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A Year of Temporary Respite for LGBTQs BY PAUL MASTERSON
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ast year, 2021, began ominously. On Jan. 6 right wing terrorists inspired by the former president and with the complicity of the Republican Party attempted to violently overthrow the American democracy. Had they succeeded, we would have been thrown into the abyss of authoritarianism. It would have meant an end to LGBTQ rights as we know them.
Republicans again protected its practice statewide, Gov. Tony Evers blocked the funding of conversion therapy with state money. Meanwhile, the culture wars raged as certain school boards, buttressed by the Republican State Assembly, moved to erase LGBTQ recognition in public schools.
Two weeks later, we let out a collective sigh of relief with President Joe Biden’s inauguration. It signaled a return to the advance of LGBTQ equality. Just days after his inauguration, by executive order, Biden reversed the previous regime’s ban of transgender members of the armed forces. Later, history would be made when the U.S. Senate confirmed Pete Buttigieg, a gay married man, as the Secretary of Transportation, and a transgender woman, Dr. Rachel Levin, as Assistant Health Secretary. She would later be promoted to four-star admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, becoming the first openly transgender person to achieve that rank.
In March, the Brett Blomme child porn scandal shook the city’s LGBTQ community that had celebrated Blomme as a rising star.
It was a year of celebrity comings-out with NFL footballer Carl Nassib leading the pack. A record number of out athletes competed in the Tokyo Olympics. Speaking of Olympians, like clockwork, Caitlyn Jenner embarrassed us, again. However, transwoman Amy Schneider became a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions contestant, launching her run of victories in the middle of Transgender Awareness Week. On the dark side, murders of transgender women were record setting worldwide.
HISTORY LESSONS In 2021 Wisconsin joined 31 other states in requiring the teaching of Holocaust history. Wausau and Sun Prairie joined 11 other cities in banning conversion therapy. While State Legislature
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Due to the pandemic, June’s traditional Pride Parade was cancelled for the second year. Milwaukee Pride, Inc, aside from organizing Pride Month events in June that included the launch of the first MCTS Pride Bus and the Hoan Bridge illuminated in rainbow colors, managed to produce a smaller PrideFest, appropriately called PridetoberFest, in October. In the political and cultural realms, as part of June Pride, the second March with Pride for Black Lives Matter took place, again organized by activist Broderick Pearson. Jessica Katzenmeyer announced her congressional campaign to challenge Republican incumbent Scott Fitzpatrick. Transman artist Nykoli Koslow was the Pfister Hotel’s Artist in Residence and a dozen queer artists were featured on city billboards for a unique “Queering the Cream City” public art exhibit. Both nationally and locally, 2021 was an anniversary year for many historic events. It was the 40th anniversary of the first report in the New York Native of HIV as an “exotic new disease,” the 20th anniversary of the death of Mathew Shepherd, the 10th of the end of the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and the fifth of the Pulse Massacre in Orlando.
Illustration by Michael Burmesch.
