The Georgia GOP is trying to bring back Jim Crow. These Queer Lawmakers of color are having none of it.

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Sep 2

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Representative Park Cannon and Renitta Shannon

It’s summer in Georgia, y’all, and that means everything is hot – but nothing is hotter to me in this hot moment than a phalanx of young queer politicians fighting the GOP’s recent attempts to turn back the clock to Jim Crow.

After a trio of Democratic victories here helped put President Biden in the White House and delivered him a Senate majority, the Republican-led Georgia Legislature wasted no time enacting the most restrictive voting law in over half a century. But this time, there’s some gays in the House (and the Senate), and they’re not having it.

In the past five years, a wave of queer politicians of color has swept into office across the state, boosting the number of out LGBTQ+ members of the General Assembly from one to five. This group is proudly queer, defiantly progressive, and determined to refute the long-held Democratic logic that only milquetoast centrists can win and hold office in Georgia. I talked to a few of them about the state’s new draconian voting law, the challenges it poses for queer and trans voters, and how they’re fighting like hell to keep Georgia blue.

“Well first of all, I know I won’t be the last queer person of color to be unlawfully arrested for showing up to protest.” State Representative Park Cannon (she/her, 58th District) knows firsthand how far the GOP establishment will go to crack down on critics of voter suppression. On March 26, Rep. Cannon knocked on the door where Governor Brian Kemp was signing SB202 into law in a private news conference (under an oil painting of a slave plantation, no less). She was swiftly handcuffed and dragged out of the state capitol by state troopers. The charges against her were ultimately dropped, but the shocking footage made headlines around the world. After visiting her in Fulton County jail, Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock called her arrest an “attempt to squeeze the people out of their own democracy.”

Despite Republicans’ insistence that the new law merely makes voting safer, Representative Cannon – who won her seat in 2016 at the ripe age of 24 – was under no illusions about its true intent. “Everything was unusual about how the GOP moved this bill into law,” she told me. “If you want to do election overhaul, you start by bringing people into the conversation.” Instead, lawmakers simply looked for parts of the system that successfully turned out Democratic voters, and curtailed those as much as possible. Absentee ballot requests, ballot drop-boxes, out-of-precinct provisional balloting, and mobile voting are all severely restricted in the new law. Governor Kemp signed the new law a mere seven hours after GOP lawmakers pushed it through, underscoring how little Republicans cared about even a veneer of bipartisanship.

And while the law’s ban on line-warming – handing out water and snacks to people waiting to vote – is flagrantly, almost comically, cruel, its most insidious element is that it allows the Republican-dominated state legislature to seize control of ballot counting in any district. “Taking away local control and moving it to state control is a big deal,” explained Representative Renitta Shannon (she/her, 84th District). “This bill was built so that, if ever there was a situation in the future where some rogue president is looking for 12,000 votes, he or she would be able to find them.”

Rep. Shannon, a bisexual Black woman who’s held her Assembly seat since 2017, has been vocal about SB202’s impact on her constituents. “These traps have been laid to make it harder for Black and brown folks, younger folks to vote,” she told me over the phone. She sees Georgia’s accelerating demographic change as key to the state’s blue tilt – and the corresponding backlash from a dwindling older, white majority.

Senator Kim Jackson (she/her, 41st District), won her seat in 2020, becoming Georgia’s first openly-queer state senator – quite a feat in the district that’s still home to Stone Mountain Park, a towering stone love note to the Confederacy, much beloved by white nationalists (“I’ve never been!” Sen. Jackson told me laughingly over coffee recently. Me neither. Sorry, old racist dudes). As she sees it, the best hope for Georgia and the rest of the country lies with the Biden administration. “We need federal legislation desperately,” she said.

Rep. Shannon agrees; she chided the President for holding out for a compromise with Republicans. “I’ve said it time and again,” she told me. “Democrats at the Federal level have to stop romanticizing bipartisanship. They need to do whatever it takes.”

But while the For the People Act languishes in the U.S Senate, Georgians are not sitting on their hands waiting for help. All three lawmakers were clear: white conservatives may have pulled out their old Jim Crow playbook, but organizers have a playbook from those days, too. “I’m a Black woman who grew up in the South,” Senator Jackson told me dryly. “It’s in my DNA to know how to fight in order to get to the vote.” For now, it’s going to be all-hands-on-deck to make sure voters know how to get past new restrictions and cast their ballot.

“We will just have to out-organize these bills as best we can,” Representative Shannon explained. “Making sure folks are checking their registrations, making sure that before election day they have a plan to vote, they know exactly what precinct to go to.”

One area of special concern for queer lawmakers is ensuring that trans and non-binary voters have proper identification with their correct name and gender identity. According to a 2021 study from the UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute, 476,000 transgender adults lack an ID with the correct gender marker. Georgia, unsurprisingly, is on the wrong end of the stick when it comes to changing a gender marker: individuals need proof of some form of transitional surgery before a judge can issue a court order allowing them to change their birth certificate and other documents (yeah, you read that right).

“It’s too complicated, and too stringent,” noted Lori Anderson, Senior Staff Attorney with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, which offers low-income Georgians support with name and gender marker changes and other civil law matters at no cost. A recent District Court decision out of Alabama found the surgery requirement unconstitutional, which could eventually lead to a nationwide ban, but for now, it’s the law in 25 states.

Name changes are less complicated – that system, after all, was originally designed for married women to easily take their husbands’ names. They do require filing a legal petition, however, and the name change must be published in the county legal newspaper for several weeks, both of which charge a processing fee (Legal Aid’s clients often have these waived). As Ms. Anderson explained, “These things can be financial or social barriers for people who may have had uncomfortable, unpleasant, or even violent run-ins with the justice system and may not want to walk into a courthouse.” Senator Jackson told me that getting everyone IDs is an overall priority – over 200,000 Georgia voters don’t have an ID on file at all – and helping trans voters secure IDs with the proper name and gender marker is top of the list (in terms of voting eligibility, names are the most important, since there must be a match between voter rolls and what’s listed on the ID). “Attorneys are out there doing that work pro-bono, so we really have to muster those folks to help make that happen,” Senator Jackson explained.

She and Representative Cannon also worked together on SB75, which helps to protect victims of domestic violence by making it easier to obtain a protective order and to break a residential lease to escape a stalker or abuser. SB75 passed with bipartisan support and went into effect earlier this month. Rep. Cannon notes that the ability to break a lease will also allow stalking victims to register to vote in a safer place. “As queer legislators,” she explained, “We feel a duty to protect our vulnerable constituents – people need to feel safe enough to register to vote.” So while voting rights will loom large in the upcoming session, these General Assembly members are still committed to doing the work for their constituents. The gulf between right and left under Georgia’s Golden Dome has never felt wider, but they will continue to find common ground wherever possible to make the state a safer, healthier place for all Georgians.

Another thing these lawmakers made very clear: having flipped Georgia blue, they are determined to keep it that way.

“I’m hopeful,” Representative Shannon said. “This is the same fight we’ve been fighting the entire time, and I’m hopeful we will be victorious.” Senator Jackson told me, “Quite frankly, if the situation here weren’t so hopeful, we wouldn’t have had those bills in the first place. The fact that they are trying to suppress the vote is a sign that we are winning.”

When I asked Representative Cannon about Democrats’ prospects in the state’s upcoming elections, she sounded ready for the fight.

“Oh, she blue,” she told me with a determined laugh. “She blue.”

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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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