If we have even just a shred of humanity left in our being, we’ve been shuddering at the hateful rhetoric spewing from the mouth of some Republican candidates, and especially the one getting all the attention — Donald Trump. The punishing vitriol towards those less fortunate than the self-aggrandizing businessman who would be king, will not be repeated here.  The press has devoted altogether far too much ink already to that particular narcissistic hate-monger.

Trump is a mixed bag on LGBT issues, at least by conservative standards, and far worse on immigration, women and the working poor.  More ominously, given the way he has lambasted Congress, the White House, and both parties, it is questionable whether, as president (God forbid) he would maintain a democracy at all.

So before we all get deported for one thing or another (foreignness, deviancy etc etc), let’s ask whether this country is really as bad as the ugly face presented by Trump and his supporters would have us believe?

A Washington Post-ABC News Poll, released on September 16, suggests not.  The poll specifically asked individuals about their views on so-called “religious freedom.”  It turns out that despite the circus hoopla surrounding #DespicableHer (aka Kim Davis), a majority of respondents thought she was in the wrong.

Most encouragingly, there was bi-partisan agreement among those polled about equality under the law versus religious beliefs.  Whether Democrat, Republican or Independent, a majority believed that “the need to treat everyone equally under the law” was more important than someone’s religious beliefs.  Eighty percent of Democrats thought so, trailed only slightly by Independents at 75% and Republicans at 66%.

Coincidentally, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) released its own, similar poll, one day earlier, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.  That poll found that “by a 68 to 24 percent majority, Americans oppose allowing government employees to cite their religious beliefs as a reason to deny service to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”  That majority included 50% of Republicans polled.

HRC has done quite a bit of polling to assess the mood in the country toward presidential candidates hostile to LGBT rights. Here are some of their most telling findings:

A 55 percent majority of voters are less likely to support a candidate for president who opposes allowing same-sex couples to marry, including 40 percent who strongly oppose.

A 59 percent majority of voters are less likely to support a candidate for president who opposes protecting LGBT people from discrimination.  This is not just a progressive base issue.  A 61 percent majority of Independent voters say they are less likely to support a candidate who opposes these protections, as do 58 percent of Catholic voters, 54 percent of blue collar voters and 60 percent of married women.

Fully 60 percent of Americans are less likely to support a candidate for president who supports laws allowing government officials such as Kim Davis to discriminate and deny service against LGBT people.

The significance here is that non-LGBT voters, and especially independents, are rejecting Republican opposition to LGBT rights.  The allies are turning out, and they are turning out from unexpected quarters.  The GOP candidates especially need the independents because, homophobic or not, they are not very likely to secure high numbers of LGBT voters.  As New York University professor Patrick J. Egan, told the New York Times after the 2012 Obama win, LGBT voters “aren’t swingable because they have liberal positions on a whole bunch of issues besides gay rights.”  In 2012, exit polls showed that 76 percent of voters who identified as gay supported Obama.

So does this mean that Republican presidential candidates have made a giant misread of the American voting public?

Brandon Lorenz, who leads the polling work in his position as Campaign Communications Director at HRC, says you just have to look at his organization’s April 2015 Indiana case study to find the answer.  After that state’s governor, Mike Pence, signed a controversial and discriminatory Religious Freedom Restoration Act, “Pence’s polling dropped like a rock,”  said Lorenz.  “People had a very negative view of his job approval.  This also damaged the state’s reputation and economy,” he added.  The HRC Indiana poll found 53% of likely voters said the religious refusal fight left them with a less favorable opinion of Gov. Pence.

Straight voters across the political spectrum who disagree with, or disapprove of, presidential candidates opposed to LGBT equality, constitute a powerful new base.  The encouraging numbers are “warning signs that candidates should heed carefully,” Lorenz says.

That message got through, in part, to the California Republican Party.  Perhaps sensing that their continued anti-LGBT stance may be losing them popularity, they voted near-unanimously on September 20 to remove anti-gay communications from their platform while adding language supportive of the LGBT community.  But they still stopped short of supporting marriage equality despite the fact that is now the law across the country.

The poll numbers will be put to the real test, of course, just over a year from now.  That’s when we will find out whether the stridency of the pro-Kim Davis crowd and the nasty trumpetings of Trump are the desperate hysteria of an out of date, out of touch minority clinging to survival.  Or whether the headline-grabbing venom of the anti-LGBT minority can deliver the White House as well.

Photo Credit: Huffingtonpost.com

The post As A Country, Are We Really This Bad? appeared first on Florida Agenda.

 To love another human being fully, one hundred percent, with every ounce of one’s heart and soul.  Is there any greater gift?  For some gay Catholics, that gift comes from God.  How could it not, they ask? 

“My sexuality is as much a gift from God as my spirituality,” says Christopher Cappiello in a video for DignityUSA, an organization that works for respect and justice for all people, especially gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender members of the Catholic Church.

“It means my capacity to love, to be in a loving, nurturing relationship for 26 years, with a man, has to be a gift from God.  If anything else in this life is, it’s got to be that,” concluded Cappiello.

The gift still ungiven, however, is full acceptance of LGBT Catholics by the Vatican hierarchy.  Many gay members of the Catholic church hoped that the visit by Pope Francis to the U.S. this week would afford a platform for such a change.  Seemingly so progressive in some areas, the pope has sent mixed signals on the LGBT front, leading to hopes both raised and dashed.  

“I am in many ways deeply impressed with Pope Francis, especially by his ardent concern for the poor and economically disenfranchised, and for the environment,” Carl Siciliano told me on the eve of the pope’s U.S. visit.  “But I am disappointed that he has thus far not signaled a willingness to explore substantial change in the church’s hostile stance towards homosexuality.”  

Siciliano is the founder of the Ali Forney Center, a shelter for homeless LGBT youth in New York City.  A gay Catholic and former Benedictine monk, Siciliano has worked with the homeless for more than 30 years and is passionate about seeing change within his Church.  He was among many in the Catholic and secular LGBT ranks who wrote to Pope Francis requesting a meeting during his U.S. tour.

Siciliano’s letter, termed a “plea”, implored Pope Francis to visit the LGBT youth at his Center and “see for yourself how their lives have been devastated and made destitute by religious rejection.”

DignityUSA and GLAAD, along with 28 co-signatory groups, sent their joint letter to the pope in late June.  (GLAAD is a secular organization that works to get positive and accurate stories about LGBT into the media.)  They described their request for a meeting with the pontiff as “a compelling pastoral need,” and said the teaching and practices of the church were “upholding systemic, institutionalized discrimination against LGBT people and our families.”  

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country’s largest, and arguably most influential, LGBT advocacy group, hung a banner on their building reading: “We Are Your Children, Your Teachers, Your Faithful.  Welcomed by God.  Dismissed By Our Bishops.  Pope Francis, Will You Welcome Us Home?”  HRC headquarters are conveniently located close to the Cathedral of St. Matthew where Pope Francis was to pray with bishops during his DC visit. 

HRC President, Chad Griffin, stated that, while the Campaign would “join in welcoming the pope to the United States, we will also be urging him to continue to move toward greater acceptance and embrace of members of our community who are longing to hear that their Church welcomes them — and their families — fully.”  None of the groups had received a reply by press time.

Siciliano said he thought a visit to his Center by the pope could have brought home the urgent imperative for change in a very personal way.  “I would hope that the pope’s heart would be opened to the harmfulness of church teaching on homosexuality if he met with our youths, so many of whom have been driven to the streets by the religious beliefs of their parents,” he told me.  “I would hope that he would realize that church teachings are to promote love, and there is nothing loving about hundreds of thousands of parents throwing their LGBT children into the streets.”

Siciliano is not tossing out statistics idly.  As he explained in his letter to the pope, the shocking reality is that religious rejection is the number one cause of homelessness among LGBT youth who represent “up 40 percent of the homeless youth population in this country, despite comprising only about five percent of the overall youth population.”

Marianne Duddy-Burke, president of DignityUSA, sounded a more optimistic note when we talked prior to the pope’s arrival in the U.S.  “There is a small but growing number of Catholic leaders speaking out and openly questioning official teaching and Francis has given permission for that to happen,” she said.  “I believe we are in the process of evolving as a church on this and the people of the church will lead the leaders.  At some point, the church teaching will change.”  

Pope Francis has been dramatically on point on a number of causes.  His encyclical on climate change was so well received by environmentalists they rallied on the National Mall during his DC visit.  But he sounded a negative tone on same-sex marriage during a January visit to the Philippines.

“The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life,” he said then.

The Vatican showed no shift in stance in June after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage across the country, a decision warmly supported by DignityUSA and other progressive gay Catholics.  Catholic Bishops called the decision a “tragic error” while the pope’s top U.S. advisor, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, wrote that “enshrining same sex marriage in our constitutional system of governance has dangers that may become fully evident only over time.”

Nevertheless, a real commitment to LGBT acceptance is coming from some within the Catholic church leadership, such as Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago.  During a meeting with Pope Francis earlier this summer, and after the Supreme Court ruling, Cupich called on Catholics to welcome LGBT people.  Cupich insisted that gays and lesbians “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.  Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”  He emphasized that “This respect must be real, not rhetorical, and ever reflective of the Church’s commitment to accompanying all people.”

The intransigence of the church establishment leads to what Siciliano described in his letter to the pope as the “horrific” suffering of rejected LGBT youth who then endure “the torment of being unloved and unwanted by their parents, combined with the ordeals of hunger, cold and sexual exploitation while homeless.”  He implored the pope to “prevent your bishops from fighting against the acceptance of LGBT people as equal members of society.”  Jesus, Siciliano reminded the Vatican “spoke of God as a loving parent who would never abandon his children.”

For now, it appears, the Vatican has put Siciliano’s call, and others, on hold.

The post Does Pope Francis Really Love Gays? appeared first on Florida Agenda.

Take a deep breath.  Then read this number: $884 billion.  That was the buying power of the LGBT community in the U.S. in 2014.  That means there should be plenty of deep LGBT pockets to help fund a presidential run for one of the more outspoken allies of the movement ever to hold higher office.  That candidate would be Joe Biden.  Except that, despite the fun “Ridin With Biden” catchphrase of the Draft Biden campaign, the sitting U.S. Vice President is still pondering his options.

Why the delay?  There has been much talk about his personal situation — the devastating loss of his son Beau in May to brain cancer at the age of 46 — as a reason for Biden’s hesitation.  Many thought Beau might one day make a run for the presidency himself. If so, that might have sidelined any ambitions on that score from what would have been a proud father. Instead, now he is bereft.

But the greater concern has been about fundraising, with suggestions that it is just too late to get into the field.  That is a sad commentary on our electoral system which undemocratically affords the wealthiest the best chance of getting seen and heard and, thereby, elected.  Or at the very least, nominated.

In any case, Biden should run.  Soon.  With the assorted Republican mavericks dominating the headlines in their quirky quests for the presidency, a Biden announcement could begin to liven up the Democratic field.  When embattled NBC anchorman, Brian Williams, referred to a certain politician’s “uncontrolled verbosity” and tendency to be a “gaffe machine,” he wasn’t talking about Donald Trump.

Fundraising from the deep-pocketed disposable income of LGBT voters shouldn’t be a problem for Biden who would be an unarguably stellar candidate for the LGBT community.  After all, as conversion therapy survivor Ryan Kendall joked to me in a recent interview, “Joe Biden outed President Obama.”

And it’s true, in a way.  In a May 2012 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Biden sent the White House into a bit of a tizzy when he stated in an off the cuff remark: “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.”

Forty-eight hours later, President Obama abruptly stopped “evolving” on the issue and officially endorsed same-sex marriage.  By June 26, 2015, the Obama White House was floodlit in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court’s landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage across the country.

So why is Biden, who is also resolutely pro-union, such a friend to the LGBT agenda? Here he is explaining it on May 17, 2015, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia:

“My father taught me the simple notion that everyone, everywhere is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.  When it comes to LGBT people, that simple proposition has been painfully difficult to accomplish over the years.  But in the last decade, thanks to the astounding bravery of the LGBT community and those who have championed their cause, the United States has made remarkable progress toward the ultimate goal of equality in law and in life.  Our progress remains incomplete, but the momentum has shifted in the right direction.”

The Draft Biden Facebook and Twitter sites are full of glowing statistics offering other reasons to support Biden including his allegiance to the needs of working people and his strong views on climate change.  Not to mention his outpolling Democratic candidates who are actually running.  Curiously, there is little if any mention on the sites of LGBT issues, including silence on the Kim Davis saga which might have afforded Biden another golden opportunity to blurt something exciting or controversial.

We’ll have to forego that fun this time.  But the longer the question mark about his candidacy lingers, the more press and hype Biden gets.  Which is probably strategically quite a smart play.

Clearly, to win the nomination, Biden will need broad appeal beyond the LGBT community and its buying power.  But he seems to both understand and make the connection across the board on social injustices.  Consequently, even as the stereotypical older, white, affluent male, he is able to win support in demographics very different to his own.

At the March 2015 Human Rights Campaign convention in Washington, DC, Biden drew parallels between the civil rights and LGBT rights struggles, recalling the Selma demonstrations and attempts to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“Without a good job, without a decent place to live, without a shot at a decent education, it’s very hard to make it today,” Biden told the audience.  “Until everyone in the country – regardless of race, gender, religion, identity, orientation – has a fair shot of crossing that bridge all the way to the other side – that’s the legacy of Selma, that’s the challenge of Stonewall.

That sensitivity clearly appeals to Draft Biden team members such as openly gay national finance chair, Jon Cooper.  In a recent Reuters interview, Cooper said: “If Joe Biden does enter the presidential race, he’s going to get very strong support from the LGBT community and deservedly so.”

That “if” continues to linger in the air while the Biden riders hit the road, looking for LGBT donors in key states such as New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada.  It’s the campaign bus without a candidate.

So will the Ridin With Biden chocolate bars that the Draft Biden 2016 Super Pac craftily handed out at the Democratic National Committee’s 2015 summer meeting in Minneapolis last month simply become a collector’s item (if indeed any went uneaten)?  Or will the Obama-esque artwork on the wrapper evolve into a genuine presidential campaign poster?  We should know the answer in the coming days or weeks.

The post Biden His Time. But Will He Declare And Can He Win? appeared first on Florida Agenda.

The senseless access to guns in this country has once again been brought into sharp focus by the latest shootings — of two Roanoke, Virginia news network personnel by former station employee, Vester Flanagan. Flanagan has been described in the press as “deranged,” “depraved,” and a “narcissist.” His family is yet (by press time) to come forward and shed any light on Flanagan’s mental health past. As far we know, Flanagan lived his life either undiagnosed and/or untreated, although employers had encouraged him to seek mental health support, which he had refused.

But the sensationalist adjectives deliberately ignore the more obvious explanation for Flanagan’s actions. His wild fluctuations between “the funny guy” and an intense persecution complex; the mood swings of charm and rage; and a delusional sense of self-importance, present themselves as textbook symptoms of severe, unmedicated bi-polar disorder (also known an manic depression.)

While many suffering from bi-polar disorder live full and productive lives with the help of lithium and other drugs, others have ended catastrophically. Virginia state senator, Creigh Deeds, spoke out eloquently after his bi-polar son Gus stabbed him, then killed himself. Although the elder Deeds never saw the violence coming, he had endeavored to get his son help, but “the system failed my son,” as Deeds described it. No psychiatric bed could be found in time for Gus, who was released from emergency custody with fatal consequences.

Vester Flanagan’s situation was profoundly different to Gus Deeds in two key areas. He was black. And he was gay. We do not know whether Flanagan, 41 at the time he died, suffered racial or homophobic discrimination. We can certainly assume, given the era in which he grew up, that he must have encountered it. While being black and gay are not relevant to Flanagan’s fatal actions, they may well have had a bearing on whether or not he sought or received the medical help he needed.

As a black, gay man, and one suffering already from a sense of persecution brought on by his mental illness, Flanagan may have been up against a hostile medical environment even if he had considered psychiatric help. And it is an environment which sadly persists today.

As both speakers and members of the audience at a recent LGBT health forum at George Washington University in Washington, DC repeatedly articulated, cultural competency is still far too often lacking in doctors‘ offices and at hospitals. Too many medical practitioners are ill-informed, do not know how to talk to or treat LGBT patients, and may even shun them altogether. Just take a look at some of the state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts which allow hospitals to turn away LGBT patients.

A high-profile example of this was the case of married lesbian couple, Krista and Jami Contreras of Michigan — who spoke at the recent unveiling of the Equality Act on Capitol Hill. When they turned up with their newborn daughter for her first pediatric visit, their handpicked doctor, Vesna Roi, had chosen not to treat their child.

Roi’s decision was based on so-called religious principles, but a general lack of cultural competency in dealing with lesbian or gay patients remains far too widespread. (The problem is even more acute for transgender patients as too few doctors have been trained in how to address them, let alone treat their unique medical needs.)

Audience members at the GWU health forum emphasized how much more comfortable they felt with a doctor “who looks like me” or who was also gay or even trans. But a black, gay doctor, is, even today, unlikely to advertise himself in this way, making him hard for the Flanagans of the world to find.

We may never know how early Flanagan’s symptoms began to manifest or whether he or anyone around him recognized his crying need for treatment. According to a cousin, Guynell Flanagan, who talked to reporters at the British newspaper, The Daily Mail, “when I knew him as a child he wasn’t like that.” She also insisted that Flanagan’s sexuality was well known to his family and not a problem with them. “The whole family knew he was gay. We accepted him,” she told the Mail. “He’s not the only one in the family who’s gay and personally I couldn’t care less.”

Doctors who might not “care less” about their gay patients need to be trained from the outset, insists Naseema Shafi, deputy executive director at Whitman-Walker Health, a Washington DC community health center specializing in HIV/AIDS care and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender care. The center conducts its own cultural competency training but, Shafi says, “medical schools have a responsibility” to train their graduates who must also “be open to hearing from patients.”

Flanagan may not have been heard. Or he may never have asked. And the answer to these questions, if they come at all, will come too late for his victims. But it’s important to recognize that our health system continues to underserve minorities, whether racial or sexual. And, according to Dr. Ilan Meyer, the problem is systemic.

“We need to be concerned about quality health care beyond LGBT,” said Meyer during the GWU forum. Meyer is an American psychiatric epidemiologist, author, professor, and a senior scholar for public policy and sexual orientation law at the Williams Institute of UCLA.

“It is not even just about providers who don’t know about LGBT health or attitudes,” Meyer continued. “It’s about the structures for patient-doctor intervention. It’s about the ability of providers to spend time with their patients. They spend just three minutes with a patient and the problem starts right there. It’s a bigger problem and a larger debate that is not LGBT specific.”

Thanks to the idiotic stranglehold on Capitol Hill by the gun lobby, there will be more shootings by more Vester Flanagans. But there will also be more black, gay patients with nowhere to go, the ones without the guns, and without the headlines. They will not commit atrocities. They will simply suffer neglect, stigma and, in many cases, economic depravation that will exclude the option of psychiatric help.

As Mara Kiesling, founding executive director of DC’s National Center for Transgender Equality, put it so succinctly during her remarks at GWU: “We need to do more better, faster and now.”

Photo Credit: Breitbart.com

The post Did Gay Shooter Seek Help For Mental Illness? appeared first on Florida Agenda.

“Among all gay and bisexual men, African Americans are the racial/ethnic group most affected by HIV.”  That’s the blunt statement at the top of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) web page on HIV/AIDS among gay and bisexual men.

The next CDC fact states: “Young African American gay and bisexual men accounted for the highest number of new HIV infections in 2010 among all gay and bisexual men.”

That concern persists in 2015 and is at the heart of the work of Al Sura, Inc., a Washington, DC nonprofit that seeks to provide tangible, fiscal support to local groups working to better protect the health of the African American community in general, the LGBT community in particular and especially African Americans afflicted with AIDS or HIV.

AIDS is still described as an “epidemic,” and its presence is deeply felt in the African American community here in Washington, DC and elsewhere.  The fact that the HIV infection rates are highest among young black men, a demographic that also leads the incarceration rates, is particularly disturbing to Al Sura, since HIV has become treatable and even livable over the long-term.  But this very improvement — in drug therapy, healthy diet and lifestyle — that has added to the longevity of people living with HIV, may also have contributed to a myth that HIV is no longer a problem.

“People should not be dying,” said Abdur-Rahim Briggs, an Al Sura co-founder and board president, when we spoke recently at the group’s annual White Attire Affair fundraiser at the historic Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington, DC.  “It’s gone to a whole other level — PrEP, prophylaxis,” he said.  “People think ‘I can do whatever I want to do.’  This has added to health disparities and not just HIV, but also other STDs.  It is why people are still dying from it.  People are desensitized.”

But why, with all the education and awareness about AIDS and HIV, would young people, and especially young African Americans, be so susceptible to infection?  “There’s a false sense of security, the sense that ‘I’ll just get medicines and I’ll be ok’,” said Ronald Thomas, also an Al Sura co-founder and board member.  “It’s the idea that if you don’t look sick so you can’t be sick.  HIV does not have a look but AIDS does.  So there’s this impervious attitude among the young that it will never happen to you.”

Sometimes, however, the fact that young people are neither tested nor treated can be related to the family environment as well.  “It can be due to abandonment,” continued Thomas.  “Family and friends shunning them.  They are forced onto the streets and it’s about survival sex.  They have to do something to stay afloat.  So they’ll have sex with a stranger just to get shelter.”

The lack of awareness can be exacerbated, said Briggs, by the fact that “African American society is still socially conservative, especially the black churches.  There are a lot of issues. But we have to keep pushing.”

While once Al Sura — whose website says the name means “new beginning” or “new chapter” — handed out large grants to just a few individuals, the organization has gone through an evolution since its founding in 2008.  “We realized we were helping people but we were not helping enough people,” Thomas said.  “We scaled it down to be more personal for people.”

Consequently, Al Sura is able to help multiple groups with seemingly mundane but essential things, like bedding and toiletries for the Wanda Alston House, a shelter for homeless GLBTQ youth, or facilitating the formation of a new group’s 501(c)(3).  The ManDate, a monthly discussion group that brings gay black men together in an intimate at-home setting to explore a wide range of issues related to health and wellness, is another Al Sura beneficiary.  But the group also sponsors more high profile ventures such as a 2013 DC production of James Earl Hardy’s play, B-Boy Blues, and the Howard Theatre debut of an out black comic, Sampson McCormick, who is a dedicated HIV/AIDS awareness campaigner.  McCormick, who grew up in DC, has raised money for homeless and HIV affected LGBT youth and has volunteered at the Wanda Alston House.

Al Sura is necessary because there is not a strong tradition of institutional philanthropy within the black community, says Darryl Moch, Al Sura board vice-president.  He would like to see  — and to help — the more affluent members of the gay black community make a cultural shift toward philanthropic endeavors.   “Black gay men in particular hold onto their wealth more,” he said.  “They are highly educated but they have not learned the key to philanthropy.  Culturally we are taught to be consumers, not to save money and do something with it.”

Consequently, Moch, who has also run for DC City Council as a member of the Green Party, is aiming to develop Al Sura into a major donor-advised philanthropic organization, specifically targeting grants to the African American community.  “That’s my vision,” he said.

Re-energizing that community can be an uphill struggle, Moch admits.  “For the black community, they are so used to not getting what they want and need, so when it doesn’t happen, they don’t go out and make it happen,” he said.  While whites may eagerly confront LGBT equality challenges without the added burden of racial discrimination, Moch says, “the same-gender loving black community is just tired of fighting or we feel we shouldn’t have to fight.  And so we are not fighting for everything all the time.”

Briggs is hopeful, meanwhile, that the legalization of same-sex marriage might help the more conservative black community come to greater acceptance of its same-gender loving members.  “Marriage makes people healthy,” he said.  “If we are married, we are not trying to be promiscuous.  We just want to love.”

That love was celebrated in festive style at the White Attire Affair, which is also an opportunity to network, to thank donors, and to celebrate gains, all dressed to the nines in sparkling white while dancing to the irresistible beats spun by a professional DJ.

It is a brief interlude each year (along with the Al Sura In Black event in the spring), when it’s possible to forget some of the harsh realities that confront the community each day.

The post AIDS And HIV In Black Same-Gender Loving DC appeared first on Florida Agenda.

When Florida Agenda founder and CEO Bobby Blair and I were finalizing edits on his autobiography — Hiding Inside the Baseline — one nagging question persisted: Would an out Bobby Blair today be allowed to coach a youth program at the United States Tennis Association (USTA)?

When Blair was hiding inside the baseline and the closet in the 1980s and ‘90s, he was sure the answer would have been “no.”  But when I asked D.A. Abrams, Chief Diversity Officer at the USTA, about today’s climate, his answer was an unequivocal “yes.”  In fact, he went even further.  “We would be 100% fine with that,” he said.  “In fact, if we weren’t, I personally would have an issue with that.”

As the director of the USTA’s Diversity Department — which encourages and promotes racial diversity as well as LGBT participation — Abrams is a natural advocate.  He grew up “playing tennis in the inner city as a young African American kid,” he recalled.  But while he is no stranger to breaking down barriers, he feels tennis is largely an accepting environment.  And, to that end, he is determined that the USTA “walk the talk.”  His department proactively engages tennis clubs and associations to reach out to minorities and to the LGBT community.  The USTA even provides a tailored handbook offering specific tools for that purpose.

When I asked USTA President, Katrina Adams the same question about hiring a gay tennis coach for the association’s youth programs, her answer, as befits her position, was more politically non-committal.  “We hire coaches for their teaching skills,” she said.  Adams, like Abrams, is African American and personifies diversity — she is the youngest, first black woman and first ex-professional player to hold the post of USTA President.

But would she hire an out gay coach for juniors, I persisted?  “I can’t say whether we would or wouldn’t,” Adams replied.  “That’s more a parent issue than for us.”

No active male touring pro is currently out anyway, so the question, at least on the men’s side, remains moot for now.  But what is clear is that the USTA has made a proactive commitment to encourage LGBT participation in tennis, whether integrated into the game in general or by promoting events specifically geared toward LGBT players.

It’s not all pure benevolence, although Abrams is emphatic that the central reason for bringing more LGBT players into the game is a fundamental one.  “It’s the right thing to do,” he said.  “Everyone should have the opportunity to be part of tennis.  You can play for life, from eight to 80, able or disabled.”  However, there’s a business-savvy reason, too.

“LGBT couples on average make at least $20,000 more annually than heterosexual couples,” said Abrams, pointing to an intriguing statistic. “That’s a big deal.” Consequently, said Abrams, “if you actively encourage the LGBT community, they can afford professional tennis events and the stuff that goes along with tennis. From a business standpoint it makes good sense to include and engage LGBT folks.”

This played out quite nicely at four professional tournaments last year that agreed, on the USTA’s initiative, to screen the documentary “Queens at Court” about gay tennis players, and build an event around it with which to draw in LGBT spectators.

At the USTA’s initiative, the documentary “Queens at Court,” a documentary about gay tennis players, was screened during four professional tournaments last year,  in an effort to draw in LGBT spectators.

The USTA also created a new category for its non-professional adult tournaments — same gender couples’ doubles.  The first event was held in March 2015 in Palm Springs, CA, and more events quickly spawned from there.  Adams heralded this initiative as “an idea whose time has come. We look forward to offering more same-gender events as part of our efforts to make tennis more accessible to more people,” she said.

The USTA also sponsors the U.S. tournaments held by the international Gay and Lesbian Tennis Alliance (GLTA) whose mission is to “provide an open, safe, inclusive space and community that is committed to promoting and developing amateur tennis in the LGBT Community.”

Here in Washington, DC, these fall under the auspices of the Capital Tennis Association.  When I spoke to one member, Quang Nguyen, during the June Capital Pride Festival where both the CTA and the USTA had booths, he expressed the widely-held belief that it is easier to be out in an individual sport like tennis than a team sport.

“It’s kind of fun to be colorful and just be yourself on the court, try to be fun and quirky and not worry about being discriminated against,” Nguyen said.  “It’s just a fun community to play tennis with people who share similar interests.”

Nguyen feels that tennis, as an individual sport that has always embraced and even promoted individuality and difference — think Andre Agassi’s bleached hair and acid-washed tennis shorts — can lead the way on openness in the sports environment.  “I think even a lot of straight tennis players embrace their gay families so yes I think tennis can lead the way,” he said.  He added: “I think in general LGBT acceptance has been growing around the world so hopefully that will translate into professional sports sometime soon.”

Even still, it was not easy early on.  Billie Jean King has achieved legendary status today both on and off the court but her involuntary outing in 1981 by a scorned lover cost her millions in lost income.  Martina Navratilova came out at the height of her career, but her choice was not without its downside.  She told reporters in a phone press conference earlier this year that while her decision benefitted her game and peace of mind, she had to endure a barrage of criticism and, like King, lost millions in sponsorships.

“I don’t know what the issue is,” said Abrams when asked why no male touring pros are out.  “I’m an LGBT ally so it’s easy for me to say I think it’s OK to come out but it’s not me doing it.  I don’t think it will be an issue.  It will just take one to make the others feel comfortable.”

Top ten tennis stars, Roger Federer and Andy Murray, agree, and are on the record as saying a gay player on the men’s pro tour would be accepted without problem.  American tennis pros Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish have joined Athlete Ally, a nonprofit that “provides public awareness campaigns, educational programming and tools and resources to foster inclusive sports communities.”

Roddick is also on the advisory board of King’s newly-formed BJK Leadership Initiative, that was “created to address the critical issues required to achieve inclusive leadership that will lead to significant changes in how women and men operate in the world.”

That world, Adams says, “is very different.”  Which is why the USTA is able to embrace diversity so fully, but not, as Adams points out, merely as a program.  “It is a department and part of our core values,” she said.  The department will continue to grow, Adams added, until “we are what America looks like.”

Photo Credit: advantagenews.com

The post Tennis Association 100% Fine With “Out” Coaches appeared first on Florida Agenda.

Where is the gay hotspot in Washington, DC?  “Wherever I am,” answered one lovable wise guy when a group of us was asked this question at the start of a historical walking tour conducted by the Rainbow History Project.

Of course we thought we already knew the answer: Dupont Circle.  But as it turns out, it’s an open question whether Dupont Circle remains the gay epicenter of the nation’s capital, or whether that even matters.  Our walk through the neighborhood on a sultry Saturday morning in June, the weekend of Capital Pride, seemed more about what was gone than checking off a list of iconic gay landmarks.

Tourists flocking to the District in August, the peak season for visitors, may seek out what they believe to be the city’s gay Mecca.  And for many decades, Dupont Circle was indeed that place.  But how did it come to be so?  The answer was surprisingly mundane: cheap real estate, explained our guide, Jeff Donahoe, who, with other volunteers at the Rainbow History Project, is collecting an oral history of LGBT Washington, DC, along with giving tours.

“It was the late 1960s, there was white flight, and in April 1968, when the riots happened, smoke actually filled Dupont Circle,” Donahoe said.  “Real estate was inexpensive, you could get a ratty apartment and find cheap social space.”

And you could find other “subversives.”  The area was already home in the 1960s to anti-war protesters, the Black Panthers and the alternative music scene among others.  It became the perfect training ground for a new and emerging group of activists as the gay liberation movement began to find its footing.  Cruising gay bars was still a million miles away, even though the ability to do so was eventually spawned right in the same neighborhood.

But cruising wasn’t an overnight sensation either.  When the LGBT community first began to populate Dupont Circle, you could not stand in bars except to wait for tables (this rule applied to all bars not just gay ones.)  Nor could you move your own drink, we learned, which had to be done by a waiter.  This made bars a difficult place to meet anyone.  But it was overcome, Donahoe informed us, by an ingenious idea.  Booth numbers and telephones.

And so began “gay cruising” — but in a rather sedate way.  You could sit in booth 8 and eye a cute guy in booth 15 and give him a call on the phone conveniently placed in every booth.

If you wanted to find a gay roommate or an LGBT-friendly hangout, you went to what was colloquially known as the community center, which evolved into Lambda Rising, perhaps the locale’s most important landmark, but which sadly closed in 2010.  Lambda was the inspiration of Deacon Maccubbin who opened it originally as a head shop and craft center called Earthworks.  It occupied premises at 1724 20th Street, NW, a street that became the block party precursor to Capitol Pride.

Lambda Rising eventually became a popular bookstore but retained its unofficial community center status throughout its existence.  Not far away from its original 20th street location was the short-lived lesbian collective, the Furies, which also published a newspaper and where noted out author, Rita Mae Brown, lived while writing Ruby Fruit Jungle.

Two moves later and Lambda Rising was, as Donahoe put it, “on main street,” occupying a large storefront on Connecticut Avenue, NW, a major DC thoroughfare.  The huge picture windows in front meant that you could not go in or out without being seen.  Dupont Circle was finally out.

Nearby was Rascals, a drag club that was a distinct departure from more traditional venues and featured three levels of bars and dance spaces.  Rascals followed loosely in the footsteps of the more formal training ground provided by The Academy, established in 1961 and which remains a major fixture in the DC drag scene.  But at Rascals, smiled Donahoe, “if you had a boom box, a tape and a boa you were in.  It was a much more porous way of doing drag.”

And then, even before the 2010 closure of Lambda Rising, it all began to change. Where before you might seek out beefcake, today you find cupcakes.  The bars and clubs and secret places are now pizza parlors and mattress stores.  And although Dupont Circle remains home to a sizable gay population, there has been a new “gay flight” out to the suburbs for those who want cheaper rent, their own home, or to raise kids.

Nearby Logan Circle is vying to replace Dupont Circle as the new gay hot spot now, along with the adjoining 14th Street, NW which is also the capital’s new restaurant row, and offers a decided mixture of chic and eclectic.  The drab normality of mattress discount stores on Connecticut Avenue has been eclipsed by upscale trendy furniture stores on 14th street.  The annual high-heeled drag race down 17th Street, NW at Halloween now draws straight families and their kids who drive in from the suburbs to pack the sidewalk as spectators.

But while DC has always more or less embraced grown men in frocks in their annual dash down 17th street in wobbly stilettos, there were never riots.  No Stonewall.  Donahoe paused, when asked why not, then explained the culture of DC to his tour group.  DC is a political town, he said.  Problems here are solved less on the street and more often in the law courts or on Capitol Hill.  Rather than protesting, you put on your suit and tie and you deliver your grievance in person.

It was an appropriately unexciting answer, rather like the explanation of Dupont Circle’s gay origins and its evolution into homogenous banality.  So perhaps our witty wag was right after all.  DC’s gay hot spot is now just wherever you happen to be.

Photo Credit: washington.org

The post From Beefcake To Cupcakes: A Changing Dupont Circle appeared first on Florida Agenda.

Those of us hooked on Downton Abbey were somewhat relieved last season when writer, Julian Fellowes, eased up a bit on Thomas, the wicked gay under butler.  But the “conversion” of Thomas to a more empathetic character came at a price.  When the meddling manservant returned from a trip to London looking pallid and clammy, some of us knew instantly what had happened.

Equally, when we watched the decline and fall of one of Britain’s greatest unheralded World War II heroes, as portrayed in the biopic The Imitation Game, we cringed with horror.  We were witnessing the painful unraveling of a gay man trying to “turn” straight.  Back then, it was known as chemical castration, and it is what both WWII codebreaker Alan Turing, and Downton’s fictional Thomas, underwent.

The chemicals and the castration may be behind us, but efforts to “cure” gays and lesbians from their ill-advised “choice” to be homosexual persist.  It’s just called by a more benign sounding, and totally inappropriate name; conversion therapy (or sometimes reparative therapy.)  As advocates for a ban point out, no one truly gets converted or repaired and the procedure is far from therapeutic.

Arguably, conversion therapy is just as dangerous and cruel as chemical castration, the subtle difference being that it inflicts psychological rather than physical pain and damage, even though, as in Turing’s case, suicide is too often still the outcome.

Just ask the resilient Ryan Kendall, a conversion therapy survivor and now one of the most compelling voices calling for a ban.  At 16, Kendall ran away from home, got a legal separation from his parents and endured a decade of homelessness, depression, suicidal ideation and drug abuse.  All of this was to escape enforced conversion therapy which invites “every kind of quack,” Kendall told me while warning that “parents should never send a child through something like this.”

This was never more appallingly exemplified than by the experience of conversion therapy survivor, Sam Brinton, whose “therapist” told him when he was still a child that he already had AIDS but that it would go away if he converted to heterosexuality.

On the legislative front, Kendall thinks little if anything will change while both the House and Senate are controlled by the GOP.  “The GOP doesn’t care if conversion therapy kills people,” he says bluntly.  “We will make no progress on this or anything while Congress is controlled by the GOP.  Zero.”

Despite such pessimism, Kendall was active in support of Representative Ted Lieu’s (D-CA) Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act which was introduced on May 19, although Kendall adds that “now we are just waiting to see which committee will kill it.”

Lieu, who is straight, but who authored the bill that got conversion therapy banned in California, which Kendall also worked on, describes the practice as “abuse.”  When we spoke outside the Supreme Court in June, Lieu explained that he chose to challenge conversion therapy specifically as fraud because “it is fraud to try to purportedly cure someone of a medical condition that doesn’t exist.  There is no such thing as being heterosexual or being homosexual that equates to a medical condition.  It’s just being a human being,” he said.

Lieu is still seeking co-sponsors despite the potentially dim prospects of passage.  “And it will pass, eventually,” added Kendall.  (Attorney Sanford Jay Rosen introduced an amicus brief on behalf of survivors of conversion therapy in Obergefell vs. Hodges.)

In April, the Obama White House agreed to support “efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.”  Conversion therapy has already been ruled illegal at the state level in California, New Jersey, Oregon and the District of Columbia and is pending in Illinois.  It has been repudiated as harmful and ineffective by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), American Medical Association, and American Academy of Pediatrics, among others.  The APA states that: “altering sexual orientation is not an appropriate goal of psychiatric treatment.”

A major nail in the conversion therapy coffin came in July 2013 when high profile exponent, Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, America’s largest ex-gay Christian ministry, shut down his operation and admitted he was wrong.  In an April 2015 article for Religion News Service, Chambers wrote: “For too long, same-sex attraction has been categorized as sinful and in need of repairing.  Such stigma has caused LGBTQ people crippling shame and fear.  As a child I experienced and as an adult I perpetuated that stigma.  I profoundly regret my support for and promotion of reparative therapy.”

Kendall was reunited with his parents after an appearance on Anderson Cooper 360.  But his father died in January 2015 and he notes,  “I’ll never get back that time we lost. The damage can never be fixed.  I was just fortunate I was able to reconnect with him.”  It is a story repeated over and over, but often with a less happy ending.  More typically, there are sorrowful parents weeping at grave sites, regretting too late their failure to accept their own children for who they are.

And who they are starts at birth, suggests the catchy #BornPerfect Campaign, a project of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.  The campaign aims to end conversion therapy in four years “by putting the industry out of business,” said Samantha Ames, the campaign’s coordinator and staff attorney, when we talked recently by phone from her San Francisco office.  Ames hopes to see other states like Massachusetts and New York ban conversion therapy before the end of the year, after which the campaign will set its sights on more challenging arenas like Utah, Texas and Michigan.  But the strategy extends beyond the legal and the legislative.

“The states bills are a vehicle for education,” Ames said.  And that education, she says, has to extend to religious communities, which is why #BornPerfect has a strong stable of allies from the faith community.  “We find a lot of religious trauma in the LGBT community,” she added.

Ames likes Lieu’s fraud approach because, as she explains, “the advantage of consumer fraud is you can go after individual practitioners.”  State bills can only cover licensed institutions.

The fraud approach was given a powerful boost in June when the Southern Poverty Law Center won its case in New Jersey Superior Court against a conversion therapy group, Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing. The jury found the defendants guilty of fraud under New Jersey’s consumer protection laws.  The case involved firsthand accounts by survivors.

Both Ames and Kendall agree that personal survivor stories are the most powerful strategy for change.  Ames admires individuals like Kendall because, she says, “when you go through a childhood trauma like that it can take decades before you can talk about it.”  The headlines are more frequent now — take the suicide case of transgender teen, Leelah Alcorn, who was forced into conversion therapy.  But, Ames says, “survivors have been telling their stories for years.  It’s not the stories that are new.  It’s that more people are listening.”

Kendall is more than just a survivor of trauma.  He has dramatically turned his life around, getting a degree in political science at New York’s Columbia University.  When we spoke, he was about to enter law school at UCLA.  Similarly, survivor Brinton, the son of Baptist missionaries, who described landing in the ER numerous times after being beaten by his father, is now a graduate of MIT and a spokesperson for #BornPerfect.  His five suicide attempts are behind him but sometimes the retelling of his story, which he does often, overwhelms him emotionally.

“Telling our stories, those personal stories, is the only tool I’ve ever encountered that can change people’s hearts,” Kendall said.  “It’s a human tragedy.  That’s why we are dedicated to ensuring that every LGBT child will know they were born perfect.”

Photo Credit: YouTube.com

The post The Human Tragedy Of Conversion Therapy appeared first on Florida Agenda.

It was high noon on the Hill and the small room was packed to the rafters, although Members of Congress, their aides and allies far outnumbered reporters.  A sense of history filled the air, and not only because we were shortly to be treated to the impassioned oratory of Representative John Lewis (D-GA.)

We were crowded into in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, named for the 36th President of the United States who signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  And here we were in 2015, learning of a new effort to amend that very Act in order to include the currently excluded lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender members of our society.  A society, as many of the speakers pointed out, that still fails to provide liberty and justice for all.

It was the day that Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) introduced the Equality Act.  As Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) pointed out, “This legislation that we are introducing is something that resonates with the best of who we are as a nation.  But the need for this legislation reflects the worst of who we are.  This great country cannot celebrate ideals of liberty and freedom and equality if that is not the truth for every American citizen.”

The level of Democratic endorsement, both in the House and Senate, was reflected in the high-calibre lineup of speakers who were there on July 23 to announce and lend their support to the Equality Act.  House Democratic Leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke of the collective decision taken by openly gay Congressmen Cicilline and Jared Polis (D-CO), along with other House colleagues, that “there is no place for discrimination in America – not in employment, not in housing, not in transportation, not in health care, not in any subject that you can name.”

There was Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and openly gay Congressmen Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Mark Takano (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), and countless other politicians and NGO leaders.  And there were personal stories, from gay couple, Krista and Jami Contreras, with their baby daughter in their arms, whose pediatrician had abruptly declined to treat their child.  There was Carter Brown, fired when outed as a transgender man, and Luke Peterson, a gay man who lost three separate jobs due to his sexual orientation.

Cicilline and Polis secured in rapid time an impressive 155 House co-sponsors before the Equality Act was even announced (now at 158 and counting.)  Merkley tallied the Senate score at 40 so far.  But all are Democrats.  I asked Merkley and Cicilline whether they thought that, in light of the seven Republican senators who voted for the Democratic led Student Non-Discrimination Act (that fell eight votes short of the necessary 60 to pass,) they might see similarly welcome defections for the Equality Act?  (The Act will likely first go to several committees, including Judiciary in both House and Senate.)

“In the House for sure,” Cicilline said.  “We’ve been working very hard to continue to educate our colleagues to get the remainder of the Democrats and Republicans on this bill.  At the core of this is the question about equality, about being against discrimination, and I think those are deeply-held American values.”

Senator Merkley saw Republican support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act as precedent-setting and an indicator that the Equality Act may indeed also garner bi-partisan votes if it reaches the floor.  “We will continue in the same fashion,” he replied. “This is the starting point on the journey for a comprehensive vision to end discrimination for the LGBT community in America.”

There was plenty of repetitive rhetoric about gay couples getting married one day, posting Facebook pictures the next, then showing up to work and getting shown the door instead.  And there was some amusing stumbling over references to announcing LGBT legislation in the LBJ room.  But in end, the afternoon belonged to Lewis, as his voice alternately crescendoed, then dropped to a whisper.

“This legislation is what justice requires, this legislation in what justice demands,” boomed Lewis,  “and like the recent Supreme Court decision, it is long…over…due,” he said, his voice dropping low as he stretched out the emphatic last three syllables.”  It was lost on no one that Lewis, who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, was an important historical bridge in the long civil rights struggle.

“We believe then as we do now that we are a society committed to the concept of equal justice under the law,” Lewis said.  “I’ve said it in the past and I’ll say it again, we fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The room erupted in applause, but Lewis wasn’t done. “I believe in my heart of hearts that we must come together and truly create one nation, one people, one family, one house, the American house, the people’s house,” Lewis continued.  “A country that is free of hate, free of fear, and committed to love, understanding and respecting the dignity and worth of every human being.  It is our calling, it is our mission.  Let’s pass legislation and do the right thing.”

In the GOP Congress, passing the Equality Act remains a real long-shot.  “There is no question that we have made great progress in advancing the rights for LGBT communities,” avowed Merkley.  “But as long as people are afraid to put their spouse’s photo on their desk at work; as long as they are worried about being evicted from their apartment if they don’t pretend to be just roommates, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Cicilline agreed.  ”Discrimination and intolerance should have no place in the United States of America in 2015 and it’s time for Congress to stand up and prohibit discrimination against someone because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender,” Cicilline said.  Then he quoted LBJ who said, a year before signing the Civil Rights Act: “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights, we have talked for more than a hundred years.  It is time now to write the next chapter and to write it into the books of law.”   It was a natural segue.  “My friends,” said Cicilline, “the time has come for us to stop talking about full equality for LGBT people and start writing the next chapter into the books of law.”

The post A Star-Studded Opening Act For Equality appeared first on Florida Agenda.

Now let us praise famous Republicans, unaccustomed though this column may be to doing so. But praise is indeed due the seven Republican senators who voted in favor of Senator Al Franken’s (D-MN) Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), aimed at protecting LGBT K-12 school students from discrimination and bullying.

SNDA was designed “to end discrimination based on actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity in public schools.” The bill was attached to the new “Every Child Achieves Act of 2015” which replaces “No Child Left Behind.” It would have established new federal non-discrimination protections modeled after Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Every Child Achieves passed, but Franken’s amendment scored 52 votes for and 45 against, eight shy of the necessary 60 votes to pass. This was the fifth consecutive year that SNDA had been introduced but the first time it had reached as far as an up-or-down vote in the full Senate.

But thank you anyway to Senators Ayotte (R-NH), Collins (R-ME), Heller (R-NV), Johnson (R-WI), Kirk (R-IL), Murkowski (R-AK) and Portman (R-OH) for crossing the aisle to protect kids. And shame on the 45 Republicans who voted no.  I hope the next LGBT youth suicide — because sadly there will be a next one — weighs heavily on your consciences.  What could have possessed the thinking of any reasonable adult in the Senate not to vote to protect kids and especially LGBT kids who are demonstrably the most vulnerable in our schools?

One typical excuse these days for buck passing is “leave it to the states.” It’s where some Republican opponents of the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage run to hide when asked their view on the matter. The same rationale was cited by senators opposing SNDA. But this system has proven not to work.

As Washington, DC public school teacher, Desiree Raught, wrote in a column for the Huffington Post: “Leaving anti-bullying policies up to the localities — many of which are still largely anti-LGBT in general — opens our youth to an unimaginable vulnerability. Without national legislation to hold them accountable, we simply can not trust administrators, counselors, teachers, and local school districts to be unbiased in their approach to the bullying of LGBT youth.”

Nathan Smith, Director of Public Policy at the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), agrees. “The Senate is still catching up to where it seems a lot of the rest of the country is,” Smith told the Agenda. “They don’t see it as a specifically federal issue, but of course we disagree.” Non-discrimination laws are in place in 13 states and the District of Columbia, “but beyond that there are a number of states that will have a lot of trouble getting those laws passed,” Smith said.

When the Agenda spoke to Raught recently, she said what outrages her the most is that the Senate, as well as school administrators in the more conservative areas of the country, “put their own moral code on an entire public policy. There is no room for personal feelings in legislating support to protect LGBT youth,” she said.

Raught recounted one incident of a gay student who was harassed and eventually stabbed in the face with a screwdriver despite pre-warning his school administrator that he was under threat. The administrator went unpunished “because we have no federal law like SNDA with which to prosecute them,” she said.

With SNDA once more on the sidelines, advocates are looking for other ways to get the legislation passed. “We are looking for other opportunities including other legislative vehicles,” GLSEN’s Smith told me when we picked through the ashes of Franken’s bill. Smith said the seven Republican defectors were largely the result of direct discussions and that the greatest impact for change can come from “constituents who can speak directly to the issues in schools.”

While GLSEN was disappointed with the outcome of the SNDA vote, they shared a broad optimism that change is close by. “Half the Senate voted for it, including some of the not most progressive Republicans,” Smith said. “That’s remarkable and a sign of progress.” The “easiest and quickest way” to get LGBT students full protection, Smith says, “is to pass SNDA. We’re hoping that will happen the next time.” When that will be, Smith admitted, was “the million dollar question.”

Meghan Maury, Senior Policy Counsel at the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund, told the Agenda that despite SNDA’s defeat, they had also just won “a significant victory in our work to better understand the lived experiences of LGBTQ students.” That victory was the decision by the Department of Education to include gender identity and sexual orientation as separate biases in the upcoming School Survey on Crime and Safety. Maury said this was “an essential step in gathering consistent and accurate data on what LGBTQ students face in school.”

The need for better data was urged by Haught and might help improve the prospect of SNDA’s passage next time. “Part of it could be that Senators don’t fully understand the enormity of the issue,” Smith said. That enormity includes a staggering 90% of transgender students who “face derogatory remarks sometimes, often or frequently at school,” said Maury. At least 46% of transgender students “report missing school out of fear for their safety,” she added.

When Franken made it to the floor to speak for SNDA he said: “It is a simple bill. It stands for the principle that LGBT kids have a right not to be bullied just because of who they are.” He went on: “This amendment would merely provide LGBT kids the same legal remedies available to other kids under our federal civil rights laws. It says that schools would have to listen when a parent says ‘my child isn’t safe;’ and the school has to do something about it.” In case that wasn’t enough for the more stony-hearted of his colleagues, Franken went on to recount heart-rending tragedies of LGBT youths who were bullied to suicide, complete with photographs. Incredibly, forty five Senators remained unmoved.

“We need the parents, the LGBT community and their allies to put pressure on those who did not vote for SNDA,” said Raught, looking forward to what might be done to reverse the outcome the next time. “We need to make the focus not so much on sexual identity but on safety. This is not about being gay. It’s about protecting children. And you are not protecting children by denying that LGBT youth exist.”

In the meantime, LGBT kids will continue to be bullied and harassed and commit suicide while 45 Republican senators sleep soundly in their beds. It’s another shameful chapter in the history of a country built on the premise that all of us are all entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The post 45 Republicans Leave Every LGBT Child Behind appeared first on Florida Agenda.