National
‘Day of Rage’ protests held over India sodomy ruling
Advocates gathered in Delhi, Mumbai, D.C., London
LGBT rights advocates in Bangalore, India, on Dec. 15, 2013, protest the Indian Supreme Court ruling that recriminalized homosexuality. (Photo courtesy of Neha Nambiar)
Thousands of LGBT rights advocates in India and around the world on Sunday took part in “Day of Rage” protests against last week’s India Supreme Court ruling that recriminalized homosexuality.
Activists and their supporters gathered in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkota and other Indian cities to express their outrage over the Dec. 11 decision. Protests also took place outside the Indian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., in Northwest D.C. and in New York, London, Toronto and other cities.
“I was especially overwhelmed to see parents of individuals from the community standing up for their kids,” Neha Nambier told the Washington Blade after she took part in a protest against the decision in Bangalore in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.
Omkar, an engineer from Bangalore who did not provide his last name to the Blade, took part in the same protest.
“This verdict encroaches upon my freedom of living life, and it threatens to snatch my dignity,” he said. “Not just mine, but of everyone else too. Therefore, I feel, I must protest against this verdict and voice my concern.”
Mahesh Natarajan, a gay man who has lived with his partner for nearly a decade, also took part in the Bangalore protest.
“I felt betrayed, let down, outraged,” he told the Blade as he discussed the decision. :For me, it is the supreme court abdicating its responsibility and by throwing us back in the hands of the possibly homophobic majority.”
Nearly three dozen people took part in a candlelight vigil outside the Indian embassy near Dupont Circle on Dec. 13.
Members of KhushDC, a group for LGBT South Asians who live in the Washington metropolitan area, placed a rainbow flag in the hand of the Mahatma Gandhi statue near the intersections of 21st and Q Streets, N.W., and Massachusetts Avenue. An unidentified official with the Indian embassy asked the protesters to remove the flag from the monument before the vigil began.
Nearly two dozen people gathered outside the Indian embassy two days earlier to protest the ruling.
“We are together because we want to show the strength of our community and people have been upset by the incredibly intolerant decision of the Supreme Court of India,” said KhushDC President Sapna Pandya during the Dec. 13 vigil.
Vanlal Hruaia of Cheverly, Md., who is from the Northeastern Indian state of Mizoram between Bangladesh and Myanmar, held a sign written in Hindi script during the candlelight vigil that read “I have loved, not committed a crime.”
He described the 2009 Delhi High Court ruling that struck down the country’s colonial-era sodomy law as a “great baby step in moving forward and being open-minded.” Hruaia added he feels the Indian Supreme Court decision that reinstated it is a “Stonewall moment” for LGBT Indians.
“Gays have been marginalized like crazy since British rule came to India,” he said, noting Hinduism recognizes what he described as a third gender. “It’s only when the British came that they marginalized the third-gender people that they’ve been living on the edge of society. And we’ve somehow failed to move beyond that.”
India is now among the 41 U.K. commonwealth countries in which homosexuality remains criminalized.
Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress, which is one of the country’s two main political parties, on Dec. 12 criticized the Indian Supreme Court’s ruling.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in a Dec. 11 statement described the decision as a “significant step backwards.” She also urged the Indian government to review the ruling.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki last week declined to say how the White House would pressure New Delhi to repeal the country’s colonial-era sodomy law in response to questions from the Blade and other media outlets.
Indian Law Minister Kapil Sibal said his government will consider ways to overturn the decision. It remains highly unlikely lawmakers will decriminalize homosexuality before next year’s elections because members of the socially conservative Bharatiya Janata Party, which observers have labeled as Hindu nationalist, and their political allies will likely block any such proposal.
“The judges seem to have decided that they were speaking for a ‘real India’ that finds all this distasteful or worse and against that view all the legal skill on our side was of no use,” Vikram Doctor of the Times of India newspaper told the Blade. “If anything it confirmed their feelings that this was all elite urban outrage.”
LGBT rights advocates are planning to ask the Indian Supreme Court to reconsider their decision. They are also scheduled to meet in New Delhi on Dec. 22.
“I don’t think this is going to be as easy to change as people are hoping,” said Doctor. “All the support we are seeing now is wonderful and heart-warming, but it remains to be seen how much difference it will make over time and when we are up against this ‘real India’ attitude which is quite widespread.”
Tushar Malik, a Human Rights Campaign fellow from New Delhi, told the Blade during the Dec. 13 vigil outside the Indian embassy in D.C. that a lot of “dissatisfaction with this decision” remains in India.
“It’s a shame to our democracy,” he said.
Harjant Gill, a D.C. anthropologist from Chandigarh in Northern India, said the outrage over the Indian Supreme Court’s decision he has seen on social media networks demonstrates his countrymen increasingly support LGBT rights. He told the Blade after he attended the D.C. vigil on Dec. 13 that most people with whom he has spoken in India since the judges announced their ruling described it as “incredibly stupid.”
“They don’t understand this is moving the country in the wrong direction,” said Gill. “A lot of people see gay rights as a human rights issue and the fact that the India Supreme Court did this says something about their commitment to human rights and that in fact they’re maybe not committed to human rights.”
“Queer Indians have always been a fractured lot across race, caste, religion, economic status, language, gender, sexuality, colour and everything else, and find it hard to come together,” added Natarajan. “This judgment has already brought us together to a larger degree than anything else so far. Every liberal Indian is coming out and speaking out. We got to build on this and make this our stonewall moment. There isn’t any other choice.”
Omkar had a similar message for the court.
“We are simply asking [it to] let consenting adults decide how they express feelings of mutual love and affection,” he told the Blade.
New York
Men convicted of murdering two men in NYC gay bar drugging scheme sentenced
One of the victims, John Umberger, was D.C. political consultant
A New York judge on Wednesday sentenced three men convicted of killing a D.C. political consultant and another man who they targeted at gay bars in Manhattan.
NBC New York notes a jury in February convicted Jayqwan Hamilton, Jacob Barroso, and Robert DeMaio of murder, robbery, and conspiracy in relation to druggings and robberies that targeted gay bars in Manhattan from March 2021 to June 2022.
John Umberger, a 33-year-old political consultant from D.C., and Julio Ramirez, a 25-year-old social worker, died. Prosecutors said Hamilton, Barroso, and DeMaio targeted three other men at gay bars.
The jury convicted Hamilton and DeMaio of murdering Umberger. State Supreme Court Judge Felicia Mennin sentenced Hamilton and DeMaio to 40 years to life in prison.
Barroso, who was convicted of killing Ramirez, received a 20 years to life sentence.
National
Medical groups file lawsuit over Trump deletion of health information
Crucial datasets included LGBTQ, HIV resources
Nine private medical and public health advocacy organizations, including two from D.C., filed a lawsuit on May 20 in federal court in Seattle challenging what it calls the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s illegal deletion of dozens or more of its webpages containing health related information, including HIV information.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, names as defendants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS itself, and several agencies operating under HHS and its directors, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.
“This action challenges the widespread deletion of public health resources from federal agencies,” the lawsuit states. “Dozens (if not more) of taxpayer-funded webpages, databases, and other crucial resources have vanished since January 20, 2025, leaving doctors, nurses, researchers, and the public scrambling for information,” it says.
“These actions have undermined the longstanding, congressionally mandated regime; irreparably harmed Plaintiffs and others who rely on these federal resources; and put the nation’s public health infrastructure in unnecessary jeopardy,” the lawsuit continues.
It adds, “The removal of public health resources was apparently prompted by two recent executive orders – one focused on ‘gender ideology’ and the other targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) programs. Defendants implemented these executive orders in a haphazard manner that resulted in the deletion (inadvertent or otherwise) of health-related websites and databases, including information related to pregnancy risks, public health datasets, information about opioid-use disorder, and many other valuable resources.”
The lawsuit does not mention that it was President Donald Trump who issued the two executive orders in question.
A White House spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.
While not mentioning Trump by name, the lawsuit names as defendants in addition to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., Matthew Buzzelli, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health; Martin Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Thomas Engels, administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration; and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.
The 44-page lawsuit complaint includes an addendum with a chart showing the titles or descriptions of 49 “affected resource” website pages that it says were deleted because of the executive orders. The chart shows that just four of the sites were restored after initially being deleted.
Of the 49 sites, 15 addressed LGBTQ-related health issues and six others addressed HIV issues, according to the chart.
“The unannounced and unprecedented deletion of these federal webpages and datasets came as a shock to the medical and scientific communities, which had come to rely on them to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, assist physicians and other clinicians in daily care, and inform the public about a wide range of healthcare issues,” the lawsuit states.
“Health professionals, nonprofit organizations, and state and local authorities used the websites and datasets daily in care for their patients, to provide resources to their communities, and promote public health,” it says.
Jose Zuniga, president and CEO of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC), one of the organizations that signed on as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the deleted information from the HHS websites “includes essential information about LGBTQ+ health, gender and reproductive rights, clinical trial data, Mpox and other vaccine guidance and HIV prevention resources.”
Zuniga added, “IAPAC champions evidence-based, data-informed HIV responses and we reject ideologically driven efforts that undermine public health and erase marginalized communities.”
Lisa Amore, a spokesperson for Whitman-Walker Health, D.C.’s largest LGBTQ supportive health services provider, also expressed concern about the potential impact of the HHS website deletions.
“As the region’s leader in HIV care and prevention, Whitman-Walker Health relies on scientific data to help us drive our resources and measure our successes,” Amore said in response to a request for comment from the Washington Blade.
“The District of Columbia has made great strides in the fight against HIV,” Amore said. “But the removal of public facing information from the HHS website makes our collective work much harder and will set HIV care and prevention backward,” she said.
The lawsuit calls on the court to issue a declaratory judgement that the “deletion of public health webpages and resources is unlawful and invalid” and to issue a preliminary or permanent injunction ordering government officials named as defendants in the lawsuit “to restore the public health webpages and resources that have been deleted and to maintain their web domains in accordance with their statutory duties.”
It also calls on the court to require defendant government officials to “file a status report with the Court within twenty-four hours of entry of a preliminary injunction, and at regular intervals, thereafter, confirming compliance with these orders.”
The health organizations that joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs include the Washington State Medical Association, Washington State Nurses Association, Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Academy Health, Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Fast-Track Cities Institute, International Association of Providers of AIDS Care, National LGBT Cancer Network, and Vermont Medical Society.
The Fast-Track Cities Institute and International Association of Providers of AIDS Care are based in D.C.
U.S. Federal Courts
Federal judge scraps trans-inclusive workplace discrimination protections
Ruling appears to contradict US Supreme Court precedent
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas has struck down guidelines by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission designed to protect against workplace harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
The EEOC in April 2024 updated its guidelines to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which determined that discrimination against transgender people constituted sex-based discrimination as proscribed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
To ensure compliance with the law, the agency recommended that employers honor their employees’ preferred pronouns while granting them access to bathrooms and allowing them to wear dress code-compliant clothing that aligns with their gender identities.
While the the guidelines are not legally binding, Kacsmaryk ruled that their issuance created “mandatory standards” exceeding the EEOC’s statutory authority that were “inconsistent with the text, history, and tradition of Title VII and recent Supreme Court precedent.”
“Title VII does not require employers or courts to blind themselves to the biological differences between men and women,” he wrote in the opinion.
The case, which was brought by the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, presents the greatest setback for LGBTQ inclusive workplace protections since President Donald Trump’s issuance of an executive order on the first day of his second term directing U.S. federal agencies to recognize only two genders as determined by birth sex.
Last month, top Democrats from both chambers of Congress reintroduced the Equality Act, which would codify LGBTQ-inclusive protections against discrimination into federal law, covering employment as well as areas like housing and jury service.
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