Divisions over LGBTQ-related policies have flared recently at several religious colleges in the United States. On Monday, there was a dramatic new turn at one of the most rancorous battlegrounds — Seattle Pacific University.
A group of students, faculty and staff at the Christian university sued leaders of the board of trustees for refusing to scrap an employment policy barring people in same-sex relationships from full-time jobs at SPU. The 16 plaintiffs say the trustees’ stance — widely opposed on campus — is a breach of their fiduciary duties that threatens to harm SPU’s reputation, worsen enrollment difficulties and possibly jeopardize its future.
The lawsuit, filed in Washington State Superior Court, requests that the defendants — including the university’s interim president, Pete Menjares — be removed from their positions. It asks that economic damages, in an amount to be determined at a jury trial, be paid to anyone harmed by the LGBTQ hiring policy.
“This case is about six men who act as if they, and the educational institution they are charged to protect, are above the law,” the lawsuit says. “While these men are powerful, they are not above the law… They must be held to account for their illegal and reckless conduct.”
In addition to Menjares, the defendants are board chair Dean Kato; trustees Matthew Whitehead, Mark Mason and Mike Quinn, and former trustee Michael McKee. Whitehead and Mason are leaders of the Free Methodist Church, a denomination whose teachings do not recognize same-sex marriage and which founded SPU in 1891.
There was no immediate response to the lawsuit from SPU, though its communications office acknowledged receiving a query from The Associated Press and said a reply was in the works.
SPU’s LGBTQ-related employment policy has been a source of bitter division on the campus over the past two years. One catalyst was a lawsuit filed against SPU in January 2021 by Jeaux Rinedahl, an adjunct professor who alleged he was denied a full-time, tenured position because he was gay.
That lawsuit eventually was settled out of court, but it intensified criticism of the hiring. Through surveys and petitions, it’s clear that large majorities of the faculty and student body oppose the policy, yet a majority of the trustees reaffirmed it in May — triggering resignations by other trustees and protests by students that included a prolonged sit-in at the school’s administrative offices.
At SPU’s graduation on June 12, dozens of students protested by handing gay-pride flags to Menjares, rather than shake his hand, as they received diplomas.
Kato, the trustees’ chair, responded to the protests with a firm defense of the hiring policy.
“We acknowledge there is disagreement among people of faith on the topic of sexuality and identity,” Kato’s wrote to student activists. “But after careful and prayerful deliberation, we believe these longstanding employee expectations are consistent with the University’s mission and Statement of Faith that reflect a traditional view on biblical marriage and sexuality.”
In June, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson notified SPU that his office was investigating “possible discriminatory employment policies and practices” at the school. SPU was asked to provide details on hiring and firing policies related to individuals’ sexual orientation and involvement in a same-sex marriage or relationship.
On July 27, SPU filed a federal court lawsuit against Ferguson, contending that his investigation violated the university’s right to religious freedom.
“Seattle Pacific has asked a federal district court to step in and protect its freedom to choose employees on the basis of religion, free from government interference or intimidation,” the school said in a statement.
Ferguson responded two days later, declaring that his office “respects the religious views of all Washingtonians” but chiding SPU for resorting to litigation.
“The lawsuit demonstrates that the University believes it is above the law to such an extraordinary degree that it is shielded from answering basic questions from my office regarding the University’s compliance with state law,” Ferguson said.
When Joseph Kibbe attended the first Boise Pride Festival in 1989, he and about two dozen other participants wore paper bags over their heads to hide their faces from potentially violent onlookers.
At the first festival parade two years later, Kibbe and his friends were greeted by protesters with nooses in front of the Statehouse.
“Boise was a very different place back then — it was not a safe time to be LGBTQIA,” he said.
Still, for Kibbe — then a junior high student who faced frequent beatings at school, now the vice principal of the Boise Pride Festival board — the event was the one place where he felt like part of a community.
“I could come and be who I wanted to be here, who I actually was,” Kibbe said on Friday, just a few hours before this year’s festival was set to begin. “That was a huge morale booster, and why I’m so passionate about what we’re doing today.”
But this year, a roughly half-hour program on the three-day-long festival schedule called “Drag Kids” has prompted a wave of political pressure and anonymous threats.
Festival organizers envisioned a short performance where kids could put on sparkly dresses and lip-sync to songs like Kelly Clarkson’s “People Like Us” on stage. But others, including Idaho Republican Party Chairwoman Dorothy Moon, expected a lurid scene where children would “engage in sexual performances with adult entertainers.”
The event garnered national attention from far-right websites and podcasts, and by Tuesday organizers realized this wasn’t the “normal” amount of opposition, said festival president Michael Dale.
“The sexualization of children is wrong, full stop,” the Idaho GOP wrote on Twitter. “Idaho rejects the imposition of adult sexuality & adult sexual appetites on children.”
Moon and the Idaho GOP sent out statements directing constituents to ask the festival’s corporate sponsors to pull support. A few did, at least partly — removing their logos from festival fencing and canceling plans for booths. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare announced it was pulling $38,000 in funding along with resources focused on tobacco-cessation and HIV/AIDS prevention.
A conservative pastor from California began rallying like-minded congregations, asking members to tell the Ada County Sheriff to arrest any festival organizer who “contributes to the delinquency of minors.” A group known for armed protests told followers to show up Sunday.
Others, though, rallied to support Boise Pride. Four Democratic state lawmakers pledged their own financial support, and released a joint statement criticizing what they called “the false, dangerous claims from Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon that stoke violence.” New business sponsors stepped up to fill vacancies.
But the political maelstrom was growing more intense by the hour, and five kids were stuck in the middle. Riley Burrows, a full-time drag entertainer from Boise who was co-producing the Drag Kids event, began getting death threats on social media.
“It’s: ‘We’re going to show up at this festival,’ ‘We’re coming after you,’ ‘I hope you know you have a target on your back,’ and ‘You’re going to be found in a tree,’” Burrows said. “It’s gotten so repetitive.”
On Thursday afternoon, festival organizers made the decision to postpone the kids’ performance.
“We wanted to ask these kids first and foremost, because it affects them, and their confidence and their lives. And they still wanted to do it,” Dale said, fighting back tears. “But it came to be an issue of their health, their wellbeing, and that of the festival-goers.”
Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric has been increasing in Idaho and around the U.S. in recent months, and earlier this year 31 members of a white supremacist group were arrested outside of a northern Idaho Pride event for allegedly planning to riot. The Boise Pride organizers have been working with Boise Police to boost security since the northern Idaho arrests in June.
None of the five young performers are new to drag shows. The youngest is 10, and was inspired by watching her mom get ready to perform.
“She really wanted to copy me and just do the makeup and have fun with it,” said Harley Innocent, who goes by her stage name. Innocent is one of many cisgender women who participate in drag, sometimes referred to as “AFAB” or “Assigned Female At Birth Queens.”
Her daughter’s first performance was in 2019, in the rural Idaho town of Emmett. She loved it, Innocent said.
“She was really looking forward to being able to do it on the Pride main stage — it was a big opportunity for her to share her talent.”
Innocent says her daughter does a “porcelain doll” makeup look, wears a wig and chooses a song that fits her mood.
It’s similar to a glitzy beauty pageant, Innocent said, but more laid back. “In drag you don’t have to be perfect. We’re just trying to have fun and welcome them to this art form.”
Burrows, the Drag Kids co-producer, said the kids are just having fun on stage in pretty outfits.
“It’s like if you were to send your kid to a school of dance, and the performance theme was rainbows — big tutus, bows and fun hair.”
That’s different from an adult drag show, which can have heavier themes, more revealing costumes and be geared toward more mature audiences, Burrows said: “It’s like the difference between a kid’s TV show and an adult TV show.”
Youth performances can give kids a sense of belonging, he said, adding that “it’s not scary to be gay when you’re surrounded by love and acceptance.”
There’s a lot more support available for LGBTQ kids today, said Kibbe, but it was still heartbreaking to tell them the event was being postponed until organizers could find a safer, more supportive venue.
The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed an Orthodox Jewish university in New York to deny official recognition to an LGBTQ student group, the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a brief order granted an emergency request made by Yeshiva University, which claims that recognizing the group would be contrary to its sincere religious beliefs. Sotomayor has responsibility for emergency applications arising from New York.
The dispute is the latest clash between religious rights and LGBTQ rights to reach the high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Friday’s decision puts on hold a decision by a New York state judge, who ruled in June that the university was bound by the New York City Human Rights Law, which bars discrimination based on sexual orientation. The university argues that it is a religious institution and therefore should be exempted from the law. Requiring it to endorse the group would be a “clear violation” of its rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects the free exercise of religion, the university argues. Sotomayor said the lower court ruling would remain on hold “pending further order” of the Supreme Court, suggesting the court could issue a more detailed order in the coming days.
“Yeshiva shouldn’t have been forced to go all the way to the Supreme Court to receive such a commonsense ruling in favor of its First Amendment rights. We are grateful that Justice Sotomayor stepped in to protect Yeshiva’s religious liberty in this case,” said Eric Baxter, a lawyer at the religious liberty legal advocacy group Becket, which is representing Yeshiva.
The Pride Alliance group, which first sought recognition in 2019, sued in April 2021, saying the university was required to grant its request because it is a place of public accommodation that is covered by the anti-discrimination law.
Katherine Rosenfeld, a lawyer for Pride Alliance, said Friday that the group “remains committed to creating a space space for LGBTQ students” on campus and would await final action from the Supreme Court.
Yeshiva, which describes itself in court papers as “a deeply religious Jewish university,” has said that officials concluded after consulting with Jewish religious scholars that an official LGBTQ club would be inconsistent with its religious values. The university was founded in 1897 for religious purposes and says it maintains that character even as it expanded its educational scope to include secular programs.
The New York City anti-discrimination law includes an exemption for religious organizations, but Manhattan-based Judge Lynn Kotler concluded that Yeshiva did not meet the relevant criteria.
Pride Alliance, joined by four individual plaintiffs, said in its response that the university’s request was premature and questioned whether there was an emergency that warranted Supreme Court intervention. All the university would be required to do if the judge’s order was allowed to go into effect is provide the group access to the same facilities that 87 other groups already receive, the group’s lawyers said.
Kotler’s ruling “does not touch the university’s well-established right to express to all students its sincerely held beliefs,” the lawyers said in court papers. They noted that a LGBTQ club has existed within the university’s law school for decades and that the university’s student bill of rights says that the New York human rights law applies to students.
Members of Pride Alliance have said that they are planning events backing LGBTQ rights for the coming weeks, including some timed around Jewish holidays.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority has strongly backed religious rights in recent cases, including several in its last term that ended in June. Among those rulings, the court ruled in favor of a high school football coach who led prayers on the field after games, sparking concerns from school officials that his actions could be viewed as government endorsement of religion as prohibited under the First Amendment.
The court, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, has also weighed several cases pitting LGBTQ rights against religious rights, ruling in 2021 in favor of a Catholic Church-affiliated agency that Philadelphia had barred from participating in its foster care services because the group refused to place children with same-sex couples. In 2018, the court ruled in favor of a conservative Christian baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Along similar lines, the justices are set to hear oral arguments this fall in a case involving a web designer from Colorado who wants the court to rule that, based on her evangelical Christian beliefs, she does not have to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. The court is currently on its summer recess, with the new term set to start in October.
In the last three decades, protections for LGBT people’s rights have advanced rapidly in many countries and regions. However, rising populist authoritarianism poses a significant threat to this progress because abolishing sexual freedom is often at the heart of repressive political projects. The progress and backsliding in my home country, Colombia, illustrates the process of using democracy to erode rights.
In 2016, Colombia seemed like a legislative paradise for LGBT people. That year, a pinnacle of legislative success was a Constitutional Court ruling that secured a range of family rights for same-sex couples, including marriage and adoption, and protection of LGBT students in schools. But toward the end of the year, there was another exceptional event. In an effort to end a brutal, decades-long armed conflict, the Andean country held a plebiscite on a peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Unexpectedly, a small majority of 50.2 percent rejected the agreement after a bitter and polarizing campaign.
A key issue that mobilized the “no” electorate was the moral panic generated by the inclusion of gender, women rights, and LGBT-related provisions in the peace agreement, including a definition of gender and the explicit recognition of these populations as victims of the armed conflict. Extremist groups decried these provisions as imposing a “gender ideology,” tapping into a recent controversy about gender and sexuality education in schools.
Following the suicide of a queer student who had experienced severe bullying and discrimination in school, the Constitutional Court directed the government to carry out an existing law detailing measures to protect LGBT students from discrimination and to recognize diversity in sexual orientation and gender identity as a principle of comprehensive sexuality education. Conservative groups attacked this decision as imposing “gender ideology” on children, and social media became a battleground where the fate of Colombia’s peace was intertwined with the fate of LGBT people.
Many Colombians followed the conservative groups’ reasoning and conflated the peace agreement and the Court’s decision, believing the peace deal itself advanced “gender ideology” through gender and LGBT inclusive provisions. Again, social media—this time coupled with ballots—was the site of this mobilization. Political actors disseminated outrageous falsehoods regarding the peace agreement on social media networks, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, all of which impacted the public perception of the plebiscite. Notably, several fueled the idea that if the peace agreement were approved, “gender ideology” would be included in the Constitution and society would be “homosexualized.”
This juxtaposition between success in court and the mobilization of anti-LGBT sentiment on the streets left me questioning the efficacy of using law reform as a primary strategy to advance LGBT rights. Six years after the rejection of the peace agreement referendum, I can see that what happened in Colombia was not an isolated incident; instead, it has now formed an integral part of a new authoritarian playbook that manipulates democratic institutions to undermine the rights of women and LGBT people.
Anti-LGBT movements develop national, regional, and global strategies that rely on political authoritarianism, the spread of misinformation, and grassroots mobilization. A notable rhetorical feature of the anti-gender movement is its use of human rights language to undermine LGBT rights, for example, by using religious freedom or parental rights as a basis for attacking minority rights. This political homophobia approach is the major threat to LGBT rights worldwide.
In many parts of the world, as never before, the legal recognition of the rights of LGBT people is gaining ground, and the long arc of history shows rapid progress, primarily triggered by democratic institutions such as elected officials or independent judges. One benchmark is the gradual decriminalization of same-sex conduct, another is the extension of marriage equality. However, this legal evolution coexists with threats such as those witnessed in Colombia. Well-organized groups mobilize around abstract and unfounded fears, articulating their conservative agendas in the frame of “gender ideology” that would somehow undermine the family and corrupt children, exploiting polarized elections, constitutional changes, or institutional crises.
Moreover, these actors are often aligned with authoritarian political projects that use social media to spread misinformation and smear campaigns. They instrumentalize anxieties around children and their welfare to garner popular support, invoking inveterate, dangerous stereotypes of LGBT people as immoral corrupters of children. In some contexts, these actions usher in anti-LGBT legislation and, at the same time, bolster the political fortunes of authoritarian leaders.
This new form of anti-LGBT sentiment is codified in legislation that focuses on censoring public expressions of identity, including speech on sexual orientation and gender identity, justified under the pretext of “protecting children.” The Russian “gay propaganda” law is a classic example of political homophobia that curbs the rights of LGBT youth and has a broader, stifling effect on the public expression of identity.
In recent years, Hungary has enacted laws banning discussions on LGBT issues, ended legal gender recognition for transgender and intersex people, and amended the constitution to define marriage as a heterosexual union and to functionally prohibit same-sex adoption. Seeking to justify its homophobic rhetoric the government held a homophobic referendum coinciding with national election day in April.
Poland, and more recently Romania, have taken steps to adopt comparable legislation. A bill before the Ghanaian parliament that forbids any form of support or speech regarding LGBT rights similarly discriminates against LGBT people.
In the Americas, lawmakers have increasingly proposed anti-LGBT legislation, such as in the United States where in the last five years there has been a spate of laws primarily targeting trans and non-binary youth in states including Texas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. And in Brazil, Human Rights Watch analyzed 217 bills and laws that restrict comprehensive sexuality education, including information on sexual orientation and gender identity, or ban alleged “indoctrination.” In Guatemalaand Perú lawmakers have proposed bills with similar terms, though in Guatemala the bill was withdrawn.
We should view the struggle for LGBT rights as part of a broader struggle against authoritarianism: a political regime founded on the erosion of human rights and freedoms, particularly of the most vulnerable groups. We should invest more in understanding the tactics that pro-authoritarian groups use, especially on social media. We should also develop recommendations and strategies to end the harmful misuse of social media and hold tech companies accountable for allowing the spread and amplification of damaging, bigoted messages.
Finally, any legal actions and progress should continue building on the grassroots mobilization of LGBT people and our allies. As is, law without social mobilization is vulnerable to authoritarian backlash.
On September 4, members of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq proposed an odious bill to Parliament that, if passed, would punish any individual or group who advocates for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. The bill is reportedly gaining momentumamong parliament members.
According to the “Bill on the Prohibition of Promoting Homosexuality,” anyone who advocates for LGBT rights or “promotes homosexuality” would face imprisonment up to one year, and a fine of up to five million dinars (US$3,430). The bill would also suspend, for up to one month, the licenses of media companies and civil society organizations that “promote homosexuality.”
If passed, the law would endanger free expression in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) and eradicate public discussion around gender and sexuality. Even as LGBT people across Iraq have faced egregious violence, including murder, over two decades, the KRI was a comparatively accessible space for activism.
The proposed bill comes amid a heightened crackdown on free assembly and expression in the KRI, where just last month security forces arrested dozens of journalists, activists, and politicians in advance of planned protests over worsening corruption, poverty, and unemployment.
The new law would make a bad situation worse for LGBT people in Iraq, who can already be arrested under a range of vague penal code provisions aimed at policing morals and limiting free expression. In June 2021, police in the KRI issued arrest warrants under a “public indecency” provision against 11 LGBT rights activists who are either current or former employees at Rasan Organization, a Sulaymaniyah-based human rights group. As of September 2022, the case remained open pending investigation, though authorities had not detained the activists.
Advocates who support LGBT rights and document abuses against them should not fear reprisals for speaking up. The Kurdistan Regional Government should immediately quash the proposed bill and publicly guarantee the right to free expression, including around the rights of LGBT people.
Though public support for pro-LGBTQ policies is at an all-time high, many queer people living in the South report that a caregiver tried to change their LGBTQ identity, a new survey found.
More than half, or about 58%, of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in 13 Southern states reported that a parent or caregiver tried to change or repress their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to a survey published this week by the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South.
Some groups were more likely to report experiencing such efforts: More than two-thirds of transgender participants (68.7%) and participants of color (67.5%) reported experiencing these efforts, compared to 50.8% of cisgender participants and 57.4% of white participants. Younger LGBTQ Southerners, those ages 18-24, were also more likely to report that a caregiver tried to change or repress their identity (64.4%) compared to those 25 and older (51.1%).
The Campaign for Southern Equality partnered with Campus Pride, which advocates for LGBTQ inclusivity and safety at U.S. colleges and universities, to survey 4,146 LGBTQ Southerners in the fall of 2021. The new survey’s questions covered family, faith, education and health.
Austin H. Johnson, the director of the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Research & Policy Center and an assistant professor of sociology at Kenyon College, said in a statement that the dominant narrative emerging from the survey data “is that thousands of individuals throughout the South are not getting the social support they need and deserve at home, in schools, and in their communities.”
“This lack of support and inclusion is disempowering and may cause detrimental harm to their mental and physical wellbeing, especially when that lack of support gets compounded with clear, state-sponsored discrimination such as the passage of anti-LGBTQ laws,” he stated.
Among the other data, the survey found that more than two-thirds (68.82%) of respondents who identified as spiritual or religious reported that they were alienated or discouraged from participating in their faith community due to their LGBTQ identity.
More than one-third (33.9%) of all LGBTQ survey respondents reported experiencing efforts to repress or change their sexual orientation or gender identity in a religious setting, with participants ages 18-24 more likely to report such efforts (44.1%) compared to respondents 25 or older (30.7%).
The survey also asked LGBTQ Southerners about their physical and mental health. Most participants rated their physical health as fair (43.42%) or good (37.48%), though most also rated their mental health poor (28.7%) or fair (40.2%). More than half of LGBTQ Southerners surveyed (56%) reported experiencing suicidal ideation, and more than one in 10 (13.5%) reported attempting suicide at least once.
Shane L. Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, said in a statement that “it’s especially troubling that younger people are often perceiving and receiving less emotional, mental, and physical support and resources than older respondents.”
“Young LGBTQ+ people are being forced to conjure immense strength and resilience to combat marginalization and isolation — and it’s vital that we do everything we can, on every level of society, to support and affirm them for being who they are,” Windmeyer stated.
The survey recommends that educational institutions “take a proactive approach to inclusion” by having a clear mission statement against discrimination of LGBTQ students and by including queer students in school policies. It also recommends that schools create privacy policies that do not “out” LGBTQ students to their family or others without their knowledge and permission — a recommendation that contradicts guidance that some teachers say they have received due to new state laws.
“Considering both the findings of this report and the anti-LGBTQ sentiment among many school boards and decision makers across the South, it is clear that much of the harm experienced by younger LGBTQ individuals is in school,” the authors wrote in the report’s conclusion. “Regardless of the political and cultural attacks in the South, and the lack of protections from the institutions we rely on as Southerners, the LBGTQ community in the South is truly that — a community, one with an overwhelming amount of love, acceptance, joy, and beauty.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.
For many gay and bisexual men, the sprawling and chaotic monkeypox outbreak has upended a summer that was supposed to be a well-earned opportunity — following the peak of the Covid crisis — to finally have some fun and revel with their gay brothers without the threat of viral infection hanging over them.
Soon after Memorial Day, however, these men, as well as transgender individuals and other queer people — GBTQ for short, because lesbians’ monkeypox risk is remote — were met head-on with harrowing reports about monkeypox’s often devastating and disfiguring effects on the body. Next came anger and frustration over what queer activists characterize as the Biden administration’s fumbling initial response to the outbreak.
Lost amid the frantic media and public health reports about monkeypox epidemiology, the delayed vaccine deliveries and the squabbling over how best to communicate about the virus are the millions of GBTQ people whose happiness, well-being and connection to one another have in many cases been considerably compromised by the mere threat of monkeypox infection.
Guillermo Rojas spent the summer in his native Mexico City because of the high rates of monkeypox in New York, where he now lives. Benjamin Ryan
“Life has sort of halted,” said Guillermo Rojas, 29, a Mexican citizen and public administration graduate student in New York City. “This was supposed to be the great summer that everything went back and opened.”
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, a psychiatrist at the LGBTQ-health-focused Fenway Institute in Boston, said the outbreak has “been extremely distressing for community members and is also triggering in that it harkens back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It has a chilling effect on people’s sense of community, cohesion and belonging.”
Fortunately, there has been at most one U.S. monkeypox death in the U.S. — a potential case in a severely immunocompromised person in Texas is under investigation — even as the national case count has swelled to 19,465 diagnoses. And after a slow start, the federal government has now doled out approximately 800,000 vaccine vials, with a heady supply arriving in short order.
People lined up outside of Department of Health & Mental Hygiene clinic on June 23, 2022 in New York.Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Over 100 gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people responded to an NBC News online survey seeking to learn about how monkeypox has affected their lives. What this diverse cross-section of the community most had in common were missed opportunities. They wrote about sex they never had, dates they never went on and gatherings with friends they avoided.
All that avoidance, the respondents made evident, was enmeshed in a cat’s cradle of fear — of contagion, of pain and suffering, of lonely and potentially financially ruinous weeks of isolation at home should they contract the virus.
They spoke of a summer they had hoped would prove invincible but that for them has turned out to be anything but.
A decade of sexual liberation, interrupted
Over the past 10 years, the introduction of PrEP, the HIV prevention pill, and the emergence of landmark studies proving that successfully treating HIV blocks transmission of the virus have cultivated a resurgent sexual liberation among many GBTQ people. Long-standing anxieties about HIV have eased, and hookup apps have made meeting sexual partners as convenient as procuring takeout — hence the term “ordering in.” As a result, people like Rojas have felt free to explore and revel in sex in a way queer people haven’t since the AIDS epidemic brought to a crashing close the sexual freedoms gay men enjoyed during the 1970s.
Then, in 2020, a new viral plague kept all of society cooped up and longing for freedom.
“Post-Covid,” said Rojas, recalling how he experienced the free-spirited bacchanalia into which monkeypox arrived in New York City this spring, “everybody went crazy, and there were sex parties all over town.”
Monkeypox swiftly pushed the contemporary safer-sex playbook out the window. Queer people have been left scrambling for answers about how to protect themselves and have expressed bewilderment as they’ve struggled to process mixed messaging from public health leaders and journalists about what poses a substantial risk of infection.
Rojas was one of the first U.S. residents to receive the prized monkeypox vaccine, in late June. But even with the benefit of his first jab of the two-dose vaccine, he has still sharply curtailed what he had hoped would be a long-awaited libertine summer.
“I’ve stopped going to sex parties,” he said, given that public health authorities identified such gatherings of men as major monkeypox risk factors. “I also stopped having sex with people who live off their OnlyFans. I additionally stopped cruising at the gym, I did not continue to go to Fire Island, and I stopped attending orgies.”
Evidence suggests a recent tidal shift in sexual behaviors in responses to monkeypox. According to the American Men’s Internet Survey, which conducted an online poll in early August of 824 gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, 48% reported reducing their number of sexual partners because of the outbreak, while 50% reduced hook-ups and 49% reduced partners met on hookup apps or at sex venues.
“It’s just a small, temporary break until everybody gets the vaccine,” said Rojas, who remained so concerned about living in the nation’s monkeypox epicenter that he decamped to his family’s home in Mexico City for the summer.
Fighting over — and for — sexual freedom
Not everyone in the queer community has been on the same page regarding monkeypox precautions. Just as battles over mask mandates and school closures have turned neighbor against neighbor during the Covid pandemic, fierce internecine conflicts have arisen among GBTQ people this summer about the best ways to respond to and communicate about monkeypox.
Michael Weinstein, the president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, dusted off his outspoken antipathy toward PrEP and published a scathing rebuke of the sexual liberties the HIV-prevention pill has facilitated in an op-ed titled “Monkeypox Reckoning” in the Los Angeles Blade on Monday. Notorious for an unapologetically strident, moralizing and fear-based approach to HIV-prevention communication, one that is far out of step with that of the vast majority of the public health community, Weinstein decried “a wholesale abandonment of safer sex promotion in favor of PrEP.”
“There has always been a sex radical group that has defined gay liberation as absolute sexual freedom,” Weinstein wrote, blaming monkeypox on those freedoms.
For another man named Michael, who like some people interviewed preferred to go only by his first name to shield his privacy, protecting himself against monkeypox by sacrificing the very sexual freedoms that Weinstein castigates has come, he said, at a great cost.
“I am not changing my behavior with an attitude of cheerful, take-one-for-the-team compliance,” said Michael, 42, who works in education in Philadelphia. “Instead, I find the situation fearful, miserable and diminishing. I am experiencing this outbreak as a serious setback to something that is very important to me, namely sexual freedom.
“Sex,” he continued, “isn’t just a frivolous pastime. For many of us, sex has serious meaning, sex is one of the things that makes life worth living.”
LaRon Nelson is an associate professor of nursing and public health at Yale University and a long-time researcher in the HIV field.Mara Lavitt
After more than two years of Covid restrictions, the arrival on U.S. shores of yet another major virus has also dealt a blow to the already strained mental health of many queer people, said LaRon Nelson, an associate professor of nursing and public health at Yale University.
“The fear of contracting monkeypox and the concern about access to the vaccine have led people to isolate or continue to isolate,” Nelson said. “That chronic exposure to this type of stress also comes at the expense of their psychological well-being.”
J.J. Ryan, a bisexual trans man assigned female at birth, spent the height of the Covid pandemic transitioning.
“I felt like I was just surviving before. I wasn’t really living,” Ryan, 34, said of his pre-transition life. “So I was really excited to get out and live my life — for this to finally be my ‘hot boy summer.’” Instead, he said, he has sadly “sharply reduced” his sexual exploration.
Fears of resurgent discrimination
With so many broken social, romantic, familial and sexual connections lying in pieces around them, many of the respondents to NBC News’ survey said they further dreaded that the monkeypox outbreak would fuel discrimination, hate and even violence toward LGBTQ people.
There is evidence — including a recent attack in Washington, D.C. — that such fears are beginning to manifest.
“My greatest worry in all of this is the turning of the clock back to less and less acceptance society-wise,” said Ryan, who is a Ph.D. student and a policy researcher at a nonprofit research organization in Washington.
John Pachankis is a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health and a leading researcher of LGBTQ mental health.Michael Benabib
John Pachankis, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, noted how for the past two decades, queer advocacy organizations have pushed “a narrative that gay people are just like everyone else” in a successful effort to secure many civil rights protections. He spoke to the conflict that members of this community now face when the particulars of gay sex lie at the heart of the monkeypox outbreak and, as during the AIDS crisis, have become fodder for intense public debate.
“In the context of the real threat of those rights’ being taken away,” Pachankis said, referring to the recent rising tide of anti-LGBTQ sentiment and policies in the U.S., “the last thing that you want to do is disconfirm that narrative — even if the picture is a little more nuanced, even if gay people do live distinct lives from straight people, even if they express their sexuality more creatively, some might say more authentically.”
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Brian Minalga works in the HIV field in Seattle.Courtesy Brian Minalga
Brian Minalga, 36, who is gender nonbinary and works in the HIV field in Seattle, said: “There’s this idea that there are good people with good behaviors having the good type of sex. It’s moralistic and puritanical.”
Recapitulating racial disparities
For queer people of color, the outbreak has brought an unwelcome recapitulation of the racial health disparities that have characterized both the HIV and the Covid epidemics in the U.S.
“We saw monkeypox start with more affluent white gay men, and then eventually it seeped into more diverse networks, and that includes men of color,” said Gregorio Millett, the director of public policy at amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and various state andlocal health departmentshavereported that monkeypox is indeed already disproportionately affecting Blacks and Latinos. And yet outsize shares of the vaccines have tended to go to whites — thanks, health advocates say, to structural factors that favor access to more privileged members of society.
Watching such patterns play out “is painful,” said Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, an associate professor at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, “because it’s a reminder of the presence of systemic racism.”
Matthew Rose, 36, a health equity advocate in Washington, D.C., spoke to the myriad ways he and his Black gay peers have been dehumanized over time. He said he feared that monkeypox, the very name of which evokes a racist trope, will only worsen matters.
“For Black gay men, the last thing you need is to add a whole other discussion where you become this Black vector of disease,” he said.
Three viruses, one sense of fear
For some GBTQ people, fears of contagion instilled during the height of the Covid pandemic have primed further anxieties about monkeypox. The rueful history of the early AIDS epidemic serves as yet another backdrop.
“I decided several weeks ago that intimate contact isn’t worth the risk until I am fully vaccinated and the infection rate is under control,” said Steven Dwyer, 68, who is retired and based out of Baltimore and has been living with HIV since the mid-1980s. “As a long-term AIDS survivor, I learned it’s better to get informed about disease outbreaks that could affect me.”
The plight of Jason, a Los Angeles-area screenwriter in his late 20s, is a particularly profound example of the way crippling anxieties about infectious disease can be all-consuming. Jason has lived with obsessive compulsive disorder since childhood. It causes him intense dread of contagion and contamination, as well as various compulsions in response to such thoughts and stimuli. Fear of Covid left him largely housebound. Now the monkeypox outbreak has magnified those fears just as he was starting to feel more comfortable with venturing outside.
Jason lives with his boyfriend, and they’re monogamous, so contracting monkeypox sexually isn’t a concern. But suggestions that casual contact or contaminated surfaces can transmit monkeypox have left him reluctant to push his luck with his OCD. Consequently, for Jason, it’s as if those cloistered first few months of the Covid pandemic never ended.
“I am probably one of the only people I know that still doesn’t really go out much,” he said.
Many other GBTQ people said monkeypox has led them to question going to crowded spaces, such as concerts, bars and clubs — enjoyable outings and chances to connect with fellow queer people after having lived through the lonely and dull height of Covid.
Jason has been agonizing over whether to attend an upcoming concert of a performer he loves, something he has been looking forward to for years since it got delayed because of the pandemic. And in a recent interview, Dwyer, who travels constantly, expressed concern about contracting monkeypox from hotel linens.
Worries about monkeypox transmission even led to the cancellationof a major concert at the Southern Decadence celebration in New Orleans, which takes place over Labor Day weekend — even though it was to have been held outdoors.
Ryan said that when he visited his family in Philadelphia before he got his first monkeypox vaccination, his mother was hesitant to hug him for fear of the virus. That only aggravated his own worries about perhaps unknowingly passing monkeypox to his young niece and nephew.
Ben Rosen is a psychotherapist at the LGBTQ-focused Harlem United in New York.Brent Unkrich
Such hesitance from family members, said Ben Rosen, a psychotherapist at Harlem United in New York, parallels the cold shoulder many gay men got during the early AIDS crisis, “where people are being told, ‘Oh maybe you shouldn’tcome visit.’”
Recent research suggests, however, that anxieties about monkeypox transmission in public settings and other relatively casual scenarios are most likely misplaced or at least grossly overblown. According to researchpapers and reportsfrom globalhealth authorities, cases of nonsexual transmission are uncommon to rare.
Last week, Dwyer concluded that bed sheets don’t actually pose a substantial risk.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis was recently appointed as the White House national monkeypox response deputy coordinator.Benjamin Ryan
On an Aug. 19 call with reporters, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the deputy for the White House’s monkeypox response, said he believesattending crowded concerts is generally a low-risk activity. Merely brushing by someone, he said, is likely to be “low or no risk.”
Christopher Vasquez, 39, the director of communications at the National Center for Lesbian Rights in San Francisco, said: “I think we need to be very careful about overreacting and shutting down events. Especially after two-plus years of the LGBTQ community feeling the effects of loneliness and depression because of Covid.”
The great work begins
Praising the myriad ways queer activists have fought for a better response to monkeypox, including faster and broader access to vaccines, Keuroghlian of the Fenway Institute said, “The silver lining is to see the amazing ability of our community to organize with solidarity and to articulate their needs.”
There are signs such efforts are bearing fruit.
Recent reports suggest transmission slowdowns in New York, Chicago and San Francisco — likely the result, experts theorize, of changes in sexual behavior, increased vaccination and possibly immunity from past infection.
With the challenging summer coming to a close, Guillermo Rojas is freshly back in New York for the fall semester of his graduate studies at Columbia University. Sitting in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center on a humid late-summer afternoon just after a cloudburst, he expressed optimism over the future of the outbreak.
“As people start getting vaccinated and the second vaccine starts kicking in for most people, things should get back to normal,” he said.
He got his own second shot on Wednesday.
Editor’s note: NBC News would like to hear from people who have recovered from monkeypox infection. If you have, please fill out this confidential online survey, and we may contact you for an interview.
A 33-year-old Black trans woman was fatally shot in Detroit last week, becoming the second trans woman in a month to be murdered there.
On August 27, Dede Ricks was pronounced dead at the scene after police found her on the ground with gunshot wounds to her chest and back, The Detroit News reported.
Thirty-one-year-old Antoine Close has been arrested for killing Ricks and charged with second-degree murder and felony firearm possession. A motive has not been revealed.
“The fact that we have seen two homicides of transgender women in just three weeks shows the danger this community faces,” Alanna Maguire, president of LGBTQ advocacy organization Fair Michigan, said in a statement.
“Rather than being supported, we often hear people vilify the transgender community which fuels this kind of violence and hate. We are proud to work with Prosecutor Worthy’s office on these cases, and we hope to bring justice to the victims and their families.”
Wayne County, Michigan Prosecutor Kym Worthy emphasized that “while some protections for transgender citizens in Michigan are finally beginning to be recognized, their lives are still very much in danger.”
“We have seen this happen before and hope that this does not become a pattern,” she said.
The statement from the prosecutor’s office also inexplicably used Ricks’s deadname and then explained what a deadname is.
At the end of July, 28-year-old Hayden Davis, another Black trans woman, was also shot and killed in Detroit. Her killer has not been found, reports Fox2Detroit. Worthy said the cases do not seem to be connected.
In the United States, at least 27 trans people have been killed by violent means so far this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign. 2021 saw a record number of murders, with 50 trans and gender nonconforming people killed.
A group of “angel” defenders protected LGBTQ+ Brigham Young University students from protesters who targeted a Pride event.
Utah’s Brigham Young University (BYU) students were confronted by protesters on Saturday (3 September) during a scheduled “Back to School Pride Night” that included an all-ages drag show.
The hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ protesters reportedly screamed homophobic slurs and some had even brought handguns, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
But things took a turn after a group of counter-protesters appeared in white cloaks and wings made of sheets.
They formed a protective barrier around the group of rainbow-wearing students.
BYU student and “angel” Sabrina Wong told the Tribune: “I’m doing this because I want our LGBTQ community to feel like they can be themselves and know we have their backs.”
The religious university, which is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon church, disallows LGBTQ+ students from meeting on campus in organised groups.
It forbids same-sex dating on campus (despite removing the official policy in 2020), potentially violating several civil rights clauses according to Associated Press.
The group of protesters included former and current BYU students ,who described gender dysphoria as a “social contagion“. Others screamed various slurs at the group, including saying they were “going against God”.
“This shouldn’t be at a public park,” co-founder of the informal BYU conservative group Thomas Stevenson said.
The “Back to School Pride Night” was organised by the RaYnbow Collective, a local group focused on creating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ BYU students and staff.
It was a spin-off of the usual annual Pride event for new students of BYU, this time also featuring a family-friendly drag show that included BYU students as performers.
RaYnbow Collective’s founder Maddison Tenney was told by police to expect large anti-LGBTQ+ crowds ahead of the event.
“Religion has been weaponised against the queer community for a long time,” she said. “But that needs to end. I believe there’s nothing more divine than who I am as a queer child of God.”
Tenney initially thought of the angel costumes after seeing them being used by friends of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in 1999.
Shepard died six days after being beaten, tortured, and left hanging from a fence by two homophobic men, who were eventually sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole.
The tactic was used to block signs by members of the Westboro Baptist Church that read “God hates f*gs” from public view using the wings as a cover. It has become a common tactic by pro-LGBTQ+ religious groups, including at the funerals for the victims of the Orlando LGBTQ+ nightclub shooting in 2016.
Today U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled in Braidwood Management v. Becerra against a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires employers to provide insurance coverage for PrEP (Pre-exposure prophylaxis), a medication that prevents the transmission of HIV. The judge ruled that the ACA mandate violates employers’ rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Read the ruling in the case (courtesy of Chris Geidner)here.
Ivy Hill(they/them pronouns), Community Health Program Director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said today:
“This ruling is about imposing extreme religious beliefs – not, as it purports, about protecting religious freedom: Far right extremist judges are attacking privacy and access to health care.”
“We must be increasing access to life-saving medications like PrEP, not using it as the latest political wedge to attack LGBTQ people in the South. Whether it’s access to abortion, trans-affirming care, birth control, or PrEP, we are seeing dangerous action from activist courts intervening in Americans’ healthcare decisions – and we must push back.”
PrEP is a daily pill used widely for HIV prevention by individuals who are HIV-negative but at high risk for exposure, including men who have sex with men, people who are in a sexual relationship with an HIV-positive partner, and people who have recently injected drugs. Daily PrEP use can reduce the risk of HIV infection from sex by more than 90%.
PrEP is an especially critical strategy for HIV prevention in the South, the epicenter of the modern HIV crisis in the United States. According to 2016- 2017 CDC data, one-half of all HIV diagnoses occur in the South, 47% of HIV related deaths happened in the South, and 46% of people living with HIV live in the South. In the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Report of the 2019 Southern LGBTQ Health Survey(direct link to HIV data), we found that respondents’ reported rates of living with HIV more than 15 times higher than the national rate, with 5% of respondents saying they are living with HIV and 10.4% saying that they don’t know their status.
Judge O’Connor has a long history of ruling against the Affordable Care Act, and a history of rulings that harm the LGBTQ community, including opinions that overreached on marriage rights for same-sex couples and a decision on anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination that blatantly violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.
This summer the Campaign for Southern Equality launched a new campaign, Meeting the Moment in the LGBTQ South to mobilize responses to growing anti-LGBTQ attacks, such as this ruling. Learn more about Meeting the Moment here.
