On a gray afternoon last June, the school board in Glendale, California, was preparing to make what was once a routine vote to honor June as LGBTQ+ pride month.
School board meetings used to be pretty placid affairs. This year, however, cops in riot gear surrounded the building and helicopters hovered overhead. As Erik Adamian, an alum of the school district, waited in line to get inside the meeting, he heard demonstrators shout: “You are all a bunch of pedophiles!” “Stop grooming our kids!”
It was a “display of hatred” the 30-year-old said he had never witnessed before that week.
Adamian had arrived in Glendale from Iran in 2008 at the age of 14, joining the large Armenian community in the quiet, palm-tree studded suburb of Los Angeles. At the time, he said, he had been so deeply closeted that he was not even out to himself. But in the years since, he had become a LGBTQ+ rights activist, and the president of the largest queer Armenian organization in the US.
Coming out as queer in his immigrant community had not been easy, but he felt over the years there had been real progress towards acceptance. Now, as insults were being hurled at him and other activists, he felt frightened, but also heartbroken. He knew how the protest would be portrayed. He knew the conclusions queer kids in Glendale would draw from it.
The school board protest was the second education protest protest in less than a week in a Los Angeles-area neighborhood with a large Armenian community. Four days earlier, a group of angry protesters had gathered outside an elementary school in North Hollywood over a school assembly reading of a picture book that mentioned families with LGBTQ+ parents.
Rightwing media outlets had covered the two protests as a sign of Christian immigrant parents rising up against “woke policies” imposed by California’s liberal bureaucrats. But Adamian didn’t think that was the full picture.
During both June protests, Adamian said, it was clear that there were Armenian community members in the crowds. But there were also rightwing activists who had been prominent at previous pro-Trump and anti-vaccine rallies across the region – people with documented connections to the Proud Boys and the January 6 insurrection. Many protesters wore matching white T-shirts with a slogan Adamian had never seen before: “Leave our kids alone.” Trucks with giant “Leave our kids alone” banners circled the neighborhood. That cost money, Adamian thought: who was paying for it?
And, Adamian knew, the Los Angeles protests didn’t take place in isolation. That same month, anti-LGBTQ+ protests hit several immigrant communities, with protests in Arab American and Muslim American areas in Michigan, Maryland and Canada. Adamian and other queer immigrant activists struggled to make sense of how these campaigns had escalated so quickly.
The street protests would turn out to only be the beginning. Adamian and the organization he led, the Gay and Lesbian Armenian Society, would be targeted throughout the rest of the year by anonymous social media accounts that attacked his character, suggested he had inappropriate influence in the school district, and demanded that local politicians distance themselves from the group.
It was a brutal playbook. And in the supercharged election year of 2024, Adamian feared, attacks on LGBTQ+ education, and its defenders, were only going to get worse.
The heart of the diaspora
Glendale is a city of about 200,000 people, with well-regarded public schools and a downtown that features one of LA’s most popular outdoor malls. On a summer day at one of its gleaming public pools, as Latino and Asian American kids jump off the diving board and elderly Russians gossip on the lounge chairs, it can seem like the perfect version of the suburban American dream.
More than half of Glendale’s residents were born outside the United States, and as many as 40% are Armenian, making the city one of the global centers of the Armenian diaspora. Armenians hold key roles in local government and in the school district. There are multiple Armenian Orthodox churches, a sign of the centrality of faith in Armenia, which proudly calls itself the “first Christian nation”. Each April, Glendale public schools close in honor of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day.
The Armenian community around Los Angeles is also very diverse, perhaps the most diverse in the world. There are fourth- and fifth-generation Armenian Americans descended from those who emigrated to California in the 1890s, and much more recent immigrants who arrived fleeing war or disruption elsewhere in the diaspora. There are the Kardashians, reality TV royals who occasionally use their fame to spotlight Armenian causes, as well as Armenian American families who just arrived from countries with laws that criminalize homosexuality, like Russia and Iran.
For Adamian, who moved from Iran to Glendale when he was 14, being gay was simply not discussed at home, except as the punchline to jokes, he said. Homosexuality was “positioned in my family and culture, growing up, as something really demonic, something that was not right”, he said.
His Glendale high school in the early 2010s did not provide much of a counterbalance. There wasn’t much about queer people in the formal curriculum, he said. He remembers reading only two books that helped him understand the experience of being gay, both 19th-century novels: Frankenstein and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was handed to him by a sympathetic teacher. “You’ll appreciate the themes,” he remembers her telling him.
While the school did have a Gay-Straight Alliance club, Adamian perceived being part of it as “dangerous”. The few Armenian kids perceived to be queer were “heavily bullied”, he said. He ended up getting much of his early education about queerness from TV shows, including Grey’s Anatomy and Glee.
Some of Adamian’s fellow queer Armenian Californians describe similar experiences growing up. One woman, whom the Guardian is not identifying by name because she’s not out publicly, said that she had felt intense cultural pressure to marry a man and form a traditional heterosexual family, and that she still fears it’s not safe to tell many people in her family that she is a lesbian.
When she was younger, “there was no real language” for being queer and Armenian, she said. “I thought being openly lesbian was only for American white women, to be honest. It didn’t feel like it was allowed to be a possibility for someone like me.”
She did not even start to come out until her mid-30s, and some members of her family, whom she described as “dangerously homophobic”, have threatened her even for voicing generic support for LGBTQ+ rights, she said.
“I think there’s a lot of denial in the Armenian community that LGBTQ+ Armenians exist,” she said.
For Adamian, coming out as queer in college meant temporarily separating himself from his community – in a very literal way, by moving out of his family’s home. “It was very painful,” he said.
Then, in his third year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he learned there had been a Gay and Lesbian Armenian Society (now Galas LGBTQ+ Armenian society) in California since 1998. The group has an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 in its network, though it does not have a formal membership list.
Adamian still has a vivid memory of the first time he attended the group’s annual friendsgiving in Los Angeles. “A queer Armenian person greeted me and my friends. It was a very surreal experience. It’s like: you’re queer and you’re Armenian. OK, yes. You exist, I exist,” he said.
He remembers Tata Simonyan’s music playing, the smell of rice cooking, and meeting dozens of other Armenians, almost all of them queer. “It was magical,” he said. “You could be all parts of yourself, together in one room, celebrating.”
‘Going through the school boards’
By 2016, Adamian had a job working for an LGBTQ+ history organization and was helping teachers create age-appropriate lesson plans that would affirm the contributions of queer people to US history.
The work was the result of California’s Fair Education Act, which had passed in 2011 and mandates the teaching of LGBTQ+ history in California public schools. The bill had been authored by Mark Leno, the first openly gay man to be elected to the state senate, in response to the deadly shooting of a 15-year-old queer student by a male classmate in their school computer lab in 2008. (Defense attorneys for the 14-year-old suspect, who later pleaded guilty, argued that he had been reacting to the queer student sexually harassing him.) The bill was a way to ensure that queer students saw themselves reflected in the curriculum in positive ways, Leno said, and that straight students were educated about the “diversity of human experience”.
“It didn’t feel controversial at the time to do this. It felt like, ‘Yes, we have arrived at the correct moment,’” Adamian recalled of his work. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and LGBTQ+ people were facing some national setbacks, but to Adamian, it still felt that “the larger society, and the education system, is slowly but surely catching up”.
While working on lesson plans, Adamian travelled to other states to give presentations on California’s new approach to LGBTQ+ education and the evidence that it reduced bullying.
“It felt like a calling,” he said. The programs he was working on would have made his own high school experience less lonely. “I wouldn’t have thought about: ‘Maybe there is no queer history or representation of queer people anywhere because we don’t deserve representation.’”
These efforts did not attract much national political attention. Then, in 2021, Trump supporters invaded Congress in a failed attempt to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. As the Department of Justice began arresting and charging hundreds of Trump supporters who had participated in the insurrection, Republican activists across the country shifted their focus. As the former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon said on a May 2021 podcast, “The path to save the nation is very simple – it’s going to go through the school boards.”
Teachers become targets
The first wave of Republican school board organizing had focused on opposition to discussions of racism and discrimination, often presented as an attack on “critical race theory”, an area of legal scholarship that is not typically taught in US grade schools. In Glendale, several parents and educators said, an anti-critical race theory campaign never really took off. But when local activists had begun raising concerns about the district’s policies regarding transgender kids, gender identity and discussions of LGBTQ+ identity in elementary schools, they’d hit on a topic that resonated with parts of the community.
As in many districts, parents had been divided over Glendale schools’ Covid policies, and had discussed them in social media groups on Facebook. At least one of these parents’ groups became organizing grounds for a handful of local activists, some Armenian and some not, who used them to share concerns about trans-inclusive and other LGBTQ+-inclusive policies, other parents said.
In 2021, a handful of local activists began making public records requests to the Glendale school district for emails and documents that referenced keywords like “CRT”, “DEI”, “diversity and inclusion”, “gender identity”, “gender queer”, and trainings related to antiracism and trans youth.
These types of efforts were taking place in other school districts as well, and were being encouraged at the national level by conservative groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Policy Alliance and the Heritage Foundation, which produced online guides for parents about how to gather information about what was being taught in schools, including detailed guidance on how to file public records requests.
Among the documents the activists unearthed was a 2021 email thread in which an elementary school teacher asked for guidance about several Pride-themed videos that she had shown to her third-grade students. Since classes were still being held over Zoom, a parent had observed the class and complained about it.
In the emails, school officials told the teacher she might want to reconsider using one of the videos in a future class, since it mentioned sexual orientation and sexual attraction, but praised her for embracing inclusive education.
In April 2022, when the emails were made public, several Armenian women showed up to a meeting of the school board, telling the board they did not want their young children exposed to sexual material of any kind and asking for parents to be notified and have a chance to opt-out of these kinds of lessons. Some said that if public schools could not have Bible lessons, they should also not have lessons about the LGBTQ+ “agenda”.
A video of the meeting, showing one Glendale woman denouncing a “third grade teacher trying to talk about sex with eight-year-old students” in her comments to the board, went viral on conservative media sites and social media, racking up a million views on one YouTube video alone.
The controversy over the videos prompted so many personal threats against the teacher that she was involuntarily transferred out of her classroom for her safety, the Los Angeles Times reported.
A year later, in April 2023, another story about Glendale schools went viral on conservative channels. The new outrage focused on an 2017 video of a Glendale assistant superintendent talking about new policies about students’ gender identities, including candid comments about how male athletic coaches were often uncomfortable with the idea of trans boys in their locker rooms, as well as advice for how administrators should protect the privacy of school files that included the names and gender identities of students who had transitioned.
Dozens of people showed up at the next school board meetings. Commenters said they felt that parents’ rights were being disrespected and children were being indoctrinated into false beliefs about gender. “My concern is the exclusion of parents in deciding the child’s gender identity,” one woman said. “To go on a field trip, they need consent, but not to change their sex. Make it make sense!”
The meetings became heated, with invocations of satanic beliefs, evil and pedophilia.
By mid-May, Glendale school board meetings were attracting an audience far beyond the small crowd that had attended them in the past. Activists from the California chapter of “Gays Against Groomers”, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a far-right extremist group of self-identified LGBTQ+ people who use the cover of their identity to engage in anti-trans organizing”, were showing up to testify, telling angry parents that there were gay people who agreed with them.
An anonymous public Instagram account, GUSD Parents’ Voices, began sharing more video clips and documents related to the school district, some of them highlighting the names, photographs, and even the spouses, of members of local LGBTQ+ groups, experts who had given paid trainings on how to support trans students, or teachers talking about how to recruit kids to participate in school clubs or other activities for LGBTQ+ students and their allies.
Teachers, school board members and administrators – many of them Armenian – were called groomers and pedophiles on social media, and some even received death threats, said one Glendale high school teacher, whom the Guardian is not identifying to protect them from further harassment.
The personal targeting of teachers prompted a California state senator to introduce a bill that would criminalize harassment of teachers – a development that prompted even more national rightwing media coverage, and even more harassment, the teacher said.
Rampant misinformation
Galas had been talking to educators about the hostile climate in the school board meetings throughout 2022 and 2023, Adamian said. But when activists from the organization came to offer support during the volatile protests in June 2023, they were alarmed not only by the hundreds of angry demonstrators and fistfights in the streets, but at the way the battles were being portrayed in the local media as a fight between LGBTQ+ people and Armenian parents – as if queer Armenians simply did not exist.
Even some LGBTQ+ activists had adopted that framing, reacting to the protests as if the Armenian community was one large anti-gay monolith. “Go back to Armenia!” one of Adamian’s friends had heard a white queer activist scream at the Armenians demonstrating outside the North Hollywood elementary school.
At the same time, Galas activists said, they were fielding a flurry of questions from parents and community members based on misinformation about what was actually happening within Glendale’s schools. There were rumors about drag queens “in thongs” doing sexually explicit performances in elementary schools, Adamian said. “I heard from somebody that ‘it’s being said if you go to school on Pride assembly day, they will sign you up to receive hormone injections to transition.’”
“I’ve had queer parents come up to me and ask me: ‘What do you think about the gender reassignment that the schools are doing?’” said a trans activist who is a member of Galas, whom the Guardian is not identifying because of safety concerns. “They think that somehow the school, which can barely afford to pay their teachers a living wage, is funding sex-based surgeries for children.”
Some queer Armenians said they were concerned that language barriers were helping misinformation spread more quickly within their community, since attempts to factcheck or provide official information were often done in English. In a statement, the school district said that multiple district officials had gone on Armenian TV programs to try to share accurate information about what was happening in schools, as well as producing a fact sheet correcting some of the rampant misinformation.
The fact sheet spelled out, for example, that district employees “are not medical doctors” and do not “perform medical procedures on students” and also that “employees do not proactively encourage students to come out as transgender”.
Clinicians say gender-affirming care for trans teenagers is typically a slow process that involves extensive periods of consultation and therapy before any medical treatments.
An Armenian American therapist said that when she had gone to get her hair done in Glendale in mid-June, she had known what she would be talking about: public schools and what they were teaching children, “the hottest topic that has come up in our community in a long time”, and a “very divisive” one.
The therapist, whose daughter is queer but not out to all their extended family, asked not to be identified by name to protect her daughter’s privacy.
The people she was hearing from in the Glendale school discussion “were accepting of the fact that there are LGBTQ+ Armenians, and that they are part of our community”, the therapist said – a sign of some of the progress that she believes has been made in the past 40 years. “But they still do not want anything discussed at school. They see this as a topic that should not come up.
“There is almost like this missing step of complete inclusion,” she said. “‘I’m accepting, I’m OK, it’s part of our community – but not my kid. Don’t let my kid learn about this.’”
As a mental health provider, she said, it reminded her of the stigma around suicide: “It’s an old mentality and wrong mentality, I think: if you don’t talk about something, it doesn’t exist.”
Many of her peers, even highly educated professionals, seemed to sincerely believe the “extreme” claims circulating in Glendale that a suburban public school system was “indoctrinating our kids” to “be a certain way in their sexual orientation”.
Maro Yacoubian, a Glendale parent whose child attends an Armenian-language program at a public school in Pasadena and who supports parents’ rights activists, said that she and her friends were indeed concerned that Glendale schools were “pushing” inappropriately sexual materials and that the schools were having “outsiders coming in and trying to impose a way of thinking on the kids”.
“Parental rights doesn’t mean anti-gay,” Yacoubian said. It should be possible, she added, for schools to welcome gay and trans students and teach LGBTQ+ history, which she supports, while also respecting parents who “just don’t like my child learning about explicitly sexual material, and feeling like they’re being pressured into questioning their sexuality”.
“Should there be support groups for LGBTQ children? Of course. Should there be clubs? Of course. Should there be resources for these children? Yes,” Yacoubian said. But “kids don’t need to feel like if they’re dressed like a girl one day, or dressed like a boy one day, there’s going to be a descension of teachers on them to be like, ‘Oh, join our club, because you probably feel like a boy now,’ that ‘you may want to take steps to transition’.”
“It’s very naive for anybody to think that there aren’t bad actors out there who are trying to take advantage of our children,” Yacoubian said.
Nationwide ‘conflict campaigns’
Glendale wasn’t the only US immigrant community where these kinds of debates were taking place. In the same month as the protests in California Armenian communities, a Muslim-majority city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, passed a resolution banning Pride flags from being flown on city property; a large group of Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox parents in a Maryland school district protested over books with LGBTQ+ characters; and Muslim parents participated in “anti-gender ideology” demonstrations in Canada. The previous fall, Arab American parents in Dearborn, Michigan, had also participated in a volatile school board meeting protesting over books with LGBTQ+ content.
Some progressive Armenian activists said they saw a connection between what was happening in their community and tensions in Arab American, Latino and other immigrant communities in the US – a development they considered the result of a “deliberate divide and conquer strategy” by white conservative activists.
In Glendale, suspicion over the origin of the moment was fueled by the fact that the administrators of Instagram accounts that many in Los Angeles said were central to the debates – GUSD Parents’ Voices and Saticoy Elementary Parents – have remained anonymous. Neither account responded to requests for comment.
Shenaaz Janmohamed, the executive director of Queer Crescent, an LGBTQI Muslim advocacy group, said that scenes from the Dearborn school board protests in Michigan and in California were very similar. While Muslim communities have always had conservative members, she said, “what’s hard in this political moment is the ways in which their presence is being exploited by rightwing political interests.”
John Rogers, a UCLA education professor who has been studying school district “conflict campaigns” nationwide since 2021, said it was possible that communities had been strategically targeted. But, he said, it was also possible that conservative activists had simply won school board battles in majority-white areas the previous years, and moved on to fighting the same fight in more ethnically diverse districts.
What was clear, Rogers said, was that while US school districts have been going through real social changes when it comes to policies about how to treat trans and nonbinary kids, and how to approach supporting LGBTQ+ kids overall, those policies were in place for several years without much objection. Only after the school board campaigns became part of the national political agenda did they suddenly become controversial among parents: “Nothing was dramatically new, except for the misinformation that was being put into play,” he said.
Artineh Samkian, a University of Southern California education professor who is also a Glendale public school parent, said she sees the “chaos campaigns” targeting Glendale and other public schools broadly as “an attempt to dismantle trust in public education, and, by extension, dismantle public education”.
The public records request strategy the activists in Glendale had used was deeply misleading, she said: in a district with over a thousand teachers and hundreds of administrators, they presented just a tiny handful of incidents, which the activists spotlighted and referenced over and over, as if they were standard practice.
The result of these campaigns was stark: a nationwide survey of principals found that schools in high-conflict “purple” districts, like Glendale, had seen a 22% increase in reports of students making multiple demeaning or hostile remarks about LGBTQ+ classmates between 2018 and 2022.
The “chaos campaigns” also pushed talented teachers and administrators out of their jobs, Samkian said: Vivian Ekchian, the well-regarded Armenian American superintendent of Glendale schools, announced her retirement in June 2023, after the protests.
While most of the harassment was targeted at the district, administrators and the school board, “a handful of teachers who are vocal LGBTQ+ advocates, are LGBTQ+ themselves, or have used LGBGTQ+ materials in their classrooms” were also targeted, a spokesperson for the school district confirmed.
Taline Arsenian, the president of the Glendale teachers’ union, said that photographs of individual teachers’ classrooms and their personal social media profiles had been posted online and dissected, with one parent sharing images of an elementary school teacher in a rainbow shirt and saying she was afraid of what the teacher might tell her child because the teacher “supports that community”.
“Teachers are fearful to teach some state-mandated curriculum for fear of how parents will react,” Arsenian said. “Elementary school teachers should not have to be concerned about sending home projects in which students used rainbow colors.”
The high school teacher said the atmosphere felt “like a red scare”. Pro-LGBTQ+ symbols had been ripped from hallways, and some fellow teachers, worried about being targeted, were taking down Pride flags in their classrooms, the teacher said. Queer students were feeling the hostile environment, too, the teacher said.
“Leave our kids alone” activists organized two separate protest days in June and August when they made their children stay home from school to protest the district’s approach to LGBTQ+ education, furthering divisions. School district data shows that on those days, some schools saw as many as 60% of their students absent. Districtwide, the average percentage of absences were over 20% for both protests.
The closeted woman in her 30s worried the ultimate effect of these political battles would be more queer Armenians with lives like hers: “Someone who’s afraid to be out in public. Someone who’s afraid to live my authentic life. Someone who is afraid of people who love me. Who would wish that upon their children?”
‘An uphill battle’
By late summer, Adamian and other Galas activists said they were exhausted and demoralized. They had spent months showing up, speaking out and fielding misinformation– all while feeling much less safe in public themselves.
When the anti-LGBTQ+ campaign in Glendale had started, Adamian said, he had reached out for help to both prominent Armenian American community groups, as well as larger mainstream LGBTQ+ organizations. The initial response, he said, had been rejection or silence.
Galas kept working on its slow, local strategies to build inclusion, he said: support groups for family members of queer Armenians held over Armenian coffee, poetry readings, a traditional craft fair featuring local queer artisans. But even when the Glendale school board controversy fell out of the headlines, the harassment did not stop.
In July, the GUSD Parents’ Voices account posted multiple videos on the theme of “Who is Erik Adamian?” “Are these really the people you want influencing your child’s education?” the account asked. There were hundreds of comments, many harsh and personal. “I wish these two were in Russia, they would have beaten the shit out of their head in no time,” one person wrote. Among the most hurtful comments, Adamian said, were those saying “that person is not Armenian” or “we don’t claim him”.
In August, another Instagram account posted photographs of posters around Glendale with the names and faces of Armenian teachers and school board members, under the headline “Glendale Groomer Watch”.
2023 was Galas’ 25th anniversary as an organization, and, trying to focus on the positive, the group held a big event in September, with 200 participants sharing a meal and enjoying Armenian music and dancing, including one performance that would become controversial: an Armenian drag queen.
Before Galas members had even finished cleaning up after the event, footage from the anniversary had been leaked online, and soon the drag performance was being denounced as cultural appropriation and a violation of Armenian womanhood, because the performer had worn, and then taken off, a daraz, the traditional Armenian women’s dress.
That same week, a standoff between Armenia and Azerbaijan had suddenly exploded, and tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians began fleeing their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed territory within Azerbaijan, in what Armenian officials called an ethnic cleansing.
Over the next weeks, as the conflict in Artsakh sparked a major refugee crisis and Armenian Americans staged protests and raised money for refugee relief, the online videos and comments criticizing Galas for “desecrating” Armenian culture continued. It almost felt as if queer Armenians and their supporters were being treated as another enemy, Adamian said.
“We are, in fact, a living, breathing commitment to unconditional love towards being Armenian,” Adamian said.
By November, a new anonymous Glendale Instagram account was posting videos about Adamian and Galas, attacking “Armenians who are traitors” and urging people to vote for Glendale’s most prominent parents’ rights activists, who were now running for school board.
Adamian said that months into the tensions, he still didn’t fully understand what had happened: “The question ‘why?’ is what keeps going in my head,” he said. “It is a very uphill battle.”
