On May 31, Latvian lawmakers picked the country’s long-serving popular foreign minister, a strong backer of Ukraine, as its new head of state in a tight vote. The 100-seat Saeima legislature elected Edgars Rinkēvičs, the country’s top diplomat since 2011, as president to serve for a four-year term. He received 52 votes, one vote more than required to win. Incumbent Egils Levits, Latvia’s head of state since 2019, didn’t seek re-election. Rinkēvičs, who announced in 2014 that he is proudly homosexual, will be the first openly gay president in the Baltic nations — all former Soviet republics where attitudes to sexual minorities have been less tolerant than in Western Europe. It should be noted that LGBTQ+-friendly Stoli Vodka is based in Latvia.
Baltic Nation Elects First Openly Gay President
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A proud board member of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Fort Lauderdale, one of the largest LGBTQ archives in the United States, and an associate professor of history and the deputy director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) at Florida International University. He is the author of the book “Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940” and an editor and contributor to the Made by History section of The Washington Post, which offers historical context to today’s headlines.
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