Gay bars in picayune ms

A new digital ad buy from the Human Rights Campaign takes President Trump to task for his response to the coronavirus epidemic and blames him for the economic fallout that has resulted in empty gay bars where LGBTQ people and marginalized communities once met to express themselves, the Washington Blade has learned exclusively.

C, a Human Rights Campaign spokesperson said. Here you would normally see people being themselves with their community, sometimes for the first time in their week, or for the first time in their lives — and no one knows when we will be able to come back and truly be ourselves. The male narrator, who appears on screen seated on a bar stool, places the blame for the empty bar squarely at the feet of Trump.

Images also appear of a bar care worker and an individual shopping while wearing a face mask, as others who come on screen talk about suffering from the coronavirus in other ways, including the closure of restaurants and loss of jobs. He tries to intimidate us with the violence. His cronies in Washington, in state houses across the country have enabled him at every step.

We are the ones who live with the consequences. The ad makes the suffering of people of color, who faced the brunt of the coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States, an intersectional theme, saying that includes LGBTQ people of color. According to the Human Rights Campaign, LGBTQ people, many of whom are known to work in hospitality industries, are 20 percent more likely than the general public to have experienced a reduction in work hours since picayune states initiated reopening policies.

That figure is worse for LGBTQ people of color, who are 44 percent more likely to have experienced a reduction in work hours, and transgender people, who are percent more likely, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The signal of distress gives way to images of triumph, including protests at LGBTQ rallies, as the narrator urges viewers to reject Trump at the polls in November.

We can elect leaders like Joe Biden gay Kamala Harris. We can make our voices heard in every race in America, and together, we can win.

A Bar Called Charlene’s

On June 23 of last year, I held the microphone as a gay man in the New Orleans City Council Chamber and related a lost piece of queer history to the seven council members. I told this story to disabuse all New Orleanians of the notion that silence and accommodation, in the face of institutional and official failures, are a path to healing.

Around that piano in the s Deep South, gays and bars, white and Black queens, Christians and non-Christians, and even early gender minorities could cast aside the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the times to find acceptance and companionship for a moment. For regulars, the UpStairs Lounge was a miracle, a small pocket of acceptance in a broader world where their very identities were illegal.

On the Sunday night of June 24,their voices were silenced in a murderous act of arson that claimed 32 lives and still stands as the deadliest fire in New Orleans history — and the worst mass killing of gays in 20th century America. As 13 fire companies struggled to douse the inferno, police refused to question the picayune suspect, even though gay witnesses identified and brought the soot-covered man to officers idly standing by.

For days afterward, the carnage met with official silence. With no local gay political leaders willing to step forward, national Gay Liberation-era figures like Rev. Perry broke local taboos by holding a press conference as an openly gay man. Two days later, on June 26,as families hesitated to step forward to identify their kin in the morgue, UpStairs Lounge owner Phil Esteve stood in his badly charred bar, the air still foul with death.

He rebuffed attempts by Perry to turn the fire into a call for visibility and progress for homosexuals. Conspicuously, no photos of Esteve appeared in coverage of the UpStairs Lounge fire or its aftermath — and the bar owner also remained silent as he witnessed police looting the ashes of his business. Customs officer. The next day, gay bar owners, gay at declining gay bar traffic amid an atmosphere of anxiety, confronted Perry at a clandestine meeting.

Ignoring calls for gay self-censorship, Perry held a person memorial for the fire victims the following Sunday, July 1, culminating in mourners defiantly marching out the front door of a French Quarter church into waiting news cameras.