Crying On LinkedIn + Asking You to Help Make The World Safer: IDAHOBIT

"Peace can only be possible if we protect each other"

Last year I completed a monthslong six-continent Global Peace Tour to conduct ethnographic and cultural research, and to train leaders from more than 150 countries how to build positive peace.

The peace tour was focused on providing leaders with the skills that they needed to address attitudes and beliefs about inequalities and how to reduce direct, structural, and cultural violence in their communities. As a global leader who is part of the Queer community, I noticed a pattern in their shared concerns about gender-based violence and discrimination in their communities - both in terms of violence against women and violence against the LGBTQI communities.

Today is International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia #IDAHOBIT and I'm sharing my experiences engaging with leaders from these communities and my experience in Berlin's Memorial for the Homosexuals who were Persecuted by Nazis with LinkedIn to ask for your help in making communities safer.

• Phase 1 Africa and the Middle East: My wife met me at a conference in Mauritius. We had the unique opportunity to normalize same-sex partnerships, serve as role models, and answer questions for those who had never met a couple like us before. Leaders from this region who had vastly different experiences. A few were able to share their sexual orientation somewhat publicly. Others shared that they would never share this part of their identity because to do so would be a death sentence, and they explained the realities of how they have seen families, the state, religious groups, and communities torture and kill their peers.
• Phase 2 Europe: While in France, I had the chance to engage with Queer leaders at a local pub where the Sa?ne and Rh?ne meet and found that their experiences with the freedom to share their identity were more bifurcated than expected - even across six of the most LGBTQI countries. Some lived openly in countries where their rights are fiercely protected, while others still had concerns that telling others would put their lives and careers at risk.
• Phase 3 Americas + the Caribbean: While in South America, I met leaders who told me about extensive violence including homicides towards the LGBTQI communities in Latin America and the Caribbean and their deep desire to make their communities safer for this community and to protect their legal, physical, and mental well-being. It was helpful to learn about cultural attitudes, beliefs, and dangers to understand the tensions between progress and tradition in order to keep allies safe in their advocacy.
• Phase 4 Asia Pacific: Conversations about LGBTQIA rights in South Korea were dynamic and hard. Among the very secretly Queer leaders in this group, I learned about the very real risks that leaders face for being associated with members of this community and how their mental health is impacted by having to shut down an entire part of their identity.

On Phase 5 of the Global Peace Tour, I took a train from Amsterdam to Berlin before making my way to the Balkins to learn more about Post-Wall Berlin and to see the Memorial to the Murdered Jews. While in Berlin, I learned about a much less popular historical site that I had to prepare myself to visit, the Memorial for the Homosexuals who Were Persecuted by the Nazis.

"This memorial is important from two points of view - to commemorate the victims, but also to make clear that even today, after we have achieved so much in terms of equal treatment, discrimination still exists daily," Klaus Wowereit (New York Times, 2008)

All around the world today, hard-fought advances in the rights and safety of the LGBTQIA are being shoved back, and my Queer siblings and peers are afraid. In the United States, the Institute of Economics and Peace and Social Progress Imperative have been tracking the rapid deterioration of the Acceptance of the Rights of Others in the United States and the rapid deterioration in the city, state, and national social progress of the LGBTQI and Gender Non-Binary communities (particularly towards individuals and communities of color) that accompany the surge in hate crimes towards this community since 2016.

Sharing this tearful tribute on International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia #IDAHOBIT.

It serves as an authentic tribute to all of the leaders whose stories of fear, discrimination, and violence I carry with me in the pursuit to create a more inclusive, just, and safe world; to each person I've met during the Peace Is Possible Global Peace Tour; and to all the members of my global community

Sharing this full-length unedited video of my experience - crying and all - with an ask that all LinkedIn connections make a commitment to accept the rights of others today.

The video is 6 minutes long. Making a commitment takes less than one minute. Sharing takes seconds. Please watch, pledge, and share with your networks.

"Transcript:

Hey Everyone, This is Ashlea and I am reaching out from the memorial for the homosexuals (who were persecuted by Nazis) in Berlin, which is located across the street from the Memorial for the Murdered Jews - and my heart breaks for this one

There’s a pretty big difference, a juxtaposition between the two monuments - one is a large community of blocks, and then this one, which is a monument to all the people who were gays, lesbians, who were rounded up in Nazi Germany and murdered at a rate of genocide that we don’t talk about as much as we should. 

And it stands completely alone. Much like a lot of the members of our community, wherever they are in the world. It’s completely alone, it’s a singular structure in a park 

And it’s really really hard because in a lot of the work that I do is promoting gender equality, it's promoting decreased gender-based violence, but the murders of all of the members of the LGBTQ community and the ongoing violence and threats to members of this community throughout the world - it is gender-based violence - it is genocide. 

What’s harder about this is that - every day that I walk through the world, or I walk somewhere, or my wife is somewhere, I have to be worried. I have to be worried. 

And I have so many friends who have reached out from all over the world and said - you’re so lucky to live in the US where you have rights - where members of the LGBTQ community are safe. 

But we’re not safe. 

And people who live in different places - aren’t safe. 

Friends in certain countries in the coalition of peacebuilders that I’ve made - aren’t safe

Their families - aren’t safe. 

There are still people who believe that you should round us up, and kill us all. 

That something unnatural about us - makes us deserve genocide 

And it’s so hard, it's really really hard.

I’ve been advocating for rights for this community for 30 years.

And there’s still hate speech every day.

And there are still people who think that they should just kill us all - and throw us all in a pile, all by ourselves and that no one would care.

So whoever is out there who thinks that it’s okay to believe that people in the LGBTQ community should just be like everyone else or that it’s okay to hate us, to despise us, to make our rights impossible, to make our daily lives scary - it’s not okay.

It’s not okay.

It wasn’t okay for the people who are represented here in this monument 

It's not okay for the people who are in our communities today 

This monument is harder - because it’s me. It would have been me. I’m not Jewish - and what happened across the street and the monument for the murdered Jews is horrifying.

But the isolation - the isolation of this monument is heartbreaking. 

So if you are a from a community who thinks it's okay to hate members of the LGBTQ community 

If you think it's okay to turn the page when you see people who are queer or transgender or the genderqueer or gender non conforming community be killed, just say ‘oh, it's okay, I mean they were disgusting anyway, it's not okay’. Do better. 

Do better. Fight hate. Fight. Hate. 

Any time you hear homophobic language

Anytime you hear transphobic language 

Anytime you see someone who's trying to go to the bathroom, or walk through the streets, or live their life, or have their rights - and you see that other people believe that it is okay to treat them unjustly, unfairly, for them to continue to persecute them, murder them, kill them by the tens of thousands, Hang their bodies as a display in town, cut their heads off, send their body parts wherever they may wish, into a stranded park. 

It's not okay. 

I would like to hold all of you accountable for decreasing hate against the LGBTQ community wherever you live, wherever it is not safe. Wherever it is not safe. 

I hold you accountable and I am making an ask that you try harder. I will continue to try hard for every single community of people experiencing inequality, discrimination, murder, and genocide. And that’s the pact. 

Peace can only be possible if we protect each other. 

And as long as anyone believes that this would be okay today - you’re failing."