A Lyft passenger launched into a racist and homophobic verbal tirade against his driver simply because he was asked to wear a face mask.
A May 28 ride in Reno, Nevada, saw a passenger identified as Richard board driver Edgar’s vehicle. Edgar wore a mask while Richard, according to the dash-came footage seen by TMZ, did not.
When the driver politely asked the passenger to strap on a mask – a crucial tool in the fight to contain the coronavirus pandemic – he exploded into a racist and homophobic rant.
“You believe in that shit?” Richard asked the driver.
“Yes, I do because I have family who are sick from that [coronavirus],” Edgar replied.
Footage then shows Richard griping about the government, saying he doesn’t “trust” officials and that “it’s not the government – it’s the people who are getting sick”.
“It’s because we are really close right here in the car,” he said, before criticising Edgar for following the route to his destination as instructed by the Lyft driver app.
Eventually driver Edgar pulled over to ask his passenger to exit the vehicle. Richard refused, saying he had “a contract”.
“You represent Lyft, you little candy-ass faggot in your white glasses,” video shows him shouting.
“I should just f**king crush your f**king skull right now.”
He then mocked Edgar’s accent, calling him a “f***ing wetback [a slur used against people from Central or Latin America]” and claiming: “I’m an American, motherf***er. I fought three times in a goddamn war.
“Why are you [charging] me for a full-ride when you only gave me 100 yards of ride? How is that considered to be fair? Is that considered fair in your country?”
“Yes, because this is my country, too,” Edgar responded, before Richard finally exited the vehicle.
A representative from Lyft said of the alarming video: “The behaviour shown by the rider in this video is despicable and has no place on the Lyft platform.
“Lyft is committed to maintaining an inclusive and welcoming community, and discrimination is not tolerated.”
The necessity that comes with wearing a mask has emerged as a high water point for small pockets of Americans, roiled by state officials ordering people to wear face coverings which they see as an open challenge against the freedom and liberty they have long associated with America.
Lockdown measures have inflamed deep-seated tensions in the US. (KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Recent weeks have brought with them footage of aggrieved supermarket tellers and security hurrying enraged customers refusing to wear masks out of stores. But with state officials and local authorities hastily loosening lockdown rules, the need to wear a mask is greater than ever before, health experts stress.
A “farmers’ market Karen” jeered and berated a gay vendor was jeered and berated just for handing out LGBT+ Pride flags which she called “political” in Livermore.
The startling footage, uploaded to Twitter Monday (June 15) showed Gail Hayden, head of the California Farmers’ Market Association, frostily harangue Dan Floyd for hanging out flags to “satisfy his political agenda”.
‘Farmers’ market Karen’ belittles gay cookie vendor for handing out Pride flags.
Hayden began to spar with Floyd, who owns a stall in the Livermore Farmers’ Market called Dan Good Cookies. Pedalling his baked goods, Floyd was joined Sunday afternoon (June 14) by Livermore Prides executive director Amy Pannu, handing out rainbow flags for Pride Month.
“She became very confrontational,” Floyd toldNBC Bay Area of the “farmers’ market Karen”. “Very condescending about the entire thing.”
The footage showed Hayden icily tearing into Lloyd for handing out the flags. “This person may have an issue about ‘xyz’,” she said, waving hazily at other stall-fronts and stressing that her issue had nothing to do with “what the flags are for”.
“I’ve been in places for 40 years where they bring out foetuses and put them on ironing boards. My job is to run the market, not to satisfy your political point of view.”
Hayden then attempted to stymie Lloyd by saying that the passing out of flags in the venue is stonewalled by the market’s rulebook. Yet, across its 30-pages, nowhere does it prohibit flags – only “petitions and flyers”.
“I definitely felt scared, and I definitely felt scared for my business,” Lloyd told the outlet.”It definitely felt like the flags and what they represent were the target of her tirade.”
Hayden’s daughter, the association’s senior market manager, alleged that children were using the flags are playthings, prompting her mother to intervene. However, nowhere in the recorded exchange is this alluded to.
“We apologise that he feels singled out,” Kayla Hayden said of the situation in which Lloyd was singled out. “We don’t want to single anybody out.”
As much as the scuffle stirred outrage against the California Farmers’ Market Association — with Hayden later resigning from her role — it led to a spike of orders to Dan Good Cookies, according to photographs from customers.
Officers swung open the iron doors of the cell of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco and called her name. They believed the Latinx trans woman was simply asleep while in solitary confinement.
She was dead.
Polanco, a member of one of the most storied groups in New York City’s drag ball scene, the House of Xtravaganza, could not afford the $500 bail after being charged for misdemeanour assault in 2019.
So she was sent to Rikers Island in New York City. There, when the door was closed to her cell on June 7, 2019, she went unchecked by correction officers for a roughly 45-minute stretch, despite jail policies that she needed to be checked every 15.
Startling surveillance footage obtained and released by Polanco’s family showed officers take more than an hour and a half to call emergency services after Polanco suffered an epileptic seizure in her cell.
As the US reckons with its dense history of racist practises, the case typifies the exact pattern of discrimination against queer civilians of colour that officials have sworn to end or refused to even acknowledge. Coming after the death of George Floyd issued a sweeping challenge to police and criminal justice authorities.
Layleen Polanco: Prison correction officers opened her cell to find her dead. They laughed.
Polanco’s family combed through more than 10 hours of security footage, they claimed, from a camera inside the restrictive housing unit Rose M Singer Center where the 27-year-old’s cell was located.
“The video is the last piece of the puzzle,” David Shanies, an attorney for Polanco’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of New York and Rikers staffers, toldNBC News.
“It’s the last bit of indifference to her life that we saw and recklessness to a person who obviously needed help.”
Friends and family said that Polanco had a seizure disorder that the Department of Corrections was aware of. But last week, the New York City Department of Investigation, tasked with overseeing city employees and contractors, alongside the Bronx District Attorney’s Office concluded that jail staffers were not criminally responsible for her death.
The 24-page report added that the correction officers face possible administrative action.
Shaines voiced that the footage adds details to what happened that investigators failed to mention, the latest turn in a topsy-turvy case where witnesses statements tend to chaff with official accounts.
For examples, Shaines said, kail personnel claimed they believed Polanco to be asleep. But the video showed multiple officers starting into her cell, calling for others to look: “t’s not something that you do for somebody who you think is asleep.”
The footage showed guards routinely checking on the inmate up until 1:42pm. From this point, there is a 47-minute-long gap until another officer checks on Polanco at 2:27pm.
Art 2:45pm, two correction officers begin knocking on Polanco’s cell, stretching leisure before opening the door to find her turned over on her bed with vomit on her face, began calling her name before laughing.
“It was horrifying for the family to see this footage,” Shaines said.
“They were completely unprepared for what they saw. They all broke into hysterical crying, understandably.
“And to this day, Layleen’s mother is haunted by the images of the guard laughing at her daughter,” before adding that the laughter is “unfathomable, and it’s really just a symbol of the complete disregard the entire system had for Layleen.”
The death of Layleen Polanco typifies the ‘neglect and humiliation’ of trans prisoners.
The New York City Anti-Violence project said the video exposed “neglect and humiliation” of Polanco.
Executive director Beverly Tillery told Buzzfeed News: “Thousands of transgender people are regularly subjected to neglect and violence and stripped of their humanity within our nation’s jails and prisons.
“These acts of state violence have to stop.”
In a statement to NBC News, Department of Correction commissioner Cynthia Brann said her department will pursue internal disciplinary measures.
“The safety and well-being of people in our custody is our top priority, and we are committed to ensuring that all of our facilities are safe and humane,” Brann said.
Joe Biden spearheaded a blistering backlash against the Trump administration that on Friday (June 12) “cruelly” erased precious healthcare protections for trans patients less than two weeks into Pride Month.
The Department of Health and Human Services finalised a rule that effectively means gender identity is no longer an avenue for sex dissemination in healthcare. It’s part of a slew of policy changes across education, housing and employment to narrow the legal definition of discrimination to not include trans folk.
The presumptive Democratic Party nominee slammed the move, echoing the devastating timing of the move and made a charged rallying cry to “defeat” Trump in the November presidential elections.––
Biden noted that the rule change intersected on the four year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, where a man laid siege on a Latinx queer club that killed 49 people.
He also drew attention to healthcare protections being rolled back in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic as well as it being Pride Month.
Joe Biden: ‘Donald Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds.’
“On the fourth anniversary of Pulse,” Biden tweeted to his six million followers, “in the middle of Pride month, during a global pandemic.
On the fourth anniversary of Pulse. In the middle of Pride month. During a global pandemic.
Donald Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds. We have to defeat him this November.
“Donald Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds. We have to defeat him this November.”
This was amplified by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. He tweeted to his more than 12 million followers: “It is outrageous that Trump, in the middle of a pandemic, is working to prevent LGBTQ+ Americans from getting healthcare they need.
“Discrimination of any kind has no place in our society. We must defeat Trump, guarantee health care as a right and protect all LGBTQ+ Americans”.
Various lawmakers, former Demonostric presidential contenders, city leaders, singers, comedians and variois other public figures joined in the choris of criticism against the move.
The callousness of Trump to announce this during LGBTQ+ Pride month as the country mourns the four year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting. The cruelty is the point and it knows no bounds.
What does the new ruling mean for trans Americans?
In short, it means that if a trans patient is discriminated on the basis of their gender identity by a doctor, medical facility or their health insurer, there would be little protecting them.
The Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law often known as Obamacare, established broad civil rights protections in health care. It barred discrimination based on race, colour, national origin, sex, age or disability in health programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.
In 2016, the Obama administration added gender identity to the list. But the rule was revised by Trump officials.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement saying the final rule is based on “the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
“All of these are essentially legislative changes that the Department lacked the authority to make,” the administration said of the 2016 changes in the final rule.
“They purported to impose additional legal requirements on covered entities that cannot be justified by the text of Title IX, and in fact are in conflict with express exemptions in Title IX.”
Taking to social media, Sesame Street posted a short but sweet line of solidarity to the LGBT+ people, paired alongside an illustration of its colourful characters holding hands, recreating the famous six-striped Pride flag.
“On our street, we accept all, we love all, and we respect all,” it wrote. “Happy #PrideMonth!”
Tallying more than 97,000 likes on Instagram, thousands of users praisedSesame Street for showing its support. “That’s it, I’m moving to Sesame Street,” one user remarked.
Another added: “THIS! It’s no wonder this programming has withstood the test of time. 50+ years of inclusivity and education through love.”
“Thank you Sesame Street for teaching me how to learn and how to treat everyone with love and respect,” a user reflected.
“I can’t forget the times I was a kid, I’ve watched this show every day at my grandmother’s house. You guys never changed or never hated.”
Sesame Street executives have long wrestled with the idea that Bett and Ernie are gay.
However, as the Advocate reported, not all responses to the US series’ Pride post were positive.
“My daughter is six” a Facebook user commented. “The fact is she will not see a family like hers in the show before she outgrows it” referring to the show’s long-documented lack of LGBT+ representation.
“That may be just a ‘waiting period’ for the show — but it is her childhood and it will never happen. So many of the other kids get to see families like theirs represented.
“Her friends at school who don’t think a kid ‘can have two mommies’ don’t see it either.”
Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie. (Matthew Simmons/Getty)
Indeed, while Sesame Street has gingerly begun to increase its inclusivity, having the likes of Billy Porter and Lil Nas X on the show, showrunners have long-denied that characters Bert and Ernie are queer.
Fan speculation has simmered for decades that the roommates are in a relationship, seeing them emerge as queer icons. But executives have consistently denied that they are queer, with executive vice president of Sesame Workshop, the non-profit which created Sesame Street tepidly saying that they are if the viewer thinks they are.
“People can think whatever they want [about Bert and Ernie].” Brown Johnson said in 2019.
“You want to think they’re gay? Okay. You want to think they’re not gay? They’re not gay,”
On what would have been his 90th birthday, there are many reasons to remember Harvey Milk. One of which is dog poop.
Decades on since his death in 1978, and San Francisco residents each day peak out of their apartments to see the city’s tanned streets free from pet waste.
They have Milk to thank for this, a city official who sponsored an ordinance that fined people for not clearing up after their dogs.
But there’s more to Milk than a cosmetic improvement to the avenues and roads that criss-cross the city. A pioneer of the LGBT+ rights movement, Milk was the first openly gay person ever elected into public office in the US.
Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California (Bettman/Getty)
A victory indescribably seismic at a time where fledgeling LGBT+ rights movements were being curtailed by conservative lobbies. Yet Milk managed to galvanise support and, during his time in office, pass a stringent ordinance outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Less than a year after being elected to the board of supervisors in 1977, he was fatally shot by his former city supervisor opponent, Dan White.
Hearts broken. Votes tallied. Lives risked and saved.
The life of Milk that has come to be lauded by his contemporaries is one of a pioneering spirit.
The son of Russian‐Jewish immigrants, Milk, of Long Island, New York, was born in 1930. He went onto earn a bachelor’s degree in 1951 from the Albany State College for Teachers and spent his school years in the closet.
Harvey Milk sits outside his camera shop, November 9, 1977 (Bettmann/Getty)
After graduating, he enlisted in the United States Navy and worked diving instructor in San Diego. Milk served four years before superiors found him in a park with gay men – he was then forced to resign.
His biography then became a brief run-in with Wall Street, but his colleagues noticed his lack of drive for the finance district. Across his forays into local electoral politics, however, everyone could see the passion that fizzled within him.
It took three tries for Harvey Milk to be elected supervisor.
Milk was 41 years old with when he crooned into San Fransisco in 1972.
Settling into the Castro district, he set-up a camera shop that became a refuge for the city’s LGBT+ community, long abraded by prejudice. Many looked to Milk for leadership and he exhorted them to be open and visible.
Armed with nothing more than a bullhorn and a dogged, almost impish attitude, he campaigned for city county supervisor in 1973, a move he attributed to anger generated by the televised Senate Watergate hearings.
He was, however, unsuccessful. Losing again in 1975, before beating over 16 other candidates with 30 per cent of the vote in 1977.
Milk won with his multi-pronged policy plan of not only securing LGBT+ rights, but increased low-rent housing, free municipal transportation and better childcare facilities as well.
“It’s not my victory, it’s yours and yours and yours,” he said after winning the historic seat.
Milk’s district, the fifth, encompassed most of the Haight‐Ashbury and Upper Market Street areas, where many queer migrants had decamped. The city was fractured in this way, with neighbourhoods of hippies and working-class Catholics huddling around one another, but Milk found ways to tenderly unite people.
Harvey Milk was slain by his political opponent.
On November 30 1978, a thick fog tangled with the mid-rise buildings of San Francisco for the third consecutive day. But the thousands of people below it didn’t seem to mind.
They stuffed into the Opera House that evening to attend a non‐denominational ceremony. One that many saw the last 10 months as a steady, bleak drumbeat towards.
Three days prior in City Hall, a bullet struck Milk, killing him. Former board member White surrendered to police minutes later.
It was a moment months in the making.
In 1978, Milk struck down Proposition Six, which would have mandated the firing of state public school teachers. White was the sole supervisor who voted against Milk.
Dan White (directly beneath “Fraud” sign). (Getty Images)
After quitting from his post 10 months in, White urged mayor George Moscone to rescind his resignation, citing money troubles. Moscone refused and, on the morning of November 27, White slung into City Hall through an open window and gunned both Moscone and Milk.
White was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than of first-degree murder. The verdict sparked the “White Night riots” in San Francisco, and led to the state of California abolishing the diminished capacity criminal defence.
White died by suicide in 1985, a little more than a year after his release from prison.
‘If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country.’
Pushing against the cruel, corrosive attitudes of powerful groups that sought to silence and erase LGBT+ people, Milk always knew the punitive reaction to his quest for equality.
Days after his death, Milk’s associates released a tape recording that he had instructed: “Be played only in the event of my death by assassination.”
“I fully realise that a person who stands for what I stand for, an activist, gay activist, becomes a target or the potential target for somebody who is insecure, terrified, afraid, or very disturbed themselves,” Milk said on his final tape.
“I would like to see every gay doctor come out, every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let that world know,” Milk said.
“That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody would imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights.”
“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country.”
Attacks and insults against the LGBT+ community in France surged by more than 36 per cent in 2019, according to figures released Saturday by the interior ministry.
The figures released on the eve of International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) showed a steady drumbeat of rising hate crimes against queer folk in the European country, Agence France-Presse reported.
GBT+ men were more likely to be victims, the data showed, with the majority of crimes stemming from larger cities (36 per cent).
In 2019, Twitter timelines were seized by startling video footage of a trans woman brutally assaulted during a demonstration in central Paris.
The incident sparked fury from LGBT+ activists as well as amplifying the increasing visibility of the violence facing one of the most marginalised and vulnerable groups in French society.
Moreover, the data marked 30 years since the withdrawal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses by the World Health Organization.
Homophobia is ‘anchored’ in France, ministry says.
French law enforcement identified 1,870 victims of homophobic or transphobic offences, compared to 1,380 in 2018, the ministry said in a statement.
The data hints towards a two-fold change. A potential rise in the number of hate crimes carried out against the LGBT+ community, and/or an increase in the number of victims filing complaints.
This 36 per cent upswing in physical and verbal violence eclipsed what activists described in 2018 as a “black” year. The year was pockmarked by a severe surge in anti-LGBT+ violence.
“These figures testify to the deep anchoring of homophobia and transphobia in society,” the ministry said.
Department officials said that they form part of a broader increase in “hate acts and identity extremism” in France.
Verbal attacks account for 33 per cent of offences, the data showed. Around 28 per cent of complaints concerned physical and sexual violence.
Victims were predominantly men – 75 per cent –with around six in 10 offences perpetrated against those under 35 years of age.
But the number might be higher, activists and police warn, as many hate crimes still go unreported as victims never file a complaint to authorities.
The governing body for psychologists in Albania banned Saturday the long denounced, discredited and debased practise of conversion therapy to both the surprise and delight of countless LGBT+ activists across the European country.
Albania now joins Malta and Germany in stonewalling the harmful practice, while lawmakers in Spain and the UK are all considering nationwide bans, and Switzerland has a de facto ban.
A statement from the LGBT+ organisation Pink Embassy, seen by AP News, said the decision: “Places the Order of Psychologists in Albania in the forefront of the institutions respecting LGBTI rights.”
Psychologists in Albania now prohibited from conversion therapy, LGBT+ rights group say.
All registered psychologists in Albania must be members of the Order of Psychologists. As a result, the body’s decisions are “legally valid”, Pink Embassy stressed, and no hurdles loom ahead.
“This is the final decision which does not need to go through either the legislative or executive to enter into force,” said Pink Embassy head Altin Hazizaj.
“Although reports of the use of such therapies in Albania have been small, allowing them has been a serious concern.”
The measure could, activists hope, be one that reinvigorates Albania’s stalled LGBT+ rights movements. Negative attitudes against the community continue to lurk in the conservative country, at times colliding with lawmaker’s urgency in pressing ahead with equality laws.
Marriage, adoption and the right to change legal gender have long been kicked into the long grass by government. The annual Rainbow Map – which ranks European country’s commitment to LGBT+ rights – gave Albania a 31 per cent rating.
Rainbow Map emphasised that gender recognition measures had vastly stagnated in Albania.
What is conversion therapy?
Also called reparative therapy, medical organisations across the world have widely debunked and rejected the treatment as traumatising and psychologically scarring, especially to minors.
The practice, which has been around more than a century, has many techniques. Most commonly, talking therapy.
However, some physicians who practise the therapy are known to use shock treatments and induce associative nausea in patients, according to a 2018 study by the Williams Institute of the School of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
George “Skip” Panse, a member of the Gay Men’s Chorus in South Florida, was busy greeting members with a smile and a big hug three weeks ago. Last Wednesday, he died of complications caused by coronavirus.
Panse has become a headline dreaded by all as the pandemic pelts the US. The nation has, within days, become a petri-dish of cases, hauling the highest amount of confirmed coronavirus cases in the world.
A church-goer known by loved ones for his sense of humour and passion for music, Panse’s death was confirmed Thursday by the executive director of the chorus on Facebook in a tearful post.
Loved ones mourn the loss of Gay Men’s Chorus singer George Panse who died from coronavirus.
“It is tough to know that Florida’s death toll from the Coronavirus has climbed to 23 and one of them is a dear man I knew and who was a member of the Gay Men’s Chorus of South Florida,” Mark Kent wrote.
“We lost Skip to the virus yesterday.
I am usually not public about personal pain, but I share this in the hope that it helps more people take this epidemic seriously. Please stay home and stay safe.
“My prayers for Skip’s loved ones.”
Tributes poured in for Panse, a regular attendee of the United Church of Christ Fort Lauderdale, as stunned church-goers, faith leaders and choir members regaled their favourite memories of him.
“As we all know, Skip had a great passion for music and he was fed spiritually by our music ministry,” senior pastor Patrick Rogers wrote on Facebook.
“And we will never forget Skip’s love for others and our community. Rest in Peace Brother, we know that you will always watch over us.
‘Every time you see a number, it’s someone’s mother.’
Rogers recalled with fondness the time Panse duetted with another choir member at a concert – “It was such a blessing to witness Skip share his gift with so many, I will never forget that presentation.”
Choir member Bill Spinosa said Panse’s passing should remind everyone to take the viral outbreak rampaging the world seriously, NBC South Floridareported.
Every time you see a number, it’s someone’s mother. It’s someone’s father. Somebody’s brother.
Spinosa said: It’s amazing and because people are dying alone in hospitals in the ICU, it’s even more devastating because there’s nobody there to hold their hand.”
“It just seems so surreal how I just saw him shy three weeks ago and he was just being the vibrant, high-spirited guy that he always was, every time I saw Skip he greeted me with a warm welcome and hug, we will definitely miss him,” Rodrick Minnis wrote.
“People this is so real, we really need to take care of ourselves in these difficult times, and social distancing is key.
Anyone who breaks coronavirus quarantine should be executed, says Chechnya leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The president of the Russian republic – who oversaw a brutal crackdown on LGBT+ people in Chechnya – made the claim on March 24 at a government meeting as the region confirmed its first three coronavirus cases.
“If you ask me, anyone who creates this problem for himself should be killed,” he said.
“Not only does he get sick, [but he also infects] his family, his sisters, brothers, neighbours,” the regional Caucasian Knot news agency quoted Kadyrov as saying.
Ramzan Kadyrov recommends Chechens drink water with lemon and honey to combat coronavirus.
Kadyrov added that people spreading fake information about the deadly but delicate virus should be punished with community service.
His comments came as the president ordered all restaurants, cafés and “crowded places” in the republic to shutter doors in an effort to curb the caseload steadily crawling upwards.
Ramzan Kadyrov takes an oath during the ceremony of his inauguration as the head of Russia’s Caucasus region of Chechnya for a third term, in Grozny on October 5, 2016. (ELENA FITKULINA/AFP/Getty Images)
But such measures also eclipsed comments made by Kadyrov that the pandemic paralysing the world is not to be feared. Earlier this month, he simply advised citizens to drink water with lemon and honey to strengthen immune systems.
Alongside consuming garlic for “pure blood”, BBC Russia reported.
Chechnya, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia that fought two wars for independence, is now under Moscow’s control.
Regional leader Kadyrov operates a vastly carte blanche rule in exchange for devotion to the Kremlin.
Mugs decorated with images of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin and Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov are seen on sale among other items at a gift shop in Moscow. (DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)
Being gay is taboo in Chechnya, which pushed the lives of many queer folk into private online chat rooms and darkened alleyways.
But one day, this all changed.
In 2017, images and anecdotes of queer men who suffered weeks of torture and brutal beatings in a targeted pogrom were exposed by local journalists, in a horrifying turn in the country’s long history of human rights abuses.
Local authorities denied the sweeps ever happened, but journalist Elena Milashina and human rights lawyer Marina Dubrovina hurled countless cases of kidnapped gay men into the public eye.
Witnesses have painted a brutal playbook of Chechen regional authorities bundling gay men into cars, thrown into basements of police stations or thrown into facilities where they were tormented and starved.
