PRIDE

June was filled with international Pride events. Let's not lose perspective and forget that public Pride demonstrations still require courage of the LGBTI community.  Marriage equality success can present sexual identity freedom and acceptance as a false norm.  

Being anything but "straight" remains unsafe.  

The criminalization of  HIV-AIDS exists in the majority of US jurisdictions, with many of those making it a crime for an individual living with HIV to have sex with another  without disclosure of the HIV status and that person's informed consent.  These statutes often do not require proof of intent to transmit the disease; and actual inability to transmit the disease due to effective medical intervention presents no defense.  The enforcement of these laws primarily against people of color is not unnoticed. 

Members of the LGBT community are more likely to be the targets of US hate crimes than any other minority.

Leigh Goodmark has written on the extraordinarily high rates of abuse against trans women.

While we celebrate the expansion of legal equality, let's remember that the specific "equalities" recognized are more along the path of joining heterosexual norms, rather than a celebration of sexual minorities as respected individuals who may equally participate in our society upon their terms.  Those "equalities" remain, in fact, narrow.  We must exlore whether what our culture encourages is more than demanding conformity with heterosexually based cultural institutions.

Let's try to correct and avoid heterosexuality as the norm.  Whiteness as the norm in fashioning race based remedies has resulted in the endurance of bias, implicit and explicit.  We are early in the journey of ensuring effective remedies for members of the LGBTI community.  Will we avoid the mistakes of the past in forcing alignment with false norms?   We will have some indication from SCOTUS next term.