➤ HOUSING WORKS, from p.5
zation “to sustain the thrift stores
and keep providing health care
services for New Yorkers experiencing
homelessness and facing
HIV and/ or COVID-19.”
“We’re so thankful to our volunteers
whose contributions are helping
Housing Works carry out its
mission of fi ghting HIV/ AIDS and
homelessness, especially through
COVID-19,” Bernardo said. “Every
single dollar that comes into this
store helps us provide more services
for those most in need during
this pandemic.”
Workers, including those still
employed at Housing Works, continued
to express shock about the
actions of an organization that
once developed a well-established
reputation for standing up for progressive
causes and marginalized
communities. Brian Fleurantin, a
care manager at Housing Works’
downtown Brooklyn location at 57
Willoughby Street, joined the organization
two years ago with that
reputation in mind.
“This is really frustrating because
this company presents itself
as a progressive vanguard,”
Fleurantin said as he underscored
the way the organization has
branded itself as one that stands
up for racial justice and the queer
community. “But they’re really underhanded
in how they deal with
labor. When we fi ght it, we can
really show what they’re doing is
wrong.”
The unionization effort has undergone
twists and turns since
it went public almost a year ago
when a wide range of local elected
offi cials stood with workers and
demanded that King stop standing
in their way.
It was just weeks before the city
was ambushed by the pandemic
when workers fi led for an election
with the NLRB’s regional offi ce
in Brooklyn. While the pandemic
temporarily paused the union
drive, the Brooklyn-based NLRB
offi ce ruled on July 9 that the election
should proceed.
Yet, right before ballots were
slated to be mailed out, Housing
Works stepped in with its appeal
to the NLRB’s higher-ups in Washington.
Housing Works provided Gay
City News with an email King sent
to workers on July 22 when he
said he was supportive of the right
of workers to vote in a union election,
but appealed because the organization
underwent signifi cant
changes during the pandemic and
he wanted those changes to be
taken into consideration.
In that email, King lodged accusations
against RWDSU, arguing
that the union “feels differently”
about allowing all workers to vote
and “does not want our newest
frontline workers to have a vote”
because, according to King, the
union did not want to consider the
staffi ng changes that took place in
recent months.
But workers and the union have
drilled the message that King and
Housing Works are deliberately
trying to keep postponing an election
at the direction of their law
fi rm, Seyfarth Shaw, LLC.
For now, workers are anxiously
waiting for the NLRB’s DC offi ce to
make a decision on Housing Works’
appeal — but they’re not getting
their hopes up as Trump’s appointees
at the NLRB weigh the issue.
“Considering Housing Works
has been able to successfully delay
the election, they’re setting a really
dangerous precedent,” Fleurantin
said.
➤ QATAR WORLD CUP, from p.11
proceedings regarding “criminal
mismanagement… and misappropriation.”
Rasha Younes, a researcher for
Human Rights Watch’s Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
Rights Program, neatly captured
the insidious nature of Qatar’s
response to complaints about its
anti-LGBTQ posture. When the
monarchy declared that “everyone
is welcome,” Younes argued, the
“decision to temporarily suspend
local norms has the paradoxical
effect of bolstering the idea that
same-sex desire and gender variance
are a peculiar preoccupation
of outsiders.”
And despite Qatar’s insistence
that “everyone is welcome” at the
2022 World Cup, that has never
been the Gulf State’s posture toward
foreign visitors. In 1996, according
to the US Department of
State’s human rights report, an
American citizen there was sentenced
to 90 lashes and a sixmonth
prison term for “homosexual
activity.” The following year,
Qatar’s regime deported 36 gay
Filipino workers.
Last November, the travel website
Asher & Lyric wrote that Qatar
is the second-most dangerous
country for the LGBTQ community.
The top 10 list of most dangerous
countries for LGBTQ tourists
also included the Islamic Republic
of Iran, Nigeria, the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
Asher & Lyric used the following
factors to assess the dangers
of each country: criminalization of
LGBTQ sexual relations, the status
of same-sex marriage rights,
the existence of LGBTQ worker
protections, legal protections
against anti-LGBTQ discrimination,
criminalization of hate-based
violence, adoption recognition, illegal
LGBTQ relationships and acts,
and propaganda/ morality laws.
Unfortunately, FIFA is not the
only world-class institution that
has cosigned Qatar’s homophobia.
This past February, Northwestern
University, the highly respected
Evanston, Illinois-based
institution, capitulated to anti-gay
hysteria in the Gulf state and canceled
a music event at its Qatar
campus with an openly gay singer
from the Lebanese indie rock band
Mashrou’ Leila.
Writing on the website of Human
Rights Watch in June, Younes, the
LGBTQ researcher, noted with
respect to the band cancellation,
“When Qatar paints LGBT rights
as an imperialist agenda, it leaves
LGBT people reluctant to speak out
against government oppression for
fear of being labeled ‘traitors,’ as
many LGBT Qataris have told Human
Rights Watch”
FIFA surely knew in advance of
awarding the World Cup to Qatar
that the Doha regime punishes
homosexual acts with one to three
years in prison, fl ogging, or execution
under its Islamic Sharia law
system.
Making matters worse, Qatar
continues its state-sponsored homophobia
unabated. The prestige
of being awarded the most important
world soccer competition has
not infl uenced a change in Qatar’s
anti-gay behavior.
The Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI), a nonprofi t organization
based in Washington
that monitors media in the Arab
and Muslim world, translated a
virulently homophobic June article
from a media adviser to Qatar’s
Foreign Ministry who argued
homosexuality is a grave sin and
unnatural.
In her diatribe against gays
in Al Sharq, a Doha-based proregime
daily newspaper, Qatari
journalist Na’ima ’Abd al-Wahhab
al-Mutawa’a wrote, “A grave issue
that can already be described as
a phenomenon, and which we can
no longer keep silent about, is the
warm attitude evident on many
social networks — especially on
Snapchat — toward homosexuality,
which deviates from the nature
Allah bestowed upon males
and females, and toward the phenomenon
we see in our society of
young men looking like women and
young women looking like men.”
The title of her article is “Keep
Deviant Ideas Away from Your
Children.”
Free media are nonexistent in
Qatar. The emir of Qatar, Sheikh
Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, controls
all press in the monarchy.
In response to anti-gay Qatari
sociologist Abd al-Aziz Khazraj al-
Ansari blaming the August Beirut
port explosion on Lebanese girls,
homosexuals, and plastic surgery
in the Eastern Mediterranean
country, the famed British LGBTQ
and human rights campaigner Peter
Tatchell told me, “On the issue
of homosexuality, Ansari should
look in his own backyard of Qatar,
where homosexuality is just as
prevalent as in Lebanon but hidden
behind a mask of hypocrisy. And,
unlike racist Qatar, most Lebanese
do not treat migrant workers like
semi-slave labor.”
Qatar’s regime is, of course, in
a state of denial about its LGBTQ
community. FIFA has rewarded
Qatar’s incorrigibly reactionary
homophobia. There is still time for
FIFA to relocate the World Cup to
a country that does not criminalize
homosexuality. If the tournament
takes place in the Gulf state,
it will only embolden Qatar’s lethal
homophobic system. Britain and
other countries could easily host
the tournament. The time is ripe
to relocate the World Cup.
September 24 - October 7,18 2020 | GayCityNews.com
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