National
Mariela Castro denied permission to attend U.S. gay event
Cuban president’s daughter was to have attended Equality Forum in Philadelphia
Equality Forum Executive Director Malcolm Lazin said in a press release that Mariela Castro, executive director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX,) several months ago accepted an invitation to speak on a panel at the University of the Arts on May 4. She was also scheduled to accept an award at the group’s annual dinner that will take place later that same day at the National Museum of American Jewish History.
Lazin said the State Department issued a visa to Castro that allowed her to attend meetings at the United Nations in New York City. He said the U.S. government refused to allow her to travel to Philadelphia to attend Equality Forum that will highlight Cuba.
Lazin told the Washington Blade on Thursday the Cuban government attached Equality Forum’s invitation to its application for a visa that would have allowed her to attend the event.
He said he reached out to a senior member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to ask if the State Department could reverse its decision. Lazin told the Blade neither “that member of Congress nor Equality Forum has gotten a response to that.”
“Over the past 11 years, Equality Forum has invited leaders of the featured nation to attend. For those who needed a visa, all past visas have been approved,” he said in a press release. “It is shocking that our State Department would deny Ms. Castro travel to a civil rights summit — especially one held in the birthplace of our democracy that enshrines freedoms of speech and assembly.”
Mariela Castro, whose uncle is former Cuban President Fidel Castro, has spearheaded a series of campaigns over the last decade to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and promote acceptance of LGBT people on the island.
She successfully lobbied the Cuban government to begin offering free sex-reassignment surgery under the country’s national health care system in 2010. Mariela Castro has also spoken out in support of marriage rights for same-sex couples in Cuba.
Mariela Castro in May 2012 appeared on a panel with Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, in New York while she and other Cuban scholars visited the United States. She also met with LGBT advocates in San Francisco during the trip.
In spite of this progress, those opposed to the Cuban government maintain LGBT rights advocates on the island continue to suffer harassment and discrimination.
Cubanet reported last September that Cuban security officials detained Leannes Imbert Acosta of the Cuban LGBT Platform, an umbrella organization of 12 of the island’s independent LGBT rights groups she co-founded in June, as she left her Havana home to deliver to CENESEX materials on a planned exhibit on forced labor camps to which the government sent more than 25,000 gay men and others deemed unfit for military services during the 1960s. Cuba Archive, a New Jersey-based organization that documents the Cuban government’s human rights abuses, said during a panel on LGBT rights on the island it hosted in New York a few days after Imbert’s reported detention that authorities confiscated her materials and pressured her to cancel the planned exhibit before they released her.
Imbert claimed during the same event that CENESEX did not investigate the camps known as Military Units to Aid Production — or UMAPs in Spanish — as she said Mariela Castro had promised.
The Cuban government in 1979 repealed the country’s sodomy law, but Cuban-born poet Emilio Bejel and others who took part in the Cuba Archive panel stressed authorities continue to use public decency and assembly laws to harass LGBT Cubans.
Cuba also forcibly quarantined people with HIV/AIDS in state-run sanitaria until 1993.
Ignacio Estrada Cepero, a gay man with HIV who founded the Cuban League Against AIDS in 2003, stressed during the same Cuba Archive panel in New York those with the virus on the island continue to face discrimination. He also claimed some with HIV/AIDS remain in prison for what he describe as the crime of “pre-criminal social dangerousness.”
Observers have credited Cuba’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, but Estrada complained during the Cuba Archive panel they don’t always reach those who need them.
“We don’t have access to medication and our rights are violated,” he said.
Lazin conceded that Cuba is not “a perfect nation,” but stressed “neither is the United States.”
“There are those who are being critical of necessary changes within Cuba [should be] given the right to express those views of both generally and to their government,” he told the Blade. “That to me is what freedom of speech and freedom of assembly is all about. As a country that has pioneered democracy and champions democracy, the fact that we would not allow Mariela Castro to come to Philadelphia for a civil rights summit and open herself to questions from the public and the press on LGBT rights in Cuba to me is a sorry day for the country I love.”
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on Equality Forum’s claim, citing the confidentiality of visa records under U.S. law.
CENESEX did not immediately return the Washington Blade’s request for comment.
The White House
Biden, Harris, deliver remarks for White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention
Pulse survivor Brandon Wolf among those who spoke

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) addressed an audience from the Rose Garden of the White House on Friday to honor the establishment of a first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
In a press release Thursday announcing the move, the administration said its aim is to implement and expand the provisions of last year’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act along with those contained in the president’s executive orders targeting issues of gun violence.
Additionally, Biden explained in his remarks, the office will coordinate more support for survivors, families and communities, including mental health services and financial aid; identify new avenues for executive action; and “expand our coalition of partners in states and cities across America” given the need for legislative solutions on the local and state level.
Harris, who will oversee the office, pledged to “use the full power of the federal government to strengthen the coalition of survivors and advocates and students and teachers and elected leaders to save lives and fight for the right of all people to be safe from fear and to be able to live a life where they understand that they are supported in that desire and that right.”
The vice president noted her close experiences with the devastating consequences of gun violence in her work as a federal prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and in her current role.
Biden’s comments also included highlights of his administration’s accomplishments combatting gun violence and a call to action for Congress to do more. “It’s time again to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines,” he told lawmakers.
The president also credited the the work of advocates including those who were gathered at the White House on Friday: “all of you here today, all across the country, survivors, families, advocates — especially young people who demand our nation do better to protect all; who protested, organized, voted, and ran for office, and, yes, marched for their lives.”
Taking the stage before introducing Biden, Frost noted that “Right before I was elected to Congress, I served as the national organizing director for March for Our Lives, a movement that inspired young people across the nation to demand safe communities.”
“The president understands that this issue especially for young people, especially for marginalized communities, is a matter of survival,” the congressman said. And the formation of this office, “comes from Pulse to Parkland,” he said, adding, “we fight because we love.”
Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf, a survivor of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, which was America’s second deadliest mass shooting and the deadliest against the LGBTQ community, shared a comment with the Washington Blade after Friday’s ceremony:
“Seven years ago, when my best friends and 47 others were murdered at our safe place — Pulse Nightclub — we promised to honor them with action. This is what that looks like. This deep investment in the fight to end gun violence matters, and I cannot wait to see Vice President Harris lead these efforts. We can blaze the path toward a future free of gun violence. And today marked an important step in that direction.”
U.S. Federal Courts
Federal judge: drag is ‘vulgar and lewd,’ ‘sexualized conduct’
Ruling ‘bristles with hostility toward LGBTQ people’

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a ruling Thursday denying relief to a group of university students who sought to host a drag show over the objections of their school’s president.
A Trump appointed jurist with deep ties to anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion conservative legal activists, Kacsmaryk argued that drag performances probably do not constitute speech protected by the First Amendment.
As Slate Senior Writer Mark Joseph Stern wrote on X, this conclusion “conflicts with decisions from Texas, Florida, Tennessee and Montana which held that drag is constitutionally protected expression.”
“It also bristles with undisguised hostility toward LGBTQ people,” he added.
Kacsmaryk’s 26-page decision describes drag performances as lewd and licentious, obscene and sexually prurient, despite arguments the plaintiffs had presented about the social, political, and artistic merit of this art form.
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk refuses to grant relief to Texas college students who may be punished for hosting a drag show.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) September 22, 2023
His condemns drag as “vulgar and lewd” “sexualized conduct” that harms children and is likely unprotected by the First Amendment. https://t.co/UPeolMfGON
As the Human Rights Campaign recently wrote, “drag artists and the spaces that host their performances have long served as a communal environment for queer expression.”
The group added, “It is a form of art and entertainment, but, historically, the performances haven’t only served to entertain, but also to truly advance the empowerment and visibility of LGBTQ+ people.”
Nevertheless, anti-LGBTQ conservative activists and organizations have perpetuated conspiracy theories about members of the community targeting children for sexual abuse including by bringing them to drag performances.
Among these is a group with ties to the Proud Boys that was cited by Kacsmaryk in his ruling: Gays Against Groomers, an anti-LGBTQ and anti-transgender extremist group, according to the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center.
The White House
Harris to oversee White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention
Goal is to implement and expand upon legislation, executive actions

The White House announced Thursday evening that President Joe Biden on Friday will establish the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, to be overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris.
The office will focus on implementing and expanding upon executive and legislative actions, including the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, “to reduce gun violence, which has ravaged communities across the country.”
Serving under Harris will be Stefanie Feldman, “a longtime policy advisor to President Biden on gun violence prevention,” and “leading gun violence prevention advocates Greg Jackson and Rob Wilcox.”
“Every time I’ve met with families impacted by gun violence as they mourn their loved ones, and I’ve met with so many throughout the country, they all have the same message for their elected officials: ‘do something,'” Biden said in a statement.
The president noted his signing of last year’s bipartisan gun violence prevention law, a flagship legislative accomplishment for the administration, along with his issuance of more executive actions than any president in history to address this problem.
Calling these “just the first steps,” Biden said the establishment of the White House Office on Gun Violence Prevention will “build upon these measures and keep Americans safe.”
He also urged Congress to do more by passing legislation requiring universal background checks, and baning assault weapons and high capacity magazines.
In a statement, Harris said, “This epidemic of gun violence requires urgent leadership to end the fear and trauma that Americans experience every day.”
“The new Office of Gun Violence Prevention will play a critical role in implementing President Biden’s and my efforts to reduce violence to the fullest extent under the law,” she said, “while also engaging and encouraging Congressional leaders, state and local leaders, and advocates to come together to build upon the meaningful progress that we have made to save lives.”
“Our promise to the American people is this: we will not stop working to end the epidemic of gun violence in every community, because we do not have a moment, nor a life to spare,” the vice president said.

Wolf, a Pulse survivor, was recently appointed National Press Secretary of the Human Rights Campaign.
(Official White House Photo by David Lienemann)
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