Supporters of LGBTQ+ students rallying in Utah were given protection from protesters hurling insults and misinformation over the weekend by allies dressed as angels, who raised huge fabric “wings” to shield queer marchers.
Members of Brigham Young University’s (BYU) queer community were confronted at a pride event last Saturday by anti-gay students and outside protesters, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, but they found they had an unusual and effective security barrier.
The event was held at a public park in Provo, as clubs for LGBTQ+ people attending Brigham Young are not permitted to gather on campus. The conservative university also forbids “any same-sex romantic partnerships or displays of affection among LGBTQ students”, the Tribune noted.
“My older sister, she’s gay and she used to go to BYU, and she had a really hard time here – she got kicked out,” said Sabrina Wong, a student who was among the angels. “During that time, I didn’t even know she was going through this. She hadn’t even come out to our family.
“She also didn’t have a lot of resources, and that breaks my heart so much,” Wong said.
Protesters’ presence at the event came as many US Republican-led states take steps to limit LGBTQ rights, especially in public educational institutions.
And there are heightened efforts to block queer students from enjoying the same privileges as their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts at religious colleges, such as Yeshiva University in New York’s refusal to recognize a pride group, a dispute that has gone to court.
In Utah, Carolyn Gassert, president of Understanding Sexuality, Gender and Allyship, an LGBTQ+ student group at BYU, said the majority of queer students there are accustomed to hateful language.
“This is the kind of stuff we have to deal with here. It’s not just tonight, we hear these comments in the classroom,” Gassert told the Tribune.
RaYnbow Collective, an organization dedicated to supporting the university’s LGBTQ community, organizes a yearly back-to-school pride gathering as a stand against the anti-queer environment ingrained on campus.
This year’s get-together featured a family-friendly drag show, where children attending with their families sang along to Cyndi Lauper and Ariana Grande songs, with drag performers and alumni taking part.
But protesters turned out, too, some taking up the tools of rightwing and religious zealotry culture wars. They seemed especially incensed by the drag performers, and one nearby resident repeated the kind of false assertions increasingly being used as talking points by more extreme Republican party politics, in particular shouting that “drag is a sexual fetish … this is sexualizing children”.
Some protesters called out “groomer” and “pedophile” to the rallying students. One said “you’re going against God,” while another commented “stop protecting the homos”.
But the student supporters dressed as angels stepped in between the protesters and those gathered for the pride event. Their costumes echoed those worn by LGBTQ+ allies more than a decade ago to block demonstrators belonging to an extremist anti-gay church group who were spewing hate at supporters of the murdered Matthew Shepard.
“Religion has been weaponized against the queer community for a long time,” said BYU senior Maddison Tenney, the founder RaYnbow Collective. “But that needs to end. I believe there’s nothing more divine than who I am as a queer child of God.”
Wong, however, was optimistic that BYU would someday welcome queer students. “It’s so hard for every single LGBTQ student at BYU and any minority, really, at BYU,” Wong reportedly said. “But here’s a lot of us that are different and if we stand together, there’s safety.”
BYU was approached for comment.
Meanwhile, the country singer Maren Morris has raised money for transgender aid after the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson called her a “lunatic” and “fake country music singer”, according to the Daily Beast. Carlson made these statements while introducing Brittany Aldean, who is married to the country singer Jason Aldean.
Aldean spurred controversy after using the caption “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase” on one of her makeup videos, per the website. Morris, one of the people who criticized her, reportedly sold $100,000 in T-shirts that feature the Trans Lifeline phone number with the phrase “lunatic country music person”.
