A federal appeals court has issued an injunction against part of Texas’ book-banning law that requires book vendors to rate books for “sexually explicit” and “sexually relevant” materials. Vendors must submit those ratings every year to the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the agency overseeing public schools. The TEA can then overrule a vendor’s ratings and place vendors on a “noncompliant list,” forbidding schools from buying books from them if the vendors disagree with the TEA’s decisions.
Two Texas bookstores — Austin’s BookPeople and Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop — filed a lawsuit against the 2023 Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READER) Act, calling the law overbroad and an unconstitutional violation of their free speech rights. The bookstores were joined in their lawsuit by the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
On Wednesday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that an injunction against the aforementioned section of the READER Act should remain in place because the booksellers in question are likely to suffer irreparable economic and reputational harm because of the law.
Blue Willow Bookshop said that it had already lost $200,000 in business after the law was passed as the Katy Independent School District had already paused all purchasing from it while awaiting for the business to comply with the new law.
The law requires booksellers to rate all books sold to schools if they’re either “sexually explicit” (“patently offensive” by vague and undefined community standards) or “sexually relevant” (with depictions of any sexual conduct). Blue Willow estimated that rating all of its books will cost between $200 and $1,000 per book and between $4 million and $500 million overall. This would bankrupt the store since it only makes $1 million annually, the bookseller said.
Because the bookseller makes 20% of its annual revenue through school sales, if it fails to comply with the law it would lose a large part of its business.
The Texas government argued that the plaintiffs’ case should be thrown out because vendors aren’t required to participate in the rating system and their economic injuries have not yet occurred. However, in its ruling, the court wrote, “We are not persuaded.”
The state also argued that its law didn’t violate free speech rights because there is an “abundant history” of movie and video game ratings and warning labels on cigarettes. However, the court wrote that movie and video game ratings are entirely voluntary since there are no legal requirements that any entity submit ratings before sale. Also, ratings of sexual content are not “purely factual and uncontroversial,” unlike the health warnings on cigarettes.
“The statute requires vendors to undertake contextual analyses, weighing and balancing many factors to determine a rating for each book,” the court wrote. “Balancing a myriad of factors that depend on community standards is anything but the mere disclosure of factual information. And it has already proven controversial.”
In its lawsuit, the plaintiffs wrote, “The overbroad language of the Book Ban could result in the banning or restricting of access to many classic works of literature, such as Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Of Mice and Men, Ulysses, Jane Eyre, Maus, Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, The Canterbury Tales, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and even the Bible.”
While Texas schools will still be allowed to remove sexually explicit and relevant materials from libraries and classrooms, book sellers won’t have to comply with the law for now. The full issue will be decided as the lawsuit proceeds through the judicial system.
In a statement issued after the ruling, the plaintiffs said, “We are grateful for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decisive action in striking down this unconstitutional law. With this historic decision the court has moved decisively to ensure the constitutionally protected speech of authors, booksellers, publishers, and readers, and prevent the state government from unlawfully compelling speech on the part of private citizens.”
“The court’s decision also shields Texas businesses from the imposition of impossibly onerous conditions, protects the basic constitutional rights of the plaintiffs, and lets Texas parents make decisions for their own children without government interference or control,” the statement contnued. “This is a good day for bookstores, readers, and free expression.”
Right-wingers like Alex Jones and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have long accused LGBTQ+ people and allies of being “groomers” and pedophiles. But they’re making excuses now that former President Donald Trump may soon be unveiled as one of 200 people connected to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
A judge has recently unsealed and uncensored previously redacted court documents that name up to 200 associates of Epstein. The documents were unsealed in a lawsuit brought by Epstein victim Virginia Guiffre. Guiffre accused Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell of forcing her to have sex with Epstein’s powerful and wealthy friends, including Britain’s Prince Andrew — something Prince Andrew has denied.
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Trump’s name is expected to appear alongside former President Bill Clinton’s in the un-redacted files since Epstein’s flight logs have already shown that they flew on Epstein’s private Boeing 727 plane. The plane was nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” after Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 pedophilia novel, due to the frequent delivery of apparently underage women to Epstein’s privately owned island of Little Saint James. Epstein pleaded guilty to sex with a 14-year-old girl in 2008 and was undergoing investigation for other possible sex crimes before his suspicious August 2019 suicide at a New York prison.
There’s no evidence that Clinton or Trump ever visited the island, and neither have been charged with a crime related to Epstein. Nevertheless, Jones and Greene are already pushing a conspiracy theory that any mention of Trump in the un-redacted files will be due to “deep state” federal operatives trying to smear the former president.
Jones, the host of InfoWars whose social media accounts and guests have repeatedly accused LGBTQ+ people and their allies of pedophilia, recently said, “If they put out a client list, and that’s possible that it could be fake, because Epstein’s dead. And that’s something very possible.” Jones said the CIA had previously committed similar actions in connection with the Israeli and British intelligence agencies.
Defending Trump, Jones added, “[Trump] gets devoted to one woman at a time, gets totally obsessed with them, totally nice to them.” Despite Jones’s claim, at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including extra-marital affairs.
Greene, whose anti-LGBTQ+ tweets about grooming and pedophilia have spread far on social media, has tried to deflect any association between Epstein and Trump by focusing on Clinton instead.
“For some us, it’s no surprise at all that Bill Clinton will be named in the Jeffrey Epstein files,” she wrote in a January 3 X post. “We said it a long time ago but they labeled us conspiracy theorists. There will be lots of names you’ve never heard of and the IC collected info on them. Pedophiles belong in jail not on secret government lists.”
Several X commenters asked if she’ll hold Trump to the same standard if he’s named in the un-redacted documents.
In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump said “I’ve known Jeff[rey Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
However, in 2019, soon after Epstein was taken into custody by New York authorities, Trump said he had a “falling-out” with Epstein about 15 years ago, adding, “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” Trump allegedly banned Epstein from his resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida in the early 2000s after Epstein expressed interest in a club member’s teenage daughter.
Flames shot through the crowded Up Stairs Lounge as bartender Buddy Rasmussen opened the front door to see who had been ringing the downstairs buzzer. Someone had lit the popular bar’s stairwell carpet on fire, and it burned its way up the wooden stairs into the bar, quickly igniting the lounge’s red wallpaper, curtains, and posters of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing his seven gold medals, a star-spangled Speedo, and a smile.
Some patrons saw the blaze and ran for the nearest exits or down the stairwell, emerging with their clothes on fire as neighbors raced to pour pitchers of water onto them. Rasmussen began tapping patrons on the shoulder to follow him toward the fire exit at the back of the bar, but many were too shocked by the exploding blaze to move.
The June 24, 1973, conflagration, likely set by a sex worker ejected from the New Orleans bar earlier that night, killed 32 people and injured at least 15 others.
Yet the reaction to the catastrophe hardly matched the immense suffering the fire caused, and the tragedy was compounded by multiple denials: Public officials refused to issue statements about the fire, and Catholic churches refused to hold funeral services for the victims, whom they saw as unrepentant sinners. The media only reported on the fire briefly or not at all, and some families refused to claim their relatives’ bodies because they didn’t want to acknowledge that they were gay. Three of the victims ended up buried in unmarked graves — two remain unidentified.
To this day, the arson remains unsolved.
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The June 25, 1973, blaze quickly engulfed the Up Stairs Lounge. Photo by Philip Ames, courtesy of the LGBT+ Archives of Louisiana.
Hate crimes reverberate through communities, intimidating an entire class of people. The Up Stairs Lounge had been a safe space in the gay-friendly, tourist-heavy French Quarter. But as bar patrons feared a similar attack on other gathering spots, still others worried that police might start raiding gay bars more often and arresting more men in the name of public safety. Bar owners believed talking too much about the fire could hurt business. And locals just wanted to move on from the horror.
As a result, to this day, even many queer New Orleanians aren’t aware of the most devastating fire in their city’s history, the deadliest massacre of gay men in the U.S. before the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
This year, half a century later, there’s considerable important work being done to ensure that the arson and its aftermath are remembered and the deaths memorialized. For the tragedy’s anniversary, a group of community activists, religious leaders, and queer historians partnered with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana and the Historic New Orleans Collection to organize a weekend of commemorative events at the end of June.
The weekend, attended by LGBTQ Nation, featured discussions with religious leaders and activists who lent a hand in the fire’s aftermath, artists who have made documentaries and theatrical works based on the event, church leaders concerned with the tragedy’s spiritual legacy, and podcasters and archivists dedicated to preserving its terrible memory. The weekend events also included art exhibitions, film screenings, a memorial service, and a “second line” jazz funeral through the city’s streets to the now defunct bar’s front entrance.
Their work is especially important considering the current backlash against remembering the atrocities America has committed against its most vulnerable communities. Extreme right-wingers are busy denying our guilt over slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the effect these traumas have on minority communities to this day.
But those committed to preserving history aren’t just making artworks and public speeches about the tragedy; they’re also working to ensure that the victims and their families finally get the recognition and empathy they deserve for their loss.
The fire occurred when New Orleans author Johnny Townsend was only 11 years old. Though he saw horrific photos of the aftermath on TV news at the time, as he grew up, he could find little background on what happened. So in 1989 — 16 years after the fire — he began tracking down the bar’s survivors and former patrons with the help of Rasmussen, the lounge’s surviving bartender.
Through interviews and research, Townsend published the first historical account of what happened as well as profiles for each victim in his 2011 book Let the Faggots Burn. The amateur historian struggled to find a publisher, so he eventually published it himself via BookLocker.com. After the 333-page book was released, a son of one of the fire’s victims approached him after Townsend spoke publicly about the book and said that all he had ever known of his father was what his mother had told him: “Your father was a drunk, and he died at a bar.”
Townsend’s book had given his dad back to him. Today, the historical amnesia is finally being addressed. There are three books about the fire — including Clayton Delery-Edwards’ comprehensive 2014 account, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson, and Robert W. Fieseler’s 2018 nonfiction narrative, Tinderbox.
Three documentaries have been made about the arson, with a fourth in production, as well as one play, a stage musical, four unproduced screenplays, a dance piece, various podcasts, and a permanent art installation.
One of the documentaries, a 2013 short by Royd Anderson, helped the estranged family of World War II veteran Ferris LeBlanc realize that he was one of three “unidentified white males” who perished in the blaze. The city buried his corpse in an unmarked plot within Resthaven Memorial Park, a potter’s field located near the city’s northeastern coast.
Anderson is now working on a documentary called Saving Ferris and pressuring government officials to exhume LeBlanc and give him the proper military burial that he deserved.
Max Vernon’s 2017 stage musical, The View UpStairs, depicts a snarky gay fashionista millennial who buys the dilapidated Up Stairs Lounge to launch his flagship store but is then magically transported to 1973, just before the fire. Despite its tragic content, it has been seen by over 100,000 people — Off-Broadway, in multiple U.S. cities, as well as in England and Australia — and has been translated into Japanese and seen by 20,000 theatergoers. Drag legend RuPaul called the musical “fantastic.”
None of these things would’ve been possible without Townsend’s first book. Delery-Edwards and Fieseler agreed on this point as the three book authors spoke at an opening-night panel during the 50th-anniversary commemorative weekend.
Fieseler said that people still contact him regularly with new information about the fire. At speaking engagements, attendees will often approach him, tears in their eyes, to confess their estrangement from their own queer family members.
“It can change minds,” Fieseler said of the history. “It can melt hearts when they learn the inhumanity of how these people were treated.”
Many of the weekend panelists said they wanted to ensure that the history is never forgotten and that it never happens again — but it already is happening again.
“New Orleans is renowned internationally for being a welcoming, open city. And part of us continuing to promote that narrative requires us to acknowledge a time when we were not an open, welcoming city.”City Council Vice President J.P. Morell
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Eleven states have laws censoring discussions of LGBTQ+ issues in public school classrooms. Thirty-three states have banned LGBTQ+-inclusive books from schools and public libraries, according to the free speech organization PEN America. Meanwhile, recent reports show that the LGBTQ+ community has increasingly been targeted by legislation banning drag shows and gender-affirming care, as well as by hate speech, threats, and violence from white supremacist, neo-fascist, parental rights, and Christian nationalist groups.
“New Orleans is renowned internationally for being a welcoming, open city,” City Council Vice President J.P. Morell told attendees at the opening reception of the 50th anniversary commemoration. “And part of us continuing to promote that narrative requires us to acknowledge a time when we were not an open, welcoming city.”
Morell spearheaded an official apology from the city, delivered in 2022, for its “botched and callous response” to the arson. He said that the city and media had made an “active effort” to bury the massacre and shield the politically powerful from any guilt for neglecting its victims. That same year, Louisiana state Rep. Alonzo Knox (D) passed a resolution apologizing for the state’s response.
A growing community has emerged to preserve the arson’s memory and counter those who wish to keep it buried. To understand what drives them, one must first know a little about the bar, the community it created, and the fire that ravaged both.
“When I try to explain [the arson] to people not in the queer community,” Morell told the reception attendees, “I tell them the Up Stairs Lounge is like the [1921] Tulsa Massacre for those in the African American community … The fact that we didn’t know about it as a country tells you how successful the government and the media can be in erasing history if we don’t fight for it.”
How a refuge turned into a deadly nightmare
Gay life during the early 1970s was nothing like today. The American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness, the best-known depiction across America was the hillbilly rape scene from the film Deliverance, and some closeted men got married and had children just to avoid persecution.
While some of New Orleans’ queer community joined invite-only dinner clubs and Mardi Gras krewes to socialize privately, others frequented public cruising spots and bars. In the late-night hours, police would sometimes raid these establishments, beating up and arresting patrons on vague “obscenities” charges for actions as simple as hugging. Arrestees had their names published in the newspaper, resulting in firings, divorces, and even taking their own lives.
In 1970, gay entrepreneur Philip Esteve opened the Up Stairs Lounge and hired Rasmussen, a friendly man who had been dishonorably discharged from the military for being gay.
The bar didn’t get much business when it first opened, but then Rasmussen had the idea for a Sunday evening Beer Bust from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. when customers could pay $1 for all-you-can-drink beer. He figured, accurately, that Beer Bust customers would become bar regulars.
As the crowds grew, the lounge became a refuge for its patrons, some of whom were out among gay friends but closeted at work. The bar held annual parties for Mardi Gras and Halloween and also community fundraisers for children’s hospitals and other causes. On a small stage, patrons performed plays and lighthearted “Nellydramas” where men played women’s roles, and the audience threw popcorn at cartoonish villains.
The bar also hired a pianist to play singalongs. At the end of every Beer Bust, he’d play the 1970 Brotherhood of Man song “United We Stand,” and patrons would sing together: “There’s nowhere in the world that I would rather be / Than with you my love / And there’s nothing in the world that I would rather see / Than your smile my love / For united we stand / Divided we fall / And if our backs should ever be against the wall / We’ll be together, together, you and I.”
The bar also hosted Sunday morning services for the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a gay-affirming church started in Los Angeles in 1968. William “Bill” Larson, New Orleans’ MCC minister, temporarily held Sunday services in the bar’s intimate theater. Even after moving the gatherings into his own home, church members still patronized the bar after services, often staying for the Beer Bust.
According to accounts in the aforementioned books and an ABC News featureabout the arson, during one Beer Bust on June 24, 1973, 26-year-old sex worker Roger Dale Nunez was reportedly sexually harassing patrons. One patron punched him, and the bartender threw him out. But before leaving, Nunez allegedly said, “I’m gonna burn you all out!”
It’s believed that Nunez then went to a nearby Walgreens, purchased a 7-ounce canister of Ronsonol lighter fluid, emptied it onto the bar entrance’s bottom steps, and ignited it. The small fire quickly blazed up the carpeted stairway and swept into the bar, engulfing its wallpaper, window drapes, wood paneling, posters, and decorations.
Rasmussen, who received fire training in the military, helped 22 people safely exit from a fire door behind the stage, but others were too intoxicated or stunned to follow. Some of the 42 people who remained in the bar escaped through another fire door; others ran down the fiery stairwell and emerged downstairs severely burned.
Twelve escaped by miraculously squeezing through the 10-inch gaps in the metal safety bars guarding the lounge’s large floor-to-ceiling windows. One such person was Rusty Quinton, a man who would soon after be photographed while looking at the fiery bar and crying, “My friends are up there!”
Others weren’t so lucky. Larson, the MCC pastor, squeezed his head and arm through the bars before catching flame and burning alive. Some people feared the windows’ 12-foot drop to the sidewalk and blocked others from escaping through them.
Though firefighters extinguished the blaze barely 20 minutes after it began, when they entered the bar, they discovered that nearly 17 corpses had piled atop one another while trying to escape through the windows. Firefighters vomited from the stench and cried at the horrific sights. Larson’s charred corpse remained visible in the window for nearly four hours before being removed.
Fifteen injured survivors went to Charity Hospital, forcing it to prematurely open its new burn unit. Three of those admitted died from their injuries.
One survivor with burned hands asked for help dialing his boyfriend on a pay phone. When his lover answered, he looked at the floor and said, “Hello, David? Listen, I’ve had a sort of accident. Yes … Please come quick. Please come. I hurt.”
Heroes from the ashes
Throughout history, some haven’t considered the fire a hate crime because it was committed by someone from the LGBTQ+ community. But, as one commemoration panelist, Metropolitan Community Church minister Paul Breton, said, the real hate crime happened afterward with the inhuman response of the city, state, and church.
The indignities began almost immediately. As journalists arrived at the scene, Rasmussen found Nunez in the crowd and dragged him to a police officer for arrest. The cop, possibly more concerned with crowd control, told Rasmussen to move along. The officer’s negligence characterized the police’s handling of the case. While investigators often use victims’ clothing, jewelry, birthmarks, and IDs to identify the dead, the fire had rendered them unidentifiable. Police officials told reporters from then newspaper The States-Item that they had trouble identifying people because “some thieves hung out” at the bar, and it was “not uncommon for homosexuals to carry false identification.”
Reggie Adams, Adam Fontenot, Horace “Skip” Hetchell, Ken Harrington, Rev. William “Bill” Larson, Ferris LeBlanc, Robert Lumpkin, Leon Richard Maples, Bud Matyi, Duane George “Mitch” Mitchell, and Perry Lane Waters, Jr. were among the victims on June 27, 1973. Photos courtesy of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.
Police concluded their investigation about two months later without ever questioning or arresting Nunez. The fire marshal’s more thorough investigation subjected Nunez to a psychological stress evaluation (PSE) that detected dishonesty in Nunez’s denials. PSEs, however, are subjective and often inadmissible as court evidence.
Nunez drunkenly confessed to three people — his lover, a nun, and a drag queen — that he had started the fire, only to deny it when sober. None of them told the police. The drag queen, Miss Fury, said Nunez confessed to her on Christmas Eve 1973 that “He’d only meant to cause a little fire and smoke. He’d only meant to scare everybody. He didn’t realize the whole place would go up in flames.” The 27-year-old arsonist died by suicide on November 15, 1974, by overdosing on beer and painkillers.
Even though the fire marshal concluded that Nunez was guilty, the Orleans Parish District Attorney refused to sign off on the conclusion. With no fingerprints on the lighter fluid can, witnesses to the fire setting, or confession, there was no proof and no conviction — the case remains officially unsolved to this day.
The local paper, The Times-Picayune, printed the names of the deceased and the survivors, outing some of them. Closeted survivors who avoided the press still couldn’t mention the tragedy at their workplaces. According to Delery-Edwards’ and Townsend’s research, tasteless jokes began circulating among New Orleans locals about “flaming queens,” how the dead homos should be buried in fruit jars, and how the real tragedy was that more f**gots didn’t die.
When a 1972 fire at New Orleans’ Rault Center killed six people, then-Mayor Moon Landrieu, then-Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, and then-Catholic Archbishop Philip Hannan issued sympathetic statements to the victims and their families. However, after the Up Stairs Lounge fire killed 32, the officials said nothing for weeks. Hannan reportedly told local Catholic churches not to hold funerals or burials for any of the fire’s non-Catholic victims.
An appeals court blocked 19 different lawsuits suing city and state agencies for failing to inspect the bar for fire hazards for over two years before the blaze. With no one else to hold accountable, the litigants sued the bar’s owner for $80,000, a paltry sum to split among them all.
But even amid this coldness, heroes rose from the ashes.
Three MCC leaders — MCC founder Troy Perry of Los Angeles, Reverend John Gill of Atlanta, and Minister Paul Breton of Washington D.C. — quickly met in New Orleans to begin organizing memorials and press conferences, shaming the media and government for sweeping victims’ ashes under the rug.
These men helped establish The National New Orleans Memorial Fund, which raised $18,000 (worth about $125,000 today). The fund covered burial costs and aided survivors with medical bills and lost wages. It was the first-ever national fundraiser for a gay cause, and it provided a blueprint for similar fundraisers during the soon-to-come AIDS epidemic.
Breton, who is now 83, recalled the unkindness of churches that refused to host memorials for homosexuals.
“Church is not necessarily found in a community of people who adhere to a creed,” Breton said during a 50th anniversary panel about the fire’s spiritual legacy. “The Beer Bust was a church. You had people of like mind and like interest coming together every Sunday at a specified time, and they did something that people in church should do and often that people in churches don’t do — they were friends with each other.”
The three MCC leaders eventually convinced Father Bill Richardson of St. George’s Episcopal Church to host a June 25 memorial in the church’s small chapel. Only 50 people attended since it wasn’t well publicized and victims were still being identified. But afterward, 100 parishioners complained to the local bishop and demanded Richardson’s resignation.
In response, Richardson wrote a June 28 letter to congregants stating, “St. George’s is not a private club but the House of God … Would Jesus have barred these grief-stricken people from His church, or would He have welcomed them?” If congregants felt that the church should only minister to a select few, he wrote, he’d consider resigning. He never resigned, but the Episcopalian bishop of New Orleans, Iveson Nolan, told Richardson and other local Episcopal churches not to host future memorials.
A second memorial was held at St. Mark’s Methodist Church on Sunday, July 1. Its organizers printed 3,000 flyers to advertise it, and about 300 people attended, including the Methodist Bishop of Louisiana — a big deal considering the church officially sees homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The mourners then sang “United We Stand,” the same song that bar patrons sang at the end of every Beer Bust.
That same day, 46 MCC branches in the U.S. and Europe held memorial services, and several gay bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses in eight major U.S. cities also closed for an hour to commemorate the victims.
“I’m not ashamed of who I am or who my friends are. I came in the front door, and I’m going out that way.”An attendee at a memorial event for the Up Stairs Lounge fire, circa 1973.
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Though the organizers of the New Orleans memorial had asked the press not to attend, TheTimes-Picayune and the local NBC TV affiliate arrived with cameras, waiting to record departing attendees and potentially out them. Perry notified the mourners and offered a backdoor exit. But an unidentified butch lesbian reportedly shouted, “I’m not ashamed of who I am or who my friends are. I came in the front door, and I’m going out that way.”
Recounts differ on what happened next. Some say the mourners left through the front door. Some say a few exited out the back. Others say the TV cameras had already departed by the time the memorial ended. Perry told one historian it didn’t matter if the cameras were there or not — what mattered was that the gay mourners faced them.
A reckoning 50 years in the making
(from left) A local “watering hole,” The Jimani, has occupied the street level of 141 Chartres Street since 1972. The Up Stairs Lounge on the second floor had only one public entrance, its second-floor windows were either boarded or covered with iron bars. Photos courtesy of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana.
Contrary to widespread belief, the Up Stairs Lounge fire wasn’t New Orleans’ Stonewall moment. The fire wasn’t a victory against oppression, and it didn’t rouse the local gay community to start fighting for their rights. In fact, the LGBTQ+ community rarely discussed the fire, and some opposed the efforts of the visiting MCC ministers.
The ministers were referred to as “fairy carpetbaggers,” borrowing a post–Civil War term for Northerners who profited off of Southern suffering. Up Stairs Lounge bar owner Esteve and other local gay business owners blamed the out-of-state activists for interfering in local matters, divisively politicizing a tragedy, and attracting unwanted government attention to gay establishments and their patrons.
Though the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental disorders six months after the fire, it wouldn’t be until six years later that the city’s queer community would unite to oppose a force that bears an eerie resemblance to the threat LGBTQ+ people face today.
In 1977, the leaders of seven local gay and lesbian groups organized a 2,000-person protest against hate group leader Anita Bryant — it was the city’s largest-ever gay rights demonstration. That same year, a gay and lesbian newspaper Impact began publication, and the mayor appointed gays and lesbians to his city hall committee. Throughout the 1980s, various gay political and HIV advocacy groups evolved, including the New Orleans Chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG).
Despite this progress, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire remained mostly forgotten, and it was even excluded from a 1991 Louisiana State Museum exhibit about the city’s historic fires. However, on the arson’s 30th anniversary in 2003, the New Orleans MCC and others placed a bronze memorial plaque with the names of the fire’s 32 victims in front of the bar’s original entrance. By the arson’s 40th anniversary, the city’s then-mayor Mitch Landrieu (son of the mayor who had served during the fire) issued a statement formally recognizing the fire, and then Catholic Archbishop Gregory Aymond apologized for the archdiocese not issuing a statement when the blaze occurred.
Many of the fire’s survivors are dead, and the victims’ families have grown older and largely moved away. But local MCC Rev. Lonnie Cheramie, a queer group called the Crescent City Leathermen, and others have helped organize annual memorials, including a 2023 recreation of the 1973 memorial service that occurred at St. Marks.
“There are growing numbers of people across our country who want to erase our history and our very existence. Your very existence and participation today is, in fact, a political act.”Apostle Shelly Planellas of New Covenant Church, host of the Up Stairs Lounge 50th anniversary commemoration
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In front of the crowded sanctuary stood 32 small black banners, each with the name of a different victim sewn in gold lettering. After the New Orleans Gay Men’s Chorus sang “United We Stand,” various leathermen, drag nuns with the Big Easy Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and others carried the banners through the French Quarter for a “second line” jazz funeral procession to the entrance of the former Up Stairs Lounge. (The street-level bar, The Jimani, has occupied the space since 1972, with building records dating back as far back as 1848.)
There, people left flowers and bouquets on the plaque as Regina Adams observed the proceedings. Her husband, Reginald “Reggie” Adams, died in the fire. When she returned to the bar after going home to retrieve her checkbook, she saw the fire and stood in the middle of Iberville Street, screaming. Every day of the following week, she laid out her husband’s work clothes as if awaiting his return. She has rarely ever attended these memorial events, one local filmmaker noted.
“We still have a lot of work left to do,” said the event’s emcee, Apostle Shelly Planellas of New Covenant Church, through a loudspeaker in front of the 32 black banners. “Seven years ago, we lost 49 lives at Pulse in Orlando. Last year, we lost five at Club Q in Colorado Springs. And we have lost countless members of our beloved trans community to bigotry and hatred. And our work does not end here. Our work and our mission do not end ever. Homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, and hatred are still a part of our daily reality. There are growing numbers of people across our country who want to erase our history and our very existence. Many would say that we should never politicize a tragedy like this. Your very existence and participation today is, in fact, a political act.”
Most of the memorial’s attendees skewed older, Tim Reynolds of the Crescent City Leathermen said, because the older generation is more invested in preserving history. His group helps organize the memorials, he said, to keep the memory alive for the next generation.
In a recently released podcast about the arson, The Fire UpStairs, activist, drag performer, and RuPaul’s Drag Race alum BenDeLaCreme said that many younger queer people and allies don’t understand why gay life is so centered around bars.
“These were the spaces that [homophobic society] pushed us into,” BenDeLaCreme told the podcast’s co-creator Joey Gray. But now — with more hookup apps and civil rights — even queer spaces are disappearing, she said.
This disappearance of queer spaces makes it more urgent to convey this history, Gray said, especially at a time when bigots are fighting to actively erase it. The AIDS epidemic silenced an entire generation of queer elders from passing down our community’s legacy. Because of this, more young people have grown up in an unprecedented era of acceptance and find themselves shaken and unprepared to face the current threat to our progress, not aware of similar historical threats and actions.
“In order to fight these battles and to stand up for what’s historically our culture, you have to have some kind of a foundation, a base knowledge,” said Gray about why he started the podcast.
Another guest of Gray’s podcast — Brian Derrick, founder of the progressive political engagement site Oath — noted that the cost of LGBTQ+ progress has been paid with career sacrifices, lives, and emotional labor.
“So now we have this fight in front of us,” Derrick said. “It’s also going to be expensive, and it’s going to cost a lot of time, money, careers, and all of these massive inputs in order to again move equality forward so that the next generation doesn’t have the same fight that we have right now. So we are leaving our kids — both literal and metaphorical — in a better place.”
Additional research by Billy McEntee and Kelly Suzan Waggoner.
The Christian anti-LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — is hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn state bans on so-called conversion therapy for minors. Though the court hasn’t agreed to take on the case just yet, it provide insight into how ADF plans on challenging more conversion therapy bans in the future.
The ADF is providing legal counsel to licensed marriage and family counselor Brian Tingley in Tingley v. Ferguson, a legal challenge to Washington state’s ban. Tingley says the ban violates his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, The New Republic reported.
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Tingley’s petition to the court says that his speech as a therapist should be considered as “speech” and not professional “conduct.” He said he “lives in continuous fear of government persecution” because the ban “forbids him from speaking, treating his professional license as a license for government censorship.” Tingley says he should be able to offer conversion therapy — even though it has been widely disavowed as a form of psychological torture by numerous American mental health organizations — because some kids are actively seeking to change their sexual orientation.
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His case may actually be aided by the 2018 Supreme Court decision National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra which said that the government couldn’t “compel” or “regulate” anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers in California to inform pregnant people about state-funded reproductive health services.
However, Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis told the aforementioned publication that the cases are different. Bans on conversion therapy aren’t trying to force Tingley and other therapists to say things they don’t want to say, Kreis argues. Rather, he reasons, state bans are trying to prevent medical conduct from resulting in “tangible harms.”
A 2013 survey showed that 84% of former patients who tried ex-gay therapy said it inflicted lasting shame and emotional harm. Additionally, March 2022 peer-reviewed study from The Trevor Project showed that 13% of LGBTQ+ youth nationwide had reported being subjected to conversion therapy. Of those, 83% were subjected to it before reaching the age of 18. The study showed that young people who underwent conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide afterward. Numerous conversion therapy advocates have later come out as still gay and apologized for the harm that conversion therapy causes.
Furthermore, Kreis notes that the bans provide specific exemptions for “purely religious” speech and also that the government already heavily regulates the professional fields of therapy and healthcare. Thus, the bans are just an extension of that.
Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University, said the ADF will use similar free speech arguments to try and overturn regulations involving professional conduct.
“We have all sorts of regulations for licensed mental health professionals, and the patients rely on this kind of safety that those licensing requirements impose,” she told The New Republic. “Opening the door in this kind of case… opens the door to quite a few other situations where a person may have an objection to what is a public norm or an expert judgment about the safety of other people. It shouldn’t be your private decision that you’re not going to agree with that and therefore [will] not follow that law, when that is a condition of your licensure.”
The methods of so-called conversion therapists include encouraging queer people not to masturbate, redirecting their sexual energy into exercise, “covert aversion” (a fancy name for imagining possible negative consequences of being queer), Bible study, directing same-sex sexual desire onto opposite-sex partners, inflicting pain and humiliation anytime LGBTQ+ feelings arise, and forcing people to act out stereotypical gender roles in behavior and personal appearance.
Twenty-nine U.S. states have either passed full or partial bans on conversion therapy for minors. In three of those states — Alabama, Georgia, and Florida — court injunctions have stopped the bans from going into effect while legal challenges to the bans proceed in court.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860) is staffed by trans people and will not contact law enforcement. The Trevor Project provides a safe, judgement-free place to talk for youth via chat, text (678-678), or phone (1-866-488-7386). Help is available at all three resources in English and Spanish.
Gay, lesbian, and bisexual young people are more likely to use alcohol, e-cigarettes, cannabis, and tobacco than their heterosexual peers, a new study has found. Researchers say that stress from sexual orientation-based discrimination is to blame.
The study — published this autumn in the American Medical Association’s open-access medical journal, JAMA Network Open — looked at data on the habits of 28,291 middle and high school students taken from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey.
About 4.5% of student respondents self-identified as gay or lesbian, and 11.8% self-identified as bisexual. These percentages represent about 4,611 of the respondents.
Researchers found that 29.3% of non-heterosexual youths had used alcohol in the last 30 days, compared to 21.6% of heterosexual youth. About 25.6% of non-hetero youth self-reported cannabis use over the last 30 days, compared to 14% of heterosexual youth. Approximately 26.2% of non-hetero youth self-reported e-cigarette use, compared to 16.4% of hetero youth. Lastly, 9.1% of non-hetero youth self-reported cannabis use over the last 30 days, compared to 4.6% of heterosexual youth
Researchers found that bisexual youths were especially more likely to have vaped cannabis oil and e-cigarettes than their gay and heterosexual counterparts.
“It is well-documented that minority stress (eg, stress from sexual orientation-based discrimination) is associated with youth substance use, which may be consistent with vaping cannabis,” the study’s authors wrote. “Preliminary evidence from this study may inform future prevention strategies directed at reducing substance use disparities among sexual minority youth.”
The study’s findings reflect similar findings from past studies. A 2018 surveyfrom the Ohio Department of Health showed that LGBTQ+ teens were more likely to have vaped or smoked in the last 30 days compared to their straight counterparts.
A 2017 CDC study found that LGBTQ+ people were twice as likely to smoke than straight and cisgender people. Another study from the same year found that queer youth were more likely to smoke than straight and cis youth. One studyfound that LGBTQ+ people spend about $7.9 billion on cigarettes each year.
The representatives — Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO), Kay Granger (R-TX), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Debbie Lesko (R-AZ), and Victoria Spartz (R-IN) — all voted against the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, a law that requires the federal government to recognize legal same-sex marriages.
“The Republican House is failing the American people again,” Spartz said. “[The House is] like a theater full of actors in the circus…. Our children will be ashamed of another worthless Congress.”
“Right now, Washington, D.C. is broken; it is hard to get anything done,” Lesko said in a statement.
“I always have been disappointed with our inability in Congress to deal with major issues, and I’m also disappointed that the Republican Party continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen,” Buck said. “Our nation is on a collision course with reality and a steadfast commitment to truth, even uncomfortable truths, is the only way forward.”
Buck predicted that even more House Republicans will leave “in the near future,” The Hill reported.
These announced departures accompany recent unrest among Republicans following a contentious three-week search for a new House speaker after the previous one, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), was ousted by far-right Republicans for striking a deal with Democrats to pass a stopgap funding bill to avert a federal government shutdown. With another shutdown looming, the new speaker, rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), seems poised to do the exact same thing.
Republicans are also reeling from heavy election night losses in which Democrats took control of the Virginia state legislature, passed abortion protections in Ohio, elected a Democratic governor in red-state Kentucky, and defeated the book-banning “parents’ rights” group Moms for Liberty in school board races nationwide. Many pundits said that the election results signal a growing backlash to Republicans’ pro-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ culture war that could hurt the party’s chances in the 2024 presidential election.
Trump also seems highly likely to clinch the party’s presidential nomination, putting Republicans nationwide in the uncomfortable position of either supporting Trump’s anti-democratic stances or angering his loyal (and large) voting base. While recent national polls show Trump beating President Joe Biden in key swing states, polls also suggest that large swaths will stop supporting Trump if he’s convicted of any of the 91 federal criminal charges facing him.
It’s likely that the departing Republicans — especially those from conservative-leaning districts — will simply be replaced by Republicans who are similarly anti-LGBTQ+. But the departures signal a widening rift between Trump’s small but influential MAGA wing and the party’s more moderate members.
Vermont’s largest school district, the Champlain Valley School District, has passed a set of policies that affirm transgender and nonbinary students’ identities. The policies require schools to let trans students access school facilities, play on sports teams, and use pronouns and names that match their gender identity without informing potentially unsupportive parents.
The policies, which closely follow the trans- and nonbinary-inclusive guidelines issued by the state Agency of Education in 2017, were developed using “feedback from principals, school counselors, and nurses, students, and parents, along with staff from the Vermont Department of Health and Outright Vermont,” the independent state publication Seven Days reported. The school board unanimously voted in favor of the policies, which underwent two rounds of legal review and will affect the district’s over 4,000 students.
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The three-page policy set allows trans students to determine how much information about their identities they want to share with others, including their parents. It also allows students to decide which names and pronouns they want teachers to use — and to retroactively change this information on past student records — without requiring a court order or legal name change.
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While students must be allowed to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities matching their gender identities, students who request increased privacy “will be provided with reasonable alternative arrangements,” such as a private area, a different changing schedule or a single-stall restroom, the aforementioned publication noted.
The district’s policies are more decisive in their wording than the state education agency’s. For example, while agency policies say trans students “should be” allowed to use bathrooms that match their gender identity, Champlain Valley School District’s says that trans students “must be permitted” to use them.
School board chair Angela Arsenault, who served on the committee that created the policies, said the policy could be challenged in court by transphobic and anti-LGBTQ+ groups like Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). ADF regularly files lawsuits against any expansion of LGBTQ+ civil rights.
“We really do feel that we’ve covered our bases on the legal front, and are confident that the policy would hold up to any legal challenge,” she said.
Dana Kaplan, executive director of LGBTQ+ youth advocacy organization Outright Vermont, praised the new policies, noting that many school districts across the nation have sought to restrict trans and nonbinary students’ rights.
“[This is] an exciting moment where a district is coming out and saying, in no uncertain terms, ‘We want all of our students to be safe,’” Kaplan said. “Having really clear guidance in this day and age, when rhetoric is flying around and [there’s a] concerted effort to squelch the rights of young people… is incredibly important. I hope other districts will follow suit.”
The Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics also praised the school district’s policies, noting “[Our state] is not immune to attacks on transgender and gender diverse Vermonters… When students feel safe to express their identities across the gender spectrum, they will be more prepared to learn and thrive in school.”
An estimated 4% of the state’s high school students identify as trans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
While numerous studies have shown the challenges facing LGBTQ+ Americans and the support they receive from allies and the community, several recent studies illustrate just how different life looks for queer Hispanic and Latinx Americans in particular.
It turns out that nearly 20% of young adult Hispanics identify as LGBTQ+, that a majority of Christian Hispanics support LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination laws, and that over two-thirds of LGBTQ+ Hispanics feel supported by their social circles. As such, these stats provide stunning insights and hope for even greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ Hispanics, both in their own communities and in society at large.
Nearly 1 in 5 young Hispanic adults in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ+
Two polls, taken four years apart, show that not only do more U.S. Hispanics identify as LGBTQ+ than members of any other race, but also that nearly one in five young Latinx adults in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ+.
A 2022 Gallup poll found 11% of U.S. Latinx adults identified as LGBTQ, nearly twice the rate of the 6.2% of white adults and 6.6% of Black adults who identified as queer in the same poll. The poll also found that more than 20% of Hispanic Gen Zers between ages 18 and 25 also identified as LGBTQ+.
And Gen Zers aren’t alone. A 2018 report from the University of Chicago’s GenForward Survey project found that 22% of Latinx Millennials — defined as between the ages 18 and 34 — identified as LGBTQ+. This is much higher than the 14% of African American Millenials, 13% of white Millenials, and 9% of Asian American Millenials who also identified as queer, the poll found.
Hispanic LGBTQ+ people report higher rates of discrimination
A 2020 survey from the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that Hispanic LGBTQ+ people reported higher rates of discrimination compared to white LGBTQ+ people. Hispanic LGBTQ+ respondents said they experienced rates of healthcare and housing discrimination that were anywhere from 10% to 15% higher than that reported by white LGBTQ+ respondents.
“Hispanic LGBTQ individuals face high rates of service denial and often lack access to alternative services,” CAP research assistant Lindsay Mahowald wrote in a report on the survey’s findings. She said that language barriers and lack of culturally competent care also contributed to the higher rates of discrimination reported by queer Hispanics.
Nevertheless, many LGBTQ+ Hispanics feel community support
Over 2.3 million Latinx LGBTQ+ adults are living in the United States, according to a 2021 study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. That number is about the entire population of Houston, Texas, the country’s fourth-largest city.
The study also found that LGBTQ+ Latinx people were more likely to experience depression, high-risk health behaviors, and likely diagnoses of serious health conditions than non-LGBTQ+ Latinx people. However, the higher rates may have resulted partly from the fact that LGBTQ+ Latinx respondents had greater access to health insurance, personal doctors, and health care than non-LGBTQ+ Latinx respondents.
Despite these higher rates of discrimination and health disparities, 64% of Latinx LGB adults and 40% of Latinx transgender adults said they felt connected to the LGBT community, and 68% of Latinx LGBTQ+ adults said they felt supported by their social circles. As such, close friends and community apparently play important roles as psychological and emotional support for Latinx queers.
A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 37% of all Hispanic respondents viewed the legalization of same-sex marriage as being good for society, and 36% considered greater social acceptance of transgender people as good for society as well. These percentages were much lower than the 74% of all respondents who considered the widespread availability of contraceptives as good for society.
However, the poll also found that this view depended greatly on Hispanic respondents’ ages, education level, English-speaking, religious beliefs, place of birth, and political party affiliation.
Younger, college-educated, English-dominant, non-religious, Democrat, and U.S.-born Hispanics viewed same-sex marriage and trans acceptance about 21% to 25% more positively than their older, non-college-educated, Spanish-dominant, Catholic, Protestant, Republican, and foreign-born Hispanic counterparts.
Hispanics largely support LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections
Approximately 62% of Latinx respondents in a 2022 Axios/Ipsos poll said they are comfortable around LGBTQ+ people, two-thirds said they support students being taught about LGBTQ+ identities, and 48% agreed that teens should be able to determine their gender identity for themselves.
Pro-LGBTQ+ attitudes are also shared by religious Hispanics. A 2022 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found strong LGBTQ+ support amongst Hispanics who are Protestant, Catholic, or religiously unaffiliated. Among these groups, 63% to 78% supported LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination laws, and 62% to 82% opposed religiously based refusals to serve LGBTQ+ people.
These accepting attitudes may result from increased visibility of LGBTQ+ people on social media and millennial parents who have created LGBTQ+-inclusive households, Jorge Reyes Salinas, communications director for the LGBTQ+ organization Equality California, told The Salt Lake Tribune.
“It is very pleasantly surprising that Latinx, Latino Gen [Zers] and millennials are identifying more as LGBTQ+, especially when Latino households are culturally known to be more conservative when it comes to sexual orientation or gender norms,” Salinas said. “[Queer Hispanics] are accepted and loved for who they are…. I think that’s extremely hopeful.”
The United States has scored a middling “C-level” rating in lesbian, gay, and bisexual human rights in a study of queer rights across the globe from 2011 to 2020. The 2020 “C” score for the U.S. represents a decline from its higher “B” score in 2016, ranking the U.S. 31 out of 204 world countries overall. The U.S. has also scored a consistent “F” on trans rights throughout the study’s span.
These scores come from the Franklin & Marshall Global Barometers Report, an annual study that measures LGBTQ+ rights in 204 world territories and countries on five different dimensions: anti-LGBTQ+ laws, political and cultural practices, LGBTQ+ rights advocacy, anti-discrimination protections, and violent persecution. The final scores rely on reporting from governmental and non-governmental organizations, media coverage as well as surveys from over 167,000 LGBTQ+ people worldwide.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States suspended operations in Kyiv. But they didn’t stop helping Americans who needed them – especially the queer community.
The report scored each country’s LGB and T rights, separately, with one of five scores: A for “protecting” queer rights, B for “tolerant” of them, C for “resistant” to queer rights, D for “intolerant,” and “F” for “persecuting.”
Franklin & Marshall Global Barometers ReportA world map showing the A-F scores of different countries on LGB rights.
While the U.S. currently has a “C” for its LGB rights record, Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, a professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College who founded the study, told The 19ththat the U.S. will likely score an “F” in the years to come because of the recent wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation targeting queer people in public life.
“With the anti-drag laws that they have in Tennessee and in Florida, a lot of LGBT rights organizations are not able to peacefully or safely assemble, or pride events are not allowed by the state,” she said. “And do security forces provide protection [for] LGBT Pride participants? Again, that varies . . . depending on state.”
The study gave 62% of world countries an F on LGB rights. Only 35% of countries got a C-level grade or higher on LGB rights. All countries and territories that allowed for same-sex marriage scored either an A or a B on LGB rights by 2020, except for the United States.
The study found that countries and territories with higher levels of democratic rights tend to have more rights for LGBTQ+ individuals. It also found that most persecuting world regions continue to be in the Middle East and North Africa.
Only 10 countries have consistently scored an A on LGB rights from 2011-2020: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Luxembourg, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, and Uruguay.
Franklin & Marshall Global Barometers ReportA table showing a positive shift in LGB rights globally from 2011 to 2020
However, the study also had some good news from the global perspective: More countries are moving from lower LGB scores to higher scores. From 2011 to 2020, 24 countries — including the U.S. legalized — same-sex marriage equality. Eight other countries decriminalized homosexuality, bringing the total number of countries that criminalize homosexuality to 71.
As for trans rights, 70% of all countries got an F, and only 24% scored a C or higher. The U.S. has consistently scored an F on trans rights because of laws against the trans community in different states and continued violence and political rhetoric against trans people.
While trans rights improved somewhat globally over the 10-year span of the study, international scores overall have stayed low largely due to violence against trans people and arbitrary arrests for gender non-conformity.
Approximately 86% of all book bans across the nation have occurred in school districts with a local chapter of one of three anti-LGBTQ+ groups: Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF), and Parents’ Rights in Education, according to a new report from the free speech organization PEN America.
According to their report, the groups have used a variety of tactics, including the promotion of state laws and rhetoric against so-called “sexually explicit,” “harmful,” and “age-inappropriate” “porn in schools”; the taking over school boards; the enlisting of parents to threaten public pressure or civic penalties against school boards, educators, and librarians; and the filing of challenges to books, primarily those with racially- and queer-inclusive themes.
State lawyers couldn’t even answer basic questions about how the law is supposed to work.
Moms for Liberty now boasts 284 chapters or local affiliates over 44 states; Citizens Defending Freedom claims 20 local affiliates, located primarily in Texas and Georgia; and Oregon-based Parents’ Rights in Education has local affiliations in 15 states.
Moms for Liberty has been fueled by right-wing funding and has ties to Republican politicians, according to Media Matters. It has also been associated with both the Proud Boys and Gays Against Groomers, two extremist groups that have targeted school board meetings and drag events across the nation.
Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF) has allied with anti-LGBTQ+ groups Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Turning Point USA, according to Media Matters. ADF gave CDF $50,000 in 2021.
Parents’ Rights in Education recently hosted an event for “parents fed up with transgender and DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] education,” The Nation noted. The Parents’ Rights in Education national organization claims schools are pushing “anti-American, anti-white, and anti-capitalist sentiments amongst students.” The group also advocates for transphobic bathroom bills and policies outing trans students to their potentially unsupportive parents.
PEN America recently noted that book bans in public K–12 schools continue to intensify. “In the 2022–2023 school year, PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of books banned, an increase of 33 percent from the 2021–22 school year,” the group said. Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals, with 30% of the banned titles including either characters of color or discussions of race and racism, and 30% including LGBTQ+ characters or themes.
Most book bans in this year’s Index are classified as “banned pending investigation.” In these instances, a title is removed during a review to determine what restrictions, if any, to place upon it.
In late September, beloved actor and LGBTQ+ ally LeVar Burton — and over 175 other artists and authors — signed an open letter encouraging people to fight back against anti-LGBTQ+ book bans that are sweeping the nation.
“Far-right politicians like Ron DeSantis are championing draconian laws to ban books and the teaching of accurate multicultural American history in favor of upholding a homophobic, transphobic, and white supremacist vision of our nation,” the letter’s website, Artists Against Book Bans, reads. The website and campaign were spearheaded by the progressive political group MoveOn.
“This restrictive behavior is not just antithetical to free speech and expression but has a chilling effect on the broader creative field,” the letter says. “The government cannot and should not create any interference or dictate what people can produce, write, generate, read, listen to, or consume.”
