Anthony Franklin, a gay 21-year-old who grew up in Mid-City, said he wasn’t surprised by Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 presidential election.
Franklin was raised in a “very heavily” Christian household and was bullied for being gay in school. It wasn’t until he graduated from high school and started college at Tulane University that he formed connections with other openly queer people.
At the same time that Franklin began making more queer friends and community at Tulane and around New Orleans, Louisiana’s Republican-led state legislature began advancing anti-LGBTQIA+ bills through the statehouse.
In 2022, the legislature passed a bill banning transgender youth athletes from participating in sports that correspond with their gender identity.
The next year, the legislature passed a ban on gender affirming care for youth. And this year, a trio of bills — one concerning pronouns and deadnames, one banning discussion of gender and sexuality in public schools and one segregating certain public facilities by sex assigned at birth — passed and were signed into law by Gov. Jeff Landry.
Franklin saw all of this happen on the state level — and similar happen in neighboring states in the Deep South — and interpreted it as part of an upswell of anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment across the country.
“It just felt like it was gonna head in that general direction anyways and like the odds are already against us,” he said. “[I was] not surprised … especially with how Louisiana has been with Jeff Landry and all of his anti-LGBTQ laws.”
Franklin spoke with Verite News just after a march to protest Trump that was held the day after the election by a coalition of activist organizations. Representatives of the coalition, which included Unión Migrante and the Queer and Trans Community Action Project, spoke about preparing to fight back against potential attacks from the Trump administration against communities of color, immigrants, poor and working class and LGBTQIA+ people.
“We know the attacks haven’t stopped. … They’re only going to increase,” Naomi Retherford, a member of the Queer and Trans Community Action Project, said at a rally before the march. “With Trump taking the Oval Office and a Republican-controlled Senate, things are going to be worse; [there are] going to be more assaults on queer and trans rights.”
LGBTQIA+ people in New Orleans expressed heartbreak and anxiety in reaction to Trump’s election, anticipating that legislative attacks, hate crimes and general anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment will increase once the President-elect takes office. The same is true around the country. The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ crisis hotline, reported a 700 percent increase in calls after the election.
But people who spoke to Verite News said they are looking for ways to support themselves and each other on the local level by creating and fortifying safe spaces and pressuring local lawmakers to protect citizens.
“I think there’s going to be a bit of a call on us as a community and as individuals to check in with each other and keep up with each other, and make sure we’re safe,” Retherford told Verite after she spoke at the rally. “You know, we do keep us safe in a very, very serious way.”
Pressuring the city
Earlier this year transgender activists demanded that New Orleans adopt policies that would shield residents from anti-trans legislation then making its way through the state legislature, becoming a “sanctuary city” for trans people.
The policies would be similar to ones adopted by cities across the U.S., including New Orleans, to protect undocumented immigrants from federal regulations and enforcement strategies and improve their access to social services.
Similar policies have been adopted in Democratic-led states like California, where sanctuary measures were adopted in Sacramento and San Francisco, and even cities in Republican-led states such as Kansas City, Missouri and Austin, Texas have policies with specific protections for LGBTQIA+ people, including prohibitions against using city resources to enforce state laws that ban gender-affirming care. No such policies have been adopted by the New Orleans City Council. No council members responded to requests for comment by publication time.
The city has not been silent on LGBTQIA+ rights. In resolutions adopted in 2021 and 2023, the council expressed opposition to anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and committed to ensuring safety and equality for people with diverse sexualities and gender identities.
In 2013, the New Orleans Police Department adopted a policy — since updated in 2017 and 2018 — advising police on how to treat LGBTQIA+ residents equally, including guidance on respecting people’s gender expression and identity. The New Orleans municipal bill of rights — part of the city charter — prohibits the passage of city laws that “arbitrarily and capriciously or unreasonably discriminate” against people based on sex, sexual orientation or gender identification. But none of those measures go as far as the sanctuary resolutions passed elsewhere.
Over the past several months, the activists who were pushing for sanctuary status turned their focus to protesting the federal government’s support for Israel’s ongoing military attacks on Palestine. But their demands for protection for themselves and other queer and trans New Orleanians resurfaced at the Nov. 6 Trump protest.
“We have our effort to make New Orleans a queer and trans sanctuary city, to push our City Council to put some energy behind their resolutions and actually resist the state legislature,” Retherford said to a crowd of supporters at the protest.
But queer and trans New Orleanians who spoke to Verite News want the council to go further than resolutions and pass ordinances with explicit protections and pledges to increase social support for their community.
Quest Riggs, another member of the Queer and Trans Community Action Project, said that next year’s upcoming City Council and mayoral elections provide an opportunity to pressure local politicians and aspiring electeds to support policies that will protect and support LGBTQIA+ residents.
“We can put more of a fire behind them to take a more powerful and a more organized stance because things like sanctuary city and protecting the rights of LGBT people in a red state are popular demands in our city,” she said. “There’s been attempts in the past, but the problem is that the politicians are very quick to take the easy road and to make conciliations towards forces that are just going to bleed our people more and more.”
Fortifying community
The same month that trans activists made their demands for sanctuary status known, a new LGBTQIA+ community center, the New Orleans Pride Center, opened in Bayou St. John.
Since then, it’s become a hub for New Orleans’ LGBTQIA+ community — with game nights, community organizing meetings, theater rehearsals and workshops. The day after the election, the center hosted a community event for people to process their emotions related to the results.
Kyle DeVries, the president of the Pride Center’s board of directors, said he screamed at the top of his lungs when he saw the election results early Wednesday morning, “just to let out a bit of emotion.”
“To see the large swaths of Americans that have decided to pivot towards him, choose him over the first woman of color president, and choose hatred and divisiveness and the erosion of rights for so many people, it was hard,” DeVries said in a phone interview.
“It was really hard. It was a little heartbreaking to see, to see that America is happy to choose racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, basically hatred overall, and mostly for the sake of their perceived pocketbook.”
He said that LGBTQIA+ people he knows are feeling “a lot of fear and anger” about the Trump campaign’s ads attacking transgender people, the outcome of the election and incoming administration. Republicans spent $215 million on TV ads attacking transgender and gender nonconforming people during the 2024 election cycle, the Associated Press reported.
“It was a gut punch to see that that was successful, that our trans community, trans family know that they’re going to continue to be targeted first and foremost,” he said.
In a city that’s already a refuge for LGBTQIA+ people in the Deep South, DeVries hopes that the community center can provide an extra layer of protection and support to withstand expected attacks on LGBTQIA+ rights during the Trump administration.
“I think very much there’s this need for a safe space for all the amazing community organizations and projects that are already here,” he said. “And we’re just getting started.”
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