National

The church volunteers assembled furniture and hung decorations in the newly renovated apartment building. They laid out nearly every necessity, down to the bath towels, bed linens, cooking supplies and televisions.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, the first residents of the home in Worcester, Massachusetts moved in: three gay men seeking asylum in the U.S.

“I don’t even have the words,” said Alain Spyke, 26, who fled Jamaica after being continually harassed and threatened by a local gang for being gay. “To come into this country and have a safe space to escape all the hardships and trauma? Not everyone has that opportunity.”

A Massachusetts church group that’s uniquely focused on support for immigrants fleeing their countries due to their sexual orientation has opened a new, permanent home for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender asylum seekers.

The LGBT Asylum Task Force, a ministry of Hadwen Park Congregational Church in Worcester, raised more than $500,000 to purchase and renovate a dilapidated, three-story former group home on the city’s well-heeled west side.

It’s the ministry’s biggest investment amid long-running efforts to help LGBTQ immigrants, said Al Green, the task force’s director.

The group typically houses asylum seekers in rented apartments throughout New England’s second-largest city, but as the effort has grown over the years, it’s become challenging to coordinate services and foster community among the new immigrants, he said.

The task force covers rent and provides a $500 monthly stipend for immigrants, at least until they can receive work authorization, a process that can take around two years, Green said. The group also connects asylum seekers with immigration lawyers, sets them up with bank accounts and health insurance, and helps prepare them for entering the workforce, among other things.

“We found that giving folks stability has helped them better prepare for their asylum cases,” said Green, who is also from Jamaica and participated in the program. “They know they’re in a safe place until they can get on their feet.”

The church effort is one of the few programs providing wide-ranging and long-term help to LGBTQ asylum seekers once they’re in the U.S., says Pastor Judith Hanlon of Hadwen Park Congregational Church, who co-founded the ministry.

Groups like the Rainbow Railroad in Toronto, Canada, help LGBTQ individuals escape persecution in their home countries. Temporary shelters like Casa de Luz in Tijuana, Mexico, provide safe havens for gay and transgender migrants on the perilous journey across the U.S. southern border. And groups like the LGBT Asylum Project in San Francisco focus on providing legal help while others like the Trans Queer Pueblo in Phoenix, Arizona, focus on community building and advocacy.

The church ministry started in 2008, when the United Church of Christ congregation rallied to support a single gay immigrant from Jamaica.

As the church’s reputation spread, migrants from Jamaica and the dozens of other countries where homosexuality is explicitly outlawed began arriving, oftentimes unannounced, Hanlon said. The task force is currently assisting 21 LGBTQ immigrants but has helped more than 400 over the years, with all so far winning asylum, she added.

Among the recent arrivals is a 25-year-old Muslim woman from Uganda who said her parents forced her to marry a man 30 years her senior after discovering she had a long-term girlfriend.

The woman, who asked only to be identified as Aisha, arrived last December after searching online for ways to get out of her forced marriage and learning about the church’s work.

She says she appreciates the group doesn’t impose Christianity or require her to attend church services. “They’re really accepting me as I am, and that’s been heartwarming,” she said.

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The new home’s opening comes as immigrant and gay rights activists push President Joe Biden’s administration to make good on his campaign promise to undo harmful policies enacted under former President Donald Trump.

The Biden administration has rescinded a rule that made it harder for migrants, including LGBTQ persons, to qualify for asylum because of domestic abuse or gang violence, said Ari Shaw, a director at the Williams Institute, a research center at the UCLA School of Law focused on sexual orientation and gender identities.

But other Trump-era immigration policies disproportionately impacting gay and transgender migrants also remain in effect, such as the use of Title 42 of the U.S. Code to justify denying asylum claims from migrants based on concerns about the spread of COVID-19, Shaw said.

Following a court order, the Biden administration also recently announced plans to reinstate Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims were being processed.

The Department of Homeland Security’s guidance for resuming the so-called “Remain in Mexico” policy includes a new exemption for gay and transgender individuals, although there’s concern among some advocates about how that will be implemented in practice.

A DHS spokesperson said exceptions for LGBTQ persons and other particularly vulnerable individuals will be considered case-by-case. The agency also noted that Biden issued an executive order in February committing to improving the asylum process and combatting the sexual and gender-based violence and other “root causes” of migration.

DHS doesn’t track LGBTQ asylum claims, but a study earlier this year from the Williams Institute estimated LGBTQ individuals filed at least 11,400 applications from 2012 to 2017, with more than half of those coming from Central America.

Overall, approval rates for all asylum applications haven risen since Biden took office in January. Gay and transgender individuals can seek asylum under the same legal category as those persecuted for their race, religion or political opinions.

Back at the Worcester home, Spyke says he’s still wrapping his head around the freedoms America affords.

In Jamaica, his family ostracized him after finding out he was gay and he faced harassment, even in popular tourist destinations like Montego Bay.

Now living in the U.S. for nearly two years, Spyke says he finally felt comfortable enough to kiss another man in public for the first time just this April.

“It felt really cool,” he said. “I’d never dare to do that in Jamaica.”

Allyship, an old noun made new again, is Dictionary.com’s word of the year.

The look up site with 70 million monthly users took the unusual step of anointing a word it added just last month, though “allyship” first surfaced in the mid-1800s, said one of the company’s content overseers, John Kelly.

“It might be a surprising choice for some,” he told The Associated Press ahead of Tuesday’s unveiling. “In the past few decades, the term has evolved to take on a more nuanced and specific meaning. It is continuing to evolve and we saw that in many ways.”

The site offers two definitions for allyship: The role of a person who advocates for inclusion of a “marginalized or politicized group” in solidarity but not as a member, and the more traditional relationship of “persons, groups or nations associating and cooperating with one another for a common cause or purpose.”

The word is set apart from “alliance,” which Dictionary.com defines in one sense as a “merging of efforts or interests by persons, families, states or organizations.”

It’s the first definition that took off most recently in the mid-2000s and has continued to churn. Following the summer of 2020 and the death of George Floyd, white allies — and the word allyship — proliferated as racial justice demonstrations spread. Before that, straight allies joined the causes of LGBTQ oppression, discrimination and marginalization.

“This year, we saw a lot of businesses and organizations very prominently, publicly, beginning efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Allyship is tied to that. In the classroom, there is a flashpoint around the term critical race theory. Allyship connects with this as well,” Kelly said.

In addition, teachers, frontline workers and mothers who juggled jobs, home duties and child care in lockdown gained allies as the pandemic took hold last year.

Without an entry for “allyship,” Kelly said the site saw a steep rise in lookups for “ally” in 2020 and large spikes in 2021. It was in the top 850 searches out of thousands and thousands of words this year. Dictionary.com broadened the definition of “ally” to include the more nuanced meaning. The terms “DEI” and “critical race theory” made their debuts as entries on the site with “allyship” this year.

What it means to be an authentic ally has taken on fresh significance as buzz around the word has grown louder. One of the aspects of allyship, as it has emerged, is how badly it can go.

Among the example’s of how to use the word in a sentence cited by Merriam-Webster is this one written by Native activist Hallie Sebastian: “Poor allyship is speaking over marginalized people by taking credit and receiving recognition for arguments that the unprivileged have been making for their entire lives.”

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As global diversity, equity and inclusion executive Sheree Atcheson wrote in Forbes, allyship is a “lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.” It’s not, she said, “self-defined — work and efforts must be recognized by those you are seeking to ally with.”

Allyship should be an “opportunity to grow and learn about ourselves, whilst building confidence in others,” Atcheson added.

Among the earliest evidence of the word “allyship,” in its original sense of “alliance,” is the 1849, two-volume work, “The Lord of the Manor, or, Lights and Shades of Country Life” by British novelist Thomas Hall: “Under these considerations, it is possible, he might have heard of Miss Clough’s allyship with the Lady Bourgoin.”

Kelly did some additional digging into the history of allyship in its social justice sense. While the Oxford English Dictionary dates that use of the word to the 1970s, Kelly found a text, “The Allies of the Negro” by Albert W. Hamilton, published in 1943. It discusses extensively the potential allies of Black people in the struggle for racial equality:

“What some white liberals are beginning to realize is that they better begin to seek the Negro as an ally,” he wrote. “The new way of life sought by the liberal will be a sham without the racial equality the Negro seeks. And the inclusion of the Negro in the day-to-day work, in the organization, the leadership and the rallying of the support necessary to win a better world, can only be done on the basis of equality.”

On the other side of allyship, Kelly said, “is a feeling of division, of polarization. That was Jan. 6.” Allyship, he said, became a powerful prism in terms of the dichotomy at a chaotic cultural time during the last two years.

Other dictionary companies in the word of the year game focused on the pandemic and its fallout for their picks. Oxford Languages, which oversees the Oxford English Dictionary, went for “vax” and Merriam-Webster chose “vaccine.” The Glasgow, Scotland-based Collins Dictionary, meanwhile, plucked “NFT,” the digital tokens that sell for millions.

While Merriam-Webster relies solely on site search data to choose a word of the year, Dictionary.com takes a broader approach. It scours search engines, a broad range of text and taps into cultural influences to choose its word of the year.