LGBTQ News
Senegal’s ongoing crackdown on its LGBTQ+ community is not only increasing fear and stigma on the West African coast, but it is likely also violating international human rights laws as well as protections guaranteed by the country’s own constitution, according to a new report fro...
The liquor was flowing, the dice were rolling and the women were plentiful. Down on 14th Street in the U Street corridor in 1946, at Club Madre, your thirst could be quenched and your vices satisfied. At the center of it all was a large, dark-skinned woman whose taste for mink, m...
Donald Trump had a lot to say about Sen. Jon Husted's (R-OH) body at a campaign stop in Youngstown, Ohio. "I’m standing over here, and I don’t do this with men very often," Trump said before describing what he was thinking as Husted spoke, with Trump standing behind him. "I start...
When the Welsh government in 2021 embarked on what Deputy Minister of Social Partnership Hannah Blythyn described as a project to make Wales “the most LGBTQ+ friendly nation in Europe,” Welsh scholar Norena Shopland was commissioned to help train librarians, museum staff, and arc...
Sept. 12 is a solemn day for the people of Turkey. It is the anniversary of the 1980 coup d'état — when members of the National Security Council, along with the armed forces, dissolved the Turkish parliament, arrested hundreds of thousands of people, and entered a three-year peri...
The BBC announced Tuesday it is creating a two-part documentary about Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s rise to popularity as a beloved figure in children’s literature and the subsequent controversy over her anti-transgender views, encompassing the last several decades of her li...
A gay couple in Slovakia is suing the government over its refusal to recognize their marriage as legal. Ivan Novotný, 31, and Metod Špaček, 51, wed in Austria in 2020, and under a 2025 ruling by the European Union's highest court, Slovakia must register the marriage. Related Slov...
The GOP's relentless attacks on LGBTQ+ rights and dignity over the past two years have not driven the record number of LGBTQ+ adults back into the closet, according to a new report from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. In fact, the hostile climate seems to be having the oppo...
Industry actress and Them cover star Myha'la Herrold is opening up about her recent elimination in the third episode of The Celebrity Traitors season two on the BBC.In response to an Instagram commenter who said she was eliminated “because you are BLACK” and called the social ded...
Who cares about the WNBA's policy on trans players when there are no trans players in the WNBA? A new analysis suggests that, well, no one actually cared. This past summer, WNBA player Sophia Cunningham made some transphobic comments about sports, saying that she wants "to protec...
Spooky season is here, making it a fantastic time to talk about queerness and horror. More precisely, it's a chance to explore how the horror genre emerged and transformed our perspective on queer identity. Horror is far more political than most people realize. Personally, if sci...
Billionaire transphobe Elon Musk allegedly cut off his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson's health insurance coverage the day after she came out as transgender. Wilson's mother, Justine Wilson, made this claim in Musk, the newly released nearly four-hour documentary about Musk's global...
As the Trump administration’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, prepares to hold her first White House press briefing on Tuesday morning, online sleuths have uncovered her past social media posts that push conspiracy theories, including the debunked, anti-LGBTQ+ QAnon theory o...
Days after President Donald Trump called Annie Andrews, the cisgender Democratic nominee for South Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat, an anti-transgender slur on social media, Andrews came out against transgender girls and women participating in sports. Trump called Andrews a “trannie”...
New York’s Long Island, which is just 50 miles from the Stonewall Inn, is a reliably red enclave where President Trump won easily in 2024. Chris Gallant, an openly gay Democrat running for New York’s 1st Congressional District, which includes the eastern side of Long Island, is t...
LGBTQ exclusion may be costing Japan as much as ¥16.42 trillion ($10.35 billion) annually, according to a new report by Open for Business, which argues that greater inclusion could help address the economic pressures facing a country with a shrinking population and workforce. Jap...
The 2025-2026 school year experienced a record number of book bans, according to a new report from PEN America. Public schools across the country saw 12,000 book bans during that time period, the largest number in a single year since PEN America began tracking in 2021. The organi...
A man convicted of killing a Black transgender woman should have been allowed to use the victim’s sex assigned at birth as part of his defense, a Tennessee appellate court ruled last week. In its October 5 ruling, a three-judge panel for the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals ov...
A federal judge last month dismissed a case by a Christian spa worker claiming she was a victim of religious discrimination after she was suspended in 2023 for refusing to give a trans woman a tour of the facility. Jeriah Sellers sued Hershey Entertainment after the company suspe...
Twenty years ago, in October 2006, the Equality Forum of Philadelphia christened 31 LGBTQ+ persons as History Month Icons. Almost all of them were big stars in the sky: author James Baldwin, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, congressman Barney Frank, lesbian pioneer Barbara Gittings, art...
Donald Trump claimed in a speech on Friday that it is becoming unacceptable for kids to use the term "mom." The president was mocking a New York bill focused on updating language in state law surrounding surrogacy and parentage to "gestating parent" and "non-gestating parent" rat...
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito doesn't believe the Court will overturn marriage equality, despite his strong opposition to the ruling. In a CBS News interview promoting his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, Alito said the Court's overturning of ...
Republican California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is targeting Spanish-speaking voters with an AI-generated ad that shows a caricature of a trans girl playing soccer against high school girls. The ad even features an AI-generated version of his Democratic opponent, Xavie...
The BBC is facing backlash after the broadcaster was caught electronically removing a pro-trans rights message from a dancer's T-shirt on Strictly Come Dancing. While recording the October 10 episode, Bethany Antonia, an out lesbian actor from House of the Dragon appearing on thi...
The GOP is a sinking ship, and the rats are deserting- well, the other rats. With just three weeks to go before Election Day, Republican candidates are trying their best to convince voters that they really don't always agree with everything their leader is doing. A new analysis f...
Two measures on the ballot in Washington are asking voters to legalize targeting and discrimination of LGBTQ youth. The measures would also have extremely negative consequences for all girls, their families, and other vulnerable youth. IL26-638: Requires gender inspection of girl...
The Center for Black Equity held its annual BE. Gala at Conrad Washington, D.C. on Saturday, Oct. 5. Lolita Leopard Miyake-Mugler and Anthony Oakes co-hosted the awards ceremony. Honorees included journalist and producer Justin Stewart; nonprofit leader Nikki Alexander; HIV advoc...
The punk subculture, in its idealized form, brought people from all walks of life — mostly outcasts and weirdos — together to make music and art. But nowadays, if you ask most people to picture a generic 1970s punk, they'll likely imagine a sneering white guy with a mohawk and a ...
In 2024, the Republicans ran on platforms of hatred and fear bolstered by promises of an economic paradise. Two years on, and Americans can see how those promises have played out. The atrocities committed by ICE have been thorough and well-documented, and they haven’t made anyone...
Justice Samuel Alito said that marriage equality should be overturned because it makes Christians look bad for opposing it Really: “In dissent from [Obergefell v. Hodges], I expressed my worry that equating the expression of certain views with bigotry – or, if you like, with dign...
Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson has a stark message for Democrats caving on trans rights: "You're doing too much and getting too little." Robinson made the comment while speaking to The Advocate during a roundtable discussion with reporters on Monday. She added, "...
Editor's note: Chandreyi Guharay is the global advocacy officer for Walking the Talk. She spoke with queer activists from around the world at World Pride 2026 in Amsterdam about the impact of shrinking aid. Queer activists and Dutch NGOs gathered at Amsterdam City Hall as part of...
The effects of a newly amended law rolling back self-determination for transgender people in India have been documented in a survey of those caught between medical ethics and the conservative government's anti-trans agenda: the doctors responsible for their trans patients' care. ...
Here are this week’s most popular positive stories, with some fun social media posts tossed in too. Like seeing uplifting content like this? Sign up for our Good News email. Autumn is here, and though the weather is getting cooler, our weekly Good News Roundup is full of brightne...
Many people think the telltale signs of drug addiction include sweating and vomiting. But a prominent addiction medicine physician says the best signals aren't always so visible. Dr. Yngvild Olsen says more accurate signs come from the brain, specifically the compulsion to keep u...
Conservative commentator Katie Zacharia will be the Trump administration's new press secretary, The New York Times reported on Friday. Her record of transphobic commentary on Fox News makes her the perfect spokesperson for Trump's endless crusade to eradicate trans people from ci...
A new Australian study links a growing, toxic culture of anti-transgender hate online with higher rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts among trans Australians, who described the stigma they encountered online as "relentless," "omnipresent," and "inescapa...
Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer who received the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, immediately mocked President Donald Trump upon learning of the honor. “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she said in Nuremberg, Germany. A crowd la...
The owners of a New Jersey gay bar have issued a public video apology after hosting a trivia night at which a team competed under a name that mocked the story of an alleged gang-rape at Cornell University.As the Hoboken Daily Voice reported, patrons of the bar Pint in Jersey City...
Nearly 12,000 books were banned by public school districts nationwide during the 2025–2026 school year, according to a new report from PEN America, which also found that artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly driving bans that specifically target LGBTQ+ literature. Accordin...
As if ripped from the plot of a romance novel, women’s professional baseball player Ashton Lansdell and professional softball player Aliyah Binford are stealing the hearts of queer sports fans with their couples content. Naturally, the sapphic internet is eating it up. Lansdell, ...
The International Criminal Court this week unsealed arrest warrants for four Taliban officials in Afghanistan accused of targeting LGBTQ people, women, and others who defy the group’s strict gender norms. The warrants the ICC unsealed on Oct. 5 are for Hibatullah Akhundzada, the ...
Janelle Sarauw, a former senator in the US Virgin Islands (USVI) legislature, is coming to the US Congress as the territory's next at-large congressperson. The out legislator won the Democratic primary in August by a wide margin and faces only token opposition in her very blue, i...
Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) was asked what she thought about Donald Trump calling her opponent, Democrat Dr. Annie Andrews, a "tr***ie," and she refused to answer the question. In a separate interview, Graham Nordone implied that Trump's use of the slur was justified. Grah...
Daniela Fuentes came to the United States from Cuba and worked as a hairstylist and drag performer in Miami. Then she was picked up by ICE, detained, and deported to the Central African Republic, a country she’s never been to, where she knows no one, doesn’t speak the language, a...
Several crew members attached to the production of Ben Shapiro’s pro-ICE film Pawn Shop, which is currently in production in Livingston, Montana, left the film early after originally being told they were going to work on a “fun action movie,” and were allegedly kept in the dark a...
The Opening Night On the evening of Tuesday, September 29, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in SoHo filled with the kind of noise every exhibition hopes for. From 6 to 10 p.m., more than 200 guests moved through Nemesis: Remember, the final exhibition of GLAAD's Equity in Media an...
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Conservatives rejoiced this week after the Washington Post reported that 2025 data from the U.S. Centers by Disease Control and Prevention appears to indicate that LGBTQ+ identification among young teenagers has dropped over the past few years. But even in the Post’s own reportin...
Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown released an ad Thursday refuting a new, lie-filled attack ad featuring a detransitioned activist named Soren Aldaco. Aldaco's ad claimed that Brown supports "sex changes for minors [and] irreversible surgery" which she was "a kid." B...
Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews of South Carolina recently released a political ad saying that she neither supports "biological men playing women's sports" nor "gender surgery for minors." While her ad is intended to deflect political attacks from her opponent, Sen. Dar...
The BBC has reached a "substantial" settlement with the online UK LGBTQ+ outlet PinkNews over allegations the BBC now agrees were "false and defamatory," including accusations of sexual misconduct and misogyny by the publication's founder Benjamin Cohen and his husband, Anthony J...
Bet Mishpachah Executive Director Joshua Maxey on Wednesday was among those who spoke at a ceremony in D.C. that marked the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack in Israel. The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington hosted the ceremony that took place at the Washington Hebrew C...
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (D) vetoed an anti-trans bathroom bill Friday, after Republicans passed it using a procedure that allowed them to bring the legislation up for a vote without a public hearing. As the Kansas Reflector notes, the version of Senate Bill 244 passed by the stat...
The U.S. Department of Justice charged Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, 18, of Richfield, Minn., on Oct. 7 with one count of knowingly receiving a firearm and ammunition in order to commit a federal crime of terrorism. Mohamud allegedly planned to carry out a mass-casualty attack in...
In the continuing race to see who can throw transgender people under the bus most quickly, South Carolina Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Annie Andrews has released a new direct-to-camera campaign ad in which she states that she does not support trans athletes playing in spo...
A new rule from the Trump administration will take effect on October 13, barring federal Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funds from covering gender-affirming care for minors. While several Democrat-led states have produced workarounds to keep the programs ...
Virginia state Del. Tim Griffin (R), a Christian, posted a video of himself expressing his rage at a school district for recognizing October as LGBTQ+ History Month. The Loudoun County School Board approved the proclamation in September. It rejects anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and ...
Angela Winston, 37, spent 11 months on Rikers Island, in a New York jail complex that has become notorious for inhumane conditions and reports of violence perpetrated by correctional officers. Now living in a treatment facility after her recent release, she’s focused on parenting...
Today there are war criminals leading three major governments. President Trump here in the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. The world would be a better place if they were thrown into a jail cell together, and the key tossed away. We are l...
