Why We (Still) Need LGBT+ Activists
October 4, 2019Now that climate change activism is at the core of social fights, one can wonder what is the current state of activism for the LGBT+ community and if it is (still) needed.
Activism is the fight for political or social change. And there is no way to back up the importance of activists but to look at where we were 50 years ago and where we are now.
We have gone from LGBT+ people being criminalized because of their sexual orientation to including nonbinary pronouns to dictionaries.
Activists like Harvey Milk or Barbara Gittings (a.k.a. ‘The mother of the LGBT civil rights movement’) or Magnus Hirschfeld changed LGBT+ history because they fought for what they believed in.
And activists such as Bisi Alimi work now to try and shape a better future for the LGBT+ community in counties where being LGBT+ is against the law.
“Just being gay then was to be a criminal,” said Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt, an artist who lived then as now in Manhattan, Ed Pilkington for The Guardian reported earlier this year. “Liberals would say you should be given electroshock treatments which they thought was being nice; conservatives would simply throw you in jail.”
“The turning point for gay liberation came on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the popular Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village fought back against ongoing police raids of their neighborhood bar. Stonewall is still considered a watershed moment of gay pride and has been commemorated since the 1970s with “pride marches” held every June across the United States.”, reports Bonnie J. Morris, Ph.D. in a paper for the American Psychology Association.
In simple words? What changed the course of LGBT+ history are activists.
“The battle for gay rights was being fought, slowly but surely, for decades before marriage equality became law in the United States in 2015. Generations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists paved the way for the progress we see today”, writes Michele Debczak.
And today, with homophobic hate crimes rising, it is clear that activists are as important now as they were then.
“Bringing an end to homophobia and transphobia will save lives. Anti-LGBTI harassment puts LGBTI identifying people at a heightened risk of physical and psychological harm. Everyone has the right to life, freedom and safety” notes Amnesty International on their LGBT+ rights page.
“By embracing LGBTI people and understanding their identities, we can learn how to remove many of the limitations imposed by gender stereotypes. These stereotypes are damaging across society, defining and limiting how people are expected to live their lives. Removing them sets everyone free to achieve their full potential, without discriminatory social constraints.
“LGBTI people, especially transgender and gender non-conforming people, are often at risk of economic and social exclusion. Fighting for laws that are more inclusive of people of regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity will allow them access to their rights to health, education, housing and employment.
“While there is no doubt that the LGBTI movement has made significant progress, there is still work to do”, it continues.
Not long ago, and not just once, did it make headlines that someone has been fired from a job because of his sexual orientation or gender identity. Sure, society has become more open in accepting all members of the LGBT+ community, but still, there is work to be done.
An article on ‘Medium’ reports on the subject: “Day in and day out, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender activists fight for their right to live, love, work, be heard and respected. They risk their safety to push for a world where all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics, are treated with equality. On some fronts, there have been joyous victories, but there is still much to fight for.
“In every region of the world, persons of diverse sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity continue to face pervasive discrimination and intolerable acts of violence that go unpunished. LGBTI persons face gaps in wages, are denied economic and social opportunity, and lack access to leadership and decision-making positions. These experiences cannot be separated from the struggles they also endure as people living in poverty, people with disabilities, people of younger or older age, as migrants, refugees, and internally displaced persons, and as people of colour.”
In the same article, the Executive Director of an LGBT+ organization in the Nile Valley area of Egypt and Sudan, Noor Sultan says she puts a lot on the line when she goes to work each day.
“I’m an activist because I do not want younger LGBTI persons to go through what I went through when I was a teenager,” she says.
“I am inspired to continue my activism because I see change happening. There was no organized advocacy effort when I began working as an activist eight years ago. Now, I see queer mobilization in Egypt fighting for LGBTI rights”, she continues.
Just earlier this week, we read the news of a male teenager committing suicide because his classmates uploaded on social media intimate messages he had exchanged with a fellow male student, forcing him to ‘come-out’.
James Kirchick writing for Atlantic reports: “As long as gay kids commit suicide at rates higher than their straight peers, as long as even one gay person is denied a job because of his sexual orientation, there will be a need for activism, education, and other efforts toward positive social change. But for the gay movement to persist in its current mode risks prolonging a culture war that no longer needs to be fought because one side — the gay side — has already prevailed.”
On Kirchick’s statement, Katelyn Burns for Vox reminds us that LGBT+ includes a different range of people with different sexual preferences and gender types, and what she writes is of equal importance:
“But that doesn’t mean the fight is over; that means it’s half-waged at best. The list of attacks on LGBTQ rights grows longer by the day, with Trump administration rolling back federal contractor nondiscrimination rules for both sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as defunding fetal tissue research, which is a vital component to the discovery of a cure for HIV/AIDS. Trump has also moved to make it easier for adoption agencies to discriminate against gay and lesbian parents. His administration’s attacks on the trans community are even more extreme, banning trans people from the military and proposing a rollback of protections for trans people in health care and homeless shelters. One of his first acts as president was terminating Obama-era Department of Education guidance encouraging schools to support the gender identities of students.”
Talking with myGwork, activist Aritha Wickramasinghe expressed his need to turn his life around and to return to Sri Lanka to fight for LGBT+ rights.
“I never planned on being an activist. I realised that being a lawyer, gay and out about my sexuality gave me a certain amount of privilege and I didn’t think it was fair that others didn’t have the same privilege as I did.
When you look at Sri Lanka, laws criminalising homosexuality has meant most LGBT people are either not out or are discriminated. Being a very vocal lawyer on LGBT issues in this environment hasn’t always been easy. Receiving hate is a common experience for many of us who are activists. However the more hate we receive, the more we are convinced that what we are doing is right. Only a more loving, equal and fairer world can defeat hatred.”
The Oxford Dictionary defines activism as “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change”.
As long as homophobic hate-crimes, discrimination in the workplace as well as in everyday life, and the feeling of ‘not belonging’ continue to affect the LGBT+ community, the fight is not over, LGBT+ activists will be needed.
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