Queer Louisianans feel a rift between their community’s vibrant history in contrast to what newly-elected House Speaker and Louisianian Mike Johnson has said on behalf of the state regarding LGBTQ people.

“It’s a little bit difficult driving the family minivan to drop our kids off at daycare, passing the dome of the Capitol knowing that the speaker of the House sitting under that dome doesn’t even think our family ought to exist,” openly gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN in response to Johnson’s remarks about homosexuality being sinful. “My ‘lifestyle’ is that I’m a married father of two beautiful boy and girl twins. Our family deserves to be protected and supported, just like every American family.”

The 51-year-old Republican congressman represents Louisiana’s fourth district, a majority white and Republican district that includes Shreveport, Bossier City, Minden, DeRidder and Natchitoches. He has been in office since 2015, when he was first elected to the House of Representatives.

Since Johnson took his seat as the new Speaker of the House on Oct. 25, many of his past and ongoing homophobic remarks are resurfacing.

Prior to serving in Congress, his work as an attorney revolved around multiple anti-LGBTQ campaigns. Johnson has written multiple op-eds in the early 2000s classifying same-gender attractions as “inherently unnatural,” while working with religious conversion therapy group Exodus International.

He has continued to hold that sentiment to this day. Even the day after his election as Speaker of the House, he claimed that his worldview is simply, “Go pick up a Bible.” His use of Christianity to validate his anti-LGBTQ viewpoints only further feeds into the notion that religion and gender and sexuality are mutually exclusive.

Above all, advocates say his views can add more harm onto an already-hostile environment for the LGBTQ community, and his newfound role as Speaker of the House could defer the efforts being made to promote equality and protection for LGBTQ individuals.

Despite his dangerous narratives, Louisiana’s queer history is much bigger than Speaker Johnson’s talking points against the community. Frank Perez, a historian, writer and co-founder and president of LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving local queer history, believes there is a stark difference between the Louisiana he knows and the one Johnson is painting. Perez grew up in Baton Rouge, La. and is a survivor of conversion therapy.

Slander against the LGBTQ community aside, there are three major aspects regarding Louisiana and its queer history that cannot be erased by Johnson.

The first sustained effort at queer political activism occurred with the creation of a group in 1980 called the Louisiana Lesbian and Gay Political Action in Congress—or LAGPAC, according to Perez. Their purpose was to work through the political system to promote full equality and civil rights for all lesbians and gay men.

This was a reaction to the French Quarter fire in 1973, where an arsonist set fire to a gay bar named UpStairs Lounge in the French Quarter. It killed 32 people and remains the deadliest crime against queer people in 20th century history. Although the Pulse shooting in Orlando set a new deadly record against LGBTQ people, the UpStairs Lounge arson remains the deadliest fire in New Orleans.

“The real hate crime was the city’s reaction,” said Perez. “They the guy was never arrested; the police were not that interested, and he eventually committed suicide. The reaction of the queer public in the city to the fire reinforced the closet because you couldn’t be out at work.” For instance, Perez’s friend Stuart Butler was there that night, and had to pretend like nothing had happened the following day to prevent himself from being outed.

Meanwhile, due to the deeply conservative and evangelical nature of the district, much of queer history in the northern part of Louisiana where Johnson is from remained in the closet—but not all of them.

Blanchard “Skip” Ward, who Perez describes as a “gay guru,” lived in Pineville, across from the river Alexandria in northern Louisiana in 1970s. He co-founded the Universalist Church’s Gay Caucus and created the state’s first newsletter publication called Louisiana Gay Blade, dedicated to queer people. In the newsletter, many gay men wrote to him asking for advice, and “he offered a lot of sage advice and encouragement to mostly rural gay men,” Perez said.

Ward eventually became LAGPAC’s point person in North Louisiana, and he and his partner bought property in Shreveport and co-founded a gay humanistic group called the place Le Beau Monde—French for “beautiful world.” Shreveport is where Speaker Johnson is from. Perez describes Le Beau Monde as “like a campground. He was kind of in that same vein as the Radical Faeries, back-to-the-land movement.”

Radical Faeries is a community of queer people who gather in retreats—usually in the outdoors or in the woods—and be in communion with one another. They tend to operate in an anti-hierarchical, radical and anti-authoritarian mode of community, and Ward was no exception. Based on Johnson’s track record, a group of radical queer people at Le Beau Monde would be something he’d categorize as destructive to the “entire democratic system.”

Ward’s work via newsletters has proved itself to be a vital source of documentation for queer communities in North Louisiana. The Alexandria Museum of Art and Letters Read—an ongoing series where local performers interpret historically interesting letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and Louisiana communities—collaborated on a podcast episode about the archives of Ward’s letters back in August.

“Other than that, we don’t know a whole lot because being queer was not something people wanted to document, you know?” Perez said. “Why would you not want to document that because to do so could get you fired, arrested, evicted, put in a mental asylum and so forth?”

Primary source material of North Louisiana is still scarce, but at the Archives project, Perez and his team are working to recover them so that Louisianans with larger platforms like Speaker Johnson won’t eclipse the history of the state.

The new House Speaker is not the only elected official from Louisiana to make noise regarding the LGBTQ community; newly-elected public service commissioner Devante Lewis became the state’s first openly LGBTQ official as well as the first LGBTQ Black official in the state.

During Obama’s presidency in 2015, Lewis was an activist and lobbyist in the state, and he met Speaker Johnson when he was first elected to the House of Representatives that year.

“[What Johnson stands for] has been deeply troubling and problematic since day one,” Lewis said. “He has made this Christian, white fundamentalist evangelical positioning centered to his career. [His focus] showcases to me that he’s deeply committed to discrimination.”

Commissioner Lewis, who is Christian himself, adds that, like many officials on the right do, Johnson makes his politics guide his faith, rather than letting his faith guide his politics.

Jim Meadows, the Executive Director of New Orleans Advocates for LGBTQ+ Elders (NOAGE), an organization that provides queer elders in the city with social support, education and health care, says that the recent surge of public homophobic talking points like Johnson’s is not new.

“Anytime a group of marginalized people make some progress, there’s almost inevitably at some point going to be a backlash,” said Meadows, who also says that people who’ve been involved with the LGBTQ rights movement are not surprised because they’ve seen the rise and fall over decades. “They know that you can never be completely comfortable when you’re a minority and that you risk tyranny as the majority.”

Above all, Johnson does not represent everyone in the state; he represents the National Republican Party, according to Commissioner Lewis.

“I remind people that those who represent not only Louisiana, but a good chunk of our brothers and sisters in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia: it’s not that [the officials] are the majority,” he said, adding that racial gerrymandering and economical oppression has limited who gets to prosper in electoral representation. “Judge Louisiana by its people, not by who has been able to solidify power by rigging the game in their favor.”

Commissioner Lewis adds that Louisiana is a place that embraces culture and diversity, stemming from how New Orleans accepted the Haitian migrants after the war, how the French settlement is there, and how there is an abundance of Caribbean and Cajun culture.

“Once we break the cycle of racial gerrymandering, once we can break the cycle of economic and opportunities and give people a way to live forward, you would see a very different Louisiana in our representation.”