Youthalizm

Our mission at BreakOUT! is to end the criminalization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth to build a safer and more just New Orleans. Building on the rich cultural tradition of resistance in the South, we build the power of LGBTQ youth ages thirteen to twenty-five directly impacted by the criminal justice system through youth organizing, healing justice, and leadership development programs. All of BreakOUT!’s programming and campaigns work in tandem to move us closer toward our vision of creating a city where all people can move down the street without fear.

The We Deserve Better Campaign is BreakOUT!’s first and oldest campaign. Formed in 2011, BreakOUT! began working with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other community stakeholders to bring attention to the experiences of the LGBTQ community in New Orleans—and in particular African American transgender women and LGBTQ youth—impacted by the criminal or juvenile justice system. The federal investigation of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) that resulted named discriminatory policing toward the LGBTQ community as an area of top concern, and was the first time the DOJ had gone so far as to outline concrete measures to address profiling and discrimination against our community. This moment marked an unprecedented victory for the LGBTQ community, which experiences discriminatory policing. Since then, our campaign has worked to end discriminatory policing practices against LGBTQ youth of color and address “feeders” into the criminal justice system. These “feeders” include the conditions that contribute to LGBTQ youth homelessness as well as the oversurveillance of and police harassment in areas frequented by LGBTQ youth of color.

Fighting the criminalization of LGBTQ and nonbinary youth in New Orleans—the largest city by population in the state of Louisiana, which boasts the highest rate of incarceration in the United States (if you don’t include people awaiting to be sentenced [O’Donoghue 2019])—positions BreakOUT! at the intersection of multiple movements including youth, gender, sexuality, immigration, prison abolition, poor people’s movements, and more.

Context matters to what these intersections mean and Louisiana’s progressive organizations are facing crucial fights this year. These fights include:

• —A heartbeat abortion law which would outlaw abortions as early as six weeks, or as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected (Frazin 2019), which is being challenged by Women With a Vision, local partnerships, collaborations and coalitions of legal, service, and community organizations;

• —The continual rise of surveillance, as exemplified by the Citywide Public Safety Improvement Plan, which invests millions of public dollars toward the 24/7 surveillance and monitoring of our city under the slogan of not only making New Orleans safe, but making it feel safe (Maris Jones 2018);

• —The Crimes Against Nature Law (CANS), which dates back to the nineteenth century and equates adult consensual sex that is not “heterosexual” as “against nature.” A crime against nature is described in Louisiana state law as either of the following: (1) The unnatural carnal copulation by a human being with another of the same sex or opposite sex or with an animal, except that anal sexual intercourse between two human beings shall not be deemed as a crime against nature when done under any of the circumstances (described in R.S. 14:41, 42, 42.1, 43); or (2) The marriage to, or sexual intercourse with, any ascendant or descendant, brother or sister, uncle or niece, aunt or nephew, with knowledge of their relationship.¹ Although the law was amended in 2016, the amendment is not retroactive for individuals who were unlawfully impacted, meaning there are still significant numbers of Black trans women and Black women sex workers who are still on the sex offender registry list for having consensual sex. The law is being challenged by the CANScantSTAND campaign;

• —The continual rise of immigration raids and detainments which is being challenged by the Congress of Day Laborers/Congreso de Jornaleros and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (Burns 2019), who have recently brought attention to the advanced collaboration of local law enforcement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the use of technologies of...