Q
POLITICS
Q ueer Keisha Waites
Liliana Bakhtiari
Bakhtiari, Waites wins make LGBTQ Atlanta history By Mike Fleming ATLANTA GETS THREE OPENLY LGBTQ City Council members in the New Year after Liliana Bakhtiari and Keisha Waites won their Nov. 30 runoffs. Former state Rep. Waites and queer community organizer Bakhtiari both led their fields with margins just shy of winning outright on Election Day, and both dominated their runoffs. Waites beat Jacki Labat for the At-Large Position 3 seat with 53% of the citywide vote. Bakhtiari won the District 5 seat with a whopping 68% of votes against Mandy Mahoney. The two join councilmember-elect Alex Wan, who with nearly 80% of the vote on Election Day won back the same District 6 seat he vacated in 2017. He became the council’s first Asian American and first out gay male member in 2010. The three newly elected members make up the most openly LGBTQ councilmembers to ever 8 theQatl.com
serve on Atlanta City Council at the same time. Lesbian members Cathy Woolard and Anne Favre served together in the early 2000s. As of this writing, neither new candidate made a direct public statement declaring victory, though Waites tweeted a meme that says “To God Goes the Glory” late on Tuesday night.
MAKING MORE HISTORY
Bakhtiari becomes the first openly LGBTQ Muslim elected official in state history. She is one of just five out queer Muslims ever elected to public office in the United States. She relished the opportunity to represent Atlanta’s diversity on the council. “Atlanta is supposed to be the gay mecca of the South,” she told Project Q in July. “If we don’t have representation on council – the very body that has the ability to affect the LGBTQIA population,
