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'Where are you going to be safe?': Arizona LGBTQ+ community on edge ahead of election

Phoenix Pride 2018
Jackie Hai/KJZZ
A pride flag during Phoenix Pride in 2018.

Anxiety is running high in the LGBTQ-plus community in Arizona, where the Republican Party has been stoking fear of transgender persons and their allies through repeated campaign ads and anti-queer messaging.

In one of former President Donald Trump’s latest campaign ads, he tells voters that Vice President Kamala Harris is for ”they/them,” while he is for “you.”

"It's strange to me that rather than simply say, ‘OK, this person is different than I am, and I'm still going to treat them as a person with decency and respect,’ that we've come to a place where we politicize it and we other people to the point where it's not safe for them to come out in public," said Jessyca Leach, the executive director of the Southwest Center for HIV and AIDS in Phoenix.

"I'm a queer person. I have a child who identifies as agender. And so I’m looking at my 13-year-old and thinking, ‘Oh God, where are you going to be safe?’"

And it’s overwhelming, Leach said.

"There's a ton of fear; there's a ton of anxiety, not just from within my agency, within all agencies that represent communities like this. And there's also funding tied to this."

"There's also fear in our community of, how are we going to provide the needed services to ensure that we can continue to thrive?"
Jessyca Leach

A large part of Leach’s funding for VIV-prevention program PrEP, as well as for STI testing, come from the federal government.

"So there's not just fear in the community about their identities or the political ramifications of one or the other winning," Leach said. "There's also fear in our community of, how are we going to provide the needed services to ensure that we can continue to thrive?"

Aaron Tax is with SAGE, a national LGBTQ-elder advocacy organization, and said this kind of rhetoric isn’t new, but it causes fear.

"Because you have someone with quite a large mouthpiece denigrating a whole class of people."

And Tax worries about how a Trump presidency could impact their rights.

"But we hope they understand that this too shall pass and eventually we'll get through this and eventually we will continue to see progress," Tax said.

KJZZ senior field correspondent Kathy Ritchie has 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local media outlets — nearly a decade of it has been spent in public media.
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