The Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ rights organization, is taking its LGBTQ equality message on the road with a multicity tour focused on changing more hearts and minds, particularly in red states.
The “American Dreams Tour” will kick off Wednesday in Columbus, Ohio, and travel to cities in predominantly Republican-led states through November. The tour’s goal, according to HRC, is to amplify LGBTQ people’s stories “at a time of rising political attacks and cultural erasure” and “celebrate the communities pushing back against hate and fighting for a future of equality for all.”
“For half a century, our movement has changed hearts and minds with our stories — Harvey Milk in the Castro, Pedro Zamora on the Real World, trans youth and parents coming forward in statehouses across the country. When people know who we really are, everything changes. This tour is about reclaiming that legacy,” Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “We’re traveling to the places where harm is happening—and where hope is rising. We’re showing up for communities who’ve been told they don’t belong and reminding them, and the country, that they are the American dream.”
The tour will “anchor” in six major cities — Columbus; Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; Dallas; Atlanta; and Nashville, Tennessee — with other stops to be announced in the coming weeks, according to HRC. Each stop will be tailored to the issues queer people are facing in those particular locales. The Columbus stop, for example, will be centered on “Ohio’s legacy of LGBTQ+ activism while confronting today’s political backslide and barriers to HIV care,” according to HRC, while Atlanta’s stop will be in partnership with Atlanta Pride and will zero in on “Black LGBTQ+ leadership and community-led care models.”
The “American Dreams Tour” comes at a precarious time for LGBTQ rights — and particularly transgender rights. So far this year, nearly 600 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S., according to a tally by the American Civil Liberties Union. And a report published last week by LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD asserted that 300 anti-LGBTQ actions had come from the Trump administration since January. An NBC News analysis published in February found that lawmakers in at least nine states had recently introduced measures to try to chip away at same-sex couples’ right to marry.
“For the first time in decades, we’re actually seeing a backslide in LGBTQ+ rights across this country, and we’ve got to do something,” Robinson said Monday in an interview with MSNBC. “We’ve got to get back to basics in telling our stories and meeting people where they are, because we know that when we tell our stories, we not only change hearts and minds, we shift the way people behave, that they vote, that they advocate in their communities.”
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