New York’s 7th District has always been home to LGBTQ+ people building lives and community on their own terms. From Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn to the underground networks that formed around the Navy Yard during World War II, queer and trans people in this district have been finding each other, protecting each other, and organizing together for generations. 

This district is made up of neighborhoods where Latino immigrants, working class families, and queer communities have long overlapped and built something together. We see that history today. In the Audre Lorde Project that was founded in Fort Greene in 1994 to serve queer people of color. At Marsha P. Johnson State Park in Williamsburg, the first New York State Park to be named after an LGBTQ+ person. And we see it at The Bush in Bushwick, a bar that opened in 2023 and can proudly self-identify as a “dyke bar for queers” because of the groundwork those people and places already laid in NY-7. 

One of those people is Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, whose voting record has consistently earned a perfect score from the Human Rights Campaign since the release of their Congressional Scorecards in 2003. She has used every tool at her disposal in Congress to advance the human rights of LGBTQ+ Americans, and now she’s endorsed Antonio Reynoso to continue her work.

Antonio will support the No Place for LGBTQ+ Hate Act to repeal Trump’s egregious Executive orders attacking queer Americans, and he will vote no on every bill seeking to limit or degrade queer lives in any way. But Antonio Reynoso has always been a proud and vocal ally, and he knows that LGBTQ+ people need and deserve more than defensive work. His LGBTQ+ policy plan is a reflection of that knowledge, informed by the time he’s spent standing shoulder-to-shoulder with queer folks of NY-7.