Jo Yarcaba

Black LGBTQ people face an increased risk of violence and harassment. A new app hopes to help change that.

David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, said Black queer and trans people have to worry about things “most people take for granted and don’t have to think about, like whether or not a barber or beautician is going to say something that might be homophobic, or you’re going to be denied access to a cake because a baker is going to hide their hate behind religion,” he said. 

Knowing this, Johns said he has dreamed for years about creating a way for Black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving people to more easily find safe spaces. 

That dream became Lavender Book, a web-based app launched Monday and created in collaboration with Out in Tech, a nonprofit for LGBTQ people who work in the technology sector. 

Lavender Book’s key feature is a crowdsourced search engine that shows users safe and friendly establishments in different locations. Users can narrow down their search by the service they’re looking for and a list of attributes, such as gender-neutral restrooms, Black- or trans-owned, or LGBTQ-trained staff.

The app is based on the historic Green Book, which was a guide for Black road-trippers published during the Jim Crow era that mapped safe spaces for Black people.

“We know how much uncompensated labor goes into finding safe spaces,” Johns said. “Black LGBTQIA+ folk, and then [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] folks with intersectional identities thereafter, spent a lot of time making phone calls and leveraging community networks to identify places where the likelihood of us being victims of verbal harassment, bias, discrimination or violence associated with actual or assumed sexual identity and gender orientation or expression will happen.”

Some of that, Johns said, is informed by the disproportionate rates of violence against Black LGBTQ people. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing violence against LGBTQ people, found in 2013 that people of color comprised the majority — 58 percent — of LGBTQ and HIV-affected people who reported hate violence to its member programs. 

The report also found that Black LGBTQ and HIV-affected people were 1.4 times more likely to experience physical violence and two times more likely to experience threats and intimidation during incidents of hate violence. 

Johns said the violence Black LGBTQ people face is nothing new. In the month of April alone, the National Black Justice Coalition reported on the deaths of at least seven trans women — all of them women of color, five of them Black. So far in May, three more trans women have been killed, all of them also women of color. 

Since the start of 2021, at least 24 trans and gender nonconforming people have been killed, according to the Human Rights Campaign, putting the year on track to outpace the number of deaths in 2020, which HRC called “the most violent year on record” since the group began tracking anti-trans violence in 2013. 

“For so many of us, the spaces we’re forced to move through and the world around us is not welcoming,” Johns said. 

One of the beta-testers for the app and a member of NBJC’s Youth and Young Adult Action Council, Sage Grace Dolan-Sandrino, 20, said that as a Black and Latina queer and trans woman, “it is imperative to my survival that I know in what spaces I am safe.” 

“Growing up in Washington, D.C., I became familiar with my safe spaces — where to eat, where to shop, and where NOT to,” she said. “Since moving to upstate New York for college, it has become incredibly aware to me that so many of the spaces are not safe. With the introduction of an app and program like this, I may have been able to avoid getting my car fixed by a Trump-supporting, white nationalist, gun-toting mechanic.”

She said that while using the app, she could “easily imagine the profound impact this could have on the safety of being queer in public.”

Peter Redmond, Out in Tech’s New York City chapter head and events producer, said the app is “for us, by us,” because it was built by a diverse team of engineers, product designers and UX designers. 

He said he hopes the app grows to include not just businesses like restaurants, but also essential services like health care. 

“I have found myself traveling to cities where I’m not exactly sure will I be welcomed in certain establishments, so I’ve definitely had to lean on services like this in the past,” he said. “So to have the Lavender Book now join all of these other services out there, I think it’s only going to just create a better experience for anybody that’s looking for services where they know they won’t be discriminated against.”

On April 25, 1965, three teenagers refused to leave Dewey’s Restaurant in Philadelphia after employees repeatedly denied service to “homosexuals and persons wearing nonconformist clothing,” according to Drum magazine, which was created by the Janus Society, an early gay rights group.

The teens were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, and Janus Society members protested outside of the restaurant for the next five days, according to Marc Stein, a history professor at San Francisco State University.

“Every single element of what we know of as Pride and gay rights and, especially, the pre-Stonewall homophile movement, was borrowed from the Black Freedom Movement.”

ERIC CERVINI, LGBTQ HISTORIAN

“Unlike so many other episodes, it kind of combined issues of homosexuality and trans issues,” Stein, author of “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement,” told NBC News.

On May 2, three more people staged a second sit-in at Dewey’s. Though the restaurant called the police, the protesters weren’t arrested, and after a few hours they left voluntarily, according to a Janus Society newsletter. The Society wrote that the protests and sit-ins were successful in preventing future denials of service and arrests.

The sit-in at Dewey’s is among a long list of examples that show a “direct line” to the Black civil rights movement, according to Stein. Specifically, sit-ins organized by gay activists in the ‘60s appear to be directly inspired by protests held in 1960 by Black college students at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, against racial segregation.

Early LGBTQ activists (though they didn’t use that acronym at the time) adopted many of the civil rights movement’s strategies, Stein said, and they relied on much of the foundation laid by Black civil rights activists.

But the two movements weren’t necessarily separate — they often overlapped — and so influence happened in a few ways, Stein said.

“Influence can be the influence of ideas, and specifically, ideologies, influence of strategies,” he said. “Influence can also come in the form of people who move between movements, or who are engaged in multiple movements, and we do have examples of that in the early LGBT movement.”

The influence — or ‘plagiarism’ — of ideas

Queer activists were building a movement long before the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City, which is widely referred to as a turning point in the LGBTQ rights movement. Though Stonewall was a pivotal moment, activists like Frank Kameny were organizing for gay rights well before.

Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C., one of the first homophile groups (“homophile” being the adjective of choice at the time), and he drew strategies directly from the Black civil rights movement, according to Eric Cervini, a historian and author of “The Deviant’s War,” which focuses on Kameny and the early gay rights movement.

“Every single element of what we know of as Pride and gay rights and, especially, the pre-Stonewall homophile movement, was borrowed from the Black Freedom Movement,” Cervini said. “Frank Kameny’s primary role, what made him so brilliant but also complex of a historical figure, was that he served primarily as a Xerox machine copying different elements of the Black Freedom Movement and applying that to a previously nonmilitant, nonprotesting movement.”

Flashback: Civil Rights Activist Bayard Rustin

OCT. 12, 201601:03

For example, Cervini said Kameny and a delegation of eight Mattachine Society of Washington members attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The march was organized by Bayard Rustin, who had been arrested in 1953 for having sex with another man. In 1963, Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., a segregationist, called Rustin a “sexual pervert” on the Senate floor in an effort to discredit the march, according to Out History.

Kameny and the delegates saw that, even though Rustin had been exposed, 200,000 Americans still attended the march, and it became a historic moment, according to Cervini.

“So these white gay activists, who previously had been refusing to take to the streets, looked around and said, ‘Maybe it’s time, maybe not right now, but maybe in the near future,’” Cervini said. (In fact, in 1979, activists would organize a National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights, which drew an estimated 200,000 protesters, according to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce).

Within a year of the 1963 march, gay rights activist Randy Wicker began picketing the U.S. Army Induction Center in New York City, and a few months after that, Kameny began picketing the White House and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Cervini also noted that Kameny modeled his phrase “Gay Is Good,” which was used on protest signs and buttons, on the Black Power movement’s “Black Is Beautiful.”

A few years later, in 1966, Wicker and three activists with the Mattachine Society’s New York City chapter organized a “sip-in” at Julius’ Bar to challenge a New York State Liquor Authority rule that said bars couldn’t serve “disorderly” customers. In practice, bars would refuse to serve LGBTQ people out of fear that they’d lose their liquor license. The sip-in, like the sit-in at Dewey’s, used the same tactics as the college students at Woolworth’s lunch counter, according to Stein.

Stein said Black civil rights movement strategies also affected how early LGBTQ activists conducted peaceful demonstrations. A coalition of gay and lesbian organizations held a yearly peaceful protest at Independence Hall called the Annual Reminder from 1965 to 1969, which Stein said were influenced by the early civil rights demonstrations in which demonstrators were instructed to dress respectably, with women in dresses and men in suits.

Cervini said civil rights demonstrators dressed up as a “reclamation of morality that was so effective when you look at the images of Montgomery or Birmingham or Greensboro.” He said Time magazine even drew attention to the fact that young civil rights activists looked like they were going to church, and, as a result, “How can you possibly claim that those Southern whites are the ones protecting morality?” he said. “So the early gay activists tried to emulate that same tactic, by using respectability as a political tool.”

On the other hand, gay and trans activists were also affected by the Black Power movement and urban uprisings, according to Stein. He said LGBTQ rebellions like the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot in San Francisco and the Stonewall uprising a few years later were likely influenced by events like the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, where six days of riots erupted between police and the predominantly Black community.

“I would argue that the Black Power movement was just as influential as the civil rights movement,” Stein said. “Black Power ideologies and strategies came to influence the movement very much so in the second half of the ‘60s and then into the ‘70s, so there were both of those influences — peaceful, respectable demonstrations on the one hand, and a more aggressive militant action sometimes including riots on the other.”

Cervini said FBI reports explicitly connect the Black Freedom Movement and the early homophile movement.

“We can connect those two movements — Bayard Rustin, Frank Kameny and Randy Wicker — through FBI surveillance, and from informants within these organizations,” Cervini said. “They were the ones informing the FBI that the gays, the homosexuals were learning from and discussing copying the Black Freedom Movement.”

“This idea of a coalition between these two organizations — that the Black Freedom Movement might be inspiring this other group of American citizens who are also marginalized, and the fact that they may both be taking to the streets, perhaps in coordination — that is what scared them the most,” Cervini said of the FBI and Southern racist segregationists.

However, the homophile movement, at least in New York and Washington, never made that coalition a reality, Cervini added.

He said he uses the word “plagiarism” to describe how Kameny used civil rights tactics without working with or crediting the activists whose tactics he used.

“You are using and borrowing tactics from another movement, but not giving proper credit and not making space for people at the intersection of those two movements,” Cervini said. “I think it raises the question of the moral acceptability of that.”

Influence by intersection

In some cities, there was more of a coalition and less borrowing. The idea of one movement having an “influence” over the other could give the false notion that the fight for Black civil rights was comprised entirely of Black activists and the fight for LGBTQ rights was solely made up of whites, cautioned Steven Fullwood, co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project, which documents and preserves Black history.

“There’s Black people in parts of both of those movements,” Fullwood said, noting that there were Black people involved in both the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights group.

Fullwood also mentioned Marsha P. Johnson, who is credited as being a central figure in the Stonewall uprising, and Cervini cited Ernestine Eckstein (also known as Ernestine Eppenger), who was active in the Black Freedom Movement and the Daughters of Bilitis in the ‘60s.

Stein also gave the example of Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a Japanese-American, anti-war activist who participated in the Annual Reminders at Independence Hall and had previously gone South and participated in civil rights marches. Kuromiya co-founded the Gay Liberation Front’s Philadelphia chapter and became a spokesperson for a homosexual workshop at the Black Panther’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in September 1970, according to Stein.

He gave a presentation “to the huge audience of the convention to applause,” Stein said of Kuromiya, citing this as one of many examples showing that the movements weren’t fragmented or divided at the time in some cities.

“They were uniting against police violence, state repression, capitalist exploitation and, after all, the Stonewall rebellion was at least in part about a business exploiting its gay, trans customers,” Stein said. “So it kind of illustrates the way those issues came together at those particular episodes.”

“Any movement that does not take into account the intersectional approach is never going to achieve true liberation.”

STEVEN FULLWOOD, NOMADIC ARCHIVISTS PROJECT

Some of the major LGBTQ demonstrations, including the 1965 sit-in at Dewey’s Restaurant, took place in racially diverse communities, according to Susan Stryker, a scholar of queer and trans history.

She said the sit-in is an example of tactics developed in the Black civil rights struggle “becoming useful in situations that are not organized specifically around race, but are organized around questions of sexuality and gender expression and gender presentation.”

“So, is that a borrowing of civil rights tactics?” Stryker asked. “Or is it people who are perhaps familiar with this in different contexts of their own lives saying … ‘We need to do the same thing on this issue’?”

Stryker said there was also a huge overlap between people who were organizing for racial and economic justice and queer and trans rights in the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, which she described as “one of the first instances that we know about of militant trans resistance to police-based oppression.”

The legal blueprint

Many major legal gains for LGBTQ people are also in part due to arguments developed by civil rights lawyers.

“The legal strategy challenging racial segregation, which was pioneered by the NAACP in the 1940s, was really the wellspring from which the LGBTQ equality movement grew,” said Alphonso David, a civil rights lawyer and the first Black president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights group.

In the 1940s and ‘50s, Thurgood Marshall, who led the NAACP, spent a decade challenging segregation on public transportation, in restaurants and in public schools, David said. Marshall argued a number of cases related to segregation, and then in the mid-’50s he argued Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court, which ruled that U.S. state laws segregating schools were unconstitutional.

“It took more than a decade of litigation and argument testing combined with really a lot of sweat equity and strategic partnerships with grassroots organizers to successfully challenge racial segregation in the U.S. Supreme Court,” David said.

Marshall’s legal strategy, which involved using the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, served as a model that the LGBTQ movement used to challenge the criminalization of homosexuality and the denial of marriage rights.

“We are indebted to the civil rights leaders of the past, because they were really instrumental in outlining the essential objective, which was the guarantee of equal protection and how that should apply to all of us,” David said.

Gay rights lawyers also built on major Black civil rights decisions to achieve same-sex marriage, according to David. In 1967, the Supreme Court held in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage violate the due process and equal protection clauses. “In that case, the Supreme Court held that, yes, there is a fundamental right to marry,” he said.

This same argument was successfully used nearly half a century later in Obergefell v. Hodges, David said, where it was argued that “denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates both the due process and the equal protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution — and we won.”

“So that is one perfect example where you see the arguments that were advanced during the civil rights struggle to at least recognize equality for racial minorities being used and applied in the context of LGBTQ people,” he added.

‘The same goal’

There has been significant overlap between the civil rights and LGBTQ equality movements, Fullwood said, and that’s a key takeaway.

“What we have to appreciate is that the arguments that were used in the civil rights movement in the 1960s involved LGBTQ people,” Fullwood added, citing a speech given by Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton in 1970.

Outlining the group’s position on the two emerging movements, Newton wrote: “Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.”

Today’s activists, Fullwood said, have to think about the LGBTQ equality movement as involving Black people and the racial justice movement as involving LGBTQ people.

“Any movement that does not take into account the intersectional approach is never going to achieve true liberation,” he said. “The Black and the LGBTQ movements have the same goal.”

Fullwood said he’s pleased with the kinds of activists who are engaging multi-issue platforms that “call for different, insightful ways to resist oppression,” but that he’s occasionally run into the phrase, “This isn’t your grandmother’s movement.”

“If that’s the sentiment, I say this: You better hope it’s your grandmother’s movement, because she and thousands like her made it possible for you to have the language, perspective and insights that you enjoy today,” he said. “This is not new. Read. Research. Build. You exist in a river of resistance. Know and embrace that history. It’s waiting.”

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., reintroduced the Equality Act in the House of Representatives on Thursday, with a vote on the sweeping LGBTQ rights bill expected next week.

The move brings the bill one step closer to potentially establishing the first federal discrimination protections for LGBTQ people. Specifically, it would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing, credit, education, public spaces, public funding and jury service.

The Equality Act passed the Democrat-controlled House in May 2019, but it stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate. Now that Democrats have taken control of the Senate, advocates are hopeful that the bill will pass.

“In 2021, every American should be treated with respect and dignity,” Cicilline, who has introduced the bill every year since 2015, said in a statement. “Yet, in most states, LGBTQ people can be discriminated against because of who they are, or who they love. It is past time for that to change.”

Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin also announced that they would reintroduce the bill in the Senate next week when the Senate floor reopens for bill introductions.

“All of us go to work and school, go home and go shopping, and none of us should have to keep our families hidden or pretend to be someone we’re not to do those things,” Merkley, who wrote the Equality Act, said in a statement. “But in 29 states, Americans can still be evicted, be thrown out of a restaurant, or be denied a loan because of who they are or whom they love.”

Before Cicilline reintroduced the bill, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., announced in a letter to colleagues Tuesday that the House would vote on the Equality Act next week. In May 2019, it passed by a 236-173 vote, with eight Republicans voting for it. However, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., never took it up in the Senate.

Passing the Equality Act in the next few months would allow President Joe Biden to fulfill one of his campaign promises of signing it into law in the first 100 days of his presidency.

In October of last year, Biden told Mark Segal, publisher of Philadelphia Gay News and a longtime LGBTQ rights activist, that passing the bill is “essential to ensuring that no future president can ever again roll back civil rights and protections for LGBTQ+ individuals.”

He added that he would also direct his Cabinet to enforce the Equality Act across federal agencies. “Too many states do not have laws that explicitly protect LGBTQ+ individuals from discrimination,” Biden said in the interview. “It’s wrong to deny people access to services or housing because of who they are or who they love.”

‘A clear, consistent nationwide statement’

The Equality Act was first introduced by Rep. Bella Abzug, D-N.Y., in 1974, but the bill was eventually killed.

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Cicilline introduced the current version in 2015, just after the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage constitutional nationwide. Unlike previous versions of the act, the current version includes protections from discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

LGBTQ people across the U.S. currently have some level of protection from discrimination through state and local laws and Biden’s expansion of workplace discrimination protections through the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling last year. However, advocates say the Equality Act is needed to fill in the gaps and ensure that all Americans, regardless of where they reside, are protected.

“While President Biden’s Executive Order implementing the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling was a crucial step in addressing discrimination against LGBTQ people, it’s still vital that Congress pass the Equality Act to codify the Bostock decision to ensure protection in key areas of life including where existing civil rights laws do not have protections on the basis of sex,” Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights group, said in a statement.

Kevin Jennings, CEO of the LGBTQ civil rights group Lambda Legal, said the legislation will give clarity to employers and landlords, among others, about discrimination.

“In some instances, individuals lose rights and protections the moment they cross the border into a neighboring state, underscoring that the current patchwork of protections for LGBTQ people is inadequate,” Jennings said in a statement. “In addition, as evidenced by the thousands of phone calls to our Help Desk we receive each year, many employers, landlords and lenders still haven’t gotten the message that discrimination is just wrong, which is why we need the absolute clarity of the Equality Act, and we need it now.”

Mara Keisling, executive director at the National Center for Transgender Equality, said the bill is especially important for transgender people who face a disproportionate amount of violence.

“No act of Congress can end bias overnight or stop all attacks against transgender people,” Keisling said in a statement. “But the Equality Act is a clear, consistent and nationwide statement that says our country believes that all people – including those who are transgender – should be treated fairly and with respect. For transgender people, every trip to the store, every dinner out, every job interview or attempt to rent an apartment carries the risk of disrespect, discrimination and potentially violence. The Equality Act will help allow transgender people to live their lives openly and without fear.”