Purple Rain: How Queer Politicians of Color are Swinging Georgia Left

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Dec 31

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When the TV networks finally called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – after four days of ballot counting that turned CNN’s John King into a national treasure and everyone else into an amorphous pool of stress – the footage of American cities celebrating made the whole wait worth it. Whenever the cameras flashed to Atlanta, one could often see, beneath the feet of the cheering crowd, that now-iconic crosswalk on 10th and Piedmont, painted an ebullient rainbow.

It was a striking reminder of the city’s character, both its decades-long history as a queer Southern haven, and its emerging identity as a progressive powerhouse. As leaders and locals alike enthuse over Georgia’s surprising left-ward turn – voting for a Democrat for the first time since 1992 – credit for this victory is finally being given where it is long overdue: to activists of color in general, and Stacey Abrams in particular. The spotlight on Abrams, however, can eclipse the larger picture of transformation in Georgia, and the diverse agents of that transformation. One such agent is a growing group of young progressive leaders, who are winning political campaigns in Atlanta and beyond. Many of them are Black and brown, some of them are queer, and a small but vibrant number of them are both. I talked with a handful of Georgia’s progressive leaders to find out how queer, female, and non-white politicians are changing the state’s political hues.

One thing to remember when it comes to politics: in Georgia, like elsewhere, to be in politics and not be a white, straight, rich, Christian man is vanishingly rare. The 116th U.S. Congress – the most diverse in American history – is 76% male and 79% white, and Georgia’s numbers are similar.

But those ratios are changing. While the Trump era has unleashed a Pandora’s box of American horrors, it has also inspired a new generation of political activism, with a coalition of diverse candidates built in resistance to the patriarchal white supremacy of Trumpism. Since 2016, the Georgia General Assembly alone has welcomed three queer politicians of color: Renitta Shannon (84th District), a bisexual Black woman; Park Cannon, (58th), a gay Black woman; and Sam Park (101st), a gay Asian-American. These three join Representative Karla Drenner, for years the only out member of the Georgia Assembly, to quadruple the number of LGBTQ+ representatives.

All of these new members are progressive Democrats, committed to protecting Georgia’s vulnerable communities. And as the case for diverse representation is making clear, when marginalized people run for office to protect the most vulnerable, they don’t do so with an abstract idea of who those people are – those people are them.

“I know what it’s like to be hated,” explains Liliana Bakhtiari, a queer Muslim woman of Iranian descent who is running for Atlanta’s city council. “I know what it’s like to be hungry, homeless…to lose work for my gender identity.” Bakhtiari, who grew up in Atlanta, left her conservative Muslim parents’ home at 18 to come out as gay. She ended up homeless, drifting from couch to couch and struggling to get by. Today, 14 years later, she’s a homeowner, a human rights activist, and running for office as a proud queer woman, with her long-term partner Kris – and her parents - by her side.

For Bakhtiari, the struggles she’s faced as a queer woman of color have given her first-hand experience with the issues that plague Atlanta’s vulnerable communities, and that experience informs the kind of representative she aims to be. “It influences everything,” she told me one recent sunny afternoon. “I think it makes me a better advocate, and a better representative.” She notes that she’s always going to run on her platform, but platforms are always personal: politicians’ agendas are molded by their experiences in the world. And those experiences help diverse lawmakers shape legislation to make room for people like them.

Nowhere is this dynamic potential more visible than in Georgia, where newly elected politicians of color are pushing back against a tidal wave of conservative policy making driven by white lawmakers. Take the state’s “exact match” voter registration law, passed in 2017, which required that an applicant’s name match exactly between voter registration forms and records from the Department of Driver Services – down to every hyphen, apostrophe, and space. This law made national headlines when it resulted in the delay of 53,000 voter registration applications – the vast majority of them voters of color – ahead of the 2018 governor’s race. After a flurry of lawsuits and public backlash, the General Assembly took the law back up in 2019.

By this time, however, the General Assembly had its first Asian-American Democrat representative, Bee Nguyen (District 89), who knew firsthand how often government agencies wreak havoc on people’s names. To get her fellow lawmakers to understand the disparate impact of an exact-match policy on people like her, Nguyen – who is Vietnamese-American and whose last name is pronounced “win” – collected every misspelling of her own name in Assembly documents and presented them to the committee. As it happened, her last name was even misspelled on the roster of that committee. “80% of frozen registrations are people of color,” she wrote on Twitter, “and it just so happens my name & Renitta Shannon’s name are misspelled in our own committee notices.” Rep. Nguyen wrote an amendment to remove the exact-match policy, which passed as part of a larger voting law. On Twitter, an activist noted wryly that even during the hearing to repeal the policy, the committee chairman consistently referred to Nguyen as “Nugent.”

“I don’t know what would have happened if she wasn’t there and didn’t keep the receipts – literal receipts – of the misspelling of her name,” says Maria Banjo, an Atlanta attorney and political strategist who works closely with the Democratic party in Georgia. To Banjo, the power of minority representation lies not only in its advocacy for those same minority groups, but in those representatives’ ability to give a human face to issues that may seem abstract to their majority colleagues.

“If you don’t have any voices that can say, ‘Hey, let me tell you why this is racist, sexist, homophobic, let me give you a personal story,’ it’s going to be harder to convince others that their way of doing things may be problematic.” She adds, “It’s harder to pass these horrific laws when you’re sharing a (work) suite with someone who is going to be directly affected by it.”

Representative Renitta Shannon, who has represented the 84th District since 2017, agrees. Her name was also misspelled in the committee documents shared by Rep. Nguyen, yet another reminder that the Georgia General Assembly was not originally created by or for people like her. Rep. Shannon moved from activism to politics in order to change that story. As a bisexual Black woman, she is in the crucible of Georgia’s changing cultural climate – and to her, it’s no accident that so many of Georgia’s voting advocacy organizations are led by queer women of color.

“We understand that our lives are very intersectional,” she told me. “I’m not only Black, I’m not only a woman, not only queer.” Allowing lawmakers with intersecting identities into the legislative process provides insight into the real-world effects of legislation, which results in better, more inclusive laws and policy.

This political progress begets yet more progress: having made it to the Gold Dome, Rep. Shannon is committed to bringing others with her. In 2017, she co-founded Her Term, an organization dedicated to helping progressive women run for office. In the past three years, Her Term has flipped seats across Georgia, helping to grow female representation at the state and national level. These new female lawmakers include U.S. Representative Lucy McBath, a Black woman who turned Cobb County’s 6th District blue for the first time in nearly 40 years. McBath had been a political activist since 2012, when her teenage son Jordan was shot by a white man over a dispute about music. While McBath had been encouraged to run for office by other progressive organizations, it was Rep. Shannon who convinced her. “I took her out to breakfast and explained why I thought she should move from activism…to actually running for office,” Shannon, who made the same move herself, explained to me. “She said that a lot of folks had talked to her about running for office, but they never clearly communicated the impact she could have.” That person-to-person strategy is growing progressive movements nationwide, opening doors for more diverse candidates to walk through and change history.

Tomorrow, these leaders may bend the arc of human history, but today, they are busy flipping states: Biden’s win in Georgia, Rep. Shannon explains, is thanks to activists within diverse communities across the state, who made the case for what voting can achieve in that community. Political consultant Maria Banjo affirmed the payoff of this grassroots, every-single-voter strategy, which has garnered national attention through Stacey Abrams. “I can’t tell you how many times (we’ve) knocked on someone’s door and they’re like, ‘Wow, I have never in my twenty years here had someone knock on my door’.”

By appealing to voters from their own communities, queer, female, and non-white activists and politicians are creating seismic waves across Georgia’s electoral topography. The stakes are high, both at home and in D.C.: Georgia’s runoff election on January 5th will determine control of the Senate, with huge implications for the Biden administration’s agenda. Whatever happens next week, the trend is undeniable: Georgia is shifting blue, thanks to the efforts of leadership within marginalized communities.

What struck me in my conversations with these leaders, however, was their conviction that minority representation is not just good for each minority group, but for everyone – that the best policies and laws arrive through the filter of diverse lawmakers’ varied experiences. City Council candidate Liliana Bakhtiari put it this way: “The more diverse we are with our stakeholders, the more inclusive, sustainable, and well-rounded our solutions become.” Representative Renitta Shannon seconded this: “When you elect queer women of color, you actually get much better policy,” she told me. “People are bringing their whole selves…looking through a lens of making sure we bring everyone along and protect everyone.” When government is entirely white, male, straight, and Christian, the policies they create reflect that. Queer, female, and non-white lawmakers help to close the gaps in those policies, to better serve the entire community.

Before we got off the phone, Rep. Shannon thought of another way her identity as a queer woman helps her fight hard for her constituents, no matter who they are. She contemplated how to phrase it politely, and then she laughed.

“It is just not our top priority to make sure that men don’t think that we’re a bitch.”

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If you haven’t early voted, plese be sure and vote on January 5th for the Georgia runoff.
You can find more information about polling places here.

Rachel Garbus is a writer, satirist, and oral history podcast-maker based in Atlanta, GA. To keep up with the lesbian Joneses, she co-parents an anxious dog with her girlfriend and goes too far out of her way to recycle glass. Follow her on Twitter @rachel_garbus.

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