An earthquake kills fourteen members of Haiti’s only LGBT group

SEROvie was the only organisation in Haiti that worked solely with gay and bisexual men and with transgender women. The earthquake of 12 January 2010 killed fourteen of its members at once. Seven died when the SEROvie building collapsed to its foundations, and the director, Reginald Dupont, pulled the dead, the dying and the injured out of the wreckage. The group stopped arguing about gender and sexuality as identities and turned to relief. Its staff handed out food and medicine in Port-au-Prince, searched the camps thrown up for the displaced, and restarted operations in five regions, the North, the West, the Southeast, the Artibonite and the South. Many of the people it served had lost their homes, their papers and members of their families. The same shock brought down Vodou peristyles across the country, among them the temple of the houngan Max Beauvoir, who complained that aid reached his followers slowly and said he hoped the disaster might yet pull Haitians together.