Gay Latinos emerge as key to promoting mutual support between immigrants rights and LGBTQ camps. Art by Hector Silva www.artbyhector.com

In the midst of the national push to get Congress to vote on the DREAM Act (it has now been tentatively scheduled to be voted on November 29th in the House of Representatives and Senator Reid has said that he will bring it up for a Senate vote on as a stand-alone bill), Project Economic Refugee has been drawing parallels from the coincedental intersection in time between the DREAM Act and the other major piece of legislation that many progressive activists are trying to push: the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  Most specifically, Project Economic Refugee has been arguing for mutual empathy for the purpose of promoting the idea that we have much work to do to instill a sense of compassion and respect for “the other” in both the Latino communities and in the gay community, with a special focus on the call to foster stronger support for a humane comprehensive immigration reform among the LGBTQ community.

As the vote for both Don’t Ask Don’t Tell & the DREAM Act loom closer, it has been fascinating to see the underlying similarities between the experience of being gay and the experience of being an undocumented youth in America.  Just this week, we had a couple of cases, in Fresno State and in Miami Dade College’s InterAmerican campus, that received major national attention because of college students being “outed” or “coming out” as undocumented (or as the media derisively called them, “illegal immigrants”) and subsequently finding themselves stigmatized by the larger society even though that by growing up their entire lives in this country and for all intents and purposes, these young students are as American as any other U.S. citizen.

Another source of similarities between the movement to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell & the DREAM Act is the drama that is unfolding in the courts, as judges try to address legalese questions related to policy in the face of inaction in Congress.  Most everyone has heard of the litigation in the courts unfolding regarding Don’t Ask Don’t Tell being declared unconstitutional.  Thus, with the recent unanimous decision by the California Supreme Court ruling that undocumented individuals (which are bound to be mostly youth) were eligible for in-state tuiton rates in that state’s colleges and universities, one cannot help but draw even more parallels with the judicial drama Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is undergoing. 

Going beyond Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, similarities between the larger fight to solve the humanitarian crisis going on in our borders every day and the larger fight to achieve equality for gay rights in our country are also striking and intriguing. For example, the underlying theme of a community rallying to fight intolerance and bigotry as in the “It Gets Better Campaign” could very well apply to help alleviate the discriminations immigrant teens youth sometimes face, just as I argued in this post.  The “It Gets Better Campaign” certainly applies to gay Latinos in the more immediate sense, as xQSí Magazine recently zeroed on in this recent video they produced and that was featured on HispanicLA with LGBTQ young adults telling gay Latino teens in Spanish that it does “get better” for them too.  Moreover, it seems that gay Latinos are emerging in this intersection of LGBTQ rights and immigrants’ rights as integral to foster mutual understanding between the two camps. 

Many of them are already doing outreach to the Latino community to promote more understanding regarding the experience of being gay and I wouldn’t be surprised if some are also doing outreach to non-Latino gays to promote education about why we should have comprehensive immigration reform and why it’s important that as a society we do not de-humanize the debate with words like “illegal alien” slurs that are the equivalent of calling someone a “faggot”.  In fact, we may have started to see some of the fruits of this mutual understanding, as recently we saw this inspiring gesture of kinship between the two groups; via Newsobserver.com: