The State Department is providing financial support to a “queer” Muslim organization in India so it can provide “LGBTQI” people in the regions with a platform to write, according to a grant listing.
The grant was disbursed in September to Creating Resources for Empowerment and Action, a Soros-funded feminist group that advances “the sexual rights of all people,” and went on to fund the Queer Muslim Project, which is an “online platform for queer, Muslim and allied voices” based in India. The grant, which amounts to $15,000, purports to “support the achievement of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security.”
The work produced by the program will be presented at a “leading Mumbai literature festival.” (RELATED: Biden Admin To Pour Millions Of Taxpayer Dollars Into ‘Gender Studies’ In The Middle East)
President Joe Biden made it the policy of the United States to advance “LGBTQI+” rights around the world after he took office in 2021.
“As all G7 leaders reiterated this year in Hiroshima, with Indian leadership in attendance, we work with all segments of society to ensure full, equal, and meaningful participation of LGBTQI+ persons in politics, economics, education, and all other spheres of society,” a State Department spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Moreover, this isn’t the first time the State Department has partnered with the Queer Muslim Project.
The U.S. Consulate General Mumbai partnered with the Queer Muslim Project beginning in March to hold a 10-week “creative incubator” for young LGBTQIA+ writers called the “Queer Writer’s Room.” The consulate called the initiative a “narrative change program.”
The program ended in June when its LGBTQIA+ participants published a magazine, according to the organization’s Facebook page. One article in the magazine was titled “The Beauty and Complexity of Being Queer and Muslim” and contained the author’s complaints about gendered bathrooms.
The program posted a request for applications in June 2022, offering young queer writers in South Asia a platform “to claim agency and authorship over their stories.”
It is unclear what the group’s most recent round of support from the State Department will go toward.
(Photo by ALASTAIR PIKE/AFP via Getty Images)
The organization publishes short pieces of writing from LGBTQIA+ Muslims on its Facebook page.
One such post discussed “a pre-1948 Palestine where queerness and transness were perceived differently” while in another the author discussed being “bombarded with white gay culture” in Norway after leaving Iraq. Another post features a “non-binary Palestinian-Chicana Muslim.”
The Queer Muslim Project, in addition to platforming LGBTQIA+ Muslims, attempts to reconcile queerness and Islam.
Posts from the group argue that Djinns, a type of spirit Muslims believe in, can be genderfluid and that transgenderism has a basis in historical Islam. The group also published a series of poetry on “queer Muslim love” on its Facebook page.
In addition to the State Department, the Queer Muslim Project says it has partnered with Meta, Netflix and the British government.
Creating Resources for Empowerment and Action and the Queer Muslim Project did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.