Opinions

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The Cure for a Sickening SCTUS Appointment

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When a lifetime nomination for the Supreme Court becomes the source of spreading a deadly virus, it should be taken as an omen. 

Exactly one month after “Rona” crashed the maskless White House party for Judge Amy Barrett’s appointment, infecting staff, at least two senators and perhaps the feckless president himself, she has gained one of the nine mightiest seats of judgment in this nation. 

Even when the reign of terror by the Trump administration ends, Judge Barrett’s addition to the high court is likely to extend its carnage in the lives of millions of LGBTQ Americans. Decades of hard-won progress for anti-discrimination protections and family recognition are now imperiled by the shifting math. This includes grave danger to the precedents for privacy in Roe v. Wade and Casey and even Lawrence in which is anchored the landmark ruling in Obergefell for marriage equality. 

If settled laws establishing Social Security and Medicare are back on the table, as Barrett suggested at her Senate hearing, are even the laws to punish hate crimes safe? 

Like the utter surrender of all the president’s men to COVID, the calamity of a right-wing, interventionist Supreme Court poised to invalidate even state-based safeguards against bias and hate could inflict vast casualties. The most vulnerable and least protected could pay the highest price. 

No wonder LGBTQ people are in revolt, and voting as if our lives depend on it. Paul Monette, the gay writer who died of AIDS a quarter century ago, argued that grief is either a sword or useless. Gloria Anzaldúa, the late lesbian academic, essayist and activist, described darkness and sorrow as laboratories for the most potent rebellion.

Perhaps more than any time since the early 1990s, the LGBTQ community is enraged and engaged in electoral politics, poised to play a key role in transforming all three branches of government, including at the state level. This upsurge comes with the added attention to racial injustice, misogyny and anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bigotry, which portends more lasting and much larger coalitions for change. 

Fighting back begins with casting complete ballots. It must include visibility in the rallies and activism accompanying transitions of power. It requires participation by LGBTQ leaders in the redistricting process in the states, which draw boundaries that shape representation and how advocates might wield influence for the next decade. 

Fighting back also compels that advocates seize the teachable moment on court reform. For more than 30 years, conservatives have been using their legislative authority in the states to expand supreme courts, including recently in the states of Georgia and Arizona. These states are noteworthy for their lack of anti-bias laws covering LGBTQ people and their emerging “swing” status that jeopardizes one-party Republican control. This specter was an unmistakable motivating factor for so-called “court-packing” by conservatives to cement a kind of veto power against policy gains for LGBTQ people and other long-ignored communities. Call it a trump card, a term with added meaning now at the federal level. 

Republican condemnation of increasing the size of the U.S. Supreme Court while conducting such maneuvers at the state level has a familiar ring of hypocrisy. It builds on Republican senators’ breaking their own professed standard from 2016 about no appointments to the high court in a year of Presidential voting. The hubris and contempt for truth flaunted in their pre-election haste to install an ideological foe of LGBTQ rights on the court have now become a trigger. For Democrats, altering the composition of the high court may be justified as a consequence. For the LGBTQ community, the focus must remain on ending the onslaught on our freedom and the legal protection of our lives and families. 

The denial of COVID by the Trump administration holds echoes of the past. Refusal to reckon openly, factually and humanely with HIV-AIDS by the Reagan White House begat other cruelties, and so has this one. The entire process of strong-arming Judge Barrett into the seat left vacant by the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is soaked in sickness more malignant than the cancer that claimed the late Justice. 

Voting alone does not erase the anguish and trauma of such wicked, corrosive hypocrisy. But voting in enormous numbers is one antidote, even more potent if it ushers in diversity of representation as part of pro-LGBTQ majorities. Legislation to reform the high court, a product of changed chemistry in the Congress, could be a lasting cure. It might even inspire similar, complementary reforms in some states. The grief and havoc of these past four years, confronted boldly, can yield an outgrowth of hope. 

Hans Johnson has advised LGBT organizations and ballot measure campaigns in nearly every state. A longtime Washingtonian and former Blade columnist, he now lives in Los Angeles.

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Vote Biden/Harris to Save Our Country

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It is abundantly clear that to save our country and resume our place of leadership in the world we must elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

Like others during the Democratic primary I wavered over who was the right person to lead our party. I hosted fundraisers for Pete Buttigieg and attended two for Kamala Harris and was incredibly impressed with both. Having met Joe Biden before, I was a fan but skeptical about whether he was the right person for 2020. Since winning the Democratic nomination he has proven beyond a doubt he has the right stuff. His innate decency, honesty, and empathy are just what our country needs to begin to heal from four years of Donald Trump and his sycophants. 

As the campaign reaches its zenith, Biden is getting stronger. His recent Florida town hall was pitch perfect as was his Gettysburg speech, maybe the best of his career. He is hitting all the right notes in his campaign appearances in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. His debate performance, against a deranged president, was impressive and moved some undecided voters to him.

Then there’s Kamala Harris. Biden gets huge kudos for asking her to join him on the ticket. She has been beyond impressive as she navigates the role, never an easy one, but even harder for the first African-American woman and only the fourth woman ever on a presidential ticket. She walks a tightrope each day. Harris is a strong personality with a powerful voice for progress in her own right. She has tempered her own voice to ensure she doesn’t make her own headlines especially now that the Biden/Harris ticket is ahead and gaining momentum. She handled Mike Pence just right in their debate showing him off as a bully. Her most memorable line may have been, “Excuse me I am talking,” something women have had to say to arrogant men who tried talking over them disrespectfully for years. She made all the points she wanted to make and did it with class. 

She used her membership on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Amy Coney Barrett hearings to great effect. Again, it was not an easy task to challenge another woman and to make the points she needed to make. I am sure there were some pithy remarks she would have liked to make but she held her tongue and spoke eloquently to the American people using her time to question Barrett and highlight issues including healthcare and the Affordable Care Act, marriage equality, and the survival of Roe v. Wade. 

It has become clear this election is a referendum on Donald Trump with much focus on his mishandling of COVID. As we approach 250,000 dead and more than eight million infected, Americans understand Trump is responsible for so much of this devastation. Biden recently said, “President Trump says he lied to the American people so as not to panic them.” Biden went on to say correctly “The American people don’t panic it was Trump who panicked.” 

The referendum on Trump is a major part of why Democrats are doing so well across the nation but the second half of the equation are Biden and Harris proving every time they speak they are capable of leading the country. Even Rudy Giuliani’s effort to tag Biden and his son with wrongdoing is backfiring as it appears Rudy was duped by the Russians. Even his daughter tells us to disregard him. 

So as we enter the last two weeks of the campaign let us as Democrats, independents and decent Republicans stay strong and stay the course. We are looking toward a major win with Democrats taking back not only the White House but the Senate. If we can do that we will reclaim our country, our democracy, and show the world Donald Trump was an aberration, not who we are. We can once again move forward on issues such as healthcare, climate change, infrastructure, LGBTQ rights, and immigration. We can relegate Trump and his sycophants to the dustbin of history where they truly belong.

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ right and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

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Queer Communities Need COVID Relief Now

For those of us in the communities hardest hit, in the industries hardest hit, in the states hardest hit by COVID-19, relief cannot come fast enough.  

I live in the Rio Grande Valley, an area in South Texas that has been hit the hardest in the country by the COVID-19 virus. In the state, there is a record of more than 100,000 new cases per day, up 55% in July alone. Now, people in our region are dealing with recovering from a tropical storm. 

This pandemic caused me to lose my job. I am a queer- and trans-inclusive sex educator and have spent years addressing the erasure of trans, queer and disabled folks in discussions of healthy sexuality. My education efforts are shaped by and complemented by my experience as a queer and trans sex worker. I used to teach out of a brick and mortar adult shop, but like so many small businesses during the pandemic, the shop closed. 

While small businesses have been allowed to open up again under the Phase 3 plan, I still can’t return to work because of my own health. A few months ago I contracted a virus, and while I do not know if it was COVID-19, I now have to use an inhaler for the foreseeable future. To keep myself and my community safe, I have been socially distancing myself from others. 

Right now, I can only do about 40% of my job. I can’t do in-person sex work, or in-person sex education. Forty percent is not enough to make ends meet.   

For my colleagues who are able to go to work, they are at risk of contracting the virus every day. Many of my coworkers are queer and trans people of color. Some have pre-existing conditions or children. Some of them are college students. Even if their paychecks average $200 a week, that $200 is the difference between making rent, paying bills, grocery shopping — or not.  

In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the HEROES Act, a COVID-19 stimulus package. It is a necessary and desperately needed piece of legislation: COVID-19 cases in the United States climb every single day. Over 5 million people in the U.S. have been infected and over 160,000 have died. Latinx and Black people are three times more likely to become infected than their white neighbors, and three times more likely to die of COVID-19. Trans women and gender non-conforming communities who were already facing transphobia and transmisogyny are now facing high unemployment and delays in necessary health care.  

And yet, the Senate has still not passed comprehensive COVID relief. It is apparent that those in power don’t care about me and my community. They do not care about Black people, Latinx people, queer people, trans people, small business owners, or the people who rely on them.  

My community is one of the poorest in the United States. We don’t have any real mental health resources, and now we are isolated. Not being able to check in on my regulars is extremely stressful. Many of my customers have lower incomes; many use substances or self medicate for their mental illness. We have high rates of heart disease and diabetes and these factors make an already dangerous epidemic particularly lethal to folks like me, and to my community.  

Queer people in the work force need relief. LGBTQ people are more likely than the general public to have lost employment due to the pandemic. We need comprehensive and affordable health care, paid sick time, paid family and medical leave, personal protective equipment for all health care providers and other essential workers, protective occupational safety and health standards for front line workers, and more. It is now up to the Senate to pass COVID relief to ensure that people like me, my colleagues, and members of my community get much needed relief. 

We deserve to feel safe and secure during this pandemic. We deserve leaders who give a damn.

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Gay Republicans a Disgrace to an Otherwise United Community

How to explain the unlikely, perverse phenomenon of a gay Republican in 2020? 

Delusion? Denial? Blinded by privilege? Daddy issues rendering them subservient to Master Trump? 

Whatever the underlying issue, it’s truly sad to watch the once respected Log Cabin Republicans sink into further irrelevance. From Rich Tafel and Patrick Guerriero to R. Clarke Cooper and Patrick Sammon, Log Cabin has been led over the years by smart, committed advocates working to change the Republican Party from within. Whatever your views on the GOP, it’s important to fight from the inside, whether it’s inside political parties, organized religions, or sports leagues, to bring about change. 

But 2020 is no ordinary year and Donald Trump is no ordinary president. Anyone who defends Trump’s indefensible behavior is lying to themselves. There’s no excusing racism, sexism, and transphobia. There’s no looking the other way when Trump allows his buddy, the murderous Vladimir Putin, to put bounties on the heads of American soldiers. And there’s no justification for snatching screaming toddlers from their mothers’ arms and locking them in cages. 

Trump is running a criminal enterprise out of the people’s house; Steve Bannon is just the latest senior Trump official to be charged with felonies. What the hell more do people need to see to conclude that Trump is unfit for office, incapable and incompetent, and likely to leave Washington in handcuffs? 

Despite the overwhelming and undeniable evidence, these hypocritical gay Republicans continue to carry water for their criminal master. The latest is Ric Grenell, the former acting Director of National Intelligence (key word: acting), who released an unintentionally hilarious video touting Trump as the “most pro-gay president in American history.” 

In the Log Cabin-produced clip, Grenell refers to “gays and lesbians” throughout, notably eschewing the more common “LGBTQ.” That’s because while Trump’s attacks on gays and lesbians may be more subtle, his assault on the transgender community is overt and aggressive. From banning transgender service members from the military, to enacting an HHS rule that ends non-discrimination protections for trans patients, Trump has used the transgender community as a punching bag to score cheap points with his bigoted base. 

In the video, Grenell criticizes Joe Biden for not congratulating him on his acting appointment. Maybe that’s because the short, temporary, non-Senate-confirmed appointment was roundly criticized by experts in the intelligence community due to Grenell’s stunning lack of experience. “This is a job requiring leadership, management, substance and secrecy,” John Sipher, a former CIA officer, told the New York Times. “He doesn’t have the kind of background and experience we would expect for such a critical position.” That’s quite the diplomatic understatement. 

Grenell touts his experience as ambassador to Germany, another short-tenured post that led to widespread criticism about his inexperience and ham-handed efforts to interfere in internal German politics. 

He references Trump’s purported effort to decriminalize homosexuality around the world, but that effort seems to exist in word, not in deed. 

Grenell further criticizes Biden for his past anti-gay positions. Yes, Biden, along with most other Democrats and Republicans, has evolved on LGBTQ issues over the decades (as have a majority of Americans), but we must allow allies to grow, change, and ultimately fight with us. 

By contrast, Trump’s assault on LGBTQ equality is long and well documented. From picking the notoriously homophobic Mike Pence — who doth protest too much — as his vice president, to naming a slew of hostile, right-wing judges to the federal bench, to advocating for so-called “religious freedom” carveouts to enable anti-LGBTQ discrimination, Trump has undermined decades of work in just four short years. 

Grenell isn’t the only gay toadie still standing in Trump’s corner. Robert Kabel, Log Cabin’s board chair and a former Reagan administration official, this week announced the impending release of his new book. In the press release announcing it, Kabel “is proud to call the GOP the true party of equality—not the Democratic Party.” 

Again, these delusional sycophants cherry pick empty Trump gestures to justify their support while ignoring a tidal wave of attacks on LGBTQ Americans. Has Kabel read his own party’s platform? 

The 2016 platform was recently re-adopted for 2020. As the Blade reported, “it calls for ending same-sex marriage either through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment, offers veiled support for widely discredited conversion therapy and objects to enforcing civil rights laws to ensure transgender people can use the restroom consistent with their gender identity. Although the 2016 document doesn’t explicitly mention conversion therapy, it includes this line: ‘We support the right of parents to determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.’” 

Grenell, Kabel, and the rest of Trump’s twisted enablers aren’t just on the wrong side of history, they’re on the wrong side of the law. LGBTQ voters see through these last-gasp attempts by his enablers to hang onto power. From the botched COVID response that has claimed thousands of American lives, to the stoking of racial division and support for white supremacists, to retreating from the climate change fight, and the rolling back of LGBTQ equality, Trump has shown the world he is unfit for the presidency. He knows that clinging to power by any means necessary is the only way he will avoid prison. 

Instead of Grenell and Kabel, let’s look to Pete Buttigieg for inspiration. As he put it in his convention speech Thursday night, “I believe in this country because America uniquely holds the promise of a place where everyone can belong. … Joe Biden is right: This is a contest for the soul of the nation.” 

Indeed it is. Some of us will emerge with our dignity intact. Others like Grenell and Kabel will have to explain how they sided with a monster who worked to dismantle our government, destroy our democracy, and harm members of our LGBTQ community.

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‘Silence = Death, VOTE’

Deep in a Smithsonian vault rests an iconic election poster from the 1980s stored in an archival drawer. It reads: “Silence = Death, VOTE.” It can still shock with its imagery and blunt words. “Your vote is a weapon….we are at war,” the poster states in an historic political call to action for LGBTQ Americans to engage in the most important election of their lives in the midst of a raging epidemic. It was an election as primally important then as the one all Americans face, today. 

Despite President Trump’s suggestion that it be postponed, we are have that election, hell or high water, on Nov. 3. 

“Silence = Death,” emerging from the pain of the AIDS epidemic, is oddly prophetic for 2020. Engage and fight back or quietly succumb. Intended to rally outrage about the indifference of the federal government to the epidemic of that time, the words called forth three decades of LGBTQ activism that brought unimaginable change. Today, that same challenge faces the whole nation. An epidemic spreads like wildfire. Americans are dying and the White House is indifferent, if not hostile, to the science and medical progress essential to survival. 

“Silence = Death” was introduced in 1988 after seven excruciating years of denial of science and public health in favor of silence about the AIDS epidemic by the Reagan administration. Dr. Anthony Fauci had been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for four years, and had witnessed first-hand the political silence and bumbling that surrounded the epidemic. Five presidencies later, Dr. Fauci recalled the crucial intersection between then and today’s American COVID epidemic challenge: “….it was only when the world realized how the gay community responded to the outbreak with incredible courage and dignity and strength and activism” did the stigma of AIDS diminish and global progress against the epidemic advance. 

The Silence = Death “activism that Dr. Fauci praised led to the growth of the self-identified LGBTQ vote that today numbers nine million adults, according to the Williams Institute. These voters developed a new intensity of engagement with politics in the first national presidential election when the major party candidates took clear and differing positions on the issue of LGBTQ rights. It was at the 1992 presidential convention where candidate Patrick Buchanan declared, “There is a religious war going on in the country, it is a cultural war…..We must take back our culture and take back our country!” At Mount Rushmore on July 4th, Trump could not have sounded more like Buchanan: a “left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution…..they would destroy the very civilization.” 

The 2020 election demands the same historic courage, dignity, strength and activism Dr. Fauci summoned at the White House coronavirus briefing. Trump is reelected only if Americans don’t vote, if they are silent. LGBTQ, as well as young, Black, brown, seniors, women – all Americans have an extraordinary stake in the outcome of this election. Indeed “Silence = Death” stands as a warning to all Americans who do not use the only true weapon we have, the vote, to fight the epidemic and to keep our precious country and its citizens alive.

Jeff Trammell headed LGBTQ outreach for the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns. Charles Francis is president of The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. and served on President George W. Bush’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

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Kamala Harris Brings Pro-LGBTQ Record to Biden Ticket

When former Vice President Joe Biden announced the historic selection of Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate, he added a candidate to the ticket with a pro-LGBTQ political record that goes back to 2004.

“It’s clear the Biden-Harris ticket marks our nation’s most pro-equality ticket in history,” Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights group, said in a statement.

Harris first ran for elected office as San Francisco district attorney in 2004 when LGBTQ rights were firmly established in local law — but still highly contentious nationally.

After winning that election, she established a hate crimes unit to investigate and prosecute anti-LGBTQ violence. In 2006, Harris organized a conference in California that brought together over 100 officials from across the U.S. to discuss strategies to end the use of the so-called gay and transgender panic defense. In 2014, California became the first state to ban the practice in law, and in 2018, Harris and other senators introduced a bill to prohibit the practice nationally.

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Harris announced her campaign for California attorney general days after the 2008 passage of Proposition 8, a successful California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in the state. While serving as California’s top prosecutor — a job she held for six years — she declined to defend the ban in court. In 2013’s Hollingsworth v. Perry ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 2010 federal court decision invalidating Proposition 8, and gay marriages resumed in the state.

Shortly after it was announced that Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, had chosen Harris as his running mate, Matt Hill, a gay Biden staffer, shared a clip from “The Case Against 8,” a documentary about Proposition 8, showing the moments in 2013 when Harris, then-California’s attorney general, found out about the high court’s decision.

After she was elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris continued to staunchly support LGBTQ rights, frequently co-sponsoring pro-equality legislation and speaking out against the violence faced by transgender women.

After her selection as Biden’s running mate on Tuesday, Harris made immediate waves when she announced her chief of staff would be Karine Jean-Pierre — an out lesbian, a former Obama White House staffer and a spokesperson for the progressive group MoveOn. Jean-Pierre is the first Black person to serve as a chief of staff for a vice presidential candidate.

During the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, where Harris was among the field of presidential hopefuls, her LGBTQ platform stood out for promising to appoint a White House chief advocate for LGBTQ affairs “to ensure that LGBTQ+ Americans are represented in hiring and policy priorities across the government.”

But during the primary, Harris, Biden and over a dozen other Democratic hopefuls were remarkably unified in their positions on many LGBTQ issues, which included ending the transgender military ban and religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, and reversing policies that discriminate against LGBTQ people in adoption and housing.

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The Biden-Harris LGBTQ platform promises to make major changes in areas where LGBTQ people are not fully protected by the law — like housing, military service and health care.

During the Democratic primary, candidates were all unified in their vow to sign the Equality Act, a bill that would update many nondiscrimination laws to explicitly include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in June, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, finding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the Equality Act would amend other federal laws pertaining to credit, jury duty and housing that are not immediately affected by that decision.

The Biden-Harris campaign’s LGBTQ campaign platformconsolidates many of those threads into the strongest presidential platform in support of LGBTQ rights.

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Although Harris has been a staunch LGBTQ supporter since she entered politics in 2004, Biden, like nearly all American politicians at that time, did not support LGBTQ rights when elected to the Senate in 1972 the way he does today. Biden, along with the vast majority of the Senate, voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which defined marriage in federal law as a union between one man and one woman, but by the 2010s his views had changed.

Most famously, while serving as vice president, Biden in May 2012 pre-empted the Obama administration’s official policy in support of same-sex marriage by endorsing the unions during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men and women marrying one another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties,” Biden said at the time.

Three days later, President Barack Obama endorsed same-sex marriage.

An ‘incredibly meaningful’ pick

Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., called Harris “well qualified and well prepared” to be vice president.

Takano, who is gay, said her selection is “incredibly meaningful to the LGBTQ community, and as a Japanese American I am also proud to have someone of Asian heritage on the ticket.”

“Senator Kamala Harris is revered in the LGBTQ community for her leadership as Attorney General during the litigation of Proposition 8 and her fervent refusal to defend an unjust law,” he said in an email. “Joe Biden selecting her as his running mate reflects the deep value that both candidates share regarding equality for LGBTQ people.”

Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay former presidential hopeful who frequently campaigned on his experience as a mayor and gay man in “Mike Pence’s Indiana,” tweeted, “It feels good to visualize the moment when Vice President Mike Pence is replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Pence and Harris have starkly different track records when it comes to LGBTQ rights, with Pence, the former Indiana governor, having signed the 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was controversial for protecting anti-LGBTQ discrimination. The two are set to debate on Oct. 7.

Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first lesbian to be mayor of that city, said there’s “a tremendous level of excitement” around the selection of Harris.

“This has been a very, very difficult time for people around the country, and we need something to rally around, and I think her addition to the ticket really gives people that thread of hope that we have all been looking for,” Lightfoot said, adding that her 12-year-old daughter was “beside herself with joy.”

Chicago mayor: Sen. Harris is a ‘lawyer’s lawyer’

AUG. 12, 202008:18

Not everyone across the LGBTQ spectrum, however, is applauding Biden’s choice of Harris.

Ashlee Marie Preston, a Black trans advocate who supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts during the primaries, said many Democrats like her “are experiencing a flux of emotions right now” because of their view that Biden and Harris represent the “tough on crime” culture, which Preston described as particularly harmful to transgender people of color, who according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey are likelier to experience police harassment, incarceration and abuse while in detention.

“This won’t be a cake walk for them,” Preston said. “We need to see that their loyalty to systems that crush vulnerable communities has been dissolved. Politicians can change, as can their policies. But we’re still waiting on proof of such evolution, or at least a straightforward conversation on the matter.”

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Trump Asylum Regulation Would Put my Life in Danger

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The Trump administration has proposed a new regulation that would gut the asylum laws in the United States; excluding those who are applying because of the violence they face as LGBTQIA+ people, survivors of domestic violence, and many others. Even as a relatively recent resident of the United States, this goes against the very values I came to this country to experience. 

I am a 26 year-old lesbian woman and a citizen of a county in Central Asia — a country with zero tolerance of LGBTQIA+ people and with a strong patriarchal culture. I am here in the United States as an asylum seeker because my country refused to accept me and threatened me with violence if I didn’t change, which is impossible. 

The proposed new rule may block me from getting the asylum protection I need, and force me to return to a country where my life is in danger.

As a child, I was abused by my parents due to the fact that I was “different” — non-conforming to cultural and religious expectations. This included sending me to physically and mentally abusive “religious” retreats to rid me of the “evil” inside of me. As a teenager, I was threatened by the police and forced to pay them a bribe when they found me in a car with a female classmate. Into my adult years, I was forced to endure a severely physically, sexually and emotionally abusive relationship with a man who coerced me into a relationship with him by threatening to reveal my sexual orientation to others, including my parents. 

If I were to return to my home country, I believe I would continue to be subject to violence from my family and a forced marriage. I would not be able to have relationships with other women or even wear short hair and unisex clothing, because to do so would put me at risk of violence from my family and the public. Similarly, I would not be able to continue my activism without threat of violence from ultra-right groups. The only way to guarantee my survival in my home country would be to change my appearance, stop participating in feminist and LGBTQ activism, and live as a lesbian secretly. The years I spent doing this before coming to the United States made me deeply depressed and suicidal. 

The government of the country where gay marriage is legal in all of its 50 states should know how important it is to have the basic freedom to love anybody you want. The years of LGBTQIA+ activism and struggle that won those freedoms for Americans make it clear  how tough it is to gain that freedom, without getting abused or killed. 

Humanity is when people take care of each other globally. Humanity is when one country opens its doors to suffering people from other countries. While the commenting period is closed for the rule that would affect LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, the government is still collecting public comments for another asylum rule that would affect all asylum seekers — trying to use public health as an excuse to keep others out. The LGBTQ+ community knows too well how governments can weaponize health to discriminate against us. It’s not too late to speak out against this rule, and to make the United States a safe place for everyone.

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Masks Stop Coronavirus. Getting AIDS Showed Me the Stupidity of Not Wearing Them.

In 1985, New York Gov. Mario Cuomo urged the public to have safe sex by using condoms to help stop the spread of AIDS. Condoms were the face masks of the 1980s.

Some people wanted to use them during sex, some did not; many who chose the latter, including myself, suffered the consequences. In 1986, I decided to ignore Cuomo and every medical expert — and became infected with HIV.

Today we are once again in the middle of a war being waged between these two camps, personal freedom and staying alive. Too many people still don’t seem to accept that if they are fighting for the right to not wear a mask, it will very likely come at the price of their life or that of someone they love. The power of free choice can kill you.

I also know the feelings of regret, anger and guilt that come with the decision to value free choice above all else.

But the allure of that power is, well, powerful. As clinical psychologist Steven Taylor, author of “The Psychology of Pandemics,” recently noted, people do not like to be told what to do even if the measures could protect them.

“People value their freedoms,” Taylor told CNN. “They may become distressed or indignant or morally outraged when people are trying to encroach on their freedoms.”

I know this to be true firsthand. But I also know the feelings of regret, anger and guilt that come with the decision to value free choice above all else. I hope that by sharing the story of the mistake I made in similar circumstances, some who scorn the idea of wearing a mask — whether it’s because they don’t want to look “silly” with it on or because they are “a real American” — can see that these desires are in no way worth killing yourself or others over.

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My life-altering error in judgment happened the first night I was with my then-boyfriend, Jason, who’d told me he’d “been tested and was fine.” So I disregarded the warnings and the facts, along with that little voice in my head telling me to reach for the condom that was in my pocket. I had unprotected sex with Jason that night and for the next two months that we dated, even though it was 1986 and the height of the AIDS crisis. The euphoric feeling of having someone desire me was powerful and gave me a naive feeling of invincibility.

After the relationship ended, I refused to have unprotected sex with anyone else. I will not become a victim of this disease, I told myself. But it was too late. Two years after we’d broken up, when I went to visit him in the AIDS ward of St. Luke’s Hospital, Jason told me he had been tested for the first time eight months ago, when he started getting sick.

Image: Timothy Hedden
Timothy Hedden.Courtesy Timothy Hedden

I wanted to scream at him or strike him, but he looked so frail; virtually unrecognizable as the man I had dated, he was withered and shriveled, his skin covered in purple sores. So I said nothing to him, though I knew his deceit was going to cost me my life.

But I spent years after that telling myself that Jason and his lie were the sole reason for my getting infected. It wasn’t until this April, when the mask debate began, that I realized I, too, was responsible for my infection. As I questioned how people could brazenly refuse to take accountability for their own health and not wear a mask in public, I realized I had done the same thing and put my own life in danger.

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Within a decade of my diagnosis, my immune system was so compromised that my doctor told me to let my family know I was going to die. But luckily, at the end of that year I was put in a drug trial for a new class of drugs called protease inhibitors, which allowed me to survive.

The decision I made to not use a condom has led to irrevocable damage to my immune system and my life. For 32 years, I’ve lived in fear of germs and catching the flu or even a cold. Every cough that lingers too long sends my thoughts spiraling: Is this the beginning of the end? When the coronavirus was first being discussed seriously in this country, the most vulnerable were people over 50 with pre-existing conditions. I’m a 56-year-old HIV-positive man. It paralyzed me.

It also felt very familiar. Both of these epidemics are rampant viruses that have no cure, both have stumped global scientists and, just as at the height of the AIDS crisis, countless people are dying every day.

A glaring difference is that AIDS was labeled a “gay disease,” even though it afflicted heterosexuals as well. That misnomer allowed the Republican government and most of society in the ’80s to look away and pretend it wasn’t happening. Yet there is a parallel in this, as well: Once again, the Republican government is denying the severity of this pandemic, distorting statistics and the effectiveness of face coverings and otherwise not showing leadership or seriousness in tackling this deadly disease.

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What I see now when I come across people not wearing masks is familiar, too — a familiar stupidity. Witnessing the actions of these arbiters of freedom, I do not see patriots. I see people cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of “civil rights” and the idea of a “free country“ who don’t understand the awesome personal and communal responsibility that free choice carries with it. I see people who are making the same error I made 34 years ago when I ignored all of the warnings, all of the news and all of the numbers.

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As with having HIV, once you become a carrier of this virus, it is not only your own life you’re playing with. Both illnesses have periods of latency where someone can spread the virus before knowing they have it. So even if you feel that you have the right not to wear a mask, since you’ll be paying the consequences of that choice personally, do you feel you also have the right to kill someone else because you don’t want to cover up?

Too many people still don’t seem to accept that if they are fighting for the right to not wear a mask, it will very likely come at the price of their life or that of someone they love.

The fact that so many people who get the coronavirus recover helps feed the denial of danger to those not wearing masks. But we don’t know the long-term effects of this disease. Doctors are already starting to see abnormal clotting in the lungs and legs of COVID-19 patients, as well as myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. There are also reports of central nervous system issues and impaired kidney function.

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Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath Undermines HIV Fight

In times like these, there is no denying that white supremacy, racism, and criminalization put Black, Brown and transgender people at severe risk of violence. The COVID-19 outbreak has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown people. Counties with higher populations of Black residents accounting for 52 percent of coronavirus diagnoses and 58 percent of coronavirus deaths nationally, according to a recent amfAR study. 

And, following the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement has once again demanded an end to the systemic inequalities and senseless violence against Black people by law enforcement. 

The life-or-death impact of hate and discrimination doesn’t stop there. When it comes to sex workers in the U.S. and around the globe, many of whom are Black, Brown and transgender, discrimination and criminalization of sex work have put them at a high risk of violence, contracting preventable diseases like COVID-19 and HIV, and have exposed them to police brutality. Yet the U.S. continues to weaponize life-saving global AIDS assistance programs against sex workers by demanding recipients of PEPFAR funding to officially adopt a position opposing prostitution and acquiesce to the U.S. conflation of sex work and trafficking. 

The Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of the Anti-Prostitution Loyalty Oath (APLO), a provision in the 2003 United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act, that required all recipients of funding through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to “have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution.” The policy goes on to conflate consensual sex work with human trafficking, and refuses funds to non-U.S.-based organizations that do not have a policy explicitly opposing “prostitution and sex trafficking.” While a prior 2013 decision ruled that the APLO is unconstitutional as applied to U.S.-based organizations, Monday’s ruling declined to extend those protections to their foreign affiliates, a ruling that will further divide and hamper the global AIDS response. 

The APLO is and always has been a bad policy. There is no evidence that the policy improves health outcomes. In fact, there is evidence that it hurts them. 

Since the policy’s inception 17 years ago, the provision has done nothing to advance its stated goals of defeating HIV and AIDS and the trafficking of persons. 

This is despite the consistent and vocal leadership of members like Rep. Barbara Lee, who have consistently fought the dangerous, counterproductive, and inefficient aid conditionality of the APLO. 

Whereas there is no evidence that proclaiming opposition to sex work is an effective public health intervention, there is evidence that decriminalization of sex work would have an astounding impact on reducing the HIV epidemic, averting between 33-46 percent of new infections over a decade. Yet the APLO directly blocks organizations from halting the spread of HIV. 

Sex workers are disproportionately impacted by HIV and AIDS globally. Halting the spread of HIV simply cannot happen without trusted engagement and leadership from sex workers. Over the past 17 years, the policy has promoted stigma and discrimination of sex workers. It oftentimes blocks sex workers from engaging in the design, development, implementation, and assessment of HIV and AIDS programs and services. HIV prevention and treatment programs are more successful when they include sex workers involvement and leadership. For some organizations around the world, working with sex workers while declaring opposition to sex work feels hypocritical. It was for these reasons that Brazil rejected $40 million in U.S. global AIDS money in 2005, noting that such restrictions undermined the very programs responsible for Brazil’s success in reducing the spread of HIV. 

International health and development agencies including UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNDP, the WHO, and the World Bank have recognized the role that decriminalization of sex work plays in advancing public health outcomes while also advancing the human rights of sex workers. 

In conclusion, APLO is a punitive rule that makes it difficult for sex workers to access comprehensive, accessible and affordable health care. But everyone deserves access to quality care. Social stigmas that disproportionately impact and undermine the sexual and reproductive health rights of people across the globe do not belong in our nation’s foreign aid programs, and nothing should change that. 

Serra Sippel is president the Center for Health and Gender Equity.

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Gay Pride for Me Celebrates the Freedom to Enjoy an Open Relationship

The very act of being a Queer person is radical. Who we love and who we have sex with are acts of political defiance. Being visible, being proud, refusing to hide who we are: These are rejections of tyranny, and Pride Month is an opportunity to celebrate that.

Being LGBTQ also means freedom — to define for myself how relationships will look. There is strength there, and Pride is about these things, too.

We didn’t want our relationship to feel like a trap. We both wanted to be free to explore and to experience new things, and didn’t want to limit each other.

So June is the ideal time to make the case for open relationships and to discuss how my partner, Layne, and I have benefited from our recent decision to open up.

When you live as an outsider, there is an opportunity to question the rules of the society you are living in. If who I am is viewed as wrong, or flawed, then why should I conform? Since LGBTQ people as a community have always been on the outside, there has been a long history of questioning how we approach love and sex and relationships. Layne and I decided we didn’t want the rules we followed to be outdated heteronormative ideas.

We each want the other to have the chance to live his life as big as possible. We had discussed the idea of having a nonmonogamous relationship many times over the course of our two years together before giving it a shot this year (though we’re currently taking a hiatus in order to social distance during COVID-19). Neither of us wanted to feel like we were being forced into some societal definition of how a relationship should look and work.

The decision to open up had nothing to do with our sex life or the depth of our feelings for each other. It didn’t mean something was missing in our relationship. But it did mean we didn’t want our relationship to feel like a trap. We both wanted to be free to explore and to experience new things and didn’t want to limit each other.

It’s not that I feel that monogamy is wrong or inherently flawed; it’s the idea that monogamy is the only way to have a strong and viable relationship that I reject. Indeed, the idea that monogamy is the only path to a healthy relationship is ridiculous. The argument could be made that monogamy creates resentment, that it’s why people lie and cheat on each other. Monogamy is fine if that’s what works for you. But it isn’t what works for me — and that’s fine as well.

At the same time, just because I believe in open, nonmonogamous and poly relationships doesn’t mean I don’t struggle with them, with jealousy and insecurity and doubt. It hasn’t always been easy. I can be petty. I often refer to myself as a cave man. Belief and practice aren’t always seamless. Ultimately, my fears come down to the same thing: What if I’m not good enough, sexy enough, worthy of love? And what if that means I end up alone, abandoned, with no one?

Image: Jeff Leavell, Layne Manzer
From left, Layne Manzer and Jeff Leavell.Courtesy Jeff Leavell

This raises the obvious question: If it’s so hard and threatening and scary, is it worth it? The answer is, absolutely, yes. Even when it feels impossibly hard, it is worth it. It can be scary and threatening. But I don’t want to let fear define how I love my partner or how I live my life.

I think it’s common to fall in love with someone and then try to make that person conform to our needs, but in doing this we are actually killing the very thing we found so attractive in the first place. The person we fell in love with is this whole, separate, living human being. I didn’t want to change Layne. Instead, I wanted to encourage him to be the man I met, to keep growing. I fell in love with Layne because of his independence.

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What being in a nonmonogamous relationship has taught me is that I can’t be, nor do I want to be, everything for my partner. Once I became willing to think differently, I began to question many of the rules of relationships and the best ways to support my partner.

Do we want to live together or do we choose to maintain separate households? How do we approach our finances? How do we set our goals as individuals and as a couple? Where do we see ourselves in the future?

The very act of rethinking assumptions about relationships has opened up a space for Layne and me to really question our choices and desires and what we each want and need from the other.

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At the end of the day, I get to be with the man I love. I’m excited for our journey and I’m excited that I get to grow with him and explore new boundaries. I get to witness my partner as he grows, to see the man he will become.

And I am excited to see who I will become. I know that I have his support and love, that he is encouraging me just as I am encouraging him.

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