National
Groups lobby for political mapmakers to take LGBTQ community into account
More than 70 challenges against district maps have been filed across the country
Redistricting and updated political maps are at the heart of American democracy.
Every 10 years, the U.S. Census Bureau tells lawmakers the demographics of their constituents, and likely, how they’ll vote. Lawmakers then redraw districts, in many cases, along partisan lines to give advantage to a specific party. This process, called gerrymandering, is at the heart of state legislatures across the country, and poses a significant challenge to LGBTQ rights in many states.
Gerrymandering has been at the heart of multiple court challenges since the 2020 election. As of July, 74 cases have been filed challenging district maps in 27 states as racially discriminatory or partisan gerrymanders.
While the conversation around gerrymandering often focuses on race or political affiliation, the LGBTQ community is often left out, despite having massive voting power.
The LGBTQ community has utilized its voting power for a long time, and famously elected Harvey Milk, the U.S.’s first openly gay person to hold public office, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Since then, the number of openly-LGBTQ politicians is growing, with a record number expected to run in 2024.
Redistricting played a powerful role in Milk’s election. Despite the LGBTQ population making up one fifth of San Francisco’s voters at the time, the city’s at-large electoral system — where council members were elected by the whole city — put LGBTQ neighborhoods at a disadvantage.
Milk and other activists led the fight to change the city’s electoral system to district contests, and in 1977, Milk won his seat on the council.
The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund launched a first-of-its-kind campaign to lobby for redistricting that considers LGBTQ populations in map-drawing. The “We Belong Together” campaign, launched following the 2020 election, has two main focuses: Encourage LGBTQ organizations to lobby to keep LGBTQ areas intact and to gather data showing where LGBTQ communities are located within legislative districts.
“[We worked on] basically how to identify large groupings of LGBTQ people, and then advocate to the decision makers who are doing a lot to say, ‘Hey, this is a community of interest, and you need to make sure that they stick together,’” Victory Fund Vice President of Political Programs Sean Meloy said.
Communities of interest are communities of people that are grouped by a common factor — often race and class — that’s taken into account when redistricting happens. LGBTQ people aren’t classified as a community of interest in many states due to sexual orientation not being part of the census.
“A lot of other demographics are accounted for in the census,” Meloy said. “[The Census Bureau] did a pulse survey recently that asked about LGBTQ people. And that’s a great step in a great direction because every community and demographic has unique vulnerabilities, unique issues that government should understand so that they can help address them because they’re all people that they’re supposed to be working on behalf of.”
The Household Pulse Survey was launched in 2020 and tracks a wide variety of household data including, but not limited to, employment, housing security and access to health care. The survey also tracks sexual orientation and gender identity. According to the Census Bureau’s website, the survey tracks how “emergent issues are impacting households across the country from a social and economic perspective.”
Meloy said that this data collected by the Bureau allows for groups like the Victory Fund to draw maps of “centralized areas where there are same sex married couples.” Using the maps, groups can lobby mapmakers to not “draw a line right through” these communities, dividing up their voting power.
Arizona, California, Colorado, Michigan and Montana are all states where maps are drawn by nonpartisan commissions — as opposed to lawmakers drawing the maps — and are the top targets of LGBTQ outreach going into the 2024 election cycle.
“They have fairer districts, and a lot of those states have districts that actually do respect LGBTQ people as communities of interest, and so you know, we had more LGBTQ led legislators elected in California and in Arizona and in Colorado,” Meloy said.
Other areas, such as New York, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Boise, Idaho, could all see an increase in LGBTQ public officials if LGBTQ voters were taken into account in redistricting, according to Victory Fund.
“We know that once we elect some LGBTQ people, there is a domino effect that people feel they can come out, they can be in office, it breaks that barrier,” Meloy said. “And we’ve seen that in a lot of other places over the last 30 years, but we still have a lot of places that we need to continue breaking down those little barriers.”
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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