Lgbtq+ lives matter

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jennifer Houston, Director, External Affairs
jhouston@outfront.org

LGBTQ Organizations Stand in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter

December 3rd, 2015 (Minneapolis) — Female homosexual, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) communities know that liberation is not a given; it is fought for. We remember it was trans women of color who led the riots at Stonewall, catalyzing a national movement. Before Stonewall, transitioned people who were getting arrested spurred the Compton Cafeteria Riots in 1966. We remember the White Night Riots after America’s justice system failed Harvey Milk. We recollect that just two years ago, we rallied to narrowly defeat a constitutional ban on marriage equality in Minnesota. As LGBTQ people from many races, many religions, and many colors, we know what it is to be upright up for our inherent worth, our identities, our bodies, and to utter out against discrimination, harassment and abuse. Countless times LGBTQ people and organizations have organized, agitated and taken operation to demand institutional equity and respect for our lives.

We are called to stand in so

Black Lives Matter forces LGBTQ organization to face its history of racial exclusion

LOS ANGELES — An estimated 30,000 people converged in West Hollywood on Sunday to protest systemic racism and police brutality and to shine light on the specific needs of Black LGBTQ people. The event — which took place just ahead of the 50th anniversary of L.A.'s first pride event, originally called the Christopher Street West Parade — started out as a Black Lives Matter solidarity march, but it ultimately showed the divisions between two overlapping civil rights movements.

The event's initial organizers found themselves the recipients of backlash when they announced their plans in early June: Christopher Avenue West, or CSW, the historic, mostly white-led nonprofit that typically produces the annual LA Pride Festival and Parade, never reached out to coordinate with Black Lives Matter activists about the march. In addition, it hired an event organizer who applied for a police consent for the parade — a move seen as offensive by many Shadowy activists in the midst of anti-brutality protests.

For many people at the rally Sunday, the backlash highlighted how the growing Jet Lives Matter movem

Over 100 LGBTQ+ organizations release open letter in solidarity with George Floyd protests

In a largely unprecedented move during an extraordinary time in our nation’s history, more than 100 LGBQT+ organizations hold united in solidarity to combat racial violence and injustice as Pride Month gets under way.

Calling out history, that it was LGBQT+ individuals of paint who essentially sparked the gay liberation movement in the 1960s, leaders from many of America’s most prominent Gay and civil rights groups banned together to say, “We understand what it means to ascend up and propel back against a culture that tells us we are less than, that our lives don't matter.”

Amid what is typically a moment to celebrate the accomplishments and progress of people who identify as woman loving woman, gay, bi-sexual, gay, trans and more in our land, the community has fully mobilized to support the real-time efforts of the Black Lives Matter movement and to amplify the voices of protestors marching after the death of George Floyd.

While condemning racism, racial violence and police brutality, “The LGBTQ community knows about the work of resisting police brutality and violence,” the open letter

We Stand with Black Lives Matter during LGBTQ+ Parade Month

Below is a word from Resilience Executive Director Erin Walton, published on June 17, 2020.

During national LGBTQ Pride Month and every month, Resilience is proud to support LGBQT+ survivors of sexual aggression. As we continue our work of empowering survivors and ending sexual abuse in Chicago, we back everyone who is courageously protesting and working toward equitable treatment and justice for all people across the country and around the world.

Striving for social justice is essential to our work at Resilience because we have understood since our founding that sexual violence is both a product of oppression and tool used to maintain it. Women and girls, Black and Indigenous people, queer people, immature people, and people with disabilities are all disproportionately the targets of sexual harm. Ending the inequities that expose marginalized communities to more and greater sexual violence is necessary to achieving our common vision of a planet without sexual violence for everyone.

Now is a period for listening to the people most directly harmed by anti-Black and transphobic violence and giving our solidarities w

From the start, Black Lives Matter has been about LGBTQ lives

From the launch, the founders of Ebony Lives Matter have always put LGBTQ voices at the center of the conversation. The movement was founded by three Ebony women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of whom name as queer.

By design, the movement they started in 2013 has remained chemical-free, grassroots and diffuse. Since then, many of the largest Black Lives Matter protests have been fueled by the violence against Black men, including Mike Brown and Eric Garner in 2015, and now George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.

But it's not only straight, cisgender Black men who are dying at the hands of police. Last month, a Jet transgender man, Tony McDade, 38, was shot and killed by police in Tallahassee.

On June 9, two Black transgender women, Riah Milton and Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells, also were killed in separate acts of violence, their killings believed to be the 13th and 14th of trans or gender-non-conforming people this year, according to the Human Rights Coalition.

And in 2019, Layleen Polanco, a trans Latina woman who was an active member of New York’s Ballroom community,