A small group of community members on Thursday, Feb. 25, gathered outside of the newly opened Chick-fil-A in Elmhurst, which will also serve nearby Jackson Heights, to condemn the chain restaurant’s history of supporting anti-LGBTQ groups.

Daniel Puerto, a community activist and co-founder of Love Wins Food Pantry, said it was important to shed light on Chick-fil-A’s “history of discrimination” against the LGBTQ community, given their new location at 40-27 82nd St., which opened a day earlier on Feb. 24.

“We are in Jackson Heights, home to a large number of LGBTQ communities [and] home to a large number of trans and gender non-conforming people, and today we are here to not only question how was Chick-fil-A welcomed to our community, but to also remind our neighbors about businesses like these so that we can be an informed consumers,” Puerto said.

LGBTQ advocacy groups have long fought the Atlanta-based chain restaurant for not only donating millions to organizations with a history of anti-LGBTQ practices, like Salvation Army and Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but also for its CEO Dan Cathy’s comments opposing same-sex marriage.

In 2019, Chick-fil-A — a multibillion-dollar chain popular for its fried chicken sandwiches and customer service — announced a shift in their donations following growing protests from advocates and customers. But they did not explicitly promise to stop donating to anti-LGBTQ groups.

“Businesses like Chick-fil-A support groups that push LGBTQ youth to suicide, groups supported by businesses like Chick-fil-A fight to make sure that LGBTQ communities continue living below poverty rate lines, groups supported by business like Chick-fil-A ensure that our communities keep living in the shadows and that they keep being denied the dignity to exist in the community that welcomes them and loves them,” Puerto said.

Puerto, a member of the LGBTQ community, added that he was recently on a call with someone who said that every time they walk by a Chick-fil-A, they get “post-traumatic stress because they supported the group that was going to convert” them.

“People have lost their lives. People have been killed. People have been denied access to quality of life because of groups like this and these are repercussions that are going to impact someone’s life forever,” Puerto said.

Organizers also worried about the impact that more chains will have on the neighborhood, where businesses are predominantly mom-and-pops.

Shrima Pandey, an organizer with Queens Neighborhoods United, said that what they need is support for their communities and less of a focus on big corporations.

“This was never a block that should have welcomed any corporation like Chick-fil-A, and yet in partnership with the 82nd Street Partnership and the Business Improvement District here, companies like Chick-fil-A, like Starbucks and Target are now on this block,” Pandey said. “We know these corporations do not have our community’s best interests at heart and we will continue to keep a watchful eye on their activities and the way that they treat our people, because we have not seen, we have not had proof in other neighborhoods and in other places that they will treat our communities with kindness and with respect. We will continue to fight against these corporations as they continue to extract and leach off of our neighborhoods.”