US Customs and Border Patrol agents at a migrant processing center in Texas allegedly attempted to humiliate a Honduran migrant by making him hold a sign that read, “I like men,” according to emails written by an agent who witnessed the incident.
The emails — obtained by CNN — were sent to the agent’s supervisor and outlined the March 5 episode in which a Honduran man was forced to hold a piece of paper that said, “Me gustan los hombre(s),” which translates to “I like men,” while being paraded through a migrant detention center.
The incident is one of many, per the emails, in which the CBP agent allegedly witnessed several colleagues displaying poor behavior and management’s failure to act.
Stacy Feintuch, a mother of two in suburban New Jersey, said she didn’t know what was wrong when her oldest daughter, Amanda, 17, began to withdraw.
“I confronted her and said, ‘You need to talk to me,’” Feintuch said: “She said, ‘It’s not what you think. I’m fine, it’s not that.”
“I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you.’”
Feintuch said her mind raced: “Is she pregnant? Is she in trouble?” Finally, Amanda buried her head in her pillow and said, “I’m gay.”
“I was just dumbfounded, just shocked. It wasn’t even a thought in my head,” Feintuch said. “I said, which ended up being the absolute wrong thing to say, ‘Why do you think this?’ She started screaming at me.”
“I said: ‘Take a breath, I didn’t mean anything by it. I love you. I’m shocked, I just want to talk to you about this.”
Amanda calmed down and, fortunately, they talked.
While Feintuch considers herself an accepting person, she still faced some immediate stress and shock when her child came out to her. That’s not uncommon. A new study conducted by researchers at George Washington University found that most parents of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth have difficulty adjusting after their kids come out.
The study says it is one of the first to systematically examine the experience of parents raising lesbian, gay and bisexual children. David Huebner, one of the study’s lead authors and a public health professor at George Washington University, said his team approached the study with a question: “Can we identify the families that most need intervention to support the families and protect the kids?”
The study found that African American and Latino parents have a harder time accepting their lesbian, gay and bisexual children, as do the parents of children who come out at a later age.
The study, which surveyed a much larger sample size than previous studies, confirmed smaller studies that showed parents’ negative reactions tend to ease over time; the first two years are the hardest for parents.
There were no significant differences in reactions between mother and father, the age of the parent, or the gender of the child. The study did not examine the reactions for the parents of transgender children.
In general, acceptance seems to be growing rapidly for lesbian, gay and bisexual youth. “We see improvement in people’s respect for LGBT rights, we’ve seen political progress, concrete political progress, and we have also seen attitudes shifting at the population level,” Huebner said. “I think for parents, when you’re confronted with your own child who you love so fiercely, I think that reaction in that moment is a very personal one, and it’s one that’s hard to predict from public opinion.”
After Amanda came out, Feintuch told her daughter that she worried her life would become more difficult after having struggled with depression in high school. “I was hoping that now your time would get easier, and your life would get easier, and it scares me that it would be more difficult.”
“She’s like: ‘It’s not like how it was when you were growing up. There’s a lot of kids in my school who are gay. Its not a big deal,’” Feintuch said. “I had to get it through my head first, and get it through my mind: ‘This is how her life is going to be, and it’s going to be fine.’”
“It was about a year until Amanda was like, OK, definitely 100 percent, and then she had a girlfriend and then I saw it all come together.”
Huebner said his study is the first to measure these reactions and that previous studies of the parents of LGBTQ youth mostly recruited from accepting and friendly environments, like PFLAG, an organization for the parents of LGBTQ people.
“I think we have made a huge improvement here — 80 percent [of survey respondents] had never been to a support group, had never talked to a therapist,” Huebner said. “These were parents who had never before been heard from in research.”
Still, Huebner pointed to some potential oversights: “There’s reason to believe we are missing two groups of people: those super rejecting people, and those parents who were so immediately accepting that they also didn’t need the resources.”
Huebner hopes that this will allow advocates to devise materials so parents can better prepare themselves to accept and love their kids.
“Parents have the power to protect their kids, their LGBT kids, from all sorts of threatening forces,” Huebner said. “We know that when parents are supportive of their LGBT kids those kids have less depression and fewer risk behaviors.”
GLAAD and The Harris Poll’s annual Acceptance Index shows a decline in LGBTQ acceptance among younger Americans. At the same time, GLAAD’s Trump Accountability Project counts more than 114 attacks on LGBTQ Americans from The Trump Administration since President Trump took office.
Additionally, anti-LGBTQ violence continues to plague LGBTQ Americans. GLAAD compiled the following partial list of incidents of violence from news coverage from January to June 2019. From the horrific murders of transgender women of color to other random acts of violence – this list is a snapshot of anti-LGBTQ violence in America and is not comprehensive. If you’ve seen examples of anti-LGBTQ violence reported on in the media, contact press@glaad.org.
If you or someone you know has experienced anti-LGBTQ violence, please contact the Anti-Violence Project by calling their 24 hour free and confidential hotline at 212-714-1141 or vsiting their Report Violence site.
GLAAD mourns the loss of the following transgender women. For more about their lives please visit the Human Rights Campaign. GLAAD released the ‘More Than A Number’ report for more information on the epidemic of violence facing transgender Americans, especially transgender women of color, and best practices for reporting on this issue.
If you or someone you know has experienced anti-LGBTQ violence, please contact the Anti-Violence Project by calling their 24 hour free and confidential hotline at 212-714-1141 or vsiting their Report Violence site.
The LGBTQ community in Montgomery, Alabama, has been left with more questions than answers after a drag show was shut down by authorities Saturday night, during the 50th anniversary weekend of the historic Stonewall uprising.
“We’ve been running for weeks trying to raise money for a gay club in Montgomery, because we don’t have one,” Victoria A. Jewelle, a local drag queen who serves as the show’s director, told NBC News. “We were trying to raise money for a new establishment so we can have a place to feel safe.”
Alee Michelle is one of the drag queens who was set to perform at A Touch of Soul on Saturday, June 29, 2019, before authorities shut down the venue.Courtesy Nakeia Moss
Officials with Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board canvassed a dozen local bars, restaurants and nightclubs June 29 for what they call a “minor buy.” Essentially, the board sends a young person under the age of 21 into the establishment to see if the business will sell alcohol to them. It was assisted in this effort by the Montgomery Police Department and the Montgomery Fire and Rescue, in addition to other agencies.
At 10:45 p.m., officials arrived on the scene at A Touch of Soul, a soul food restaurant that was hosting a drag show to raise funds for the opening of a new LGBTQ nightclub in Montgomery. The city’s only full-time gay bar, Club 322, closed in May.
According to Jewelle, the fundraiser has gone on for weeks with absolutely no backlash from local authorities. All of that changed when performers say officials with the agencies came into their dressing rooms while they were putting on their makeup, shined flashlights in their faces and even went through their laptops.
Authorities ordered A Touch of Soul to close at midnight, giving everyone about an hour to pack up and leave. The fundraiser, which also served as the after party for Montgomery’s LGBTQ pride weekend, was essentially over before it even started.
Ambrosia Starling, a drag queen and community leader in Montgomery, said the scene was reminiscent of the bar raids at the long-closed HoJohns, the city’s premiere gay nightclub during the 1980s. She claimed that police would typically visit the bar at the end of their shifts to “practice the dogs” on its LGBTQ clientele.
“They used to raid HoJohns continuously,” Starling said. “The city of Montgomery has a history of harassing some of the older community LGBTQ spaces.”
‘NEVER HAD THIS PROBLEM BEFORE’
A second establishment experienced issues with authorities while hosting an LGBTQ event on Saturday night, the same day as the city’s LGBTQ Pride Month celebrations. Montgomery officials showed up at Club Reset, which was formerly known as Envi Ultra Lounge, at 2:00 a.m. and ordered patrons to “pour out their drinks” and vacate the premises immediately.
T’Chelle Monroe, a party promoter who has been organizing LGBTQ events at Club Reset for a year, said the bar typically stops serving drinks at that time and allows clubgoers to file out in a leisurely fashion.
Monroe said she’s “never had this problem before.”
“I’ve been in other clubs before, and I know they shut their bar down at 2 a.m.,” she said. “I’ve never heard that you actually had to be out of the club at that time.”
As LGBTQ people filed out of Club Reset after it was shut down, Monroe said many went over to nearby Club Ciroc, which shares a building with an auto supply shop and a hookah lounge. She said officials “followed” them to Club Ciroc, despite the fact that it had already passed its regulations check earlier in the evening.
A representative with Club Ciroc confirmed authorities did show up a second time at 2:30 a.m. but did not know whether they had followed patrons of Club Reset there.
“It made me feel like they’re targeting us,” Monroe said. “We already have enough to deal with being gay, but we’re here trying to celebrate each other on our weekend. They were tarnishing what we were trying to do. We’re just trying to have a good time amongst each other.”
NBC News contacted two other businesses that Monroe said were visited by police Saturday: Xscape Tapas Grille and Sky Bar.
A representative with Xscape confirmed that authorities were at the business for a half hour on Saturday, rigorously checking the lights, inspecting identifications and looking at liquor receipts, though the representative had no complaints about the interactions with city officials that night.
While Club Ciroc, Xscape and Sky Bar all confirmed authorities had visited their businesses, representatives from each declined to be quoted in this story.
Montgomery officials maintain that everything that took place Saturday night was completely by the book.
Dean Argo, the government relations manager for the Alabama Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, said the board didn’t initially intend to scrutinize A Touch of Soul this weekend. However, he said an inspector approached the restaurant after he observed “people outside sitting on stools collecting money at the door,” as a board representative would later write in an incident report.
Argo read NBC News the report in its entirety.
“Upon entering the location, we found there was no food in the kitchen, no cook on duty,” the report states. “A restaurant license is issued for this location and that is described as habitually and principally used for the purpose of preparing and serving meals for the public to consume on premise.”
“Speaking only for the ABC Board,” Argo added, “we did not instruct anyone at this business to shut down.”
Jason Cupps, a captain with the Montgomery Fire Rescue, added that city authorities “verbally reminded the restaurant that, under the terms of its business license, it is required to close by midnight.”
Geri Moss, the restaurant’s owner, said that explanation doesn’t hold water. Since opening A Touch of Soul in 2016, she said it has regularly stayed open Fridays and Saturdays until 2 a.m. without incident. A Google search confirms those hours. According to Moss, the restaurant doesn’t shut its doors before that time unless business is slow.
“I was told that I could stay open until 2 a.m. on Saturday,” she said, adding that the city authorities who came to the restaurant over the weekend didn’t mention its hours being an issue.
While the ABC Board inspector noted in his report that there was no cook in the kitchen at the time of the visit, Moss claimed that is not true. She said she got up that morning around 4 a.m. to prepare the menu for the show, which was steak, potatoes and salad. There was another cook onsite ready to assist patrons in the meantime, should they want to order a hamburger and fries, she added.
“My kitchen is never closed unless the cafe’s closed, and there is always a cook,” she said. “If I’m not there, there’s a cook.”
Others confirmed there was a cook onsite.
Moss also said despite claims that A Touch of Soul was “collecting money at the door” for the fundraiser, she claimed there “weren’t any customers at that point.”
“The only persons that they saw were workers that I hired to work the party,” she claimed.
When NBC News approached the ABC Board and the Montgomery Fire and Rescue with the discrepancies between their official statements and what those present at A Touch of Soul said occurred Saturday, they could not offer an explanation. Both Argo and Cupps say they had been offered no additional information on the subject.
‘UNFORTUNATE’ TIMING
Several members of Montgomery’s LGBTQ community said what upsets them most about the weekend incident is that it seems to be a departure from the improving relationship between LGBTQ residents and city authorities. That relationship, they maintain, has improved greatly since the 1980s, when police harassment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people was the norm.
Montgomery, Alabama’s second-largest city, hired its first LGBTQ liaison officer two years ago, and now it has two: Bianka Ruiz and Devin Douglas.
“We thought that we had gotten on such good footing, and that was one of the things that was so confusing for us,” Starling said. “We’re trying to build a good relationship with the police department. We thought that was being accomplished.”
Starling credits the Montgomery Police Department with being responsive to the community’s concerns about how the drag show was handled. Police Chief Ernest N. Finley addressed the matter in a speech to the LGBTQ community Sunday. According to the Montgomery Advertiser, Finley claimed the action had been planned for weeks but admitted the timing was “unfortunate.”
“You have my word that this shouldn’t happen,” he said, promising “more communication” in the future.
But even if the intentions of local authorities were benign, those present during the incident at A Touch of Soul wondered why officials couldn’t have chosen any weekend other than Pride to do a sweep of bars and nightclubs in Montgomery.
“If you knew for months, why didn’t you switch the day out of respect?” Jewelle asked.
When NBC News reached out to the Montgomery Police Department for comment, it deferred to the Montgomery Fire and Rescue’s statements on the matter.
Despite the controversy, A Touch of Soul has no plans to cease holding drag shows at the restaurant. Moss promised members of the city’s LGBTQ community they could keep putting on events until they raise enough money to “get their home,” and she doesn’t intend to break that pledge.
“If they got to shut me down, then they’re going to have to come with something not bogus and not made up,” she said.
Millions of LGBTI supporters took to the streets of New York on Sunday (30 June) to celebrate pride and renew calls for equality.
Some 150,000 participants from 600 contingents hosting more than 100 floats marched down the four-kilometer route, according to BBC News.
An estimated four million people, meanwhile, took to the streets to watch and celebrate New York City Pride Parade.
This year, New York hosted global LGBT-event WorldPride.
The mass march also marked 50 years since Stonewall Riots. On 28 June, 1969, LGBTI community members launched spontaneous protests against discrimination following raids of the Stonewall Inn.
People regard it as the birth of the modern LGBTI rights movement in the US.
The Reclaim Pride Coalition organized the Queer Liberation March. The wanted to protest a pride parade they say has become too money-centric and will be devoid of police or corporate sponsors.View image on Twitter
The estimated 45,000 attendees performed acts of resistance. For instance, on 23rd Street, in collaboration with ACT UP, they held a die-in to represent the 17 HIV+ asylum seekers who died in ICE custody.
The main march, titled New York City Heritage of Pride parade, meanwhile, passed important LGBTI landmarks. These included the Stonewall National Monument and the New York City Aids memorial.
Among the Grand Marshals at this year’s Pride is the cast of hit FX show Pose, The Trevor Project, and the Gay Liberation Front (the original group who organized following the Stonewall riots).
New York Mayor and Democrat presidential hopeful Bill De Blasio walked in the parade with his wife.View image on Twitter
Representatives from around the world marched in New York. These included a team from London Pride and Taiwan, which became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage this year.
World-renowned artists, including Madonna and Lady Gaga, performed at the WorldPride closing ceremony on one of the city’s piers.
The Stonewall riots were a six-night series of protests that began in the early morning of June 28, 1969, and centered around the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City.
Four days earlier, on June 24, 1969, the police, led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, raided the Stonewall Inn and began arresting bar employees and confiscating liquor. But when Pine led a second raid on the 28th, patrons fought back. Approximately 150 people fled, regrouped on the street and stormed the bar, trapping the police inside. The protesters began throwing bricks, bottles and garbage, and attempted to set the bar on fire.
For six nights, protesters clashed off and on with police, while chanting and marching in and around Christopher Street.
Today, many credit the protests with sparking the LGBTQ rights movement. But at the time, if you were a New Yorker reading the local, mainstream papers, you wouldn’t know that a new civil rights movement was unfolding in the city.
In the days after the Stonewall riots, depending on which paper you read, you would have been exposed to a vastly different version of events. The major dailies gave a megaphone to the police, while alternative outlets embedded themselves among the protesters.
To understand the differences in media coverage, it’s important to recall the relationship between gay people, the press and the police prior to Stonewall.
If arrested, a person’s name, age, address and crime would be published as part of the police blotter in most local newspapers across the U.S. For example, if a man was arrested for committing a “homosexual” act in Dayton, Ohio, his information would be published in the Dayton Daily News. Such publication often had disastrous consequences for the person “outed” in print.
Gay men, therefore, were forced underground. Christopher Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village became a fairly safe locale with bars and coffee shops that surreptitiously catered to a LGBTQ clientele. These bars often were run by the Mafia, which owned the cigarette machines and jukeboxes, and sold watered-down liquor.
Unlike many clubs, the Stonewall Inn, which opened in March 1967, was on a main thoroughfare instead of a side street. The clientele was mostly men, though even marginalized segments of the LGBTQ community frequented the bar because of its two dance floors.
On average, police raided bars once a month, though they typically would warn the bar that a raid was coming and time the raid to minimize disrupting the bar’s business. Police raids usually were accepted by bar employees and clientele.
However, this time was different. Stonewall’s patrons already were upset about the June 24 raid, so when one person resisted arrest, others joined in. The situation quickly escalated.
Inside Stonewall, Pine gave his officers the order not to shoot, fearing that any additional escalation could lead to a full-scale massacre. Outside, hundreds of protesters were throwing almost anything they could get their hands on, while others were trying to find a way to set Stonewall on fire with the cops inside.
Yet the mainstream media largely failed to adequately cover the protests.
The first article on Stonewall to appear in The New York Times relied solely on interviews with the police. New York Times
The three city dailies – The New York Times, The New York Daily News and New York Post – wrote a smattering of stories in which they quoted exclusively police sources and offered little context. The story was framed as an instance of lawless youth run amok – an almost unprovoked riot.
For example, the Times’ first Stonewall article, “4 policemen hurt in ‘Village’ raid” began “Hundreds of young men went on a rampage in Greenwich Village shortly after 3 a.m. yesterday after a force of plainclothes men raided a bar that the police said was wellknown for its homosexual clientele.”
The mainstream papers at least covered Stonewall. Local TV stations failed to even report on the riots happening in the heart of Manhattan.
In contrast, the most popular local alternative paper, The Village Voice, gave the riots front-page coverage. It included interviews and quotes from the protesters, as well as two first-person accounts by Voice reporters Howard Smith, who was trapped inside the bar with police officers, and Lucian Truscott IV, who was outside with protesters.
Both reporters initially witnessed the riot from the Voice offices, which were a few doors down Christopher Street from Stonewall.
The Voice’s coverage featured many hallmarks of alternative publications.
By incorporating the views of both protesters and police, they created a more complex, nuanced story. And the paper framed the Stonewall riots as an expression of liberation instead of rebellion, with Smith writing that the protesters were simply “objecting to how they were being treated.”
‘Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square’ – The Village Voice gave the riots front-page treatment. Google News
However, the Voice coverage was far from perfect. The anti-gay tone in Truscott’s piece angered protesters, as did some of the paper’s long-held editorial policies against same-sex personal ads.
While the Voice often was left-of-center politically, it wasn’t as radical as some of its more underground counterparts – the Rat, the East Village Other and the Berkeley Barb, all of which also covered the Stonewall riots.
Still, the Voice served as an important platform for the otherwise voiceless left out of the mainstream discussion during both Stonewall and the paper’s 60-year run. The Voice closed in 2018, following the shuttering of similar publications in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
An alternative press has existed alongside the mainstream since the earliest days of the nation. These papers play an important role in the U.S. media landscape by covering stories and topics that go unreported by their mainstream counterparts. They often forego the pretense of objectivity for activism; rather than quote government officials and business leaders, they’ll quote people on the ground.
Fifty years after Stonewall, it’s important to reflect on the gains of the LGBTQ movement. But it’s equally important to think about what’s lost when alternative newspapers stop publishing – and thus stop covering unreported, underreported or misreported stories.
A new survey reveals most LGBTI Americans are welcoming of police and other groups, such as corporations, at annual Pride parades.
BuzzFeed News and Whitman Insight Strategies conducted the survey from 5-10 June, speaking to 801 LGBTI people in the US. Most of the respondents identified as bisexual (46%). Gay and lesbian respondents were next, at 29 and 17%, respectively. Finally, 7% of respondents identified as transgender and nonbinary, respectively.
The survey asked a broad range of questions, including ones about Pride, gay icons, and the Pride flag.
Pride parades should be inclusive and open
Police at pride has become a controversial and heated debate in the LGBTI community.
Numerous cities have declared police in uniform are not welcome at their Pride parades, such as Portland and Sacramento. Based on this survey, however, a majority of LGBTI Americans — 79% — said police should be welcome. This includes cops marching in the parade.
The survey did not specify if the question specifically meant police in uniform, or in general.
Results of question about police at Pride | Photo: BUzzFeed News
The survey also found 7 in 10 respondents believe police sometimes discriminate against LGBTI people.
Despite this belief, only 8% said police should absolutely not be allowed to participate at Pride events, such as parades.
This welcoming attitudes towards Pride events extended to groups beyond police. A majority said both corporations (76%) and kink groups (72%) should be able to participate as well. People who responded no unequivocally were equal or lesser to 1 in 10.
Results of question about corportations Pride | Photo: BuzzFeed News
People’s critiques of kink groups present at Pride events often offer family and children as the reasoning for the critiques.
The respondents of this survey, however, also said families with children should be allowed and welcomed. Specifically, 87% said they should be present, even alongside the kink groups.
Chart showing results about kink groups at Pride | Photo: BuzzFeed News
Teaching LGBTI history — and having diversity
Another component of the survey included questions on diversity and history.
Less than half (45%) said they attended a Pride event this year (or had plans to), but an overwhelming 90% also responded they believe Pride advances LGBTI equality.
Only a little over half (54%) said they knowledge of the Stonewall Riots, but tellingly, 89% said they believed LGBTI history should be taught in schools.
How inclusive lessons or the promotion of LGBTI rights will be remains to be seen, as most respondents (56%) said they do not approve of adding black and brown stripes to the Pride flag to acknowledge LGBTI people of color.
Chart about making the Pride flag more inclusive | Photo: BuzzFeed News
Is Taylor Swift a gay icon?
Not according to this survey.
Only 9% of respondents classified her as a gay icon — three points above the Babadook.
Ellen DeGeneres was the clear winner, with 78% of LGBTI people saying she’s a gay icon. Figures like RuPaul (65%), Lady Gaga (53%), Cher (40%), and Madonna (36%) followed.
Finally, a slight majority of people (53%) also believe public figures have a responsibility to come out if they identify as LGBTI.
In an open letter, officials with Cathedral High School in Indianapolis said the teacher, who is in a same-sex marriage, was “living in contradiction to Catholic teaching.”
To remain within the archdiocese, the letter said, “Cathedral must follow the direct guidance given to us by Archbishop Thompson and separate from the teacher.”
If the school were to continue employing the teacher, the letter said, Cathedral would no longer be considered a Catholic school. The letter said Cathedral would lose its nonprofit status, its priests would not be able to serve on the school’s board of directors and it could not celebrate important Catholic rituals.
The letter, which was signed by Matt Cohoat, chairman of the school’s board of directors, and president Rob Bridges, described the firing as an “agonizing” decision.
The move was in contrast to another school, Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School, that defied an order from Archbishop Charles Thompson last week to fire a long-time teacher in a same-sex marriage.
In that case, school officials said Thompson’s “direct insertion into an employment matter of a school governed by a religious order is unprecedented.”
“After long and prayerful consideration, we determined that following the Archdiocese’s directive would not only violate our informed conscience on this particular matter, but also set a concerning precedent for future interference in the school’s operations,” school officials said.
In its letter, Cathedral, which is run by a different order, the Brothers of the Holy Cross, said that while it “respected” Brebeuf’s decision, it could not continue to function in the same way as that Jesuit-sponsored school were it to be banished by the archdiocese.
The schism that resulted in two separate events on June 30, the last Sunday of LGBTQ Pride Month, is the product of a longstanding political disagreement within the community: whether pride is a demand for acceptance and integration into broader society or whether it’s a radical demand for the liberation of all LGBTQ people.
For those paying attention, this tension has been on full display during the past two NYC Pride Marches — while the roots of the broader debate go back decades.
In 2017, activists used a “lockdown” technique to halt the official march in front of the Stonewall Inn to protest the presence of corporations and uniformed police. The NYPD was forced to arrest12 activists outside the Stonewall, where a police raid in 1969 helped spawn the modern LGBTQ rights movement — a raid that the department only apologized for this year.
Protesters from No Justice No Pride movement blocked the NYPD and Toronto police contingents during the New York City Pride March in 2017.Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images file
Then, before last year’s march, a group of activists calling themselves the Reclaim Pride Coalition delivered a set of demands to Heritage of Pride, the nonprofit that has produced the NYC Pride March since 1984.
Reclaim Pride told Heritage of Pride that if it wanted to allow police to participate, the officers had to be out of uniform and unarmed. The activist group also demanded that there be no barricades along the sidewalk of the march, to ease congestion and allow passersby to join the massive annual event. Reclaim Pride also demanded that a “resistance contingent” be given a place near the front of the march to highlight the LGBTQ community’s opposition to the Trump administration’s policies.
“Reclaim Pride Coalition believes that HOP’s management of the annual NYC Pride March, resulting in commercial and police saturation of the March among other unacceptable characteristics, has led to decades long conflict with and the alienation of many individuals and groups within the NYC LGBTQ community,” the group wrote last year.
When Heritage of Pride responded to those demands a month before the 2018 NYC Pride March, Reclaim Pride activists were incensed: The march was shortened, the route was reversed and no changes were made to the presence of police officers or barriers. In addition, Heritage of Pride distributed wristbands for officially sanctioned marchers.
This year, with the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the addition of WorldPride to the city’s events, millions of additional people are expected to descend on New York City the last weekend of June. And Reclaim Pride will be holding its first Queer Liberation March — a separate, police-free, anti-corporate, unsanctioned event that will take place just hours before the official NYC Pride March.by TaboolaSponsored StoriesKELLEY BLUE BOOK10 Longest-Range Electric Cars of 2019 SENIOR LIVINGSonoma Apartments May Have Seniors Packing Their Bags
Organizers from both groups spoke to NBC News about their views on Pride. They represent a historic divide that was present even before the Stonewall uprising of 1969: whether the LGBTQ rights movement is a revolutionary one or one seeking integration into the American body politic.
RECLAIM PRIDE’S VIEW
Natalie James, a co-founder of the Reclaim Pride Coalition, said the reason New York needs the Queer Liberation March is because of what Stonewall really was about.
“What was different about Stonewall, in terms of New York City leading up to that time, was the massive response to the brutality,” James said. “People fought back, and they fought back not just for one day, for multiple days.”
The barriers now set up by police for crowd-control purposes prevent passersby from joining the march, James said. During the first pride march in 1970, called Christopher Street Liberation Day and held on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, marchers shouted, “Off of the sidewalks, into the streets!” — and people listened. By the time marchers entered Central Park, the event’s last stop, the crowd stretched for blocks.
We’re not going to change the world again if we just sort of go along with the program.
MARTHA SHELLEY GLF FOUNDING MEMBER
Several veterans of the early LGBTQ movement agree with James and have thrown their support behind the Queer Liberation March, including Fred Sargeant, one of the organizers of the first pride march, and the activist Martha Shelley.
“I can see the Heritage of Pride point of view, that they need money to pull off a huge party and all that sort of thing,” Shelley told NBC News. “I’m also seeing from the Reclaim Pride point of view that we’re not going to change the world again if we just sort of go along with the program.”
Shelley, a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, which was founded right after the Stonewall raid, said she is dividing her time between the dueling groups.
“I am going to be the Gay Liberation Front spokesperson at the Heritage of Pride rally on Friday night,” she explained. “And then on Sunday, I’ll be marching with Reclaim Pride.”
When she speaks Friday, Shelley said she’s coming with a political message: “We have to deal with a vast economic inequality and corporate control of our political and economic system.”
“When Gay Liberation Front started, we were a tiny little group of raggedy-ass kids,” Shelley said. “We were, with one or two exceptions, all under 30. We didn’t have careers to lose, and yet we changed the world.”
During its brief existence from 1969 to 1973, the Gay Liberation Front reached out to all sorts of other revolutionary liberation groups, including the Black Panthers, according to Shelley.
“The previous gay organizations were kind of single-issue groups and weren’t making those alliances,” Shelley added, referring to integrationist groups like the Mattachine Society, which had staged an annual, lightly attended picket protest in Philadelphia.
“By doing that — by changing the attitudes on the left first — we eventually changed the entire culture,” Shelley said.
HERITAGE OF PRIDE’S VIEW
Heritage of Pride contends that there is no way to pull off the massive NYC Pride March — which is expected to draw an estimated 4.5 million people this year — without police, barricades and some level of corporate partnership.
“I understand on some level where Reclaim Pride is coming from, but I also have been an event organizer in New York City and I understand that to do a large-scale event like our march, logistically, you can’t do it without barricades,” Sue Doster, director of strategic planning at Heritage of Pride, told NBC News. “You can’t do it without police, and in New York City, if you get a permit for an event of this scale, you automatically get police, you automatically get barricades.”
Doster said that even though the parade’s corporate presence is a far cry from the small group of marchers that first stepped off from the Stonewall Inn in 1970, it is particularly meaningful for people all around the world — particularly those in homophobic countries where LGBTQ people are still demanding basic rights. Doster recounted a discussion she had with an LGBTQ activist from Kenya: “She said to me, ‘Seeing what you do in the United States, even before I came here, seeing the pictures, gives me and my friends hope, because for us it shows us how it can be.’”
When Doster started volunteering with Heritage of Pride in the 1990s, “we literally cut out letters and made our own banners,” she said. “Now, of course, we have mass-produced banners that are vertical on light poles down the entire route — very, very different.”
“When we were making our banners, we actually hung them ourselves,” she added. “We climbed the ladders with ropes and duct tape and attached them to the top of light poles all along Christopher Street.”
Now, the packs of protesters verbally harassing marchers as they paraded past St. Patrick’s Cathedral have been replaced by supportive spectators packed 10 deep on sidewalks along the entire route, according to Doster.
“And the truth of the matter is, regarding sponsors, Pride has gotten more and more expensive over the years,” Doster explained. “A lot of our attendees really want big names, and that is expensive. It’s a balancing act, and I think we at Heritage of Pride are very conscious that it’s the community’s, so that it’s not T-Mobile’s event or TD Bank’s event.”
“They came during the night,” Ahmed said. “They knocked on my door, not saying they are police, but when I opened the door and saw a couple of big, long-bearded men, I knew immediately.”
This is how Ahmed said his torture began in Chechnya, a semi-autonomous region in southeastern Russia. The short-bearded, blue-eyed 20-something, who has since fled to another part of the country, asked to use a pseudonym to protect his own safety, as well as the safety of family members still in Chechnya.
“I was driven to a police station,” Ahmed told NBC News via Skype, his face turned away from the camera while being recorded. “While police officers repeatedly asked me to betray other LGBTQ community members, I was beaten — for hours. They were using a plastic pipe.”
“I was telling them that I don’t know what they’re talking about, but they said that they know who I am,” he added. “Then they started torturing me with electricity.’
AHMED
For at least two hours, Ahmed explained, police officers were putting electricity in his body through his fingers. He said the pain was unbearable.
“Like all your body is burning,” he said. “These police officers are accustomed to torturing people … Some men I know told me that some were left hanging from the ceiling, had been suffocated with a plastic bag or even raped with the police bat. This kind of torture can last for weeks.”
Life as a gay man in Chechnya is far from easy, according to Ahmed. Meeting other gay men can be a dangerous proposition, as authorities use people as bait to attract gay men, he claimed.
“There were many cases where this kind of ‘friendship’ resulted with arrest,” Ahmed explained. “I was not using social networks to meet other gay men, and I believe that this saved me for a long time. I was mostly in a circle of well-known, trusted people, and I was cautious, so that’s why police released me in the end. They didn’t have anything solid on me.”
Ahmed said no one was ever brought in to testify against him. He speculated that his “different appearance” is probably what made authorities suspect he’s gay.
Rachel Denber, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, said that Ahmed is far from being the only person to face this type of police inquiry in Chechnya.
Human Rights Watch has interviewed several men who have been detained in Chechnya on suspicion of being gay or bisexual. Denber said these men have been through “horrific, depraved torture and humiliation,” including rape. While this torture is allegedly happening at the hands of Chechen authorities, Denber said these “cases of abduction and secret detention” are happening illegally in the region.
Igor Kochetkov, head of the Russian LGBT Network, a nongovernmental LGBTQ rights organization, said there are several dozen Chechens who have been detained and tortured in this most recent wave of persecution, which he said started at the end of 2018.
By Chechen law, he said, there are no legal grounds to deprive someone of their freedom due to their sexual orientation. He added that only few detainees manage to leave Chechnya, since authorities usually take their passports.
“Most of the Chechens who turn to us want to leave Russia, because they are afraid that the Chechen police or their own relatives will be able to find them anywhere in Russia,” Kochetkov explained.
Ahmed was among the lucky ones, as his passport was returned to him, and he was able to flee Chechnya. He is in another part of Russia and is hoping to leave for a country in Western Europe. He did not specify which country, to protect his safety, but he said his partner lives in a European country where gay rights are highly respected.
“I don’t feel safe here at all,” he said of Russia. “[Chechen leader Ramzan] Kadyrov’s people are so powerful that they can find me here, too. I keep a low profile here, and I don’t live a normal life. So until I leave Russia, I won’t be able to live free.”
Chechen authorities have repeatedly denied that this kind of persecution is happening in the republic. At the beginning of the year, Alvi Karimov, a spokesman for Kadyrov, the region’s strongman leader, said “it’s an absolute lie.” In 2017, following the reports of the initial “anti-gay purge,” Karimov stated, “You can’t detain and oppress those who don’t exist in the republic,” seemingly denying the existence of any gay people in Chechnya.
“That is totally not true,” Ahmed said of Karimov’s assertion. “There are gays even among Chechen political representatives.”
Ahmed said he would like to get married one day, but he lamented that same-sex marriage is so far away from being possible in Chechnya. He claimed even heterosexual couples can’t express their love openly in the region.
But despite what he’s been subjected to, Ahmed said Chechnya will always be his home: “If I could live there freely, I wouldn’t go anywhere else.”
