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In 1973, LGBTQ activists took a bold step.
Four years after the roots of resistance ignited the Stonewall uprising, most states still had anti-sodomy laws on the books. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness, and violence against LGBTQ people was routine.
An arson attack at a New Orleans gay bar killed 32 people – and barely made headlines.
Advocates decided to form a task force with an urgent mission: Push for equality at a national level.
Now 50 years later, activists from that same task force say they are at another defining moment – and they are mobilizing again.
“I’m struck at how many arguments in the past that were focused on our community have been refreshed to target LGBTQ people again,” said Kierra Johnson, executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force.
The task force, the nation’s oldest LGBTQ advocacy group, is marking its 50th anniversary waging battle over a cascade of bills that have put the community in the crosshairs, Johnson said. “To be really specific, the legislation is targeting transgender and nonbinary people … And they are targeting children.”
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More than 300 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced so far this year
Just two months into 2023, the landscape has already seen a wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) said last week that it is tracking 340 anti-LGBTQ bills that have been introduced in statehouses. About 150 of those would restrict rights of transgender people, the highest number of bills targeting the trans community in a single year to date, according to the HRC.
Ninety of those bills would prevent transgender youths from being able to access age-appropriate health care, the HRC said.
Utah become the first state this year to ban gender-affirming health care for trans youths – which has been supported by major medical groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
The bill prohibits transgender surgery for those under 18 and bars hormone treatments for minors who have not yet been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, defended the bill last week on Meet the Press, saying he wants more research into these treatments.
“We take power away from (parents) on a lot of things involving our young people. If there is potential long-term harm for our kids, we need to find that,” Cox said, according to NBC. “And what Utah did was just push pause until we get better data.”
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Other bills tracked by HRC would ban transgender students from playing sports consistent with their gender identity; some would ban transgender students from using bathrooms and other school facilities that align with their gender identity.
Johnson says the “community builder” in these bills is fear. “You should be afraid of trans kids, you should be afraid of parents of LGBTQ people because they are going to be coming for your children,” she said. “They are coming for your kids in school, they are coming for your kids in bathrooms, they are coming for your kids in locker rooms.”
In 1973, LGBTQ people were painted as “degenerate, not normal,” Johnson said. But in 2023, the focus has shifted and the community is being portrayed as “predators.”
‘Ignorance has always played a part, 50 years ago and today’
David Rothenberg, now 89, was “classic closeted” in 1973, living a double life in New York City as a successful playwright, producer and founder of The Fortune Society, which advocates for prisoners and those formerly incarcerated.
“You lost jobs, you committed suicide, you lost housing, you lost friends and families – you didn’t come out,” Rothenberg said.
When Rothenberg was asked to join the original board of the task force because of his criminal justice expertise, he made a monumental decision at age 39: To come out in a very public way on the David Susskind Show.
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The task force soon went full throttle, he said, marching, protesting, writing letters and testifying. And there were many successes, including the group’s role in persuading the American Psychiatric Association to declare by December of that year that homosexuality was not a sickness or mental illness.
Rothenberg sees parallels in the current climate and that of 1973. “There is a political component to homophobia,” he said. “But ignorance has always played a part, 50 years ago and today.”
Bills are part of a ‘continuous pattern’
Dee Tum-Monge, 25, a digital organizer and senior communications manager for the task force, says there are some key differences in how advocates handle challenges today. Issues such as abortion rights, gun control and racial justice intertwine with the fight for LGBTQ equality like never before, they said.
“I think the way it’s being approached is new. The task force has been a leading voice in building intersectionality and how we approach advocacy on these issues. But the way people experience these issues is not new,” they said.
Tum-Monge said the wave of bills are an attack on youths who can’t advocate for themselves, and they are bolstered by swirling rhetoric and misinformation. It’s part of a “continuous pattern that has just found a new light and new platform to spew a lot of LGBTQ hate” through the internet, they said. “People my age are just sick of it.”
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Task force confident the tide will turn
The task force is combatting this blitz of bills by collaborating with other national organizations and engaging with the people most impacted, Johnson said.
The year 2023 is “a pivotal time,” Johnson said, but she is confident LGBTQ advocates will prevail. “I fundamentally believe that the ferocity at which the opposition is coming at us is because we are winning. You don’t get this kind of anger, this kind of vitriolic energy … and creation of lies unless it’s your last-ditch effort.”
After decades of activism, Rothenberg offers a simple motto he has leaned on for years: “While you are waiting to change the world, deal with the one person in front of you … You deal with them one at a time and you build an army of change.”
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