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City, Orgs To LGBTQ+ Community: We've Got Your Back

Lucy Gellman | January 24th, 2025

City, Orgs To LGBTQ+ Community: We've Got Your Back

Culture & Community  |  Education & Youth  |  LGBTQ  |  Arts & Culture  |  New Haven Pride Center

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Top: Alyssa-Marie Cajigas Rivera Ortiz and Erycka Ortiz, founders of the Children of Marsha P. Johnson, at Friday's press conference. Bottom: Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, who represents East Rock and a section of Fair Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

New Haven has some words for Washington. Race and gender are not socially engineered—they just happen to exist. Society isn’t color blind, and it never was. There are not just two genders: the spectrum is as fluid and prismatic as light itself. And whatever voter “mandate” the Trump administration thinks it has  after the election, it’s not really a mandate at all. 

City officials, community organizers, educators and nonprofit leaders all stressed that message Friday afternoon, in a press conference at the New Haven Pride Center reaffirming the city’s commitment to LGBTQIA+ rights. Unveiling a new LGBTQ+ Resource Guide and toolkit, speakers pointed to New Haven as a welcoming and tolerant city, where community leaders will not bend a knee to federal demands that absent people of their basic human rights.   

It comes less than a full week into the Trump Administration, during which the president has issued and signed several executive orders attacking LGBTQ+ and particularly trans people, from a narrow definition of two binary genders to new threats on federal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI funding and Title VII protections. The orders are especially inhumane to trans women: they seek to end protection around equal housing and social services and ban trans women from women’s prisons.

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New Haven Pride Center Executive Director Juancarlos Soto.

“We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers,” said Juancarlos Soto, executive director at the New Haven Pride Center, quoting civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. “Angelic troublemakers are those who stand up for what is right, often in the face of adversity. They work to ensure everyone in our community belongs, because living unapologetically and fully authentic to yourselves is not just important. I believe that is sacred work.” 

“Let us be clear,” added Alyssa-Marie Cajigas Rivera Ortiz, co-founder of the Children of Marsha P. Johnson (CMPJ) and the director of programs at City Wide Youth Coalition. “Fascism thrives on our silence. It grows stronger when we allow ourselves to be pacified by empty promises. This is not the time to sit idly by, it is not the time to hope someone else will fight the battles that will need to be fought. It is a time to stand in radical solidarity with each other and to show unwavering love for our communities.” 

The work of, for and by those communities feels perhaps more immediate and visceral than it did even a week ago. In his inaugural address Monday, Trump vowed to roll back many of the policies, protections and institutions that exist to safeguard LGBTQ+ rights in a country that is increasingly obsessed with their erasure. Those include basic legal protections, like having guidelines around workplace discrimination to using pronouns that reflect one’s gender identity. 

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Top: Nova Parker, who works at Jo Bruno Salon in New Haven. As an openly trans woman, Parker stressed that everyone is welcome at Jo Bruno—and in her city—no matter their gender identity. Bottom: Bethany Perryman, director of communications for the ACLU of Connecticut. "Countries are made, and edited, and created by paper," she said. "And so when paper comes out that says that you have to fit in one of two boxes, this is what New Haven doe. This is the paper that they come up with. This is the type of paper that we need to see in the world."

In the face of those difficulties—and alongside a citywide commitment to protect LGBTQ+ rights—the resource guide is intended to help. Between its thick, glossy pages (or in a digital version online), a reader can find information about local service providers, legal support, wraparound services and mental health resources like BlackLine, the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network, and the Trevor Project.

There are pages, for instance, on immigrant and student rights, an acknowledgment of how often queerness stands at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. There’s a list of organizations that are ready to help, from Lambda Legal and A Place to Nourish Your Health (APNH) to the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL), which has long collaborated with the Pride Center and loudly opposed book challenges and proposed bans that have already hit the state. There are how-to sections around adult and child name changes on municipal, state and federal identity documents and notes about how to prepare for things like an appearance in probate court. 

“We’re a city where, simply put, people can love who they love,” said East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, a steadfast advocate of the Pride Center who is one of two openly queer people to sit on the city’s Board of Alders. “They can be who they are. And a city where leaders and others are consistently committed to protecting the rights of our neighbors.”

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Erin Michaud, a visual arts instructor at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School who sits on the LGBTQ+ Youth Task Force and has been a fierce fighter for increased protections for students in all New Haven Public Schools. 

During the press conference, several speakers also stressed the importance of defending those who have always been at the margins—and often on the front lines. Looking to CMPJ’s namesake, the activist and Stonewall rioter Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera Ortiz urged cis, straight and white allies in the room to get involved, whether it is through grassroots organizing or through their wallet. Based in New Haven, CMPJ does that work by supporting trans youth, advocating for stronger legislation, and organizing in New Haven and across the state.   

Last year, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reported the deaths of at least 32 trans people in the U.S., with more that likely went unreported. As of Trans Day of Remembrance in November,  77 percent of those killed were people of color, and 53 percent were Black trans women. 

“For too long, Black trans people have been first responders to the crises in our communities, and we are the ones who show up when systems fail,” said CMPJ co-founder Erycka Ortiz. “We’re the ones who rescue our people from homelessness, violence and neglect. But we cannot continue to carry these burdens without real investment … We are in a fight for our lives and we must move with urgency.”   

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Typhanie Jackson: New Haven Public Schools are “going to continue to create inclusive environments” going forward. 

Typhanie Jackson, executive director of student services for the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), added that NHPS is already working to safeguard the rights of the thousands of young people who are learning in the city's schools  In addition to staff trainings, resource development and investment in Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs, also called Gender-Sexuality Alliances), the district plans to double down on its policy for trans and gender nonconforming youth. 

When pressed for specifics on how the district would protect students—who have spoken out about being misgendered and deadnamed in class—Jackson did not include any, but said that the New Haven Public Schools are “going to continue to create inclusive environments” going forward. Erin Michaud, a teacher at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and member of the city's  LGBTQ+ Youth Task Force, said that GSAs are currently active at all of the city's high schools, as well as Elm City Montessori School and King-Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School. 

That doesn’t stop at City Hall—and it won’t, city officials said Friday. Mayor Justin Elicker, who last year granted the Pride Center a line item in the city budget, emphasized several times that the city plans to stand by its commitment to LGBTQ+ New Haveners despite any threats to federal funding that may come from Washington. 

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Mayor Justin Elicker: "If all of us raise our head, then we’re all together, right? Then we’re all together and it’s more difficult to target any one community.” 

Already, his administration has begun to work with attorneys "to evaluate each executive order that comes out and understand how to respond," with particular concerns for New Haven's immigrant and LGBTQ+ communities, as well as its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 

"The responses will depend on the specific circumstances," he said. "We're here to very loudly express our values and make clear that New Haven is a place that rejects the hate that is coming from Washington." 

Responding directly to the inaugural address that Trump delivered Monday, Elicker also took issue with the president's description of "trying to socially engineer race and gender” in "a society that is color-blind and merit-based." To a question from a reporter, he added that he rejects Trump’s notion that he is acting on a mandate from voters to roll back basic human rights. 

“That’s not a mandate,” Elicker said, pointing to the results of the popular election. “That isn’t even 50 percent of the United States. I think that as people who reject the policies, leaders who reject the policies of the Trump Administration, we need to be very vocal about it, and frankly I’m concerned about some of the Democrats that are out there thinking that somehow America has massively changed in our overall views of what defines our country. 

“We as leaders …  need to be really vocal about that. That fear—and that’s what’s going on here, that people are, because of the intimidation of Washington, more afraid to raise their head, because as people say, it might get chopped off,” he said. “But if all of us raise our head, then we’re all together, right? Then we’re all together and it’s more difficult to target any one community.”