A man has detailed the alleged sexual abuse he suffered 50 years ago at the hands of a now-deceased university doctor who treated “all the gay men”.
Robert E Anderson was formerly a director of the health service at the University of Michigan, and worked at the university from 1968 until 2003. He passed away in 2008.
According to The Detroit News, University of Michigan officials announced on Wednesday, February 19, that since July 2018 they had been investigating multiple reports of “sexual misconduct and unnecessary medical exams” by Anderson’s former patients.
Most of the alleged incidents took place in the 1970s, but at least one former patient said they were abused in the 1990s.
University of Michigan president Mark Schlissel said in a statement: “The allegations that were reported are disturbing and very serious. We promptly began a police investigation and cooperated fully with the prosecutor’s office.”
One of Anderson’s alleged victims, Robert Julian Stone, has spoken out about his experience of being one of the doctor’s patients in 1970.
According to All About Ann Arbor, when Stone was a 20-year-old student at the university he was fearful of visiting his family doctor because he was gay.
He said: “I called a friend of mine, a gay friend in Ann Arbor. I said: ‘Look, I don’t know. Who do I go to? Who do I see?’
“He said go to Dr Anderson. Dr Anderson treats all the gay men in Ann Arbor.”
Stone said that during the appointment Anderson began undressing and placed the student’s hand on his genitals.
He continued: “After this happened, I was horrified. I was absolutely enraged and disgusted. It makes me want to cry.
“Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s. I felt completely disempowered to report this.”
Stone, who now lives in Palm Springs with his husband, wrote an essay in the summer of 2019 about the alleged sexual abuse and sent it to the university, which triggered the investigation.
According to The Detroit News, Stone said: “When I first wrote to the university, I thought: ‘Well, Dr Anderson was a closeted gay man’, and I had some compassion for a man at that time in that position.
“Now I realise he wasn’t a closeted gay man. He was a sexual predator, and that’s … a criminal thing.”
But Washtenaw County prosecutor Steven Hiller has said that no charges can be filed because so much time had passed, and Anderson was deceased.
The University of Michigan has, however, set up a hotline for other people to come forward. According to All About Ann Arbor, there have been 22 reports to the hotline since Wednesday.
Gov. Andy Beshear spoke against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and supported a ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ youth during a historic appearance at a gay-rights rally Wednesday at Kentucky’s Capitol.
Beshear became Kentucky’s first sitting governor to attend a rally staged by the Fairness Campaign in the Capitol Rotunda, a few steps from the governor’s office. The rallies by gay-rights supporters date back to the 1990s, activists said.
The Democratic governor received loud cheers from the crowd. “Diversity and inclusion, they aren’t buzz words,” Beshear said. “They are values. And they are keys to making Kentucky stronger. Kentucky cannot reach its full potential if all of our people don’t feel supported to be themselves.”
An LGBT+ Pride group is urging a boycott of the historic Staten Island St Patrick’s Day Parade after it was banned from marching for the 10th year running.
The Staten Island St Patrick’s Day Parade has been running for over 50 years and draws more than 50,000 spectators. Around 150 organisations typically march in the parade, ranging from the New York fire and police departments to local businesses, private men’s clubs and high school football teams.
But the Pride Center of Staten Island has not been allowed to participate in the march since 2011, having reportedly been told that their group “promotes the homosexual lifestyle” and “goes against the tenets of the Catholic Church.”
Last year several politicians responded by boycotting the event; this year the Pride Center is urging local businesses to do the same.
“Any organisation who has applied, rethink marching that day. Any organisation who is thinking of applying, again, please rethink that decision,” the Pride Center’s executive director Carol Bullock told Spectrum News.
The annual march is organised by The Parade Committee of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who actively blocked the Pride Center’s attempts to apply for a marching permit by moving the sign-ups to an alternative location.
“Do [sic] to the threat of a protest by the gay pride people/politicians/and minsters of other faiths on the holy grounds of Blessed Sacrament Church the parade must move the parade sign ups to 300 Manor Rd,” a sign on the door read.
Yet again the AOH Parade Committee denied the Pride Center of Staten Island’s request to march in the SI St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and this year they also declined @GOALny#StatenIrelandPride
Bullock says that when she went to the alternate location, she was told by parade president Larry Cummings that it is a “non sexual-identification parade,” and that not allowing the group to march under its banner is “not discrimination.”
“We just really didn’t get anywhere. He doesn’t believe that it’s discrimination; we clearly feel that it’s blatant discrimination,” she said.
Pride Center is encouraging supporters to frequent the stores and restaurants along the parade route, but not actually march in it.
LGBT+ people are permitted to march in St Patrick’s Day parades in Ireland and also in New York. In 2018, Ireland’s openly gay Taoiseach Leo Varadkar marched in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade with his partner Matt.
It was hailed as a landmark moment for an event that had just three years earlier prohibited the participation of the LGBT+ community.
The Staten Island parade is refusing to follow suit despite mounting calls for change from elected officials who represent the borough, including US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Congressmember Max Rose, State Senator Diane Savino, and City Councilmember Deborah Rose.
Staten Island GOP Councilmember Steven Matteo said in a statement to Gay City News: “I strongly support the SI Pride Center and other LGBT organisations openly participating in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. It’s way past time for this to become a reality.”
The march is due to go ahead on March 1. PinkNews has reached out to the parade organisers for comment.
Lawyers for Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning on Wednesday filed a motion for her release, saying her continued incarceration for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury is unlawful.
The motion, filed in the Alexandria, Virginia-based federal district court for the eastern district of Virginia, says that Manning’s “incarceration is not serving its only permissible purpose”—to coerce her testimony. Rather, the motion argues, the detention is clearly punitive.
Manning has been held in contempt of court and locked away at the Alexandria Detention Center nearly continuously since March 2019. She may be held as long as 18 months unless she agrees to testify to a grand jury about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who remains at a London prison as the U.S. government seeks his extradition.Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
The detention is also economically costly. Manning is being fined $1000 per day, which her supporters have panned as an “outrageous” escalation of the U.S. government’s ongoing harassment of her.
Manning’s attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen explained how the continued detention is out of legal bounds.
“A witness who refuses to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena may be held in contempt of court, and fined or incarcerated,” she said in a statement. “The only permissible purpose for sanctions under the civil contempt statute is to coerce a witness to comply with the subpoena. If compliance is impossible, either because the grand jury is no longer in existence, or because the witness is incoercible, then confinement has been transformed from a coercive into a punitive sanction, and thus is in violation of the law.”
“Over the last decade Chelsea Manning has shown unwavering resolve in the face of censure, punishment, and even threats of violence,” says the new motion. In “light of her history, it should surprise nobody to find that she has the courage of her convictions.”
“She reiterated her refusal to cooperate with the grand jury process before this court, and has now reiterated that refusal every day for more than 11 months,” the motion adds. “There is no reason to believe she will at this late date experience a change of heart; there is a profusion of evidence that she will not.”
The attorneys included as evidence United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer’s November 2019 letter to the U.S. government expressing his concern about Manning’s incarceration, “particularly given the history of her previous conviction and ill-treatment in detention.”
Melzer said that Manning’s current detention may amount to “an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Manning’s lawyers also included in their motion a report from a clinical expert on Manning’s personality that described her “willingness to endure social disapproval as well as formal punishments” to pursue her values.
“No realistic possibility remains that continued confinement or other sanctions will bring about Ms. Manning’s testimony,” says the motion. “Further confinement cannot attain its stated coercive purpose, and therefore will be not simply futile, but impermissibly punitive.
Manning confirmed her stance against her incarceration in a statement Wednesday.
“No matter how much you punish me, I will remain confident in my decision,” she said. “I have been separated from my loved ones, deprived of sunlight, and could not even attend my mother’s funeral. It is easier to endure these hardships now than to cooperate to win back some comfort, and live the rest of my life knowing that I acted out of self interest and not principle.”
A newly uncovered video shows Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg in 2019 describing transgender people as “he, she, or it” and “some guy in a dress” who enters girls locker rooms — invoking a conservative cliché as he argued that transgender rights are toxic for presidential candidates trying to reach Middle America.
And yet, Bloomberg’s campaign published a new video on Tuesday that pledged the former New York City mayor believed in “inclusivity” for “LGBTQ+ youth,” featuring fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi declaring, “Mike is so incredibly sensitive to this issue.”
Bloomberg’s sensitivity was far less apparent at a forum hosted by the Bermuda Business Development Agency on March 21, 2019, in Manhattan, where Bloomberg derided Democratic candidates for talking about transgender protections.
Read the full article for the Bloomberg campaign’s response. He did sign a trans protections bill as NYC mayor in 2002.
“This is really just bringing Virginia into the 21st century,” Ebbin told The Washington Post shortly after the bills’ passage. “Voters showed us they wanted equality on Nov. 5, and the Senate of Virginia has started to deliver on that.”
Supporters gather for a group photo ahead of the floor votes on the Virginia Values Act. The event was held in the Jefferson Room of the State Capitol in Richmond, Va., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2020.Bob Brown / AP
Despite the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges making same-sex marriage the law of the land, most states still have outdated laws on their books like the ones Virginia just repealed.
Indiana is one of those states, though an attempt to remove its gay marriage ban was unsuccessful last month in the Republican-controlled state Legislature. In fact, GOP opposition to its removal derailed legislation seeking to raise the legal age to marry in the state from 15 to 18. An amendment had been added to the age-limit bill that sought to scrap the state’s 1997 law declaring: “Only a female may marry a male. Only a male may marry a female.”
“I did not think it was unreasonable to remove what is now null-and-void unconstitutional language from the code,” state Rep. Matt Pierce, a Democrat, said in defense of the amendment. “I didn’t think it would be that controversial, because this issue has been settled now. Apparently to the Republican caucus it is controversial.”
“The religious right has not said, ‘We lost same-sex marriage, and we are moving on.’ They are still fighting same-sex marriage, both politically and legally.”
PROFESSOR JASON PIERCESON
In Florida, Democratic legislators have been trying for years to repeal thestate’s ban — which says “marriage” means “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” — with no luck.
“This is not just, you know, unconstitutional and not just obsolete, but this is cruel language in our statute. So, it needs to get out of there,” Rep. Adam Hattersley told WUSF Public Media, adding that members of the state’s Republican leadership “don’t have an appetite to fix something” that they “hope would come back into play in the future.”
Five years after the Supreme Court had its say on the issue, same-sex marriage remains a politically contentious issue, and LGBTQ advocates continue to battle in courtrooms and statehouses to ensure gay couples can exercise their right to marry.
History of state-level gay marriage bans
States have two types of bans on same-sex marriage: statutory and constitutional. Statutory bans appear in state family law, while constitutional bans are embedded in states’ constitutions.
“Most of them are still on the books, though they are not enforceable,” Jason Pierceson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield, told NBC News.
“Democratic control of legislatures has created opportunities to get rid of some bans,” Pierceson said. “That’s the big difference between Indiana and Virginia.”
There were two phases of same-sex marriage bans, according to Pierceson. The first one began in the 1970s, when gay couples would apply for marriage licenses and many state judges at the time ruled that these unions were not prohibited. This prompted lawmakers to explicitly outlaw same-sex marriage. In 1973, Maryland became the first state to do so. Other states quickly followed, with Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma passing similar laws in 1975, and Florida, California, Wyoming and Utah doing so in 1977.
The second phase followed a 1993 Hawaii Supreme Court decisionthat found denying same-sex couples the right to marry may violate the equal protection clause of the state’s constitution. That ruling prompted state and federal lawmakers to take action.
Utah was first to enact a statutory ban in response to that decision in 1995, and then a year later, Congress passed the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman. Several states adopted their own “mini-DOMAs” after that, according to Pierceson, and by the year 2000, he said “virtually every state,” with the exception of New Mexico, had a “statutory ban on same-sex marriage.” These “mini-DOMAs,” he noted, banned gay marriage in family codes and state law, not the constitution.
In 1998, Hawaii became the first state to pass a constitutional amendment specifically targeting same-sex marriage. The measure empowered the legislature to enact a ban, which it did that same year through a constitutional referendum. Ultimately, 30 more states adopted constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage.
A demonstrator in support of same-sex marriage waves a rainbow colored flag after the same-sex marriage ruling outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 26, 2015 in Washington.Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
While the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision overrides all of those state measures, many of them, particularly the state constitutional amendments, remain on the books for one reason or another. In some cases, there is a lack of political willingness to remove them, while in others, the labor-intensive removal process makes them a low priority.
In Virginia, for example, while the two statutory laws banning same-sex marriage have been repealed, the state’s 2006 constitutional amendment prohibiting gay unions remains for the time being. This is because amendments must pass both the state Senate and House of Delegates and be approved by Virginia voters.
Lawmakers in Nevada will allow voters to decide whether to strike down that state’s constitutional ban at the ballot box in November. Any constitutional amendment in Nevada requires such a statewide vote.
“In Colorado we got a whole host of things to work on from transportation to education to housing to access to heath care, but instead of being able to dedicate all our resources to things like access to HIV-prevention medications, we have to allocate staff time and resource just to be able fight these bills.”
SHEENA KADI, ONE COLORADO
Sheena Kadi, deputy director of the LGBTQ advocacy group One Colorado, told NBC News that her organization has been having internal conversations for years about what to do with the state’s constitutional ban, which has been on the books since 2006 but would, in her estimate, take three to five years to remove it.
“We can take the first step through the Legislature, but then we would need a ballot initiative to remove that from the state Constitution,” she said. Given the organization’s other priorities, Kadi said going after the unenforceable constitutional amendment just seemed like too much work.
Pierceson said that in Colorado and a number of other states, having these amendments removed isn’t necessarily easy, as a number of conservative lawmakers are happy to keep them for both symbolic and political reasons.
“Many Republicans and the religious right hope Obergefell will be overturned, and then their state would go back to banning same-sex marriage, potentially,” he said.
Compliance issues
Even after Obergefell, there have been a number of instances over the past five years where state and local officials have refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Just a few months after the ruling, a Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, garnered national attention for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Davis, who went to jail for her refusal, has since retired after losing re-election in 2018. In 2019, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that, although Davis was immune from being sued as a county official, she could be sued in her individual capacity for refusing to comply with the law.
In early 2016, Roy Moore, then the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, prohibited probate judges in the state from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Moore, who is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama, was suspended from his judicial duties in September 2016 over his gay marriage order. And just last year — following the persistent refusal of a number of Alabama probate judges to issue marriage licenses to any couples so they wouldn’t have to issue them go same-sex couples — the state passed a workaround bill that no longer requires a judge’s signature on marriage licenses.
Just last year in Texas, a Waco-based judge was issued a public warning by the state Commission on Judicial Misconduct for her yearslong refusal to perform same-sex weddings. The judge, Dianne Hensley, responded by suing the commission, claiming it violated her rights under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Last month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, declined to defend the state agency in the lawsuit because its actions conflict with his views of the Constitution.
“We believe judges retain their right to religious liberty when they take the bench,” Paxton’s spokesperson, Marc Rylander, said in a statement at the time.
Hole-y matrimony
Since the legalization of same-sex marriage federally, hundreds of state bills have been introduced that poke holes in gay marriage in various ways.
“The religious right has not said, ‘We lost same-sex marriage, and we are moving on,’” Pierceson said. “They are still fighting same-sex marriage, both politically and legally.”
Equality Federation, an LGBTQ social justice group, is tracking nine marriage bills that affect same-sex marriage across seven states: Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee.
Colorado had been on this list until just last week, when advocates defeated five bills they described as being anti-LGBTQ. One of them, House Bill 1272, had proposed that existing state law — which still stipulates that marriage is between one man and one woman — be enforced as written, and that no judicial rulings, including those from the U.S. Supreme Court, should influence their enforcement.
HB 1272 also sought to restrict adoption to “marriages and civil unions that consist of one man and one woman.” This could have called into question the legal parental status of Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who in 2018 became the first openly gay man elected governor in the U.S.; he and his same-sex partner are not married and have two children together.
U.S. Representative Jared Polis, right, and his partner, Marlon Reis, with their two children, 5-year-old C.J. and 2-year-old Cora, on stage after Polis addressed supporters on November 8, 2016 at the Westin.John Leyba / Denver Post via Getty Images
North Carolina and Tennessee are considering marriage bills similar to the one Colorado just killed. However, the majority of the bills introduced that target same-sex marriage have fallen within the “religious exemption” category, according to Pierceson.
InMassachusetts, one proposal asserts that the belief that marriage is only between one man and one woman is a protected religious belief and thus prohibits the government from “discriminating” against state employees or businesses that act on this belief.
Bills in Kansas, South Dakota and Tennessee draw on the idea of the separation of church and state in their proposals. These bills define marriage as between one man and one woman and argue that to mandate otherwise is tantamount to state sponsorship of the religion of “secular humanism.”
A bill in Iowa creates a new category of “elevated marriage,” defined as one man and one woman, and it stipulates distinct and additional vows and paperwork. A separate Iowa proposal would require applicants for marriage licenses to disclose their sexual orientation, which could be used in child custody cases.
In Missouri, one lawmaker proposed replacing all marriage licenses with domestic union contracts. The measure, House Bill 2173, has drawn opposition from both LGBTQ advocates and proponents of “traditional marriage.”
“Still seeing attempts to invalidate love and invalidate families and those protections that come along with it is frustrating,” Kadi said. “In Colorado we got a whole host of things to work on from transportation to education to housing to access to heath care, but instead of being able to dedicate all our resources to things like access to HIV-prevention medications, we have to allocate staff time and resource just to be able fight these bills.”
How safe is gay marriage?
More than 10 percent of LGBTQ adults were legally married in June 2017, just two years after the Obergefell ruling, according to Gallup, and the number is likely even higher now. In addition, public opinion has shifted strongly in favor of same-sex marriage, with a2019 Gallup poll finding 63 percent of Americans approve of such unions.
So, is gay marriage safe?
“Absolutely not,” Kadi said, “especially given the current makeup of the Supreme Court.”
Pierceson largely agrees.
“I think in the short term marriage is fairly safe. It’s hard to see the Supreme Court overturn itself in the next couple of years,” he said, though he added that he is less confident about its long-term safety.
“The religious right, conservative movements and the Republican Party are hoping for an overturning of Obergefell with a more conservative judiciary,” Pierceson said.
Kadi noted that President Donald Trump has appointed more than 50 circuit court judges in his first term. And while Trump claimed to be a “real friend” to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people during the 2016 campaign, Kadi said his administration is “no ally to the LGBTQ community.”
“We have seen this impact not only the Supreme Court but the lower courts as well,” she said of Trump-appointed judges, many of whom have come under criticism for their anti-LGBTQ track records.
“It’s only a matter of time before we see another challenge” to same-sex marriage, he said. “That is why we have to stay vigilant.”
Over 2,000 queer and trans people from all 50 states and the District of Columbia have signed onto two letters highlighting criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community toward Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Two autonomous groups, #QueersAgainstPete, a collective of queer people who interrupted a Chicago fundraiser for Buttigieg in January; and Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete, a group of LGBTQ community organizers across the U.S.; have both circulated open letters making the case that the LGBTQIA community deserves better than Pete.
At Friday’s Democratic debate, Buttigeig declared that “we cannot solve the problems before us by looking back.” The groups contend that we must honor the history of LGBTQIA+ communities to move forward equitably, and Buttigieg appears uninterested in doing so. Leaders within LGBTQIA+ communities—especially Black trans women—have worked tirelessly over the past several decades to push movements to value and fight for our full identities and experiences.
“Pete Buttigieg is not a candidate of the future; he erases and mocks the histories and realities of racial, sexual, and gender minorities. The LGBTQ community, like many others, faces racism, homelessness, unemployment, and a lack of adequate healthcare. In rejecting Pete Buttigieg, we don’t seek a nostalgic return to the past but a reminder that our histories persist into our present,” said Yasmin Nair, writer and activist of Chicago, IL ”We cannot solve the problems all of us face if we leave the most vulnerable behind. That’s not ‘looking back.’ It’s making sure everyone moves forward, not just the wealthiest among us.”
In their open letter, #QueersAgainstPete notes that “gaps in Mayor Pete’s platform will fall particularly hard on economically vulnerable LGBTQIA+ communities” from his opposition to Medicare for All and cancelling student debt, to his history of “tearing down hundreds of homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods in South Bend.”
#QueersAgainstPete also highlights Buttigieg’s ongoing failure to address the concerns of Black Lives Matter – South Bend, from their call to create a Citizens Review Board, to their call for Buttigieg’s resignation following Eric Logan’s murder by South Bend police. The letter cites Buttigieg’s failure to commit to a moratorium on deportations or decriminalization border crossing, and his disregard for the voting rights of the over 230,000 queer and trans people who are currently incarcerated. #QueersAgainstPete also stands with Chelsea Manning and criticizes Buttigieg’s stance that she should remain in prison for blowing the whistle.
In an essay, Queers Not Here For Mayor Pete contrasts issues important to the LGBTQIA+ community such as affordable healthcare and housing with Buttigieg’s embrace of donations from Wall Street and billionaires, earning him the nickname #WallStreetPete. In a second essay on his racial justice track record, the group noted the highly disproportionate marijuana arrests of Black people during Buttigieg’s tenure, an issue also raised in Friday’s debate.
Queers Not Here for Mayor Petecompare Buttigieg’s campaign to that of recently-elected out lesbian Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The #StopLightfoot campaign, created by a diverse group of LGBTQ organizers, challenged her record on policing, immigration, housing, and ties to Islamophobia. She has backtracked on many of her more progressive campaign promises, and we are sure Buttigieg would do the same. “Just because someone may share our identity, it does not mean they will show up for the most marginalized and those most in need of attention within our community,” wroteQueers Not Here For Mayor Pete.
“Buttigieg has no record fighting for targeted or marginalized peoples and shows little sign of that changing—he surrounds himself with the likes of Big Pharma, CIA veterans, and billionaires,” said Harper Bishop (he/they), a co-founder of Queers Not Here For Mayor Pete based in Buffalo, NY. “We aren’t homophobic or self-hating. He has been bought-out, and we just don’t see his candidacy as a sign of collective liberation.”
#QueersAgainstPete and Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete are not the first LGTBQIA+ individuals to view Mayor Pete’s campaign with skepticism. A November 25 poll released by Out magazine shows Mayor Pete placing fourth among LGBTQIA+ voters. Jacob Bacharach, Yasmin Nair, Shannon Keating, Max S. Gordon, Rich Benjamin, and George Johnson all published critiques of his campaign from a queer lens. Rather than address concerns being voiced by the LGBTQIA+ community, Mayor Pete has decided to plug his ears. When confronted with criticism from LGBTQ media, Pete said “I can’t even read the LGBT media anymore.”
“Queer and trans people deserve a President who listens to our concerns, not one who runs from them,” said Ian Madrigal (they/them), an organizer with #QueersAgainstPete based in Washington, D.C. “While former Mayor Buttigieg boasts about the historic nature of his campaign, every step along the way, he has made the conscious decision to back policies that harm the very communities he claims to represent. Pete may be queer, but we know he is not here for us.”
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#QueersAgainstPete is a collective of queer people against Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy for president. We believe the LGBTQIA+ community deserves better than Pete. Follow @QueersAgnstPete on Twitter.
Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete is a community that believes that the foreparents of LGBTQ liberation set the bar high and Buttigieg’s candidacy doesn’t even come close. Follow Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete on Facebook.
When Reggie Bledsoe was a student in the public schools of Newark, New Jersey, he didn’t feel represented by the people he learned about in the classroom. As a black man, he could look to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. But as a gay man, he knew he didn’t fit the traditional mold of a black historical figure. He said he wishes he had learned about even one black LGBTQ figure, like Bayard Rustin, King’s longtime adviser and fellow civil rights pioneer, when he was young and in need of inspiration.
“Personally and academically, it would have been so helpful seeing myself in what I was learning,” Bledsoe, who now sits on the Newark Board of Education, told NBC News. “Had I known about Bayard Rustin or [writer and activist] James Baldwin, I could only imagine where I would be and what I would do.”
Future generations of Newark students will get the chance to learn about LGBTQ historical figures — including Baldwin and Rustin (who was posthumously pardoned by California’s governor last week, 67 years after he was arrested on anti-gay charges) — alongside their heterosexual contemporaries.
Reggie Bledsoe, center, at a meeting of the Newark Board of Education in Newark, New Jersey.Courtesy of Newark Board of Education
A year ago, New Jersey became the second state, following California, to pass a law requiring public schools to incorporate an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum into their classrooms; Colorado and Illinois soon followed suit. And ahead of the statewide law, which goes into effect in September, the nonprofit groups Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth rolled out a pilot program last month in 12 public schools across the state, including Newark Arts High School, that will run until the end of the school year in June.
Implementation
Implementation of California’s 2011 LGBTQ curriculum law was slow — so much so that the state didn’t approve LGBTQ-inclusive textbooks until 2017. Wanting to learn from California’s missteps and get ahead of the conservative politicians and anti-LGBTQ groups who vocally opposed the new law, proponents of New Jersey’s LGBTQ curriculum were proactive.
“Developing curriculum for any topic is incredibly resource intensive, so we have designed a full curriculum that we’re going to continue to expand, and we’re going to get it to every public school in New Jersey that wants it completely free,” said Jon Oliveira, director of communications at Garden State Equality, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group.
He said his organization’s goal is to ensure that an “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum has wide adoption across the state.” Unlike California’s law, New Jersey’s mandate leaves the specific curriculum materials and lesson plans up to individual school districts, not the state.
The interdisciplinary pilot curriculum, which was written by New Jersey educators, goes beyond lessons about LGBTQ historical figures and their contributions, according to Oliveira. The program also includes a creative writing lesson for how to treat LGBTQ characters, a world languages lesson on gender-neutral pronouns and biology lessons on sex and gender diversity.
Kate Okesen, the founder of Make It Better for Youth, led the writing team for the pilot program. In March 2018, when the curriculum bill was still in committee in the Legislature, she met with a group of enthusiastic volunteer educators, many of whom are LGBTQ themselves. They gathered in the library of Red Bank Regional High School in Little Silver to discuss what obstacles schools might face if the law were passed and what they could do to help ease the transition for teachers. In those conversations, the seed of the pilot program was sown.
“That input helped me recognize … if this is not grounded in the realistic practice of a classroom teacher, we’re not going to make the progress that we want to make with the spirit of the law,” said Okesen, who has been a teacher for 22 years.
Last March, Okesen and two dozen other educators gathered again for a three-day retreat at a Unitarian Universalist retreat center right by the beach town of Barnegat, where later in the year Alfonso Cirulli, the town’s conservative Christian mayor, would call the LGBTQ curriculum law “an affront to almighty God.” This time, with the law firmly on the books, the volunteers had a more concrete goal: to outline a plan to help teachers adapt to the curriculum mandate and brainstorm a collection of lesson plans and guidelines that would become the pilot program.
Kate Oksen (fourth from left on the couch) and other volunteer educators at a lesson-writing planning retreat for the state’s LGBTQ pilot curriculum in Lacey Township, N.J., in March 2019.Courtesy of Kate Oksen
The 12 elementary, middle and high schools from across the state were chosen based on a survey of interested schools, which gathered information on factors like administrative readiness and cultural competency training. The schools, which started incorporating lesson plans from the program last month, each have an assigned instructional coach — or “teacher leader” — who meets with teachers in the building to answer questions about implementation and to gather feedback on the lessons.
Another cohort of a couple of dozen schools, Okesen said, is also participating but without any instructional guidance or oversight.
John Bormann, superintendent of the Rumson School District, where the Forrestdale School is one of the pilot program’s 12 participating institutions, said his district is participating to better understand the requirements of the new law and what it must do to comply ahead of September, when the mandate goes into effect. However, he added, the district has not yet decided to adopt the curriculum.
“A lot of thoughtful decision-making and exploration needs to occur with our faculty and administration before lessons are rolled out to students,” he said.
Representation
At meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance club at Haddon Heights High School in Haddon Heights, students will sometimes discuss LGBTQ history, like the 1969 Stonewall uprising, according to GSA member Lola Rossi. But Lola, a 10th grader, said this has been the only place in school where she and her peers have been exposed to this history.
“Our history, how we got to where we are, fighting for our rights,” she said, “a lot of LGBT members don’t even know about stuff like that or even current stuff that’s happening within the community.”
Haddon Heights is one of the 12 schools participating in the pilot program this term, and Lola said she’s excited that LGBTQ history is getting more attention in the classroom — for herself, her LGBTQ peers and their straight counterparts.
“What I look forward to the most is kids seeing that we’ve always been here and we’ve always been making an impact,” she said.
Nearly 65 percent of students in the U.S. reported receiving no classroom instruction about LGBTQ people, history or events, and 15 percent reported receiving only negative information about LGBTQ people in the classroom, according to a 2017 report by the LGBTQ education advocacy group GLSEN. While less than 20 percent of students reported seeing positive LGBTQ representations in the classroom, the survey found that a more inclusive curriculum could have a positive effect on LGBTQ students’ experience in school and their educational engagement overall.
Shannon Cuttle, first vice president of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, who is the first elected official in the state to openly identify as nonbinary, said their experience in New Jersey public schools would have been greatly improved if they had seen LGBTQ representation in the classroom.
“Our curriculum and our classrooms should be mirrors and windows for our diverse community,” Cuttle said. “I didn’t have representation when I was in school. Curriculum like this would have been life-changing for me.”
For Cuttle, whose school district is not participating in the pilot program, making curriculum more inclusive is often just a matter of including LGBTQ representation in lessons that are already being taught.
“We’re already talking about LGBT figures in history,” Cuttle said. “Some just may not know that they are.”
That is how the pilot program approaches lessons, according to Oliveira. When learning about the civil rights movement, for instance, students will learn about Rustin, and in lesson plans about World War II, students will be taught about Alan Turing, the “father of computer science,” who helped defeat Nazi Germany by deciphering its coded messages. What’s often left out of the history books is that Turing, despite having been a war hero, was chemically castrated by the British government for being gay, and he later died by suicide.
Bledsoe, the Newark school board member, said he appreciates the pilot program’s inclusion of local LGBTQ history, as well. One of its lesson plans focuses on Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old black lesbian from Newark whose murder in a 2003 hate crime sparked protests and prompted a statewide conversation about protecting LGBTQ people from violence.
The curriculum also includes lesson plans on Barbra Siperstein, a lifelong transgender rights activist who was the first transgender member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee, who died last year, and Marsha P. Johnson, an LGBTQ icon who was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Marsha P. Johnson hands out flyers for support of gay students at N.Y.U. in 1970.Diana Davies / NYPL
“A criticism I often hear is ‘What does being LGBTQ have to do with that person’s contributions to society?'” Oliveira said. “It’s impossible for me, in my mind, to separate [Rustin’s and Turing’s] accomplishments from their identities in the lives that they lived.”
The response to the pilot program in the 12 participating districts has been a mix of enthusiastic support and vocal opposition, according to Oliveira. However, he said he’s confident that the program will be a success, and he added that opponents’ primary argument — that any mention of LGBTQ identity is inappropriate for the classroom — is increasingly falling on deaf ears.
“There are naysayers out there who have an agenda against our community, who say that stuff belongs at home, it’s a private conversation,” he said. “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum is not talking about people’s private lives. It’s talking about people’s public lives.”
Data component
Along with helping public school teachers adapt their lessons to comply with the new law, the pilot program will also be a source of data for a research study that Oliveira and Okesen hope will make a supportive case for an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum.
Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth are working with a team of researchers from Stockton University in southern New Jersey to measure the effect of the curriculum on individual student outcomes and on the cultural climate around LGBTQ identity in state public schools. Okesen said the research aspect of the pilot program is just as important as the lesson plans.
“I’m hoping that the data we collect demonstrates concretely for schools in New Jersey that the kind of visibility that’s offered by this curriculum creates positive outcomes for kids and that we see a shift in … students saying that they feel accepted and affirmed,” she said.
A best-case scenario, she said, would be for the study to make the case for an inclusive curriculum beyond New Jersey, as well.
A national model?
New Jersey is now one of four states to require LGBTQ-inclusive curriculums in public schools, up from just one before 2019. Oliveira said he thinks the sudden push for more inclusive public education is motivated in part by a resurgence of anti-LGBTQeducationpolicies at the federal level.
“The Trump administration is proof that, at any given moment, these rights can be taken away,” he said. “We have to constantly remain vigilant about moving forward, making sure these stories are told, making sure that our stories are raised and that LGBTQ youth see themselves represented in the classroom.”
Six states still have laws that restrict the mention or promotion of LGBTQ history and people in public schools, according to GLSEN: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The laws, sometimes called “No Promo Homo” laws, forbid teachers from discussing LGBTQ identities in a “positive light” — and often effectively mean they can’t discuss LGBTQ issues at all.
But there is also a growing consensus that curriculums should be more LGBTQ inclusive, as more states, including traditionally conservative ones like Missouri, are considering laws that mirror New Jersey’s.
Oliveira hopes the ready-made curriculum his organization has helped craft will make complying with the new mandate easier for districts across the state. He said that as the push to make curriculums more LGBTQ inclusive catches on across the country, as he hopes it will, other states could benefit from the model, as well.
“We really see the work that we’re doing here as a model that we can bring to every other state in the nation that wants to do it,” he said.
Youth suicide rates are dropping in the U.S., but the proportion of teens who have suicidal thoughts or make an attempt remains consistently higher among sexual minorities than among heterosexual young people, two new studies in Pediatrics suggest.
One study looked at suicide rates among teens between 2009 and 2017 and found young people who didn’t identify as heterosexual were more than three times as likely as those who did to attempt suicide. A second study looked at this same connection from 1995 to 2017 and found suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts were all more common among sexual-minority youth.
“Numerous studies going back to the late 1990s have consistently shown that sexual minority youth are about three times more likely to report making a suicide attempt,” said Brian Mustanski, co-author of an editorial accompanying both studies, and director of the Northwestern Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing in Chicago.
“The fact that societal acceptance for the LGBTQ community has improved significantly in the past decades raises the important question of (whether) these disparities in suicide attempt have shrunk over time,” Mustanski said by email. “The two studies . . . are some of the first to show that sexual orientation disparities in suicide attempts have not been shrinking over time.”
Adolescence is a time of sexual and social development when many young people may begin to recognize or express attraction to people of the same sex or identify with a gender other than their sex assigned at birth. While the risk of mental health disorders, suicide, substance misuse and other health problems spikes during adolescence, the risk can be even more pronounced for sexual minority youth, both teams of researchers note in their reports.
One of the studies, led by Julia Raifman of Boston University School of Public Health, examined almost a decade of data from youth in 10 states in the Northeast and Midwest.
During this time, the proportion of youth identifying as sexual minorities nearly doubled, from 7.3% in 2009 to 14.3% in 2017. Over the same period, the proportion of youth who reported any same-sex sexual contact climbed by 70%, from 7.7% to 13.1%, the study also found.
However, the proportion of teens who attempted suicide and also identified as sexual minorities also rose over time, from 24.6% in 2009 to 35.6% in 2017.
“There is a great deal of evidence linking stigma against sexual minority youth to suicide attempts,” Raifman said in an email. “Stigma in the form of family rejection, peer bullying, and higher-level state policies are all linked to increased suicide among sexual minority youth.”
The second study looked at more than two decades of data from youth in Massachusetts.
Lead author Richard Liu, a researcher at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues found that suicidal plans and attempts declined across the board, but much more steeply among heterosexual youth than sexual minority teens.
One limitation of both studies is that the results may not represent what’s happening among youth nationwide, the researchers note.
Even so, the findings suggest that at least some sexual minority youth may not be receiving the support they need, Liu said.
“I think the results of our study really highlight that we have a long way to go to reduce suicide risk in sexual minority youth,” he told Reuters Health by email.
“Interpersonal conflicts are often a trigger for suicide risk, and having supportive and accepting people in their lives is important for sexual minority youth,” Liu added. “Additionally, having family and friends to turn to when dealing with conflicts with others cab help minimize risk for mental health concerns and suicide.”
A new bill in the Ohio House would ban conversion therapy — programs intended to end same-sex attraction and make a gay person straight. The conversion therapy bill is sponsored by Rep. Mary Lightbody, a Columbus-area Democrat.
“Human beings are complex, and each individual is unique,” Lightbody said in a statement. “As children grow, we all learn about the world and develop an identity that expresses who we are at heart.”
Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. ban conversion therapy. North Carolina and Puerto Rico have partial bans. In Ohio, seven cities — Athens, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Kent, Lakewood and Toledo have banned conversion therapy.
Republicans far outnumber Democrats in both of Ohio’s legislative chambers.
