The Human Rights Marketing campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights group, is taking its LGBTQ equality message on the street with a multicity tour centered on altering extra hearts and minds, notably in pink states.
The “American Desires Tour” will kick off Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, and journey to cities in predominantly Republican-led states by November. The tour’s purpose, based on HRC, is to amplify LGBTQ individuals’s tales “at a time of rising political assaults and cultural erasure” and “have fun the communities pushing again towards hate and preventing for a way forward for equality for all.”
“For half a century, our motion has modified hearts and minds with our tales — Harvey Milk within the Castro, Pedro Zamora on the Actual World, trans youth and fogeys coming ahead in statehouses throughout the nation. When individuals know who we actually are, all the things adjustments. This tour is about reclaiming that legacy,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Marketing campaign, stated in an announcement. “We’re touring to the locations the place hurt is occurring—and the place hope is rising. We’re displaying up for communities who’ve been informed they don’t belong and reminding them, and the nation, that they are the American dream.”
The tour will “anchor” in six main cities — Columbus; Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; Dallas; Atlanta; and Nashville, Tennessee — with different stops to be introduced within the coming weeks, based on HRC. Every cease will probably be tailor-made to the problems queer individuals are dealing with in these explicit locales. The Columbus cease, for instance, will probably be centered on “Ohio’s legacy of LGBTQ+ activism whereas confronting at this time’s political backslide and obstacles to HIV care,” based on HRC, whereas Atlanta’s cease will probably be in partnership with Atlanta Delight and can zero in on “Black LGBTQ+ management and community-led care fashions.”
The “American Desires Tour” comes at a precarious time for LGBTQ rights — and notably transgender rights. To this point this yr, practically 600 anti-LGBTQ payments have been launched in statehouses throughout the U.S., based on a tally by the American Civil Liberties Union. And a report printed final week by LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD asserted that 300 anti-LGBTQ actions had come from the Trump administration since January. An NBC Information evaluation printed in February discovered that lawmakers in at the very least 9 states had just lately launched measures to attempt to chip away at same-sex {couples}’ proper to marry.
“For the primary time in a long time, we’re truly seeing a backslide in LGBTQ+ rights throughout this nation, and we have to do one thing,” Robinson stated Monday in an interview with MSNBC. “We have to get again to fundamentals in telling our tales and assembly individuals the place they’re, as a result of we all know that once we inform our tales, we not solely change hearts and minds, we shift the way in which individuals behave, that they vote, that they advocate of their communities.”
