prejudice Archives

How do you prove you are gay?

25/11/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

A culture of disbelief is traumatising asylum seekers!

People who have been persecuted because of their sexuality are facing Home Office officials who refuse to believe them, use explicit questioning and make stereotyped assumptions

A Ugandan man, Robert Kityo, was denied asylum last week on the basis that the Home Office wasn’t sufficiently convinced that he was gay. The question of evidence is the problem facing gay men and lesbians seeking protection in the UK because of persecution due to their sexuality. Often coming from one of the 80 countries where gay relationships are a criminal offence, they are faced with a culture of disbelief when they seek protection here.
It used to be the case that claims for asylum from gay men and lesbians were refused as the Home Office reasoned claimants could return to their home countries and just be discreet: refrain from same-sex relationships and hide their sexuality.
It took a case at the supreme court to overturn this. In the same way as you cannot be expected to hide your religion, the court said you couldn’t be expected to hide your sexuality.
Since then, the Home Office has changed tack in the way it refuses these asylum claims. Instead of telling applicants to be discreet, it just doesn’t believe them when they say they are gay.
So how do you prove you are gay? No one arrives in the UK with a certificate stating their sexuality, just as no one in the UK has such a certificate. Instead applicants have to rely on the believability of their oral testimony at their Home Office interview. At which stage your own feelings about your sexuality, your reluctance for it to be known publicly, your lack of words related to sexual issues (in English or your own language) all come into play. Plus having to relive the trauma of how you were persecuted.
And to compound this, research we at Asylum Aid did with Amnesty International UK all shows that the Home Office is using too rigorous a standard of proof.
Princess Oni from Nigeria has been through the asylum process herself. She told me that it is like a vicious circle. You find it hard to disclose the harm that’s happened to you and the reason for it and the Home Office official looks doubtful and repeats questions. This makes you feel more anxious and confused and speak less coherently, and the official disbelieves you further.
How much better if a circle of protection were used where the official believed the claimant – as is recommended in rape cases in the UK. Seeing encouragement from the official, claimants find it easier to speak out. Less stressed, they’re more likely to remember everything relevant to their case, and the evidence they provide will be more complete. This enables the official to assess their credibility more accurately and make a decision that is right first time.
At Asylum Aid we regularly provide legal representation for asylum applicants who have fled violence, imprisonment, discrimination and ostracism by the state and/or by their family simply because of their sexuality. We frontload these cases. This means we spend time taking down the applicant’s narrative, supporting them to tell us all the traumatic details. We supplement this with medical reports. And we obtain country reports – what is the current situation for gay men or lesbians in Uganda or Nigeria or Jamaica?
In rejecting Kityo’s case, the Home Office defended the guidance and training it has given its staff to deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex applicants. When compared with how LGBT cases are dealt with throughout Europe, it has a right to be proud of its guidance.
Our asylum system is forcing vulnerable teenagers to relive their trauma
Gillian Hughes
Read more
However, our experience and that of the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group (UKLGIG) is that that guidance is not routinely implemented, nor is the training. Despite the guidelines, UKLGIG’s research found Home Office officials using inappropriate and sexually explicit questioning and stereotyped assumptions about lesbian and gay relationships.
Lesbians interviewed by social researcher Claire Bennett talk about not being able to win in a system that feels like a game where the Home Office is trying to catch you out. Having a sexual identity that had been repressed for so long suddenly “outed” and then disbelieved is felt as a devastating blow.
One woman told Bennett, “It’s my life … And you look at me and you tell me that you don’t believe me … it’s almost as if you’re denying me my very existence.”
• Some names have been changed
Debora Singer

Read also: Daily XTra – Uncertain future for Gay Syrian Refugees

Southern Rites: A Reminder of the Parallels of Prejudice

20/05/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Editorial: Yesterday a judge decided that a bakery had shown prejudice against a gay man by taking his order and payment for a cake, and then calling him back some days later to state that they couldn’t fulfil his order because it was against their Christian principles to promote ‘gay marriage equality’. The gay man did not seek to have this action in the courts, at no time as has been stated, did he seek to ‘set-up’ the bakery (Loose Women/Janet Street-Porter).

It is obvious from the comments made by our politicians following the judgement, that they cannot separate church from state. The links between church and state in the UK are, nowadays, mostly a formality and the governance of the UK is relatively secular, although the Lords Spiritual have a significant influence when they vote as a bloc on certain issues, notably abortion and euthanasia.

As Slugger O’Toole penned, “…When it comes to separating Church from State I believe that many of our Unionist politicians are out of step with the views of the majority of Unionist voters….”

The following article on prejudice in the Southern States of the USA, show how legislation and political statements don’t remove prejudice, only a concerted action by all involved with a recognition of everyone’s equal rights will enable a balanced, forwarding looking society.

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republished from the The Advocate – BY TRUDY RING – MAY 18 2015 6:00 AM ET

A new documentary about racial tensions in rural Georgia reminds us what all types of bigotry have in common.

Sha’von Patterson holds a photo of himself and his older brother, Justin, as children. The new documentary Southern Rites addresses Justin’s violent death and its consequences.

Sha’von Patterson holds a photo of himself and his older brother, Justin, as children. The new documentary Southern Rites addresses Justin’s violent death and its consequences.

Over the past year, events in Baltimore, New York, and Ferguson, Mo., have provided ample evidence that America’s racial problems are far from solved. A new HBO documentary drives the point home as well — and its director is quick to note parallels between racism and anti-LGBT bigotry.
“It’s all about discrimination and civil rights — it’s all connected,” says Gillian Laub, whose directorial debut,Southern Rites, premieres tonight on the cable channel. And all prejudice, she notes, is about fear of the unknown.
Laub has spent most of her career as a photographer; one of her earlier projects was a multimedia piece called “Becoming Nikki,” about a 10-year-old transgender girl, commissioned by Peoplemagazine in 2013. Another project was documenting the racially segregated proms at Montgomery County High School in rural Georgia, and that’s what gave rise to Southern Rites.
Laub, who is based in New York City, had been photographing the separate proms for several years, and in 2009, The New York Times Magazine published her photo essay on the subject. National outrage led the school to finally have an integrated prom for all students. Laub continued to travel to Montgomery County; “I thought I was going back to kind of show the prom in transition,” she says. But she found far more than that, exposing continued racial tensions.
Norman Neesmith, a white resident of neighboring Toombs County, was arrested in January 2011 for shooting and killing Justin Patterson, a 22-year-old black man Laub had photographed at a prom years earlier. Neesmith’s 18-year-old great-niece, Danielle, whom he had raised after her mother abandoned her, and a friend of hers had invited Patterson and his brother Sha’von to the Neesmith home, apparently for sexual encounters. Neesmith was sleeping when the young men arrived, but he woke up, confronted them, and a fight ensued, ending in Justin’s death.
While Neesmith was facing trial in 2012, Calvin Burns, the well-respected police chief of Mount Vernon, the Montgomery County seat, was seeking election as county sheriff, hoping to become the first African-American to hold the post. Juxtaposing these two stories, Southern Rites explores the role of race in the region, making it clear that bigotry against black residents has not been erased.
It also makes clear that the situation is complicated; as much as Norman Neesmith may incite viewers to anger, it would be an oversimplification to say he’s a hopelessly racist villain. For one thing, Danielle, whom he says he loves deeply, is part African-American. “I think he’s a complicated and flawed human being, like most of us,” Laub says of Neesmith. “He’s very nuanced.”
Laub, a straight woman who is a passionate LGBT ally, notes that she’s met some Montgomery County residents who are facing homophobia along with racism. The prom king at one year’s black prom, she says, came out to her and asked what he should do with his life, as he felt there was no place for him as a black gay man in rural Georgia. But he’s still there and actually doing well, she says.
A recurring theme in her work, she says, is “trying to bring out people’s truth,” whether it’s the story of the “incredibly brave” transgender girl Nikki or race relations in the Deep South. Her next project will take her back to transgender issues; it’s a film about trans people in the military, who still face discharge if their status becomes known. Laub adds that she can’t provide any details just yet.
Meanwhile, as Southern Rites premieres, a companion photo and video exhibit has just opened at New York City’s Benrubi Gallery, where it runs through June 27. There is also a companion photo book, and Laub will give a lecture before a special screening of the film at Dartmouth College May 26.
Laub stresses that while the film, which has John Legend as an executive producer and features a song by him, deals with serious and pressing issues, it’s not all downbeat. For instance, several scenes show teens of all races having fun together and saying how ridiculous they found the idea of segregated proms. “I do want to note the progress there has been and that there is hope,” she says.
Southern Rites premieres tonight at 9 Eastern on HBO; check your local listings. For more information about the film, the exhibit, and related events, go to SouthernRitesProject.com.Watch a trailer for the film below.

Why I love music

19/01/2015 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

As a youngster I always listened to music, whether it be listening hidden under the bed clothes on my transistor radio on headphones to Radio Caroline, or Radio 2 and Radio 3, or when I was doing my homewor; I have not discounted Radio 4 for it had things like the Navy Lark, Round the Horne, The Goons, Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America etc. Today I am still a devotee of radio in all its forms, and I have it setup on my laptops, tablets, phone and I also have a smal digital portable radio and a Sony Walkman which is now over 10 years old and still working perfectly.

A photographer captured Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit as she recorded the song in 1939

Over time my musical tastes have widened to encompass jazz. Of course, I don’t like all jazz, I’m not a fan of Dickie style jazz, or jazz that seems to forget the rhythm (if it ever had any to start with). But I love the jazz you associate with speakeasies, those smokey havens of people who were keeping low and hiding away from the world.

But, I hear you ask, what has this to do with the LGBT community? As a society we often feel that we are unique in how we have been persecuted; but as I delve into the history of jazz and its performers I am dismayed to see how often music and musicians have also been targets of a society that just didn’t understand. Indeed, quite often jazz has also been seen as a scapegoat for society’s ills.

This was brought home to me again by an article on Billie Holiday – The War on Billie Holiday, by Johann Hari. In his article he writes how the Treasury Department in the USA told Harry J. Anslinger (head of the FBI) he was wasting his time taking on a community (jazz) that couldn’t be fractured, and that their efforts would have a far greater impact if they focused on a single target – someone well-known, like Billie Holiday.

The result of this unjustified targeting, was that Billie Holiday was sent to jail, and as a former convict, she was stripped of her cabaret performer’s license on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public. She wasn’t allowed to sing anywhere that alcohol was served—which basically excluded her from every jazz club in the United States.

So how does this reflect the bias and prejudice that we in the LGBT community experience today? I print an excerpt from the article:

‘Harry Anslinger was told that there were also white women, just as famous as Billie, who had drug problems—but he responded to them rather differently. He called Judy Garland, another heroin addict, in to see him. They had a friendly chat, in which he advised her to take longer vacations between pictures, and he wrote to her studio, assuring them she didn’t have a drug problem at all. When he discovered that a Washington society hostess he knew—“a beautiful, gracious lady,” he noted—had an illegal drug addiction, he explained he couldn’t possibly arrest her because “it would destroy … the unblemished reputation of one of the nation’s most honored families.” He helped her to wean herself off her addiction slowly, without the law becoming involved…’

I know, society was different then – prejudices and phobias were the rule rather than the exception. But it’s a fact: we in today’s LGBT community are being targeted in similar ways with the same element of prejudice. Even today, in various parts of the world, gay people are thrown off high-rises, beheaded, lynched and stoned to death, lashed, chemically castrated and even sent to camps for so-called ‘conversion therapy’. Doesn’t this sound a lot like what has happened to every minority group in history?

We as a community need to keep ourselves informed. We must turn out and vote in elections, and show that we will not be sidelined whether it be over a cake, a hotel room, a kiss or just holding hands walking down the street.

We must always be sure to stand up for our rights.

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Further reading:

BBC – Strange Fruit: A protest song with enduring relevance
Youtube – Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit
The Guardian – Civil rights, civil wrongs
In these times – The War on Billie Holiday
BBC -BBC Podcast – Strange Fruit: Emmet Till’s Cousin Speaks

http://youtu.be/h4ZyuULy9zs

Forty years ago I would have been denied my rights in Northern Ireland because I was Catholic. Now they could be denied because I’m gay

27/11/2014 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

A new ‘conscience clause’ being proposed will legally protect gay discrimination
If I ran a bakery and someone came in and asked me to bake a cake that says, “NO TO GAY MARRIAGE”, I would tell them to find another bakery.
So I support Ashers Bakery, which was recently threatened with legal action over its refusal to make a pro-gay marriage cake. But only to an extent. As a gay woman, they’ll never be getting my business, but I can see this for what it is: a freedom of conscience issue. Turning a a gay couple away from a hotel, however, is not. And that’s what will happen under the DUP’s proposed equality bill. Not only will service providers be able to discriminate against me, the law will protect them too.
It’s sad to see the DUP pursuing this. This was the same party that, before the Peace Process, actively supported a system of power that discriminated against the country’s Catholic minority. Forty years ago, they’d have denied me my rights because I was Catholic. Now they’re denying me them because I’m gay.
It’s as if history has taught them nothing. And it poses a worrying question – who is next? If the battle for gay equality is fought and won, will they find another target? Will black people no longer be welcome in Northern Ireland? Immigrants? We already know what the party leader thinks of Muslims.
Yet this doesn’t just affect my life. It will have an impact on heterosexual, working-class Unionists too.
The Unionists I know are not bigots. They are ordinary people who have better things to do than worry about my love life. When I was 17, I told my friend Gavyn, an Orange Order marching, July 12 loving, “British till I die” Prod that I was gay. From memory, I got a hug and, subsequently, a text after he converted to Christianity to tell me “it changed nothing”.

Yet Unionism has a PR problem. The actions of people like Paul Givan – who proposed this ridiculous equality bill – have turned it into a political ideology linked with prejudice and elitism. The battle for equal rights for Catholics has been fought and won but as long as Givan & Co. keep finding new people to hate, the Protestant community will not be allowed to forget what happened. They continue, in the eyes of the world, to be “those bigots” who said no to civil rights in 1969. Every request for others to “respect their culture” is consequently treated with scorn when it should be considered.
Christians have rights – and I will defend them. Yes, I disagree with their views on gay marriage but I’ll defend to the death their right to hold them. I can live with someone having an opinion I don’t like.
What I can’t live with is that opinion becoming law that prevents me from getting married.
Paul Givan is not asking for equality – he is asking for the right to discriminate against me. He’s asking for a return to the old Northern Ireland, where some of us are equal and some of us aren’t. And again, it’s all because of religion.

Republished from the http://www.independent.co.uk/

Washington Post: Parents Pressure Gay Son To Change

13/01/2014 By David McFarlane Leave a Comment

“Readers of The Sun know and speak and write words like poof and poofter. What is good enough for them is good enough for us,” Sun editorial, May 1990.

Twenty-three plus years later, in the USA we have a parent who is rejecting her son because he is gay (see below). IN July 2012 the BBC political reporter, Brian Wheeler, wrote an article entitled ‘Gay Politicians and the Tabloid Press’ which was a review of the book Sex, Lies and Politics: Gay Politicians in the Press, and also a commentary on whether the press has moved forward from its bigotry.

The conclusion is that we in Britain, and obviously in the USA, still have a long way to go in accepting and embracing all of the LGBT Society

By Amy Dickinson, Published: November 18

DEAR AMY: I recently discovered that my son, who is 17, is a homosexual. We are part of a church group and I fear that if people in that group find out they will make fun of me for having a gay child.

He won’t listen to reason, and he will not stop being gay. I feel as if he is doing this just to get back at me for forgetting his birthday for the past three years — I have a busy work schedule.
Please help him make the right choice in life by not being gay. He won’t listen to me, so maybe he will listen to you. — Feeling Betrayed
DEAR BETRAYED: You could teach your son an important lesson by changing your own sexuality to show him how easy it is. Try it for the next year or so: Stop being a heterosexual to demonstrate to your son that a person’s sexuality is a matter of choice — to be dictated by one’s parents, the parents’ church and social pressure.
I assume that my suggestion will evoke a reaction that your sexuality is at the core of who you are. The same is true for your son. He has a right to be accepted by his parents for being exactly who he is.
When you “forget” a child’s birthday, you are basically negating him as a person. It is as if you are saying that you have forgotten his presence in the world. How very sad for him.
Pressuring your son to change his sexuality is wrong. If you cannot learn to accept him as he is, it might be safest for him to live elsewhere.
A group that could help you and your family figure out how to navigate this is Pflag.org. This organization is founded for parents, families, friends and allies of LGBT people, and has helped countless families through this challenge. Please research and connect with a local chapter.

Further reading: