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Colombia president’s gay nephew talks LGBT rights, peace deal

Pedro Santos was a teenager when he came out to his parents

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Pedro Santos is the gay nephew of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. (Photo courtesy of Pedro Santos)

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Pedro Santos, the nephew of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, was 14 when he came out as gay to his parents nearly a decade ago.

Pedro Santos’ father, Francisco Santos, who is Juan Manuel Santos’ brother, was Colombia’s vice president at the time. Pedro Santos told the Washington Blade on Sept. 28 during an interview at a coffee shop in the Chapinero neighborhood of the Colombian capital of Bogotá that he planned to tell his parents over dinner at a restaurant, but he had to abruptly cancel the reservation because his brother was admitted to the hospital with appendicitis.

Pedro Santos instead brought his parents to a McDonald’s near the hospital.

“Now imagine my dad is in office,” Pedro Santos, who is now 22, told the Blade. “He has 100 bodyguards. My mom has 100 bodyguards. I have 100 bodyguards. They evacuate the McDonald’s. The McDonald’s is secured for my mom, my dad and me and we’re in this small table for three people in this regular McDonald’s with 100 people listening to me coming out to my parents.”

Pedro Santos described the scene to the Blade as “crazy.”

“I’m just sobbing and sobbing for one hour until my father tells me, ‘You’re gay, right?’ and I tell him, ‘Yes I’m gay,’” he recalled, noting his parents’ reaction was “beautiful.”

‘I can talk from a place of privilege’

Pedro Santos sat down with the Blade against the backdrop of the expansion of rights based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Colombia and the implementation of an LGBT-inclusive peace agreement between the country’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that his uncle helped to broker.

Gays and lesbians have been able to legally marry in Colombia since the country’s Constitutional Court in 2016 ruled banning marriage between same-sex couples was unconstitutional. The Colombian Congress in May rejected a proposed referendum on whether to rescind adoption rights to same-sex couples.

Juan Manuel Santos’ government in 2015 issued a decree to notaries and registrars that said transgender people could legally change their name and gender on identification cards and other government documents without surgery.

Angélica Lozano — a bisexual woman who is the first openly LGBT person elected to the country’s congress — in March told the Blade during an exclusive interview that she plans to run for a seat in the Colombian Senate. Her partner, Sen. Claudia López, is running for president as a candidate for the centrist Green Alliance (Alianza Verde in Spanish.)

A rainbow crosswalk at an intersection in the Chapinero neighborhood of Bogotá, Colombia. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)

Violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity remains commonplace in Colombia, in spite of these advances. Former President Álvaro Uribe — under whose administration Francisco Santos served as the country’s vice president — and former Inspector General Alejandro Ordóñez are among the most vocal opponents of LGBT rights in the country.

Pedro Santos — a photographer who lives part-time in Brooklyn, N.Y., and spent the bulk of his childhood in Spain — last spoke with his uncle five years ago at his sister’s graduation. Pedro Santos told the Blade that his uncle is “somewhat” responsible for advancing LGBT rights in Colombia, but acknowledged violence and discrimination remains a serious problem.

“I can talk from a place of privilege,” said Pedro Santos. “I’m a gay male and there are a lot of trans women and trans men that don’t come with the same luck as we do.”

Father’s party ‘misconstrued the truth’ before peace referendum

Juan Manuel Santos was Colombia’s defense minister during Uribe’s government. Voters in 2010 elected Juan Manuel Santos to succeed Uribe, who was unable to run for a third term under the country’s constitution.

Juan Manuel Santos had already begun to move away from Uribe’s right-wing policies by the time he took office. These differences became stark after Juan Manuel Santos and FARC Commander Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño in 2016 announced a peace deal to end the decades-long war that killed more than 200,000 people.

Colombia Diversa and Caribe Afirmativo — two Colombian LGBT advocacy groups — took part in the peace talks that began in Havana in 2012.

Uribe in 2013 founded the right-wing Center Democratic Party (Partido Centro Democrático in Spanish) of which Francisco Santos is a member.

Uribe and Ordóñez ahead of last October’s referendum on the agreement urged Colombians to oppose it because it “put the stability of the family at risk.”

They sharply criticized Juan Manuel Santos and then-Education Minister Gina Parody in the months leading up to the vote over a proposed handbook that contained guidance on how schools can respond to LGBT-specific issues. Uribe and Ordóñez used the controversy to galvanize opposition to the agreement, which Juan Manuel Santos and Londoño signed in the city of Cartagena six days before the referendum.

Pedro Santos recalled the streets “were filled with homophobes, with people who were chanting that we were not humans, that we should not deserve a vote or we should not deserve to get married.”

“It was for the first time that I really got scared that I actually live in a country where there’s no space for me,” he told the Blade. “I had never felt that way before. It was very scary.”

Pedro Santos’ cousin, who is Juan Manuel Santos’ son, outed him on Twitter in August 2016 when he asked his father during the protests, “I’m just wondering what Pancho Santos may feel about having a gay son.”

“He literally outed me,” Pedro Santos told the Blade. “No one knew I existed.”

Pedro Santos said he understood his cousin’s motives “because I understand what my father’s party was doing is very wrong.”

“But I don’t think you should mix family and politics,” he added. “It just agitated everything.”

Voters narrowly rejected the agreement during the referendum that sharply divided the country.

“My father’s party misconstrued the truth,” Pedro Santos told the Blade. “They started using the Christian vote and the very conservative vote to go against those education (standards) so a lot of people came out to protest those things.”

Pedro Santos supports peace agreement implementation

The Colombian congress last November ratified the peace agreement.

FARC guerrillas have moved into resettlement areas the Colombian government established, but they have criticized them because of a lack of water and other basic infrastructure. The guerrillas have officially disarmed under U.N. supervision and formed a political party.

Pedro Santos noted his father and his party are “very against” the agreement. He told the Blade he was also opposed to it before congress ratified it.

“These people have massacred us for 50 years,” said Pedro Santos. “They have literally played football with our heads, that’s how crazy they were. It’s things that people can’t imagine, right, so they came here and they say we want peace.”

Pedro Santos mocked the FARC’s ability to form a political party under the agreement. He also told the Blade the decision to award Juan Manuel Santos the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize “should have raised a few eyebrows over here.”

Saul Castellar, left, speaks with Ludwin Cabas, manager of a “House of Peace” (“Casa de Paz” in Spanish) in Soledad, Colombia, on March 13, 2017. Caribe Afirmativo, an LGBT advocacy group that works throughout northern Colombia, has opened four “Houses of Peace” throughout the region in order to support the implementation of the peace agreement. (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)​

In spite of his reservations, Pedro Santos told the Blade he is willing to support the agreement’s implementation.

“I can just cry about it and try to deny it happened or help people and try to make it work,” he said.

Pedro Santos told the Blade his father respects his position.

“He’s very fine with everything I do because he understands I’m very neutral to everything,” he said. “He respects my position.”

’Everybody hates’ Trump in Colombia

Pedro Santos was not in the U.S. when President Trump was elected.

Lozano in March told the Blade she was concerned the Trump administration would cut aid to Colombia. Pedro Santos said this concern has decreased amid growing tensions between the U.S. and North Korea and Trump’s rhetoric towards immigrants and other disadvantaged groups.

“The precedent that he’s setting is I’m white so I have the power to mock you and I have the power, like I own you basically,” Pedro Santos told the Blade, referring to Trump’s response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12 that left Heather Heyer dead. “All of this is just letting white people know it’s okay to be racist, which is not and this is setting a horrible precedent for the U.S.”

Pedro Santos also discussed the Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that has allowed roughly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants to remain in the U.S. and obtain work permits.

He told the Blade he has undocumented friends who have been living in the U.S. “for their whole lives.” Pedro Santos added some of his friends’ relatives have been deported.

“It hits very close to me because I’m a brown kid,” he said. “I am someone who is looked down upon. People don’t know how to differentiate it over there (in the U.S.) and even if I come from a family that has more money I am still a brown kid.”

Pedro Santos ended the interview with a blunt assessment of how Colombians view Trump.

“Everybody hates him,” he told the Blade. “Even the people who are the closest to the far-right think he’s atrocious.”

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Honoring the legacy of New Orleans’ 1973 UpStairs Lounge fire

Why the arson attack that killed 32 gay men still resonates 50 years later

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Fifty years ago this week, 32 gay men were killed in an arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans. (Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the face of institutional and official failures, are a path to healing.  

The story I related to them began on a typical Sunday night at a second-story bar on the fringe of New Orleans’ French Quarter in 1973, where working-class men would gather around a white baby grand piano and belt out the lyrics to a song that was the anthem of their hidden community, “United We Stand” by the Brotherhood of Man. 

“United we stand,” the men would sing together, “divided we fall” — the words epitomizing the ethos of their beloved UpStairs Lounge bar, an egalitarian free space that served as a forerunner to today’s queer safe havens. 

Around that piano in the 1970s Deep South, gays and lesbians, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment. 

For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket of acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal. 

On the Sunday night of June 24, 1973, their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and still stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history — and the worst mass killing of gays in 20th century America. 

As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the chief suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the soot-covered man to officers idly standing by. This suspect, an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Rodger Dale Nunez, had been ejected from the UpStairs Lounge screaming the word “burn” minutes before, but New Orleans police rebuffed the testimony of fire survivors on the street and allowed Nunez to disappear.

As the fire raged, police denigrated the deceased to reporters on the street: “Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.” 

For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Troy Perry of the Metropolitan Community Church flew in to “help our bereaved brothers and sisters” — and shatter officialdom’s code of silence. 

Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. “It’s high time that you people, in New Orleans, Louisiana, got the message and joined the rest of the Union,” Perry said. 

Two days later, on June 26, 1973, as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly charred bar, the air still foul with death. He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals. 

“This fire had very little to do with the gay movement or with anything gay,” Esteve told a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I do not want my bar or this tragedy to be used to further any of their causes.” 

Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business. 

“Phil said the cash register, juke box, cigarette machine and some wallets had money removed,” recounted Esteve’s friend Bob McAnear, a former U.S. Customs officer. “Phil wouldn’t report it because, if he did, police would never allow him to operate a bar in New Orleans again.” 

The next day, gay bar owners, incensed at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting. “How dare you hold your damn news conferences!” one business owner shouted. 

Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a 250-person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras. “Reverend Troy Perry awoke several sleeping giants, me being one of them,” recalled Charlene Schneider, a lesbian activist who walked out of that front door with Perry.

(Photo by G.E. Arnold/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

Esteve doubted the UpStairs Lounge story’s capacity to rouse gay political fervor. As the coroner buried four of his former patrons anonymously on the edge of town, Esteve quietly collected at least $25,000 in fire insurance proceeds. Less than a year later, he used the money to open another gay bar called the Post Office, where patrons of the UpStairs Lounge — some with visible burn scars — gathered but were discouraged from singing “United We Stand.” 

New Orleans cops neglected to question the chief arson suspect and closed the investigation without answers in late August 1973. Gay elites in the city’s power structure began gaslighting the mourners who marched with Perry into the news cameras, casting suspicion on their memories and re-characterizing their moment of liberation as a stunt. 

When a local gay journalist asked in April 1977, “Where are the gay activists in New Orleans?,” Esteve responded that there were none, because none were needed. “We don’t feel we’re discriminated against,” Esteve said. “New Orleans gays are different from gays anywhere else… Perhaps there is some correlation between the amount of gay activism in other cities and the degree of police harassment.” 

(Photo by H.J. Patterson/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

An attitude of nihilism and disavowal descended upon the memory of the UpStairs Lounge victims, goaded by Esteve and fellow gay entrepreneurs who earned their keep via gay patrons drowning their sorrows each night instead of protesting the injustices that kept them drinking. 

Into the 1980s, the story of the UpStairs Lounge all but vanished from conversation — with the exception of a few sanctuaries for gay political debate such as the local lesbian bar Charlene’s, run by the activist Charlene Schneider. 

By 1988, the 15th anniversary of the fire, the UpStairs Lounge narrative comprised little more than a call for better fire codes and indoor sprinklers. UpStairs Lounge survivor Stewart Butler summed it up: “A tragedy that, as far as I know, no good came of.” 

Finally, in 1991, at Stewart Butler and Charlene Schneider’s nudging, the UpStairs Lounge story became aligned with the crusade of liberated gays and lesbians seeking equal rights in Louisiana. The halls of power responded with intermittent progress. The New Orleans City Council, horrified by the story but not yet ready to take its look in the mirror, enacted an anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and public accommodations that Dec. 12 — more than 18 years after the fire. 

“I believe the fire was the catalyst for the anger to bring us all to the table,” Schneider told The Times-Picayune, a tacit rebuke to Esteve’s strategy of silent accommodation. Even Esteve seemed to change his stance with time, granting a full interview with the first UpStairs Lounge scholar Johnny Townsend sometime around 1989. 

Most of the figures in this historic tale are now deceased. What’s left is an enduring story that refused to go gently. The story now echoes around the world — a musical about the UpStairs Lounge fire recently played in Tokyo, translating the gay underworld of the 1973 French Quarter for Japanese audiences.

When I finished my presentation to the City Council last June, I looked up to see the seven council members in tears. Unanimously, they approved a resolution acknowledging the historic failures of city leaders in the wake of the UpStairs Lounge fire. 

Council members personally apologized to UpStairs Lounge families and survivors seated in the chamber in a symbolic act that, though it could not bring back those who died, still mattered greatly to those whose pain had been denied, leaving them to grieve alone. At long last, official silence and indifference gave way to heartfelt words of healing. 

The way Americans remember the past is an active, ongoing process. Our collective memory is malleable, but it matters because it speaks volumes about our maturity as a people, how we acknowledge the past’s influence in our lives, and how it shapes the examples we set for our youth. Do we grapple with difficult truths, or do we duck accountability by defaulting to nostalgia and bluster? Or worse, do we simply ignore the past until it fades into a black hole of ignorance and indifference? 

I believe that a factual retelling of the UpStairs Lounge tragedy — and how, 50 years onward, it became known internationally — resonates beyond our current divides. It reminds queer and non-queer Americans that ignoring the past holds back the present, and that silence is no cure for what ails a participatory nation. 

Silence isolates. Silence gaslights and shrouds. It preserves the power structures that scapegoat the disempowered. 

Solidarity, on the other hand, unites. Solidarity illuminates a path forward together. Above all, solidarity transforms the downtrodden into a resounding chorus of citizens — in the spirit of voices who once gathered ‘round a white baby grand piano and sang, joyfully and loudly, “United We Stand.” 

(Photo by Philip Ames/Times-Picayune; reprinted with permission)

Robert W. Fieseler is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of “Tinderbox: the Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation.”

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New Supreme Court term includes critical LGBTQ case with ‘terrifying’ consequences

Business owner seeks to decline services for same-sex weddings

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The U.S. Supreme Court is to set consider the case of 303 Creative, which seeks to refuse design services for same-sex weddings. (Blade file photo by Michael Key)

The U.S. Supreme Court, after a decision overturning Roe v. Wade that still leaves many reeling, is starting a new term with justices slated to revisit the issue of LGBTQ rights.

In 303 Creative v. Elenis, the court will return to the issue of whether or not providers of custom-made goods can refuse service to LGBTQ customers on First Amendment grounds. In this case, the business owner is Lorie Smith, a website designer in Colorado who wants to opt out of providing her graphic design services for same-sex weddings despite the civil rights law in her state.

Jennifer Pizer, acting chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, said in an interview with the Blade, “it’s not too much to say an immeasurably huge amount is at stake” for LGBTQ people depending on the outcome of the case.

“This contrived idea that making custom goods, or offering a custom service, somehow tacitly conveys an endorsement of the person — if that were to be accepted, that would be a profound change in the law,” Pizer said. “And the stakes are very high because there are no practical, obvious, principled ways to limit that kind of an exception, and if the law isn’t clear in this regard, then the people who are at risk of experiencing discrimination have no security, no effective protection by having a non-discrimination laws, because at any moment, as one makes their way through the commercial marketplace, you don’t know whether a particular business person is going to refuse to serve you.”

The upcoming arguments and decision in the 303 Creative case mark a return to LGBTQ rights for the Supreme Court, which had no lawsuit to directly address the issue in its previous term, although many argued the Dobbs decision put LGBTQ rights in peril and threatened access to abortion for LGBTQ people.

And yet, the 303 Creative case is similar to other cases the Supreme Court has previously heard on the providers of services seeking the right to deny services based on First Amendment grounds, such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In both of those cases, however, the court issued narrow rulings on the facts of litigation, declining to issue sweeping rulings either upholding non-discrimination principles or First Amendment exemptions.

Pizer, who signed one of the friend-of-the-court briefs in opposition to 303 Creative, said the case is “similar in the goals” of the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation on the basis they both seek exemptions to the same non-discrimination law that governs their business, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, or CADA, and seek “to further the social and political argument that they should be free to refuse same-sex couples or LGBTQ people in particular.”

“So there’s the legal goal, and it connects to the social and political goals and in that sense, it’s the same as Masterpiece,” Pizer said. “And so there are multiple problems with it again, as a legal matter, but also as a social matter, because as with the religion argument, it flows from the idea that having something to do with us is endorsing us.”

One difference: the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation stemmed from an act of refusal of service after owner, Jack Phillips, declined to make a custom-made wedding cake for a same-sex couple for their upcoming wedding. No act of discrimination in the past, however, is present in the 303 Creative case. The owner seeks to put on her website a disclaimer she won’t provide services for same-sex weddings, signaling an intent to discriminate against same-sex couples rather than having done so.

As such, expect issues of standing — whether or not either party is personally aggrieved and able bring to a lawsuit — to be hashed out in arguments as well as whether the litigation is ripe for review as justices consider the case. It’s not hard to see U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has sought to lead the court to reach less sweeping decisions (sometimes successfully, and sometimes in the Dobbs case not successfully) to push for a decision along these lines.

Another key difference: The 303 Creative case hinges on the argument of freedom of speech as opposed to the two-fold argument of freedom of speech and freedom of religious exercise in the Masterpiece Cakeshop litigation. Although 303 Creative requested in its petition to the Supreme Court review of both issues of speech and religion, justices elected only to take up the issue of free speech in granting a writ of certiorari (or agreement to take up a case). Justices also declined to accept another question in the petition request of review of the 1990 precedent in Smith v. Employment Division, which concluded states can enforce neutral generally applicable laws on citizens with religious objections without violating the First Amendment.

Representing 303 Creative in the lawsuit is Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that has sought to undermine civil rights laws for LGBTQ people with litigation seeking exemptions based on the First Amendment, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, wrote in a Sept. 12 legal brief signed by her and other attorneys that a decision in favor of 303 Creative boils down to a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment.

“Colorado and the United States still contend that CADA only regulates sales transactions,” the brief says. “But their cases do not apply because they involve non-expressive activities: selling BBQ, firing employees, restricting school attendance, limiting club memberships, and providing room access. Colorado’s own cases agree that the government may not use public-accommodation laws to affect a commercial actor’s speech.”

Pizer, however, pushed back strongly on the idea a decision in favor of 303 Creative would be as focused as Alliance Defending Freedom purports it would be, arguing it could open the door to widespread discrimination against LGBTQ people.

“One way to put it is art tends to be in the eye of the beholder,” Pizer said. “Is something of a craft, or is it art? I feel like I’m channeling Lily Tomlin. Remember ‘soup and art’? We have had an understanding that whether something is beautiful or not is not the determining factor about whether something is protected as artistic expression. There’s a legal test that recognizes if this is speech, whose speech is it, whose message is it? Would anyone who was hearing the speech or seeing the message understand it to be the message of the customer or of the merchants or craftsmen or business person?”

Despite the implications in the case for LGBTQ rights, 303 Creative may have supporters among LGBTQ people who consider themselves proponents of free speech.

One joint friend-of-the-court brief before the Supreme Court, written by Dale Carpenter, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who’s written in favor of LGBTQ rights, and Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment legal scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues the case is an opportunity to affirm the First Amendment applies to goods and services that are uniquely expressive.

“Distinguishing expressive from non-expressive products in some contexts might be hard, but the Tenth Circuit agreed that Smith’s product does not present a hard case,” the brief says. “Yet that court (and Colorado) declined to recognize any exemption for products constituting speech. The Tenth Circuit has effectively recognized a state interest in subjecting the creation of speech itself to antidiscrimination laws.”

Oral arguments in the case aren’t yet set, but may be announced soon. Set to defend the state of Colorado and enforcement of its non-discrimination law in the case is Colorado Solicitor General Eric Reuel Olson. Just this week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would grant the request to the U.S. solicitor general to present arguments before the justices on behalf of the Biden administration.

With a 6-3 conservative majority on the court that has recently scrapped the super-precedent guaranteeing the right to abortion, supporters of LGBTQ rights may think the outcome of the case is all but lost, especially amid widespread fears same-sex marriage would be next on the chopping block. After the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against 303 Creative in the lawsuit, the simple action by the Supreme Court to grant review in the lawsuit suggests they are primed to issue a reversal and rule in favor of the company.

Pizer, acknowledging the call to action issued by LGBTQ groups in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, conceded the current Supreme Court issuing the ruling in this case is “a terrifying prospect,” but cautioned the issue isn’t so much the makeup of the court but whether or not justices will continue down the path of abolishing case law.

“I think the question that we’re facing with respect to all of the cases or at least many of the cases that are in front of the court right now, is whether this court is going to continue on this radical sort of wrecking ball to the edifice of settled law and seemingly a goal of setting up whole new structures of what our basic legal principles are going to be. Are we going to have another term of that?” Pizer said. “And if so, that’s terrifying.”

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Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman, named president of Human Rights Campaign

Progressive activist a veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund

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Kelley Robinson (Screen capture via HRC YouTube)

Kelley Robinson, a Black, queer woman and veteran of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is to become the next president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ group announced on Tuesday.

Robinson is set to become the ninth president of the Human Rights Campaign after having served as executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund and more than 12 years of experience as a leader in the progressive movement. She’ll be the first Black, queer woman to serve in that role.

“I’m honored and ready to lead HRC — and our more than three million member-advocates — as we continue working to achieve equality and liberation for all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people,” Robinson said. “This is a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people. We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us.”

Kelley Robinson IS NAMED as The next human rights Campaign president

The next Human Rights Campaign president is named as Democrats are performing well in polls in the mid-term elections after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving an opening for the LGBTQ group to play a key role amid fears LGBTQ rights are next on the chopping block.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reminds us we are just one Supreme Court decision away from losing fundamental freedoms including the freedom to marry, voting rights, and privacy,” Robinson said. “We are facing a generational opportunity to rise to these challenges and create real, sustainable change. I believe that working together this change is possible right now. This next chapter of the Human Rights Campaign is about getting to freedom and liberation without any exceptions — and today I am making a promise and commitment to carry this work forward.”

The Human Rights Campaign announces its next president after a nearly year-long search process after the board of directors terminated its former president Alphonso David when he was ensnared in the sexual misconduct scandal that led former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign. David has denied wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against the LGBTQ group alleging racial discrimination.

Kelley Robinson, Planned Parenthood, Cathy Chu, SMYAL, Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders, Amy Nelson, Whitman-Walker Health, Sheroes of the Movement, Mayor's office of GLBT Affairs, gay news, Washington Blade
Kelley Robinson, seen here with Cathy Chu of SMYAL and Amy Nelson of Whitman-Walker Health, is the next Human Rights Campaign president. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
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