LGBTQ Breaking News Service

LGBTQ supporters comprised of about 30 residents and a half dozen politicians came together May 29 to raise the gay pride or rainbow flag in front of San Juan Bautista’s City Hall. The flag will remain there for the month of June, which was designated gay pride month in recognition of a 1970 march for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Society. The march was in commemoration of the Stonewall Riot that took place June 28, 1969.

San Juan’s Mayor Leslie Jordan introduced Senator Anna Caballero (D-Salinas), Assembly member Robert Rivas (D-Calif. 30th District), San Benito County Supervisor Kollin Kosmicki, and Hollister Mayor Ignacio Velazquez to speak. Collectively, they spoke of their support of the LGBTQ community as marginalized citizens and a group that has faced discrimination.

Supervisor Kosmicki, however, said even though they were there to show how far society has come, it still had a distance to go. He said when the event was posted on Facebook the comments proved there was “still a level of intolerance and hate.”

“You don’t have to go farther than our own county board [of supervisors],” he said. “On May 11, I proposed that we put something on the agenda to do something exactly like this at the county administration building and a proclamation that supports June as pride month for San Benito County. I didn’t get the three votes I needed for that.”

He said he brought the topic up again May 25 and failed again. He told those present that he was putting the supervisors “on the spot.”

“We need to have a proclamation on our June 8 agenda to recognize June as pride month in San Benito County,” he said. “I encourage all of you to take part in that meeting.”

Mayor Velazquez said he and Vice Mayor Rolan Resendiz were at the event because San Juan Bautista supported Hollister’s first LGBTQ flag raising in 2020.

“That’s important because we are changing things in San Juan Bautista, Hollister, and next year we’re going to make sure we’re helping Supervisor Kosmicki raise their flag for the entire county,” he said.

Senator Caballero said she was proud to have been the first grand marshal of the gay pride parade [1970] in Salinas and a proud ally of Equality California, a LGBTQ civil rights organization.

Rivas thanked the city staff and mayor for holding the ceremony. He said too many in the LGBT community are homeless and face harassment. He said they must keep pushing so the rural areas of the state have the same resources as urban areas.

Mayor Jordan said the city was founded on diversity and spoke of other marginalized groups of the past who led the way to equality, including indigenous women, and Japanese-Americans, who farmed in nearby fields and where forced into internment camps during World War II.

“It is our time to stand and fight for all of those who have been marginalized throughout the history of San Juan Bautista,” she said. “Thank you for those who gave your lives for what we’re here for, for loving who you want to love and being who you are. Thank you for fighting for our truth.”

While Hollister’s city council authorized up to $40,000 to pay for two flagpoles to accommodate raising the gay pride flag June 1, San Juan Bautista hoisted its gay pride flag up on the single pole beneath the American and California flags. City Manager Don Reynolds said the city issued a proclamation designating June as gay pride month and the council decided to raise the flag even though the city has no policy in place yet to determine which flags can be flown from the single pole. He said San Juan Bautista may also have to eventually erect another pole.

BenitoLink is a nonprofit news website that reports on San Benito County. Our team is working around the clock during this time when accurate information is essential. It is expensive to produce local news and community support is what keeps the news flowing. Please consider supporting BenitoLink, San Benito County’s news.

LGBTQ supporters comprised of about 30 residents and a half dozen politicians came together May 29 to raise the gay pride or rainbow flag in front of San Juan Bautista’s City Hall. The flag will remain there for the month of June, which was designated gay pride month in recognition of a 1970 march for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Society. The march was in commemoration of the Stonewall Riot that took place June 28, 1969.

San Juan’s Mayor Leslie Jordan introduced Senator Anna Caballero (D-Salinas), Assembly member Robert Rivas (D-Calif. 30th District), San Benito County Supervisor Kollin Kosmicki, and Hollister Mayor Ignacio Velazquez to speak. Collectively, they spoke of their support of the LGBTQ community as marginalized citizens and a group that has faced discrimination.

Supervisor Kosmicki, however, said even though they were there to show how far society has come, it still had a distance to go. He said when the event was posted on Facebook the comments proved there was “still a level of intolerance and hate.”

“You don’t have to go farther than our own county board [of supervisors],” he said. “On May 11, I proposed that we put something on the agenda to do something exactly like this at the county administration building and a proclamation that supports June as pride month for San Benito County. I didn’t get the three votes I needed for that.”

He said he brought the topic up again May 25 and failed again. He told those present that he was putting the supervisors “on the spot.”

“We need to have a proclamation on our June 8 agenda to recognize June as pride month in San Benito County,” he said. “I encourage all of you to take part in that meeting.”

Mayor Velazquez said he and Vice Mayor Rolan Resendiz were at the event because San Juan Bautista supported Hollister’s first LGBTQ flag raising in 2020.

“That’s important because we are changing things in San Juan Bautista, Hollister, and next year we’re going to make sure we’re helping Supervisor Kosmicki raise their flag for the entire county,” he said.

Senator Caballero said she was proud to have been the first grand marshal of the gay pride parade [1970] in Salinas and a proud ally of Equality California, a LGBTQ civil rights organization.

Rivas thanked the city staff and mayor for holding the ceremony. He said too many in the LGBT community are homeless and face harassment. He said they must keep pushing so the rural areas of the state have the same resources as urban areas.

Mayor Jordan said the city was founded on diversity and spoke of other marginalized groups of the past who led the way to equality, including indigenous women, and Japanese-Americans, who farmed in nearby fields and where forced into internment camps during World War II.

“It is our time to stand and fight for all of those who have been marginalized throughout the history of San Juan Bautista,” she said. “Thank you for those who gave your lives for what we’re here for, for loving who you want to love and being who you are. Thank you for fighting for our truth.”

While Hollister’s city council authorized up to $40,000 to pay for two flagpoles to accommodate raising the gay pride flag June 1, San Juan Bautista hoisted its gay pride flag up on the single pole beneath the American and California flags. City Manager Don Reynolds said the city issued a proclamation designating June as gay pride month and the council decided to raise the flag even though the city has no policy in place yet to determine which flags can be flown from the single pole. He said San Juan Bautista may also have to eventually erect another pole.

BenitoLink is a nonprofit news website that reports on San Benito County. Our team is working around the clock during this time when accurate information is essential. It is expensive to produce local news and community support is what keeps the news flowing. Please consider supporting BenitoLink, San Benito County’s news.

A gay pride flag hangs at half-staff during a memorial service for the victims of Florida’s Pulse nightclub shooting in San Diego, California, on June 12, 2016. SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP via Getty Images

This article is adapted from The Case for Gay Reparations, Omar G. Encarnación, Oxford University Press, 216 pp., $24.95, June 1, 2021.

The policies hardly comprise a homogenous experience, and they do not entail giving people money simply for being gay, as some suspect. In most countries, gay reparations are limited to a government apology to the LGBTQ community for past wrongs and a promise to do better in the future. In others, they have entailed memorializing the victims of state-sponsored repression of homosexual citizens. In 2008, the German government opened a monument to gay victims of the Holocaust, an unknown number whom perished in Nazi concentration camps, many of them victims of gruesome medical experiments intended to eradicate their homosexuality. In still other countries, gay reparations have centered on a pardon to anyone convicted under laws that criminalized same-sex attraction, as in the United Kingdom, which in 2017 issued a posthumous pardon to those convicted of “gross indecency,” including Alan Turing, the mathematician credited with shortening the end of World War II; or even financial compensation for wages or pensions lost due to having spent time in prison or in a mental institution because of a homosexual offense, as in Spain since 2009 and in Germany since 2016.

But none of this momentum has reached the United States. The closest the country has come to embracing gay reparations was in 2019, when, on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the New York Police Department issued a belated apology for the raid that triggered the rebellion. “The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong—plain and simple … and for that I apologize,” said New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill. Surely, the absence of gay reparations—or even a discussion of them—in the United States is not out of a rosy history free of systemic discrimination toward the LGBTQ community, although a valid argument can be made that this history is not particularly well known, save, perhaps, for “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That infamous 1993 policy allowed gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve in the military as long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret. By the time the Obama administration lifted the policy in 2011, some 13,000 LGBTQ troops had been dismissed from their jobs.

Decades before “don’t ask, don’t tell,” from the 1920s through at least the 1960s, there was the policy of “entrapment,” which involved undercover police officers sending flirtatious signals to other men they presumed to be homosexual in the hopes of ensnarling them into illicit activity. According to the historian Eric Cervini’s book The Deviant’s War, War, which is about gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, in the 15 years after World War II, “homosexual arrests—including those for sodomy, dancing, kissing, or holding hands—occurred at the rate of one every ten minutes,” for a grand total of 1 million arrests. Entrapment was followed by the Lavender Scare, the midcentury persecution of federal workers suspected of being homosexual.

Perhaps as many as 10,000 people were fired or expelled from their federal jobs during the 1950s and 1960s because they were homosexual or suspected of being homosexual based on evidence as flimsy as how they dressed, talked, or looked. The trigger for this witch hunt was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning “perverts” from working in the federal government. Some of the victims of the Lavender Scare took their own lives, while others were sent to government-run institutions, especially St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where they were forced to undergo such dehumanizing treatments as lobotomies, insulin-induced comas, and gay conversion therapy, with the aim of changing their sexual orientation.

Gay activists have compared the treatments offered at St. Elizabeths to the government’s human experiments with syphilis on Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, which between 1932 and 1972 left hundreds of diagnosed Black men with syphilis untreated so doctors could follow the progress of the illness. “As with the Tuskegee experiment, those subjected to experimentation at the hands of federal officials were a despised minority that never consented to be treated,” noted Charles Francis, president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., the main U.S.-based organization championing gay reparations—especially a formal apology from Congress.

Members of San Francisco’s gay community protest the Supreme Court’s decision upholding a sodomy law in Georgia on July 17, 1986. Tom Levy/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Adding to such mistreatment have been a host of court decisions that for decades stigmatized homosexual people. Two rulings in particular reveal the animus that American jurisprudence has in the past shown toward gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld the state of Georgia’s sodomy laws, the court determined that the Constitution did not protect the rights of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to engage in private, consensual sexual relations, because, the justices concluded, homosexual sex has no connection to family, marriage, abortion, or procreation. In his concurring opinion, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger quoted the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone’s characterization of homosexual sex as an “infamous crime against nature,” worse than rape, and “a crime not fit to be named.” Homosexuality remained criminalized in the United States until the Supreme Court overturned the Hardwick ruling in 2003. Meanwhile, in Bottoms v. Bottoms (1995), Virginia’s Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that awarded custody of a child to a grandmother, because the child’s biological mother, Sharon Bottoms, was in a lesbian relationship, which at the time was a crime under Virginia law. This ruling was not an aberration; at the time, it was customary for the courts to deny LGBTQ people the right to raise their own biological children and to adopt.

Acts of state-sponsored anti-gay discrimination sent an unambiguous message to ordinary Americans that it was acceptable to demean and demonize LGBTQ people, and even to engage in acts of violence against them. The infamous and bloody history of societal attacks on the American LGBTQ community includes singer and spokesperson Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save Our Children crusade, which depicted gay men as pedophiles; Evangelist Jerry Falwell’s “declaration of war” on homosexuality, a rhetorical tactic employed during the 1980s to raise funds for Falwell’s Moral Majority organization; and the 2016 attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. One of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history, the attack on Pulse killed 49 people and wounded 53, many of them young Hispanic men. Prior to Pulse, there was the now largely forgotten 1973 arson fire at Upstairs, a gay bar in New Orleans’ French Quarter, which left 32 people dead. The thick homophobia of the era precluded even an acknowledgement of the tragedy by the mayor of New Orleans or Louisiana’s governor.

Left: Singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant talks about her “Save Our Children” crusade to nullify a gay rights ordinance in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 15, 1977. Right: Phyllis Schlafly and the Rev. Jerry Falwell hold a news conference on the “Moral Majority” in San Francisco on July 12, 1984. The Associated Press and Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Given the terrible history of repression of LGBTQ people in the United States, the absence of gay reparations is puzzling. Canada, a country with a decidedly less troubled history when it comes to homosexuality, issued an apology to the gay community in 2017. The apology came with a multimillion-dollar payout to compensate victims of the “gay purge,” those fired from the military because of their sexual orientation, and authorized a memorial to the victims of those persecuted for their sexual orientation in the capital city of Ottawa.

An obvious factor behind the delayed arrival of gay reparations in the United States is that the subject of reparations is particularly vexing in American society, stemming from the still-unsettled legacy of slavery and from racism.

Some critics of gay reparations such as the conservative political commentator Michael Medved have maintained that gay people are not deserving of reparations because unlike Black Americans, gay people are not victims of multigenerational damage, meaning that whatever ills homophobia may have caused in the past, these ills are not the same as those left behind by slavery, as they do not carry over from generation to generation. Medved also points to the economic success of some in the American LGBTQ community (which has generated the mythical notion that LGBTQ Americans are more affluent than the population at large) as a reason for why gay reparations are redundant.

Others are opposed to all forms of reparations, racial and otherwise, believing that reparations are inherently divisive and that they lead to a slippery slope scenario in which all groups come to view themselves as victims and worthy of reparations. As argued by a writer for the right-wing website RedState, gay reparations would allow for reparation claims by the “obese, the disfigured, the disabled, the short, the bald,” and also by “[m]igrants who weren’t treated kindly when they tried to enter the U.S. illegally” and by “really smart Asians who were rejected from Harvard.”

Seen from a global perspective, though, there appears to be more compelling reasons the United States is a gay reparations laggard. The first one is the poor resonance of human rights in American politics and society. Gay reparations movements abroad, especially in Spain, Britain, and Germany—countries that pioneered the gay reparations movement—have waged their struggles as a human rights crusade. This has entailed borrowing the rhetoric and strategies of the international human rights movement to make their claims and push their agenda forward. Inspired by human rights activism, gay reparations activists have emphasized the need for reparations as a moral obligation intended to restore dignity to LGBTQ people. They have also leveraged historical narratives of homosexual repression to influence public opinion and policy toward the LGBTQ community, such as the oppression of gays and lesbians under Nazi Germany or under the homophobic laws of the Francisco Franco regime in Spain, and shamed public officials for failing to stand up for the human rights of LGBTQ people.

But in the United States, there’s not much in the way of precedent of social movements arising (much less succeeding) with human rights as their core focus. Even the American civil rights movement failed in its attempt in the 1960s to link its struggle for civil rights to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was due in no small part to the effective demonization of human rights by American conservatives during the Cold War as un-American, never mind that Americans, such as former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were among the main drafters of the 1948 declaration and that this document drew on seminal American documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Curiously, the view of human rights as un-American lingers to this day. The Trump administration, for example, attempted to reframe the promotion of human rights at the global level as exclusively entailing property rights and religious freedom. That was the mission of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. Predictably, the commission’s final report led women’s groups and LGBTQ activists to accuse President Donald Trump’s Department of State of choosing to promote the human rights it liked, while undermining those it did not support, such as LGBTQ rights.

A less apparent factor in the United States’ lagging on gay reparations lies with the American LGBTQ rights movement itself. The United States may have birthed the gay liberation movement that came in the wake of the Stonewall riots. Yet in recent decades, gay rights activism in the United States, when seen through international lenses, has been relatively conservative. Since at least the late 1990s, the legal struggle for same-sex marriage consumed American activists almost at the expense of anything else. And that struggle was less than radical. While activists in such countries as Argentina, Germany, and Spain stressed how same-sex marriage would serve to transform society and the culture at large by expanding freedom and equality and by deepening citizenship and democracy, in the United States activists were more inclined to emphasize how same-sex marriage would push same-sex couples toward existing norms, even taming their sexuality. That latter argument came to be known as “the conservative case for gay marriage,” which contended that American society, including conservatives, should support same-sex marriage because it would bolster traditional values.

Framing the struggle for same-sex marriage around such modest goals as strengthening homosexual households wasted a great opportunity to engage society in a broad debate about the role of LGBTQ people in society. It also made it harder for gay activists to expand the struggle for LGBTQ rights beyond marriage and into such areas as transgender rights and gay reparations. These shortcomings, however, should not portend the end of gay reparations in the United States beyond the Stonewall apology. The international experience demonstrates that it is never too late for nations to right past wrongs. It took the United Kingdom more than a century to reckon with its own persecution of gay men under the charge of gross indecency. And the payoff is more than worth it. Aside from restoring dignity to the victims of state-sponsored policies of anti-gay discrimination and violence, gay reparations hold the promise of putting an end to the history of oppression of LGBTQ people while reminding future generations of the sacrifices and struggles that came before them.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A cultural clash pitting religious beliefs against gay rights has jeopardized Kentucky’s long-running relationship with a foster care and adoption agency affiliated with the Baptist church that serves some of the state’s most vulnerable children.

The standoff revolves around a clause in a new contract with the state that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and that Sunrise Children’s Services is refusing to sign.

It’s another round in a broader fight in states and the courts over religious liberty and LGBTQ rights, including whether businesses can refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings. An upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Pennsylvania case could be decisive in the Kentucky clash; it’s reviewing a refusal by Philadelphia Catholic Social Services to work with same-sex couples as foster parents.

In the Kentucky contract, Sunrise officials are concerned the disputed clause would compel them to violate deeply held religious principles by sponsoring same-sex couples as foster or adoptive parents. Supporters of the provision see it as a crucial safeguard against discrimination.

Child welfare advocates worry that losing Sunrise — which also offers residential treatment programs — would further strain a state system struggling to keep up with demand. Kentucky consistently has some of the nation’s worst child abuse rates.

“You cannot pivot from losing such a large provider of child welfare services … and not anticipate some degree of disruption,” said Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates.

The state set a June 30 deadline for Sunrise to sign. If it refuses, the state has threatened to stop placing children with the agency. Formerly called Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, Sunrise’s history dates to caring for Civil War orphans. It has contracted with the state for 50-plus years, becoming one of Kentucky’s largest service providers for abused or neglected children.

Sunrise’s supporters say the agency is the target of a political correctness campaign. Critics say allowing exceptions to the LGBTQ-inclusive clause would sanction discrimination.

“If Sunrise doesn’t want to abide by that, that’s fine. They shouldn’t have access to state money, state contracts or children in the state’s care,” said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, a Louisville-based gay rights advocacy group.

Hartman said he worries LGBTQ children in Sunrise’s care are “deeply closeted,” hiding their sexual orientation out of fear of “indoctrination and proselytization.”

A long-running federal lawsuit has alleged that Sunrise imposed religious indoctrination on children. Sunrise’s attorney, John Sheller, calls it an “outrageous accusation.”

Sheller said Sunrise “willingly and gladly” accepts LGBTQ youths and does not put children in conversion therapy, which tries to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Sunrise’s focus is on finding good homes for children and treating mental health, substance abuse or other problems they are battling, he said.

When same-sex couples contact Sunrise about becoming foster parents, the agency offers to help steer them to other child services agencies that are a “better fit,” Sheller said. He was aware of a handful of such instances.

“There is clearly a tension between LGBT issues and traditional Christian values,” Sheller said. “And it does not have to be winner-take-all. There is room for both principles to survive and thrive in our pluralistic society, and we can accommodate both.”

Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services says it hopes for a “positive resolution.” Sunrise President Dale Suttles says he wants the relationship to continue.

“Sunrise would act on a contract today that allows them to care for Kentucky’s needy and abused children while protecting their deeply held religious beliefs,” said Todd Gray, executive director-treasurer of the Kentucky Baptist Convention.

Like many other states, Kentucky contracts with private agencies like Sunrise for some of its child welfare services. Overall, about 5,000 of the 9,100 children in Kentucky’s care are in foster homes or other placements managed by the state. About 4,000 receive care through private agencies.

Sunrise, which only operates in Kentucky, says it currently cares for nearly 800 children. The state reimburses Sunrise for about 65% of its costs, with private donations covering the rest.

The state insists it’s bound by an Obama-era federal rule to include the contract clause Sunrise opposes. The rule included sexual orientation as a protected class under anti-discrimination provisions.

“It would be a mistake not to place kids with wonderful couples that want to be foster parents that are gay,” Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said this week. “People make wonderful foster parents in all types of couples, and we shouldn’t be eliminating or discriminating against any of them.”

Sunrise argues that the federal rule was invalidated under former President Donald Trump, giving the state leeway to exclude the clause. Sheller said the agency is “open to any reasonable process” as long as it’s “not compelled by that language to violate its faith principles.”

“The state’s position is that it’s going to try to compel Sunrise to sign the same form contract that it uses with secular providers,” Sheller said. “And Sunrise cannot and will not sign that form contract by July 1st or any other date.”

Sunrise is affiliated with the Kentucky Baptist Convention, consisting of nearly 2,400 churches with a total membership of about 600,000 people. The faith views homosexuality as a sin.

If Sunrise loses its state contract, it would have to change its model and raise new capital to continue its services, said Suttles, the agency’s president.

“We do know that there are many children in need of help that are not in state custody,” he added.

The dispute has had political fallout. Kentucky House Republicans and state GOP officials have urged Beshear’s administration to maintain ties with Sunrise. Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron said the administration was forcing Sunrise to “choose between continuing to serve Kentucky children or abandon its religious beliefs.”

Meanwhile, other agencies contracting with the state welcome LGBTQ people as foster or adoptive parents.

“Gay-lesbian families want to grow their families just like heterosexual families do,” said Grace Akers, CEO of St. Joseph Children’s Home in Louisville.

She applauded Beshear’s administration for taking a stand she said will benefit children.

“There are children in Kentucky who are not just working through their trauma, but they’re working through who they are as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender,” Akers said. “And for us to celebrate those children, I just think is critical.”

If it cuts ties to Sunrise, the state must be prepared to fill the gaps if it loses some foster parents in the agency’s network, said Brooks of Kentucky Youth Advocates. His biggest concern is ensuring a smooth transition for the children who require “intense and specialized treatment” that Sunrise now provides.

Brooks said he’s confident the state can move children to other agencies but added that “the challenge cannot and should not be minimized.”

Kay Tobin Lahusen, a pioneering LGBT+ rights activist and photojournalist, has died after a brief illness at the age of 91. (Photo provided by Mark Segal/YouTube/Harbinger Media)

Take chances, ignore the naysayers and, instead of pulling up the ladder after you’ve made the climb, lend a hand to those on the lower rungs.

In a recorded Convocation address, author and social commentator Roxane Gay challenged the Cornell Class of 2021 to be true to themselves and to their dreams, however wild they may be.

“As you walk into the unknown of the rest of your life, please tear down the borders around your imagination and what you believe is possible for yourself and for your community,” Gay said. “Do not let the fears and insecurities of others keep you from your ambitions for a remarkable life.”

Gay, a New York Times contributing opinion writer and visiting professor at Yale University, is the author of “Bad Feminist” (2014), the New York Times bestselling essay collection, as well as the 2014 novel “An Untamed State” and her 2017 memoir, “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.” She recently began her own publishing imprint, Roxane Gay Books, with publisher Grove Atlantic.

Gay’s address to the senior class touched on her childhood; on her determination to be a writer in the face of constant rejection and doubts; on the realities of “a flawed and unjust world” that rewards the mediocrity of the majority and punishes the marginalized; and on her hopes for the graduating class.

The recorded event, which will be available to the public on CornellCast in June, began with a reading from Laurence Minter ’21 of his poem, “History is Ours”:

“Farewell to the hill, look how far we’ve come / From the analyst to the actor, the future doctors to the diplomats / The engineers to the athletes, tell your story wherever you go,” he read.

Minter’s reading was followed by welcoming remarks from President Martha E. Pollack, after which Convocation Committee Chair Hassaan Bin Sabir ’21 gave the class address. He broke with tradition, however, and gave his speech alongside fellow committee members Sarah Brice ’21 and Gloria Oladipo ’21, who also spoke.

“Here’s why: I just don’t think I know more about life than the rest of you,” Bin Sabir said. “I’m 22, and I’m still figuring it all out. But most importantly, if there’s any lesson I’ve learned over the last four years, and over the pandemic in particular, it’s that I need other people to sustain me, to make me more human … and to get me through the every day. We all do.”

Gay began her remarks by recalling her lifelong desire to be a writer, even when encouragement and validation were in short supply.

“There was a time, in my 20s and 30s, where rejection was constant,” she said. “And that rejection wasn’t an opening. It did not make me a better person. It made me salty, mostly. It also made me work harder.”

As a child, she and her brothers would create imaginary worlds, she said, digging holes in an adjacent empty lot and connecting them with ravines so they could visit one another. They also spent hours exploring the abandoned appliances and car parts in a nearby patch of woods. Her imagination and love of storytelling was born in those worlds.

“Adults never interfered with these magical places,” she said. “There were no rules. I took that carefree energy to my writing; the borders of my imagination expanded.”

Like many, she said, she has been changed by trauma. But she did not dwell on those things. “Bad things happened to all of us,” she said. “And I don’t say that to minimize my trauma or anyone else’s. Instead, I say that to mean we are all more than our suffering.”

In her youth, she said, if little else was reliable, writing always was. Her parents encouraged her to consider a career as a doctor, lawyer or engineer – what she called “the Haitian career trifecta.” But after some starts and stops in college, writing eventually won out.

“No matter what I had going on, I wrote and I read and I wrote and I read,” she said. “I made the time to write whether I was in high school or college or grad school, working an overnight shift in a video store, or as a bartender … I was able to honor this commitment to my craft because writing was, and is, my true north.”

Since 2014, when her essay collection and novel put her on the literary map, she has been “living a dream I did not even know I had,” she said. “The dream I thought I had was to write a book worthy of being published. The dream was for a few people to read and maybe love that book. I did not dare to dream of anything more than that.”

While her literary dreams were small at first (“It is hard for modest expectations to be disappointed, and so I kept my expectations incredibly modest”), she encourages others to be bold in their aspirations.

“My students often talk about how their parents disapprove of their desires to major in creative or other supposedly impractical fields. I can’t stand it,” she said. “As a writer, I often see people discouraging new writers by cataloging every single challenge they might face … It makes me wonder why they are trying to pull up the ladder they climbed.”

She closed with words of advice.

“Be fiercely committed and fiercely kind,” she said. “Be relentless. Find your true north – that thing that makes your world make sense. Always follow your true north, wherever it may lead.”

The outgoing Cabinet has not yet proposed a ban on gay conversion therapies, despite the vast majority of the Tweede Kamer in favor of criminalizing the practice as soon as possible.

The goal of gay conversion therapy is to try and change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. These practices include talking therapies and prayer but can also result in more extreme forms involving physical violence and food deprivation.

Health Minister, Hugo de Jonge and Minister of Justice and Security, Ferd Grapperhaus wrote that the focus would instead lie on a code of conduct and “support measures” for the LGBTQ+ community.

Instead of banning gay conversion therapies, the ministry asked the Humanist Association to come up with a code of conduct for religious communities on how to interact with members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“Everyone must be able to fully be themselves at all times and everywhere”, the ministers wrote. They acknowledged that not everyone in the Netherlands may experience this safety.

According to the Cabinet, it is difficult to determine when a practice is able to be called gay conversion therapy. Oftentimes, such acts take place within closed, religious circles and are labeled as ‘therapeutic’ or ‘philosophical’.

The minister did dismiss the argument that members of the LGTBTQ+ community would voluntarily undergo such a measure. “After all, the question is to what extent gay conversion therapy is voluntary if you grow up in a faith community that disapproves of your sexual orientation and gender identity.”

In the Netherlands, there are around 15 organizations or individuals that offer such therapies. The activities can lead to depression, suicidal thoughts, loneliness and sexual problems.

The swastika stickers were placed on the Alaska Jewish Museum and Mad Myrna’s gay bar. (Anchorage Police Department)