At NYC’s Pride March, Worries About L.G.B.T.Q. Rights
In a report released last week, two civil rights groups documented more than 350 acts of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. harassment, vandalism or violence in the United States between June 2022 and April 2023, with more than half explicitly referring to gay or transgender people as pedophiles.
Some of those incidents have been deadly. Last week, a man was charged with plotting a mass shooting and bomb attack on Nashville Pride. Such a plan was carried out by a shooter in Colorado who killed five people and injured 17 more at a gay bar last November, in what prosecutors have said was a hate crime.
That same month, anxieties were high in New York after a gay bar had its window smashed by bricks four times in one month. Weeks later, the office of a gay New York City Council member was vandalized by opponents of Drag Story Time, who then vandalized his home and assaulted his neighbor.
Even the site of Stonewall Inn, the site of the 1969 riots, has not been spared. In the last month, vandals have struck the national monument outside the bar four times, snapping dozens of its rainbow flags in half.
“Pride feels different this year,” said Erik Bottcher, the City Council member whose home and office were vandalized, and who represents the neighborhood that contains the Stonewall Monument.
“In the past year, there has been an increase in the level of venom that is spewed at our community,” he said. “The rhetoric has been ratcheted up online, at school board meetings and even in Congress. That kind of rhetoric manifests itself in the real world.”
Meanwhile, debates within the L.G.B.T.Q. community over whether corporations’ embrace of Pride diluted the event’s political roots have given way to a far different reality, as brands back away from that strategy after withering attacks from conservative activists and media figures.
Source: The New York Times
