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The Bay Area Reporter, which is San Francisco’s LGBT weekly newspaper, published two of our letters in response to its story about the controversy surrounding gay rodeos. On September 11th, TheirTurn wrote a story about gay rodeos from an animal rights point of view.

If you feel strongly about certain issues, please submit letters to the editor when a media outlet reports on them. These letters provide us with an opportunity to convey the message points about animal abuse that are so often missing from the stories.

At the Gay Rodeo near San Francisco this weekend, hundreds of LGBTs will applaud and cheer as their gay brothers and sisters wrestle terrified cows to the ground and then twist their necks in an event called “chute dogging.”

In a statement to San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter, The International Gay Rodeo Association defends chute dogging, bucking, goat dressing and other abusive events that celebrate the “traditional western lifestyle” by saying, “The animals of gay rodeo are well cared for and loved.”

Andrew Zollman of LBGT Compassion, a San Francisco-based group that protests the rodeo, compares the abuse of these animals to anti-gay bullying: “Instead of becoming oppressors and abusers of others who are also different and powerless, we should show compassion and empathy for them. The least we can do for farm animals is to not subject them to additional suffering and torment for the gratuitous purpose of our own entertainment.”

1. Learn more about rodeo cruelty at LGBT Compassion

2. Submit a letter to the Bay Area Reporter (news@ebar.com) expressing your point of view. Write “letter to the editor” in the subject line, and include an address and phone number.

3. Post a comment on the Facebook wall and/or email the International Gay Rodeo Association: askigra@igra.com

In press coverage surrounding the gay rodeo in Ohio this week, the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) says that “No one faces discrimination during the LGBT event.” In other words, everyone is invited to twist the neck of a terrified cow and wrestle him to the ground. Andrew Zollman, a San-Francisco-based activist with LGBT Compassion said during one of his LGBT rodeo protests, “As gay people, it is personal to us that people in our community would, after experiencing oppression and abuse and having to fight for their own rights and protections, turn around and unnecessarily abuse and bully animals.”

Rodeos are animal-bullying events masquerading as sport. How can LGBTs, many of whom, like me, have been bullied, organize a spectacle centered around abusing animals who have no voice? If anyone, gay or straight, did to their dogs what is done to the bulls, steers, calves, horses and other animals at rodeos, they would be charged with animal cruelty. Also disheartening is to see gay people bullying and attacking other gay people who stage peaceful protests outside of these events. Learn more and consider protesting at one of the many upcoming LGBT rodeos.