Skip to content

Tag: human rights

The Barbed Wire: First Arrests at Austin Pride in Over a Decade

Posted in Austin, Journalism, LGBTQIA, and The Barbed Wire

At Austin’s Pride Parade in August, while rainbow-painted police horses stood guard and brightly decorated floats passed by, officers tackled two men, using kicks and pressure points to pin their bodies to the ground. They were taken to jail on charges of ignoring law enforcement commands and resisting arrest. 

They were the first arrests at an Austin Pride event in years — perhaps more than a decade, according to one of the event’s longtime organizers. And it left many who watched it unfold, including journalists like myself, with one unshakeable thought: That didn’t need to happen. 

I’ve spent the weeks since reporting on why it did.

The Barbed Wire: Anti-LGBTQIA+ Incidents in Texas

Posted in Austin, Journalism, and The Advocate

Before dawn on a Sunday morning in April, the bars in Austin had just closed. Joshua Ybarra started walking to his Uber. Then he heard an anti-gay slur hurled at him from behind. Three men leapt on him, pinning Ybarra to the ground and thrashing him so severely that he fell unconscious. The beating was so vicious that a friend of Ybarra’s “tried to defend him by covering his body on the ground, and she was also beaten by the attackers,” according to research from the nonprofit GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Even the alleged attackers’ own fraternity brothers tried to stop the assault, to no avail. 

Ybarra’s assault was just one of 93 hateful incidents of anti-LGBTQIA+ bigotry in Texas tracked by GLAAD’s new ALERT Desk (Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker). The tracking project — which went public last week — serves as a central hub to count both non-criminal and criminal acts of hate towards the queer community since 2022. Using a wide variety of sources, from mainstream news outlets to social media and verifiable firsthand accounts, the GLAAD ALERT Desk attempts to paint a comprehensive picture of the threats against the larger queer community. (Editor’s note: GLAAD is using the term “incident” over “hate crime” because many of the events did not meet the definition of a criminal act.)

And that picture is a grim one that reflects a disturbing rise in attacks nationwide. The lead at the ALERT Desk and GLAAD’s senior manager of news and research, Sarah Moore, said across the country from June 2022 to June 2024, “we saw a 112% increase in incidents just looking at that two year period.” 

For Texas, that includes at least one murder.

Palestine Song at Austin City Hall (Oct 5 2024)

Posted in Austin, Journalism, and Video

The song performed before yesterday’s march at Austin City Hall was a lovely moment of international solidarity with the people of Palestine. I hope they could hear us.

This video represents me experimenting with CapCut to create more short videos in the style of TikTok posts or Instagram reels. As you can see, I’m still learning, but I’m also trying to get better at sharing my imperfect projects and works-in-progress more often too.

Columbia Journalism Review on Kit: “Otherwise Lost”

Posted in Austin, and Journalism

In the spring of 2023, Kit O’Connell broke a story for the Texas Observer about the dress code at the Texas Department of Agriculture. The rules stated that, at the TDA office, “pants and Western attire are allowable” for women. Skirts higher than four inches from the knee were not, nor was clothing that encouraged “excessive cleavage.” Men should not wear Crocs or slides, nor tuck their pants into boots. Also, the policy noted, “employees are expected to comply with this dress code in a manner consistent with their biological gender.” If they did not—and refused requests from their supervisors to “change into conforming attire”—they could eventually be fired.

The story got picked up quickly by NPR, NBC News, The Guardian, and beyond. O’Connell’s framing—that this was “anti-LGBTQ+ oppression”—was echoed by those larger outlets, with context on a cascade of recent anti-trans legislation in the state. The TDA didn’t respond to the Observer’s request for comment, but as attention mounted, Sid Miller, the department’s commissioner, provided an interview to Austin’s local Spectrum News channel. “When a man comes dressed in drag, or vice versa, it’s very disruptive. It’s not professional,” he said. “My people need to look and act professional.”

Time slid on. As of this summer, the dress code remained. No major national or international outlets had followed up. O’Connell checked in. “For over a year,” they wrote for the Observer, “employees of the Texas Department of Agriculture have been subject to a dress code that is transphobic and potentially illegal.” In researching the second story, O’Connell combed through internal TDA emails obtained by a nonprofit called American Oversight, which procures government records. The emails about the dress code, O’Connell wrote, showed that “senior agency staff were aware TDA was wading into legally dubious waters and that a number of employees objected to its implementation and felt personally discriminated against.” O’Connell pulled a quote from an employee who noted that “within the past six months, several trans, queer, and/or gender-nonconforming staff have been hired by the TDA. This timing could lead one to conclude that this policy is a direct result of trans visibility in the workplace.”

Before ‘Lawrence’: From Sodomy to Queer Liberation

Posted in Journalism, Media, Reviews, and The Texas Observer

On August 17, 1982, LGBTQ+ Texans celebrated “Gayteenth,” as activists called it at the time—a reference to Juneteenth, which commemorates news of slavery’s end reaching Texas. On that day in Dallas, a district court judge ruled in favor of plaintiff Don Baker in Baker v. Wade, declaring our state’s sodomy law unconstitutional. Baker, who lost his job with the Dallas Independent School District after coming out on TV, had sued the state for violating his right to privacy and equal protection under the laws.

“I want gay people in Texas to understand that this is their victory—that they should internalize this and feel good about themselves,” declared Baker, who became a figurehead of the struggle to decriminalize queer relationships.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision. The Supreme Court, which had recently ruled such laws constitutional in Bowers v. Harwick, declined to hear the case. Anti-sodomy laws in Texas and elsewhere would remain on the books and in effect until Lawrence v. Texas 21 years later.

Are You OK? Visiting With Young Trans Texans

Posted in Journalism, and The Texas Observer

In 2021, Jesse Freidin began traveling across the country to photograph transgender youth for a photo project called “Are You OK?” He’s been to more than half the states in the country, meeting with dozens of trans kids.

In August, Freidin made his second visit to Texas. In the intervening year, legal and policy-based attacks on LGBTQ+ people in the United States have reached feverish heights. Governor Greg Abbott even launched child abuse investigations into parents who seek gender-affirming healthcare for their kids. Though nonprofits like Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union have responded with multiple lawsuits against the policy, which has been partially blocked in court, it still left many families fearing for their safety. Kai Shappley, a trans girl known for her outspoken activism, fled the state with her family a month before Freidin planned to photograph her.

“I want to tell those stories before they disappear, before these families leave the country or state, before these families have to go underground,” Freidin said.