9%) of all LGBTQ survey respondents reported experiencing efforts to repress or change their sexual orientation or gender identity in a religious setting, with participants ages 18-24 more likely to report such efforts (44.1%) compared to respondents 25 or older (30.7%).
The survey also asked LGBTQ Southerners about their physical and mental health. Most participants rated their physical health as fair (43.42%) or good (37.48%), though most also rated their mental health poor (28.7%) or fair (40.2%). More than half of LGBTQ Southerners surveyed (56%) reported experiencing suicidal ideation, and more than one in 10 (13.5%) reported attempting suicide at least once.
Shane L. Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, said in a statement that “it’s especially troubling that younger people are often perceiving and receiving less emotional, mental, and physical support and resources than older respondents.”
“Young LGBTQ+ people are being forced to conjure immense strength and resilience to combat marginalization and isolation — and it’s vital that we do everything we can, on every level of society, to support and affirm them for being who they are,” Windmeyer stated.
The survey recommends that educational institutions “take a proactive approach to inclusion” by having a clear mission statement against discrimination of LGBTQ students and by including queer students in school policies. It also recommends that schools create privacy policies that do not “out” LGBTQ students to their family or others without their knowledge and permission — a recommendation that contradicts guidance that some teachers say they have received due to new state laws.
“Considering both the findings of this report and the anti-LGBTQ sentiment among many school boards and decision makers across the South, it is clear that much of the harm experienced by younger LGBTQ individuals is in school,” the authors wrote in the report’s conclusion. “Regardless of the political and cultural attacks in the South, and the lack of protections from the institutions we rely on as Southerners, the LBGTQ community in the South is truly that — a community, one with an overwhelming amount of love, acceptance, joy, and beauty.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
A group of “angel” defenders protected LGBTQ+ Brigham Young University students from protesters who targeted a Pride event.
Utah’s Brigham Young University (BYU) students were confronted by protesters on Saturday (3 September) during a scheduled “Back to School Pride Night” that included an all-ages drag show.
The hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ protesters reportedly screamed homophobic slurs and some had even brought handguns, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
But things took a turn after a group of counter-protesters appeared in white cloaks and wings made of sheets.
They formed a protective barrier around the group of rainbow-wearing students.
BYU student and “angel” Sabrina Wong told the Tribune: “I’m doing this because I want our LGBTQ community to feel like they can be themselves and know we have their backs.”
The religious university, which is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon church, disallows LGBTQ+ students from meeting on campus in organised groups.
It forbids same-sex dating on campus (despite removing the official policy in 2020), potentially violating several civil rights clauses according to Associated Press.
The group of protesters included former and current BYU students ,who described gender dysphoria as a “social contagion“. Others screamed various slurs at the group, including saying they were “going against God”.
“This shouldn’t be at a public park,” co-founder of the informal BYU conservative group Thomas Stevenson said.
The “Back to School Pride Night” was organised by the RaYnbow Collective, a local group focused on creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ BYU students and staff.
It was a spin-off of the usual annual Pride event for new students of BYU, this time also featuring a family-friendly drag show that included BYU students as performers.
RaYnbow Collective’s founder Maddison Tenney was told by police to expect large anti-LGBTQ+ crowds ahead of the event.
“Religion has been weaponised against the queer community for a long time,” she said. “But that needs to end. I believe there’s nothing more divine than who I am as a queer child of God.”
Tenney initially thought of the angel costumes after seeing them being used by friends of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1999.
Shepard died six days after being beaten, tortured, and left hanging from a fence by two homophobic men, who were eventually sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole.
The tactic was used to block signs by members of the Westboro Baptist Church that read “God hates f*gs” from public view using the wings as a cover. It has become a common tactic by pro-LGBTQ+ religious groups, including at the funerals for the victims of the Orlando LGBTQ+ nightclub shooting in 2016.
Tim Michels, the Republican candidate running for Wisconsin governor, donated $250,000 in 2020 to groups opposing abortion and all forms of contraception, and to anti-LGBTQ churches. The donations, made along with Michels’s wife Barbara through their foundation, The Timothy and Barbara Michels Family Foundation, represent 15 percent of the candidate’s total donations in 2020, according to a report by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Along with donations totaling $175,000 to radical anti-abortion organizations in Wisconsin and New York, the Michels gave $10,000 to Miami’s Christ Fellowship, whose parishioners include former Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio. Christ Fellowship’s pastor, Omar Giritli, delivered an anti-transgender sermon in May, in which he attacked Caitlyn Jenner and preached that God believes transgender people are an “abomination” and a “rebellion to their creator.” A 2015 Huffington Post report detailed the church’s consistent anti-LGBTQ message.
Spring Creek Church in Pewaukee, Wisconsin also received a $50,000 donation from the couple. The church’s pastor, Chip Bernhard, has reportedly suggested that allowing transgender children to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity is “awful.”
“While the media is desperate to find lines of attack, their generosity helps support causes they believe in and funds cancer research and other Christian causes,” Michels’s campaign spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Michels, meanwhile, has tried to downplay social issues on the campaign trail. “The people who feel the Democratic party has left them for social issues, you are now going to have a governor that’s going to stand up for the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens of Wisconsin,” he said early last month after winning the Republican primary.
Michels is running to unseat incumbent Governor Tony Evers (D).
“Tim Michels will stop at nothing to push his radical agenda in order to limit the rights of LGBTQ Wisconsinites and those seeking an abortion,” Democratic Party spokesperson Hannah Menchhoff said. “If elected, Tim Michels will implement radical policies that are out of touch with the majority of Wisconsinites.”
Several elected LGBTQ officeholders and veteran Democratic operatives have joined forces to form Agenda PAC, a national organization that will work to preserve LGBTQ rights by campaigning against right-wing candidates.
Founder Ted Bordelon, a political communications strategist, will serve as executive director. Malcolm Kenyatta, Pennsylvania’s first openly gay state representative of color, will serve as chair.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion served as a motivator, the group’s leaders told NBC News. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to also overturn landmark decisions that legalized same-sex marriage and established rights for same-sex intimacy.
“When Clarence Thomas wrote his concurrence, he welded together the freedoms to love and to choose,” Kenyatta, who earlier this year lost to John Fetterman in Pennsylvania’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, said in an interview. “Both of those are at great risk.”
Unlike groups such as Victory Fund, which are mainly focused on electing LGBTQ candidates, Agenda PAC plans to aggressively advertise against politicians they see as hostile to LGBTQ rights. The first target: Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican nominee for governor.
“We are going after the beatable bigots,” Kenyatta said. “Sometimes those beatable bigots are running against incredible LGBTQ candidates. And sometimes they’re running against folks who are allies to our community.”
Mastriano, who faces Democrat Josh Shapiro in the general election, is known for his ultra-conservative views on social and cultural issues. After winning the GOP primary in May, Mastriano used a portion of his victory speech to rail against transgender people. On the first day of his administration as governor, he vowed, “You can only use the bathroom that your biology and anatomy says.”
Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, speaks at a rally Aug. 19 in Pittsburgh.Jeff Swensen / Getty Images
More recently, Mastriano took aim at outgoing Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s executive order discouraging conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth.
“This is disgusting to me, where bureaucrats and Tom Wolf and Josh Shapiro think it’s OK to come in and threaten parents and therapists because their kids might be confused,” Mastriano said last month in a radio interview on Pennsylvania’s News Talk 103.7.
Bordelon, who is based in Philadelphia, said the group’s initial budget is in the six figures with a fundraising goal that would expand efforts into the millions. After Mastriano, Agenda PAC plans to target several U.S. House races.
“This is a national effort, but we wanted to start in our backyard and then branch out,” Bordelon said. “Nationally, Mastriano is one of, if not the worst, statewide candidate when it comes to LGBTQ-plus issues.”
Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster, and Joe Trippi, a longtime Democratic consultant who most recently has worked with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, will serve as senior advisers.
Other board members include state Sens. Shevrin Jones of Florida and Megan Hunt of Nebraska, and state Rep. Joshua Boschee of North Dakota. All are Democrats, as well as the first openly LGBTQ candidates elected to their state legislatures.
Anti-LGBTQ users on 4chan targeted the Trevor Projects suicide prevention services on Tuesday in an effort to prevent LGBTQ youth from getting help.
In a post on the notorious platform’s “Politically Incorrect” imageboard, an anonymous user posted a plan to bog down the nonprofit organization’s crisis hotline and online chatswith fake requests for help. The goal was to “f**k up the queue so sodomites and f*gs commit suicide,” to “demoralize the therapists,” and “waste as much of their resources as possible.”
According to The Daily Dot, the original thread appears to have been deleted, but it’s unclear whether it was removed by 4chan or the original poster. A second thread has been archived and was still visible on the site as of Tuesday evening.
Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at progressive media watchdog org Media Matters for America, posted screenshots of the original post and responses from trolls sharing screenshots of their chats with Trevor Project councilors.
One 4chan user posted a screenshot from the Trevor Project’s online crisis chat saying that “wait times to reach a counselor are higher than usual.”
“The act of attacking a crisis services line intended to prevent suicide among young people is egregious,” the Trevor Project said in a statement. “Our crisis counselors work around the clock to be there for LGBTQ youth who feel like they have nowhere to turn, and it’s harrowing that anybody would attempt to compromise our lifeline or encourage suicide.”
“LGBTQ youth are at significantly increased risk for suicide—not because of anything inherent about their identities, but because of the stigma, bullying, violence, and discrimination that they face,” the Trevor Project said. “The incident of users on 4chan who maliciously planned to overtake our crisis lines today is exactly the kind of mistreatment and abuse that contributes to heightened suicide risk. Alarmingly, our research has found that every 45 seconds, an LGBTQ young person attempts suicide. Every second counts when you work in suicide prevention, and we strongly condemn this intent to obstruct our lines and create even more barriers for LGBTQ people who rely on our help. We are working diligently in the face of this disruption to protect our counselors and those youth who need us.”
The Trevor Project became a target of far-right trolls earlier this year when Chaya Raichik, who runs the influential anti-LGBTQ Twitter account “Libs of TikTok,” called the non-profit “a grooming organization” in a tweet that was later deleted. Other anti-LGBTQ organizations and pundits like Moms for Liberty and Lauren Chen followed suit, equating the Trevor Project’s outreach to LGBTQ teens in crisis with giving abusers access to children.
In March of 1947, a Florida court ordered the Ha Ha Club — a nightclub famous for its “female impersonators,” as they were called at the time — to close after declaring it a public nuisance.
The order came just a month after Frank Tuppen, a juvenile probation officer with political ambitions, filed a complaint against the venue. He argued that the club’s performers were “sexual perverts” who had embedded “in the minds of the youngsters” who lived in the area “things immoral” and were “breaking down their character.”
The owner of the club, Charles “Babe” Baker, appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, but in October 1947, it affirmed the lower court’s decision that the club was a public nuisance. “Men impersonating women” in performances that are “nasty, suggestive and indecent” injure the “manners and morals of the people,” the court ruled.
Andrea Kinig at the Ha Ha Club in New York City. Herb Breuer / NY Daily News via Getty Images
Last month, nearly 75 later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is widely thought to be eyeing a 2024 presidential run, cited the case that shut down Ha Ha Club in a complaint against Miami restaurant R House over its drag performances.
The 2022 complaint, filed by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, threatened to revoke R House’s liquor license, arguing that the establishment violated a state public nuisance law by becoming “manifestly injurious to the morals or manners of the people.”
Historians say the parallels between the R House and the Ha Ha Club complaints, and the fact that DeSantis’ administration cited a 75-year-old court decision, reveal how conservatives are resurfacing a decades-old moral panic about LGBTQ people to target queer spaces.
‘Seeding America with queer consciousness’
Baker first opened the Ha Ha Club in April 1933 in New York City’s Midtown Manhattan neighborhood, where it became “Broadway’s favorite hangout spot,” said Michail Takach, who researched the Ha Ha Club for a book he co-authored, “A History of Milwaukee Drag: Seven Generations of Glamour.”
Later that year, Baker traveled south and opened the club in Hallandale, Florida, about 13 miles north of R House, which is in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. He opened the club toward the end of the so-called Pansy Craze, which was a time period when drag surged in popularity, particularly in cities, Takach said.
Same-sex sexual relations were illegal at the time in most states, and cross-dressing was criminalized in many cities, though Miami never officially had an anti-cross-dressing law on the books. As a result, Takach said clubs like the Ha Ha Club catered primarily to seemingly straight, cisgender audiences, because drag drew attention and could be a liability to club owners.
Dozens of men dressed as women were locked up on charges of masquerading and indecent exposure at the National Variety Artists’ Exotic Carnival and Ball held at the Manhattan Center in 1962. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
However, Takach wrote in his book that female impersonator clubs offered gay and gender-nonconforming men that performed at these venues “a safe sanctuary where they could not only embrace their identities but make a name for themselves.”
In Baker’s court testimony, he described how he stood at the club’s door every night and greeted all of the guests. The club held three shows from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., with more than 40 performers who sang, danced and told jokes, according to court documents.
Baker featured some of the most famous female impersonators, including Jackie Maye, whose wardrobe was estimated at the time to have been worth $50,000, Takach said, which would be worth over $1 million in today’s dollars.
His production was also a traveling show, called the Ha Ha Revue, which was inspired by the Jewel Box Revue, a famous touring company of female impersonators — and the first racially integrated drag revue in the country — that operated from 1937 to about 1960, according to Takach’s drag history book.
The traveling version of the Ha Ha Club’s show and the Jewel Box Revue “really did a solid job of seeding America with queer consciousness,” Takach said. “And you have to wonder how much of that played into the gay liberation era — how many children that went to these shows, how many adults that watched these shows, were later part of the gay liberation scene.”
The shows brought queer representation to many cities across the U.S. at a time when gay people were being criminalized and also at a time when drag had fallen “violently out of favor,” Takach said.
“They brought it back in a big way and created a mid-century drag craze in the 1950s that, in some ways, is a parallel and a rival to the RuPaul drag craze of this decade,” he said.
‘A home of perverts, queers, phonies’
On Feb. 2, 1947, after operating his club in Hallandale for 14 years, Baker tried to stop a fight between two customers at the club and called the police. Both he and a customer were arrested for assault and battery, though Baker was never charged, according to court documents.
Just three days later, on Feb. 5, Tuppen — who was running for sheriff of Broward County in an upcoming election — filed his complaint against the club. He claimed multiple men he had arrested for having same-sex sexual relations said they frequented the Ha Ha Club.
James Lathero, the lawyer for the state, asked Tuppen what the general reputation of the Ha Ha Club is, and Tuppen said, “General knowledge, it is nothing but a home of perverts, queers, phonies.” Tuppen’s complaint also alleged that the venue had contributed to “juvenile delinquency” in the county that was “injurious to the manners and morals of the people” residing there.
Baker’s lawyers called more than half a dozen locals who testified that they enjoyed the club’s shows. Baker also testified that his cast had performed for a church and the Kiwanis Club and that it had raised money for the March of Dimes, a nonprofit organization that supports mothers and babies. He also denied that his club was associated with homosexuals and said there was no evidence of “crimes of perversion” at the club.
But the Broward County Circuit Court ultimately declared the Ha Ha Club a public nuisance and ordered it to close in the spring of 1947.
Baker appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, and one of his lawyer’s, Robert Lane, wrote in the appeal that there were no complaints against Baker’s club during its 14 years in business “until an aspirant for a political office decided to complain,” referring to Tuppen and his run for sheriff.
Lane also argued that “there are different views as to what may injure the manners and morals of the public.”
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Despite Baker’s efforts, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s decision in October 1947.
“The lawful evidence presents a dirty picture; the Ha Ha Club looks as if it were a cross between a ‘honky tonk’ and a ‘speak easy,’” wrote Justice William Terrell, who later went on to defend segregation after the Supreme Court struck it down in Brown v. Board of Education. He added that the lower court determined that the Ha Ha Club’s “major connotations were evil, that it was exerting a corrupting influence and that the time had arrived to abate it.”
The case against the Ha Ha Club happened at a time when public support for drag had waned, because law enforcement and media nationwide claimed that gay people were a danger to women and children, Takach said.
“There was a very strong reaction to the liberation that people had felt, and the visibility that gay and lesbian people and gender-nonconforming people had earned during the Pansy Craze,” he said. “It led to many cities creating drag bans, shutting down drag clubs, banning female impersonation completely — silencing the queer nightlife and the queer representation that had really flourished during the Pansy Craze in the early parts of the 1930s.”
‘A cultural panic moment’
Last month, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation alleged in its complaint against R House that a “nearly nude dancer was filmed parading a young girl through the audience” on or about July 3 and that the video ignited public outrage.
Inquired about it during a news conference, DeSantis said the video prompted the department to investigate further, “and what they found was not only were there minors there — and these are sexually explicit drag shows — the bar had a children’s menu. And you think to yourself: ‘Give me a break, what’s going on?’”
People wait in line for a Drag Brunch at R House Wynwood on April 9, 2022 in Miami, Fla. Daniel A. Varela / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The complaint threatened to revoke R House’s liquor license and cited the Ha Ha Club case, noting that the Florida Supreme Court recognized that “men impersonating women” in the context of “suggestive and indecent” performances can constitute a public nuisance.
R House’s ownership said in an emailed statement last month that it is aware of the complaint and that it is working with the department through its attorney to “rectify the situation.”
“We are an inclusive establishment and welcome all people to visit our restaurant,” the email said. “We are hopeful that Governor DeSantis, a vociferous supporter and champion of Florida’s hospitality industry and small businesses, will see this as what it is, a misunderstanding, and that the matter will be resolved positively and promptly.” Ownership has not returned an additional request for comment.
There are multiple parallels between the Ha Ha Club case and DeSantis’ complaint against R House, historians said, revealing a cultural cycle.
Just as there was a public backlash to increasing queer visibility after the Pansy Craze, historians said conservatives are now pushing back against LGBTQ people winning major rights such as same-sex marriage.
But unlike in decades past, those who oppose LGBTQ equality cannot “attack gay people per se, so the people they attack are actually trans people or trans youth or drag queens, and then only in connection with children,” said Michael Bronski, a professor of women and gender studies at Harvard University and author of “A Queer History of the United States for Young People.”
Bronski called the backlash against drag today part of a “cultural panic moment,” and Takach said it’s happened throughout history in the U.S.
“People get drawn in by the glamor, and it’s a novelty,” he said of drag, “and then something happens, and the entire community turns on it.”
Maxx Fenning, the president and founder of Prism, a nonprofit that works to expand access to LGBTQ-inclusive education in South Florida, said the complaint against R House, like the one filed against the Ha Ha Club 75 years ago, shows how laws related to “public morals” can be used to disproportionately censor LGBTQ people and topics.
“This Florida Supreme Court case noted that men impersonating women is not in and of itself a verifiable offense, but it’s doing it in an indecent fashion,” he said. “You see very often this use of vague and subjective language to be able to create laws and rulings that seem common sense, but have just enough vagueness to be applied in ways that unnecessarily silence the queer community.”
As for the Ha Ha Club, Babe Baker didn’t shut down his performance after the club was forced to close. In fact, he moved it to about a mile away, to a club called Leon & Eddie’s, a nightclub first opened in New York City by Leon Enker and Eddie Davis and later moved to Miami.
He also started advertising in a “curious” fashion, Takach said. He placed ads in the Miami Herald that prominently featured the word “gay” in phrases like “gay laughs,” “gay surprises,” “gay faces,” “gay music” and “gay dancing.” Even though gay wasn’t widely used at the time to refer to queer people, Takach said Baker chose the word intentionally.
Prior to opening the Ha Ha Club in New York, Baker worked at the Howdy Club, which Takach described as “an unapologetic lesbian bar” and one of the first places in Manhattan to hire lesbians as entertainers and allow women to gather and drink without male company. Takach said it was raided by police regularly, and that the word “howdy” became synonymous code for queer.
The word “gay” similarly became a code in Baker’s newspaper ads, and the Miami Daily News caught on in 1952, Takach said. The paper criticized the Miami Herald, its competitor, for running ads for clubs like Baker’s on one page and then condemning the clubs in the Herald’s editorials. “The words ‘gay,’ ‘ha ha’ and ‘howdy’ have become beacons pointing to the hands of the perverts,” the Miami Daily News wrote, according to Takach.
Baker’s cast performed four times a night at Leon & Eddie’s, and they also went on tour across the country, selling out weeks of shows in cities including Milwaukee; Detroit; Dayton, Ohio; Minneapolis; and Spokane, Washington, Takach said.
“You could say that Broward County won the battle, but Babe Baker won the war.”
Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) order to investigate the parents of transgender youth for child abuse caused behind-the-scenes tumult at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services caused by, according to internal emails.
In February, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton (R) issued a non-binding opinion stating that gender affirming health care for transgender youth is a form of child abuse. A week later, the governor directed DFPS to investigate parents who support their transgender children and allow them access to gender affirming medical care prescribed by their doctors in a letter sent to the agency.
“I will resign,” one staffer wrote in February in response to DFPS associate commissioner for statewide intake Stephen Black’s emailed guidance on Abbott’s directive. The same employee wrote in a separate email to a colleague, “I have told my boss I will resign before I (report) on a family whose child is transitioning.”
Another employee wrote in an email to her supervisor that the directive was “Effing bull poop.”
Last week, the Houston Chronicle published a report in which several former DFPS employees said they had left the agency because of Abbott’s order regarding the families of transgender children. In April, The Texas Tribunereported that more than a dozen child abuse investigators said they had either resigned or were actively looking for new jobs for the same reason.
According to WFAA, 11 DFPS investigations have been opened related to Abbott’s directive, eight of which have been closed.
“None of the investigations have resulted in a removal of a child,” said DFPS media relations director Marissa Gonzales.
In June, a Texas judge issued a temporary injunction halting the investigations into the three remaining families.
Six out, Democratic LGBTQ candidates running for the Florida state legislature all won their primaries this Tuesday. All of them oppose the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
At least 20 states have introduced “Don’t Say Gay” laws this year. The candidates worry that, if left unopposed, Republicans will spread similar laws to harm queer youth and families nationwide with their newfound brand of queerphobia.
Adam Gentle and state Reps. Carlos Guillermo Smith and Michele Rayner are all running for the State House. Eunic Ortiz and Janelle Perez are running for the State Senate. State Sen. Shevrin Jones won his re-election campaign this week. Because he has no Republican competitor, he will retain his Senate seat.
Jones became the first openly LGBTQ Black person elected to the Florida legislature when he was elected in 2020.
On the campaign trail, he shared how publicly coming out as gay at age 30 caused members to leave the south Florida church where his father preaches. Friends stopped talking to Jones, families began making jokes about him behind his back, and even his own father expressed disappointment in his sexuality, he said.
So when he spoke out against the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law — which forbids discussing LGBTQ issues in kindergarten through third-grade classes — Jones noted that it takes courage for young people to be themselves. He also said that LGBTQ issues aren’t being taught in the aforementioned grades, and that state Republicans only passed the law to rally their voting base.
“It’s discriminatory on the surface,” Jones said in an interview. “The problem is coming when young people are being treated in a manner that they now have to question who they are, knowing that they already come from households who do not support them… I think that’s the dangerous part, because LGBTQ+ youth are four times more likely to commit suicide.”
“I think that this is the time for the LGBTQ+ community to see we’re under attack,” he added. “I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it’s Black people, I don’t care if it’s Indigenous people, I don’t care if it’s the LGBTQ+ community, because we live amongst each other and I feel that when you come for one, you come for all.”
When Michele Rayner first won her election to the state House in 2020, she became the first openly Black queer woman ever elected in Florida at any level.
“I didn’t run for office just to make history,” she said in a video. “I ran because I wanted to make a difference for people.”
“The way that I show up — I’m a Black, gay woman so I think that inspires a lot of folks,” she added in a May 2022 interview.
While she acknowledges that supporters of “Don’t Say Gay” claim it protects children from age-inappropriate discussions of sex, she said, “I don’t want my child not to be able to say that my moms and I went to Disney World or my moms and I went to the beach.”
Meanwhile, Eunic Ortiz, who is running for a state Senate seat, said the ramifications of “Don’t Say Gay” are detrimental to LGBTQ youth.
“We need to be creating solutions for the issues that everyday folks are actually facing,” she said. “Not playing political theater to try to appease a few wealthy donors in the Republican movement that, frankly, are homophobic and hate the LGBTQ community.”
Her district houses St. Petersburg, a city that has received a perfect score for eight years on Human Rights Campaign’s annual Municipal Equality Index for LGBTQ inclusive.
“We have people in the LGBTQ community living in every single county in the state. They are our neighbors and they are our community leaders…. LGBTQ people are the workers that are making our counties and communities run,” she said. “[Floridians] are tired of seeing them take on this cultural war, instead of addressing real issues,” like the environment or rising rents.
Adam Gentle spoke against the law at a political event in early March. At the event, he began his two-minute speech by announcing, “I’m gay.” He then said that schools are often the only safe spaces where LGBTQ youths feel they can safely discuss their queer identities with others.
“Their ability to talk with trusted teachers and administrators is being ripped away from them,” he said.
Rep. Carlos Smith has used his political office to oppose the law. When he debated against the bill in February, he wore a face mask with the word “gay” printed on it in large letters.
In his remarks, he said the bill was “deeply personal” to him as a queer Latino, especially since the law would prevent teachers from discussing important events, like the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting which mostly harmed other queer Latinos.
“A majority of Floridians oppose this proposal that seeks to censor conversations about LGBTQ people in our schools,” he said.
“This bill goes way beyond the text on the page,” he noted. “It sends a terrible message to our youth, that there is something so wrong, so inappropriate, so dangerous about this topic that we have to censor it from classroom discussion…. To all LGBTQ youth — we see you, you’re loved and your lives are worth fighting for!”
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) press secretary Christina Pushaw defended the law by calling its opponents pedophilic “groomers,” Smith responded, “Bigoted attacks like this against LGBTQ people are the worst of the worst…. Literally, it’s the oldest trick in the book against LGBTQ people.”
Smith said that DeSantis only signed the law to advance his political ambitions. He worries about DeSantis’ likelihood of running for president in 2024. “My concern is that he is much smarter and much more calculating than Donald Trump ever was,” he said.
Janelle Perez agrees with Smith. She’s a mother of two, married to a woman, and, if elected, she would be the first LGBTQ parent and the first queer Latina or queer woman ever elected to the Senate.
She worries that the law will subject her own daughter to bullying and prevent her from discussing her own family in school. But even worse, she worries what will happen to when DeSantis runs for president.
“When people in Hollywood, and New York, and in California are looking at the things that Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida, what they need to understand is that Florida is Ron DeSantis’s guinea pig,” she said.
“He is going to run for president in 2024,” she continued. “So if you don’t like what’s happening in Florida, and you don’t want this rhetoric to become the national conversation in 2024, then you need to help us stop it, now. Because it’s going to come after you, and the rest of the country.”
Although DeSantis and other supporters of the law say that it protects parents’ rights to control what their kids are exposed to in schools, Perez said it basically erases queer parents from schools and tells their children to feel ashamed of their families.
“LGBTQ families aren’t going anywhere,” Perez told The Washington Post. “We want to just receive the same rights as every other parent.”
“Republicans in Tallahassee have failed our state and I cannot sit idly by as they make us less safe, restrict our rights and hurt our children,” she added.
Administrators at a Nebraska school shuttered the school’s award-winning student newspaper just days after its last edition that included articles and editorials on LGBTQ issues, leading press freedom advocates to call the move an act of censorship.
The staff of Northwest Public Schools’ 54-year-old Saga newspaper was informed on May 19 of the paper’s elimination, the Grand Island Independent reported. Three days earlier, the newspaper had printed its June edition, which included an article titled, “Pride and prejudice: LGBTQIA+” on the origins of Pride Month and the history of homophobia. It also included an editorial opposing a Florida law that bans some lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity and dubbed by critics as “Don’t Say Gay.”
Officials overseeing the district, which is based in Grand Island, have not said when or why the decision was made to eliminate the student paper. But an email from a school employee to the Independent cancelling the student paper’s printing services on May 22 said it was “because the school board and superintendent are unhappy with the last issue’s editorial content.”
The paper’s demise also came a month after its staff was reprimanded for publishing students’ preferred pronouns and names. District officials told students they could only use names assigned at birth going forward.
Emma Smith, Saga’s assistant editor in 2022, said the student paper was informed that the ban on preferred names was made by the school board. That decision directly affected Saga staff writer Marcus Pennell, a transgender student, who saw his byline changed against his wishes to his birth name of “Meghan” Pennell in the June issue.
Northwest High School’s newspaper, “Viking Saga,” was shut down after 54 years of publication.McKenna Lamoree / The Independent via AP
“It was the first time that the school had officially been, like, ‘We don’t really want you here,’” Pennell said. “You know, that was a big deal for me.”
Northwest Principal P.J. Smith referred the Independent’s questions to district superintendent Jeff Edwards, who declined to answer the questions of when and why the student paper was eliminated, saying only that it was “an administrative decision.”
Some school board members have made no secret of their objection to the Saga’s LGBTQ content, including board president Dan Leiser, who said “most people were upset” with it.
Board vice president Zach Mader directly cited the pro-LGBTQ editorials, adding that if district taxpayer had read the last issue of the Saga, “they would have been like, ‘Holy cow. What is going on at our school?’”
“It sounds like a ham-fisted attempt to censor students and discriminate based on disagreement with perspectives and articles that were featured in the student newspaper,” said Sara Rips, an attorney for the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Nebraska Press Association attorney Max Kautsch, who specializes in media law in Nebraska and Kansas, noted that press freedom is protected in the U.S. Constitution.
“The decision by the administration to eliminate the student newspaper violates students’ right to free speech, unless the school can show a legitimate educational reason for removing the option to participate in a class … that publishes award-winning material,” Kautsch said. “It is hard to imagine what that legitimate reason could be.”
