Hassan Naveed has always been on the go, whether in terms of geography or activism.
Since graduating high school, the California native has done stints as a community organizer and radio reporter in Santa Barbara, as a labor and political organizer in Oakland and San Francisco, and with a D.C. public relations firm focused on civil rights. This summer, he leaves D.C. to pursue a master’s degree in public administration at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Naveed has also made a name for himself locally with his involvement in Gays and Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV), a program of The DC Center for the LGBT Community, which works to respond to and prevent hate crimes, particularly against members of the LGBT community. And last year, he was honored by Capital Pride with the Engendered Spirit award for his GLOV advocacy on behalf of the transgender community.
“GLOV has a community partner in New York City, the Anti-Violence Project, that we’ve engaged with. They’ve said, ‘Oh, you’re coming to New York City? We’d like to get you on some volunteer projects,'” he jokes. “I can’t sit still.”
Naveed’s involvement with GLOV goes back to 2010 and his first weeks after making the move from the West Coast. He met The DC Center’s Executive Director David Mariner, who then introduced him to several local activists. Soon after, Naveed joined GLOV, later becoming the group’s secretary and then one of its co-chairs. He’s also a board member with D.C.’s Casa Ruby, which provides services to members of the city’s transgender and immigrant communities.
“Drawing back on my life, I had two of my really close friends who were victims of hate crimes in college,” the 28-year-old says when asked of why he chose to join GLOV. “To see how the incidents impacted their lives, and to realize the lack of resources that were available to them, in that space, as being folks who were LGBT and also from communities of color, really made me realize that hate exists in all forms – whether it’s discrimination or something that is violent. And from then on, I made a commitment to mitigate that hate to the best of my ability, not just for the LGBT community, but all communities that are underrepresented.”
Closer to home, Naveed and his family have been targets of hateful comments or other forms of bigotry, particularly right after 9/11.
“I was leaving a grocery store. A lady pulled me aside, grabbed me and began yelling at me,” he recounts. “She kept going at me, saying, ‘You Muslims come into this country….’ It wasn’t violence, but the impact that it had on me psychologically really made me feel like ‘What did I do wrong? I did nothing wrong.'”
“To see even my own family members and friends who were impacted by – we can call it discrimination – verbal attacks on folks, all the way to the fact that someone was pulled out of a cab in New York City and beaten up, a family friend, really made me see this issue as something I wanted to work on across lines, on LGBT issues, across lines of color,” Naveed continues. “And it’s something I grew passionate about. When I came to D.C., I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of antiviolence work.”
During Naveed’s tenure at GLOV, the organization undertook several initiatives, including attempts to better track violent incidents where anti-LGBT bias may have played a role, and improving relations between the LGBT community and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). GLOV also recently launched a hotline with Helping Individual People Survive (HIPS) to connect victims of violence to support services.
“My primary goal in GLOV was to make it an organization that people can look to for assistance, and also as an advocacy unit for all those communities in the city,” he says.
Earlier this year, GLOV and six other community partners – The DC Center, Casa Ruby, Rainbow Response, the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), the DC Trans Coalition and HIPS – joined to draft a response to a report issued by the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Crimes Assessment Task Force that examined the relationship between MPD and the LGBT community. The task force had intervened to serve as a mediator at the request of MPD Chief Cathy Lanier following years of strained relations between the police and the LGBT community.
Naveed counts the task force and its recommendations, the majority of which were agreed to by both the community groups and Lanier, as a major accomplishment for the organization, but also as a potential building block for his successors.
“We’re finally engaging with the Police Department for the first time, directly, ever, and really building a plan that’s going to improve relations,” he promises. “We’re definitely in a forward trajectory. It’s going to get better.”
Naveed is also quick to offer praise to fellow D.C. activists, particularly Jeri Hughes, Casa Ruby’s Ruby Corado, Jason Terry of the DC Trans Coalition, and his GLOV peers for their contributions to the antiviolence movement. And he hopes to eventually return to the District, which he now sees as his adopted hometown.
“I might be physically gone from D.C., but I love this city a lot,” he says. “And, damn it, I’ve put my heart and soul into this city. I’ve poured myself dry. And I will be working on that plan with MPD in the years to come, because it’s something that’s been truly a passion of mine. So I will be involved in D.C. in some capacity, even though it will be different from the way it was before.”
By John Riley on February 5, 2024 @JRileyMW
A Russian court sentenced a woman to five days in prison for wearing a pair of rainbow-colored earrings, according to the human rights group Egida.
The ruling marks the second such time a person has been prosecuted following a recent Russian Supreme Court case declaring the so-called "LGBT movement" an extremist organization, which resulted in the banning of official LGBTQ organizations and raids of LGBTQ-centric establishments.
As reported by Egida on its Telegram channel, law enforcement agents tasked with combating "extremism" detained the woman after a group of "aggressive people" approached her and her friend at a local café and began filming them.
By André Hereford on March 18, 2024 @here4andre
Queer cinema needs more films like Thirty.
Maybe not exactly like Thirty, a feature loosely assembled from episodes of the eponymous VOD series created by Dontá Morrison and co-written with director Anthony Bawn. But films that likewise feature a gay Black couple as the center of the story, or of a circle of friends, come few and far between.
Undeniably the stories are out there, as is the audience, yet, as one Thirty character laments of the media landscape, "white boys get all the airtime."
Thirty lends its air time to the epic trials and tribulations of longtime couple Khalil (Bobby Musique Cooks), a Hollywood stylist, and Tyrin (Brandon Moten), an ad agency owner, and their young and restless friends, most of whom are Black and queer.
By John Riley on March 12, 2024 @JRileyMW
A group of students, parents, and teachers in Florida have reached a settlement with state educational authorities that clarifies several provisions in the state's infamous "Don't Say Gay" law.
The "Don't Say Gay" law, officially dubbed the "Parental Rights in Education" law, sought to limit students' exposure to LGBTQ issues and identities under the guise of keeping parents informed and giving them outsized influence over what subjects are broached in the classroom.
Soon after its passage, proponents of the law quickly dubbed opponents "groomers," claiming they wanted to indoctrinate children into adopting values or embracing ideas that run counter to their parents' morals or beliefs or expose them to age-inappropriate subjects. Republican lawmakers soon expanded the law's restrictions on K-3 classrooms to apply to all K-12 classrooms in the state.
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