Proud Boys anti-LGBTQ+ attacks not isolated incidents- likely to continue – Los Angeles Blade
WASHINGTON – Social media has rightly been abuzz this week with new images from NASA’s James Webb telescope, particularly the shot of SMACS 0723 – a stunning cluster of thousands of galaxies that was unveiled by President Joe Biden at the White House during a brief ceremony Monday evening.
It seems almost as if the image, with its whirring swirls of gaseous cosmic matter containing solar system after solar system, could constitute a whole picture of the universe, an arguably understandable underestimation of its practically incomprehensible size and life span.
What we’re looking at, however, “is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length,” according to NASA, “a tiny sliver of the vast universe” that existed 4.6 billion years ago, during which time the galaxies were much closer together.
The lesson serves as an important reminder of the limitations of our perceptive faculties; of our tendency to observe new phenomena without considering whether it presents a full and complete picture.
The new photographs of our cosmos happened to arrive during a week in which the Proud Boys were again were among the main characters, the primary antagonists, of the latest hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.
The comparison is hardly meant to suggest any parity between their relative metaphysical significance, but rather it underscores that the shot of SMACS 0723 was no more a representation of the universe in its entirety than the Proud Boys’ descent on Washington last year was a complete picture of the group’s reach, nor of its ambitions.
As members of the House Committee laid bare on Tuesday, the carnage wrought last January 6 by the paramilitary-clad Proud Boys – many of whom congregated in front of Harry’s Bar before marching through the halls of Congress, hunting down lawmakers and assaulting police – was carried out in coordination with a network of groups like the QAnon conspiracy cult and allied domestic right-wing terrorist organizations like the Oath Keepers.
It was also not the first time. In 2017, for instance, the Proud Boys joined forces with other white supremacist, pro-Confederate, and neo-Nazi factions who gathered in Charlottesville for the deadly Unite the Right rally. A year later, members of the Proud Boys were filmed leading a vicious assault in New York City, screaming “faggot” as they repeatedly kicked a man who was curled in the fetal position on the sidewalk.
Their use of that word is no accident. In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center took pains to detail how while the gang’s founder Gavin McInnes “often casts bigotry and slurs as some form of taboo-bending hijinks,” over the last 15 years he has used the word “faggot” as an epithet signifying that which is “weak” or “unmasculine,” along with as a pejorative term of contempt for gay men.
And the Proud Boys’ chairman, Enrique Tarrio, visited the nation’s capital a year before the insurrection, stealing a Black Lives Matter banner from a historic Black church and setting it ablaze in a right-wing rally that turned violent.
“When hate rears its head, we all must respond – whether it’s outside a parade in Idaho, at a historic Black church in D.C., or on the steps of the United States Capitol,” said leading Los Angeles Mayoral Candidate Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), in an exclusive statement to The Los Angeles Blade.
The Congresswoman’s mention of Idaho concerns the arrest of 31 men near a Pride event close to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on June 11. The suspects, armed with a smoke grenade, shields, and plans to incite a riot, were affiliated with a far-right white supremacist group, the Patriot Front, which has close ties to the Proud Boys (earlier iterations of both having appeared in the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally).
It was just one incident this summer in which LGBTQ+ people were specifically and deliberately targeted.
This summer, the Proud Boys again turned their sights on LGBTQ+ people
Just as they strode through the halls of Congress to disrupt the electoral count and demand that Democratic Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surrender themselves (along with then-Vice President Mike Pence, whom they wanted to hang), members of the Proud Boys stormed libraries, Pride gatherings and other public events this summer from the East Coast to the West Coast and the Midwest.
Likewise with their activities in Washington last year, the goal of the gang was to cause disruption and instill terror.
“The Proud Boys targeting Pride parades and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole is abhorrent,” Bass said to The Blade, adding that it “shows how important solidarity is.”
Even those who might have witnessed the footage of members of the Proud Boys desecrating the US Capitol last year, and even those who might have been familiar with the group’s homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, racist, and xenophobic ideological orientation, were nevertheless surprised to see members of the gang marching through their communities this summer with messages of hate for LGBTQ+ people and their allies.
San Francisco area resident and LGBTQ+ activist Harris Mojadedi told PBS he was shocked when the Proud Boys showed up in the Bay Area on June 11 to disrupt a family friendly LGBTQ+ event.
Clad in shirts screen-printed with assault rifles, members of the Proud Boys shouted homophobic and transphobic slurs at performers who were reading to kids during Drag Queen story hour at the San Lorenzo, CA library.
“The fact that this could happen right here, it is cause for concern,” Mojadedi said. “This is no longer an issue that’s far away,” he said. “This is — it’s home. It’s in our backyard.”
Indeed. The parents and children who were terrorized in Wilmington, North Carolina ten days later probably also did not expect a group of 15 masked men to march through the library – with help from sheriff’s deputies – disrupting for more than 90 minutes an event in which staff read stories about diverse families.
“I felt like this story time was really one of the safest places I could take my daughter for a Pride event,” said one mother, according to reporting in The Los Angeles Blade. “I just felt like it’s the library, it’s probably pretty low-risk.”
Less than a week later, in South Bend, Indiana, a staff member of the St. Joseph County Public Library’s Virginia M. Tutt Branch told WVPE the Proud Boys’ disruption of a Pride Month children’s Rainbow Story Hour “definitely came as a shock.” “We were not anticipating any problems,” she said.
Similar stories have unfolded in cities from Sparks, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, as The Blade has reported, including in LA Blade columnist James Finn’s call for law enforcement to better intervene to protect LGBTQ+ people.
It is also incumbent on us to recognize this for what it is: a coordinated assault by a group with deeply ingrained homophobia and transphobia, as well as ties to other dangerous organizations that mean us harm.
Hopefully, just as the Webb Telescope has been a boon for the astronomers and astrophysicists who study the cosmos, our meticulous and brave-faced detailing of the attacks on our communities by the Proud Boys and other right-wing terror organizations might help us to better understand them – with the aim of cutting them off at the knees.