News
Cuban LGBT activists cite progress, ongoing harassment
Authorities detained Leannes Imbert Acosta in Havanafor 12 hours on Sept. 11
Leannes Imbert Acosta (Photo courtesy of Cuba Archive)
NEW YORK– A leading Cuban LGBT rights advocate says that the country’s activists continue to suffer harassment and discrimination in spite of high profile pro-LGBT campaigns on the island.
“We are starting to understand how to organize in a more effective manner,” said Leannes Imbert Acosta, national coordinator of the Cuban LGBT Platform, an umbrella organization she co-founded in June of 12 of the island’s independent LGBT rights groups. She spoke during a panel on LGBT rights in Cuba at the Schomberg Center for Research and Black Culture in Manhattan on Saturday. “There is more societal tolerance, but discrimination still exists.”
The website Cubanet reported that two Cuban security officials detained Imbert Acosta on Sept. 11 as she left her Havana home to deliver to Mariela Castro, director of the country’s National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX.) materials for a planned exhibit on forced labor camps to which the government sent more than 25,000 gay men and others deemed unfit for military service during the 1960s. Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, has said CENESEX would conduct an investigation into these camps, known as Military Units to Aid Production or by their Spanish acronym UMAPs, but Imbert and other activists maintain that Castro has refused to work with them on this issue.
Cuba Archive, a New Jersey-based organization that documents the Cuban government’s human rights abuses, said that authorities confiscated Imbert’s materials and pressured her to cancel the planned exhibit before releasing her 12 hours later.
Castro becomes public face of Cuba’s gay rights movement
Mariela Castro has spearheaded a number of campaigns designed to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and promote the acceptance of LGBT people on the island over the last decade.
Castro successfully lobbied the Cuban government to begin offering free sex-reassignment surgery under the country’s national health care system in 2010. She has also spoken out in support of marriage rights for same-sex couples.
Castro appeared at the New York Public Library with Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in May while she and other Cuban scholars visited the United States. She also met with other LGBT activists in San Francisco during the trip.
“I honestly think that the activities of Mariela Castro and the CENESEX have been positive regarding the rights of LGBT people in Cuba,” said Emilio Bejel, a Cuban-born poet who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s. The government frequently imprisoned gays and lesbians until it repealed the country’s sodomy law in 1979, but activists and others maintain that authorities continue to use public decency and assembly laws to harass them. “The difference between the situation today and just a few years ago is considerable, but there is still a refusal from the Cuban government to give full rights afforded to LGBT people.”
Achy Obejas, a lesbian Cuban American writer and journalist from Chicago who immigrated to the United States from Cuba with her family when she was six, agreed.
“Mariela’s work has been, actually I think, very good in terms of getting non-queers to talk about queers,” she said. “We never needed Mariela for us to talk about us. What she’s done is sort of made the topic more accessible, more common in places where this conversation wouldn’t be happening unless there was a queer person present or a queer problem to contend with.”
Mabel Cuesta, a lesbian Cuban-born writer who is an assistant professor in the University of Houston’s Department of Hispanic Studies, noted that police continue to raid private gay parties — Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and French fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier were among the hundreds of people detained at a popular gay nightclub in Havana in 1997.
Independent LGBT rights groups and publications remain banned in Cuba, while the government requires officially sanctioned clubs to be heterosexual. Authorities arrested members of the Cuban Association of Gays and Lesbians, an independent LGBT rights group, after the government shut it down in 1997.
Ignacio Estrada Cepero (Photo courtesy of Cuba Archive)
Ignacio Estrada Cepero, a gay HIV/AIDS activist who founded the Cuban League Against AIDS in 2003, said from Havana that those with the virus in the country continue to face discrimination. Until 1993, the Cuban government forcibly quarantined people with HIV/AIDS in state-run sanitaria. Estrada, who is positive, noted that 577 Cubans with the virus remain in prison for what he described as the crime of “pre-criminal social dangerousness.”
Observers credit the country’s condom distribution campaign and sexual education curriculum for producing one of the world’s lowest HIV infection rates. Cubans with the virus have access to free anti-retroviral drugs through the country’s health care system, but Estrada complained that these medications do not always reach those who need them.
“What we’re confronting in Cuba is a situation where people with HIV/AIDS… are living without,” he said. “We don’t have access to medication and our rights are violated.”
Jafari Allen, assistant professor of anthropology and African American studies at Yale University who has conducted research in Cuba, was also on the panel.
State Department
Democracy Forward files FOIA request for State Department bathroom policy records
April 20 memo outlined anti-transgender rule
Democracy Forward on Tuesday filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records on the State Department’s new bathroom policy.
A memo titled “Updates Regarding Biological Sex and Intimate Spaces, Including Restrooms” that the State Department issued on April 20 notes employees can no longer use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.
“The administration affirms that there are two sexes — male and female — and that federal facilities should operate on this objective and longstanding basis to ensure consistency, privacy, and safety in shared spaces,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Piggot told the Daily Signal, a conservative news website that first reported on the memo. “In line with President Trump’s executive order this provides clear, uniform guidance to the department by grounding policy in biological sex as determined at birth.”
President Donald Trump shortly after he took office in January 2025 issued an executive order that directed the federal government to only recognize two genders: male and female. The sweeping directive also ordered federal government agencies to “effectuate this policy by taking appropriate action to ensure that intimate spaces designated for women, girls, or females (or for men, boys, or males) are designated by sex and not identity.”
Democracy Forward’s FOIA request that the Washington Blade exclusively obtained on Tuesday is specifically seeking a copy of the memo that details the State Department’s new bathroom policy. Democracy Forward has also requested “all” memo-specific communications between the State Department’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs and the Daily Signal from April 1-21.
Federal Government
House Republicans push nationwide ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill
Measures would restrict federal funding for LGBTQ-affirming schools
Republicans have been gaining ground in reshaping education policy to be less inclusive toward LGBTQ students at the state level, and now they are turning their focus to Capitol Hill.
Some GOP lawmakers are pushing for a nationwide “Don’t Say Gay” bill, doubling down on their commitment to being the party of “traditional family values” by excluding anyone who does not identify with their sex at birth.
The largest anti-LGBTQ education legislation to reach the House chamber is House Bill 2616 — the Parental Rights Over the Education and Care of Their Kids Act, or the PROTECT Kids Act. The PROTECT Kids Act, proposed by U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), and co-sponsored by U.S. Reps. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), Mary Miller (R-Ill.), Robert Onder (R-Mo.), and Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), would require any public elementary and middle schools that receive federal funding to require parental consent to change a child’s gender expression in school.
The bill, which was discussed during Tuesday’s House Rules Committee hearing, would specifically require any schools that get federal money from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 — which was created to minimize financial discrepancies in education for low-income students — to get parental approval before identifying any child’s gender identity as anything other than what was provided to the school initially. This includes getting approval before allowing children to use their preferred locker room or bathroom.
It reads that any school receiving this funding “shall obtain parental consent before changing a covered student’s (1) gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name on any school form; or (2) sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms.”
LGBTQ rights advocates have criticized both national and state efforts to require parental permission to use a child’s preferred gender identity, as it raises issues of at-home safety — especially if the home is not LGBTQ-affirming — and could lead to the outing of transgender or gender-curious students.
A follow-up bill, HB 2617, proposed by Owens, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, prevents the use of federal funding to “advance concepts related to gender ideology,” using the definition from President Donald Trump’s 2025 Executive Order 14168, making that an enshrined definition in law of sex rather than just by executive order. There is also a bill making its way through the senate with the same text— Senate Bill 2251.
Advocates have also criticized this follow-up legislation, as it would restrict school staff — including teachers and counselors — from acknowledging trans students’ identities or providing any support. They have said that this kind of isolation can worsen mental health outcomes for LGBTQ youth and allows for education to be politicized rather than being based in reality.
David Stacy, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president of government affairs, called this legislation out for using LGBTQ children as political pawns in an ideology fight — one that could greatly harm the safety of these children if passed.
“Trans kids are not a political agenda — they are students who deserve safety and affirmation at school like anyone else,” Stacy said in a statement. “Despite the many pressing issues facing our nation, House Republicans continue their bizarre obsession with trans people. H.R. 2616 does not protect children. It targets them. This bill is cruel, and we’re prepared to fight it.”
This is similar to Florida House Bills 1557 and 1069, referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and “Don’t Say They” bill, respectively, restricting classroom discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity, prohibiting the use of pronouns consistent with one’s gender identity, expanding book banning procedures, and censoring health curriculum.
The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 233 bills related to restricting student and educator rights in the U.S.
Botswana’s government has repealed a provision of its colonial-era penal code that criminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations.
The country’s High Court in 2019 struck down the provision. The Batswana government in 2022 said it would abide by the ruling after country’s Court of Appeals upheld it.
The government on March 26 announced the repeal of the penal code’s “unnatural offenses” section that specifically referenced any person who “has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature” and “permits any other person to have carnal knowledge of him or her against the order of nature.”
Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana, a Batswana advocacy group known by the acronym LEGABIBO, challenged the criminalization law with the support of the Southern Africa Litigation Center. LEGABIBO in a statement it posted to its Facebook on April 25 welcomed the repeal.
“For many, these provisions were not just words on paper — they were lived realities,” said LEGABIBO. “They affected access to healthcare, safety, employment, and the freedom to love and exist openly.”
“LEGABIBO believes that the deletion of these sections is a necessary and long-overdue step toward restoring dignity and aligning our legal framework with constitutional values of equality and human rights,” it added. “It is a clear message that LGBTIQ+ persons are not criminals, and that their lives and relationships deserve protection, not punishment.”
LEGABIBO further stressed that “while this does not erase the harm of the past, it creates space for healing, inclusion, and continued progress toward full equality.”
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