In times like these, when people don’t understand us and decide that this means we shouldn’t live at all, we need to connect with the people that do understand, even if just a little bit, even if peripherally.
This piece was co-written by Natalie, Reneice, Alexis, and Carmen. We’re four of the black members of The Speakeasy, Autostraddle’s collective for its writers of color.
An attack on a black gay celebrity like Jussie Smollet is also a message sent to his black and gay fans. So today, for all our queer fam out there, but especially for my black queer family, feel the love and strength of our community. Our kinship is a gift. Please, fortify yourself in that gift today.
Two Black lesbian friends, who were on their way to Dallas Pride, suffered stab wounds from a homophobic attack earlier this month and a Black lesbian couple were verbally assaulted on the train in New York.
One in five lesbians and one in six bisexual women have experienced a hate crime in the last twelve months.
On the White Supremacist “rally” in Charlottesville
The 27-year-old attacker called his victims ‘dykes’ and ‘faggots’ before attacking them.
One woman had her jaw broken and seven teeth knocked out, another a dislocated shoulder and bruised kidney, two left with black eyes — and, the victims of this homophobic attack tell the press, police have been handling the case “completely wrong.”
51-year-old Lisa Dawn Fuillerat and 39-year-old Samara Routenberg were murdered last Friday by Lisa’s estranged husband, who “just couldn’t handle seeing the mother of his two children in a relationship with another woman after 28 years of marriage.” At the time of the murder, he was still on probation for attacking Samara in 2015.
When the election results came in, it had already been a month since I gave up on trying to fix my own mental health issues. And so it turned out that the worst day of our generation collided with my own personal low.
Witnesses told police Steven Endsley had an “ongoing disagreement” with Danielle Smith about her sexual orientation.
Escúchame for Orlando is “a place for queer Latinxs to come together and let our voices be heard about the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. This is an anonymous space because whether you’re out to the whole world, or just to yourself, you deserve to be heard.”
“The morning after the horrific shooting, and the days that followed, I understood part of my father’s fear. Animosity towards LGBTQ people has not gone the way of black and white T.V. sets, phone booths, or travel by horse and carriage. It was and is very much alive.”
Here are just a few of the many, many LGBTQ Latinxs in our community who are speaking up and speaking out to make sure that queer Latinxs are not erased.
If we allow gun violence to continue blighting communities of color, we have failed. But if we enact gun control measures that aid the police state in criminalizing Black and brown bodies, we have also failed.
Links, updates, and further reading on the Pulse shooting, the aftermath, the victims, the gunman, gun control, politics, some resources and centering queer Latinx voices.
Seven women of color were killed this weekend at Pulse in Orlando and these are their stories.
Seven trans people have been killed this year, six trans people of color. That’s two every month, and we’re not even done with March yet.
Texas health investigators raided Planned Parenthoods across the state and obtained patient record information, a school district outside Chicago could lose up to $6 million in federal funding for not allowing a teen trans girl to use the correct locker room, Hillary Clinton will stop accepting money from private prison companies and more news stories.
Planned Parenthood created a new video series about consent, an infographic on the issues bisexuals face, a mother and daughter were assaulted in an anti-gay attack, Shadi Petosky, a trans woman, was detained by TSA at an Orlando airport and more news stories.
