LGBTQ News
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Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers and Photo Editor Michael Key will be on assignment in the Netherlands through Aug. 10. They will be covering World Pride in Amsterdam. AMSTERDAM — Madonna and 6,000 of her closest friends celebrated World Pride at Amsterd...
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The attempt to turn the WNBA into the site of the next anti-trans culture war is going about as well as you’d expect. The most recent obstacle? They want Caitlin Clark to parrot her Indiana Fever teammate Sophie Cunningham’s transphobic commentary on participation in sports — and...
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Out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview published Monday that he is "more inclined than not" to run for president again in 2028, furthering long-held suspicions that he may do so. “I think I’m more inclined than not, but there’s so much we don’t kn...
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Inflatable balloon effigies of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin kissed last Saturday during Amsterdam’s WorldPride 2026 Canal Parade. The event also featured a memorial for the victims of the recent Berlin Pride attack as well as performances by belo...
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Ken Jennings, who has hosted Jeopardy! since 2021 following the death of Alex Trebek, recently got into a relatively minor back-and-forth on Bluesky with people who claimed his subscriptions to the New York Times were supporting an anti-transgender media organization. And when I ...
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Following backlash over the announcement that actor Geno Segers had been cast in Broadway’s hit musical Hadestown, producers quickly shared an update that his casting had been rescinded."The producers of Hadestown and Geno Segers have mutually agreed that Mr. Segers will no longe...
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This story originally appeared on The Advocate.The federal government promises health insurance as part of the bargain of public service. For transgender workers under President Donald Trump, that bargain now comes with an exception. The government will cover hormones and surgeri...
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The so-called “MAGA Barbie” of the WNBA and the Fifth-Place Avenger have made contact. WNBA player Sophie Cunningham, a guard for the Indiana Fever, was seen hanging out and posing for photos with NCAA swimmer and anti-trans crusader Riley Gaines at a Sunday away game between the...
culture
The Petal Release Party and Drag Show was held at Spark Social on Friday, July 31. Performers included Tiara-Missou, Labianna and Darcy de la Cuadra. (Washington Blade photos by Landon Shackelford) The post PHOTOS: Petal Release Party appeared first on Washington Blade: LGBTQ New...
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Pro-MAGA anti-LGBTQ+ broadcaster Steven Crowder – who has been accused in the past of emotionally abusing his wife and repeatedly exposing his genitals to his show’s staffers – published a July 28 video explaining that the United States needs fascism because communists are allege...
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A hair salon that posted a message to social media telling transgender people to go to a "pet groomer" instead lost its case before the Michigan Civil Rights Commission last week. "This ruling sets the precedent that no business can publicly discriminate without consequence, whet...
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Cheryl Reeve, head coach of the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx, has sparked a frenzy online over her decision to wear a T-shirt declaring "Trans Kids Belong" during her team's Sunday game against the Indiana Fever, the team for which anti-trans player Sophie Cunningham plays. Reeve's stat...
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Disgraced gay former Rep. George Santos (R-NY) agreed last Friday to pay over $35,000 to settle an insider trading accusation that he placed a bet on the online gambling site Kalshi that he would not attend President Donald Trump's February 26 State of the Union (SOTU) Address. S...
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An X account associated with California Gov. Gavin Newsom's (D) office posted a picture of JD Vance in drag in response to the right's negative reaction to musician Bad Bunny's upcoming performance at the Super Bowl. Conservatives have been outraged this week ever since the Puert...
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A new policy from the Department of Education (ED) says the department will stop tracking numbers of transgender and non-binary students, which means it will also no longer track how often they are targeted for bullying, harassment, and assault. The change affects the already-end...
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A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday in favor of Arkansas's 2023 book-ban law, overturning an injunction that prevented the law from taking effect for the past three years. The law, signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), seeks to criminally charge booksellers and librari...
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On June 30 this year, the last day of Pride Month, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., combined cases addressing trans student-athletes' participation in girls' school sports. The Court ruled against them, 6-3. The majority decision...
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The leader of a neo-Nazi group that menaced people attending a drag queen story hour event has admitted that the group violated the state’s civil rights law. In a July 30 press release, New Hampshire Attorney General John M. Formella announced that Christopher Hood and 19 members...
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An LGBTQ+ activist won his battle against the Department of Defense last week after the agency agreed to release a previously undisclosed document to the public. LGBTQ+ activist James Dale sued the DoD for the right to access a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) it established wit...
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr had a heated conversation with CNN's Dana Bash yesterday, during which he raged at her for listening to medical experts when it comes to health topics like COVID, vaccines, and measles, but also got mad at her because she's "n...
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The state of Michigan agreed last Thursday to abandon its ban on anti-LGBTQ+ conversion therapy following a federal judge's decision against it. This makes Michigan the first state to say it will stop enforcing its conversion therapy ban in the wake of the Supreme Court's decisio...
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The Tennessee legislature has passed the Charlie Kirk Act, which, if signed by Gov. Bill Lee (R), will ban public institutions of higher education from preventing people with bigoted views from speaking on campus. Moreover, it will also punish students who speak out against campu...
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No one that Donald Trump would chose to be attorney general was going to be any good. Case in point: Pam Bondi, Trump's first attorney general. Bondi brought a long history of anti-LGBTQ+ animus to the job, only to be unceremoniously canned over her handling of the release of fil...
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AMSTERDAM — Madonna on Sunday headlined the final night of the World Pride Music Festival in Amsterdam. The gay icon took the stage shortly before 2:30 a.m. local time (8:30 p.m. ET on Saturday) during Club Confessions, a set that MISTR, a telehealth platform that offers free acc...
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Madly talented and preternaturally energetic, Reggie D. White, 38, is about to launch his first season as artistic director of D.C.’s boundary-pushing Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. White brings a lot to the job. As actor, playwright, and director, his varied resume includes a 2...
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Stonewall uprising veteran Stormé DeLarverie and her wife Diana met in 1943 at Smalls’ Paradise, a 24-hour nightclub in Harlem. Stormé — a "stone butch gay woman" in the words of their "gay daughter," trans singer Christy Henderson Jenkins — went on to be the "male impersonator" ...
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A typically queer-friendly fashion brand is ending its Harry Potter-inspired line after customer backlash, considering Harry Potter creator JK Rowling uses her money to fund anti-trans initiatives. The California-based Unique Vintage not only announced a new Harry Potter collecti...
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Amy Paris worked for the federal government in various critical capacities for the past 10 years. She was critical to helping the Biden administration implement trans-inclusive policies and most recently served as deputy digital services lead in the Department of Health and Human...
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From Riley Gaines to Sophie Cunningham, athletes seem ready to weigh in on trans inclusion in sports as reliable sources, but too often it seems they have never looked beyond simple scaremongering and right-wing talking points. The same problem, at its core, is affecting all aspe...
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A gay couple's decades-long love story has gone viral after being featured on the popular social media account @meetcutesnyc. The couple, Allen and Tony, were featured in an on-the-street interview in which they shared that they've been together for 53 years, having met on a tenn...
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A GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign for Jonathan Ross — the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who killed Renee Good, a queer mother of three — has raised nearly $500,000 as of Monday evening. GoFundMe has said it's "reviewing" whether the campaign violates its own poli...
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1 person killed in terrorist attack on Berlin Pride What happened: Abdul Ballout, a German citizen who was a supporter of the Islamic State (ISIL), drove a rented van into the Tiergarten in Berlin on the last day of the city's Christopher Street Day celebrations, killing one pers...
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Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers and Photo Editor Michael Key are on assignment in the Netherlands through Aug. 10. AMSTERDAM — The 2026 Amsterdam Pride Canal Parade was held on Saturday, Aug. 1. (Washington Blade photos by Michael Key and Michael K. Lav...
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Editor’s note: International News Editor Michael K. Lavers and Photo Editor Michael Key are on assignment in the Netherlands through Aug. 10. AMSTERDAM — Hundreds of thousands of people lined Amsterdam’s canals on Saturday for the city’s annual Amsterdam Pride Canal Parade. Dutch...
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Hi Michael, When is it worth stopping being friends with someone, or more than one person? Lately I feel like my friends aren’t being very nice to me. In fact it reminds me of high school, and junior high school, when I was being bullied. I’m not the most attractive in the group,...
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If you know, you know. That was the case with Casa Susanna, a guesthouse in New York's Catskill Mountains, which in the 1950s and 60s catered to a particular subset of the LGBTQ+ community, a group trans author and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen described as "transfeminine cross-d...
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Nonbinary music artist Sam Smith announced their engagement on Tuesday in an interview with the New York Times. Smith told the Times "with a giddy smile" that they are engaged to fashion designer Christian Cowan and explained that their new album – Hazel Eyes, which will be relea...
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Islamic authorities in Indonesia's Aceh province will hit a 20-year-old man and a 21-year-old man 80 times with a cane for kissing and hugging each other in a public toilet. Witnesses in the Taman Sari city park informed police after seeing the men enter the same restroom in Apri...
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As former Biden White House Press Secretary and current host of MS Now’s prime time host Jen Psaki read and posted the banner headline from the New York Times, I was sent into traumatic shock. It brought back all the horrors I heard about my Polish family after their torture and ...
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A TikTok influencer has delighted the internet with a video describing why he believes "lesbians are an elevated form of the human race." Steve Watson, who goes by That Steve Guy on social media, detailed a night at his lesbian neighbors' house after they invited him and his wife...
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A medical professor and an expert in psychiatry is sounding the alarm about Donald Trump's quickening mental decline, saying that Trump's mind is going so fast that he can see signs of "deterioration almost week over week." "The rate of decline is accelerating." Related Trump for...
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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. It's important to celebrate the small wins each week (as well as the big ones), and this week's Good News ...
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Poland’s top court this week rejected the recognition of same-sex marriages legally performed in other EU countries. The EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg last November ruled in favor of a same-sex couple who challenged Poland’s refusal to recognize their German marriage. Poland’...
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This story originally appeared on Out.Gregg Araki found the spark for I Want Your Sex in an unlikely place: a statistic about Gen Z's dwindling sex lives.Directed and co-written by Araki, along with co-writer Karley Sciortino, the erotic comedy centers on the sexual relationship ...
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WNBA superstar Brittney Griner is now separated from her wife, Cherelle, and wants a divorce, according to court records filed in Atlanta on Thursday and first reported by TMZ.Attorney Cherelle Griner of Atlanta stood by her wife when she was sentenced to nine years in a Russian ...
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I’ve been obsessed with the premise of One Night Only since the first time I watched the trailer. Of course, I’ve since been subjected to that trailer approximately 500 times, as has anyone who has been to the movies in the past few months. But I remain seated for what will surel...
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As much as I loved The Odyssey, one thing it wasn’t was homoerotic. I would really have to do quite a lot of imaginative labor to write fan fiction about Matt Damon’s Odysseus and Himesh Patel’s Eurylochus being together romantically. Maybe they’d get stranded on an island togeth...
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In May, right-wing media blasted a small Trans Period Pride event sponsored by the Massachusetts National Organization for Women (Mass NOW) and the MA Trans Political Coalition aimed at creating community for trans people who menstruate. The backlash was so intense the organizers...
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A New Jersey high school reached a settlement with the family of Myles Fitzpatrick, a trans teen who took his own life in 2022 after serial harassment by classmates and the alleged failure of school staff to acknowledge his distress or stop the bullying, My Central Jersey reports...
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The LGBTQ organization Lambda Legal held its annual "Lambda Legal in the Pines" fundraiser on Saturday, July 25. The event was held at a house on Fire Island featured in Ryan Murphy's 2014 HBO film, "The Normal Heart." Organizers say over $500,000 was raised to support Lambda Leg...
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In her first political ad, Darline Graham, sister of the recently deceased (and allegedly queer) anti-LGBTQ+ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), said, "Men don't belong in women's sports" and other statements meant to burnish her MAGA conservative credentials, as Republican in her state ...
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Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday establishing a "religious liberty commission" at the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and present strategies to eliminate "threats to domestic religious liberty." During his comments on the order, Trump said that he doesn...
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Wednesday night was supposed to be a "conversation" about Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton's inexplicable description of transgender girls as "boys," but the meeting between her campaign and LGBTQ+ advocates devolved into nothing short of a disaster. For starters...
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President Barack Obama apparently didn't have a very high opinion of Donald Trump Jr, summing up his thoughts on the president's son in three choice words. Earlier this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) released part of Dr. Anthony Fauci's private diary entries from 2019 to 2022, when ...
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Facing pressure from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to eliminate so-called “woke” policies, Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America) eliminated its spaces for gay young people, women, and scouts of color at its National Jamboree. An estimated 15,000 scouts, troop lea...
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Donald Trump's lesbian niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, called out how her uncle's "black hole of need" — combined with what she described as his "cognitive, psychological, and physical decline" — has resulted in him facing daily "humiliation." Speaking with journalist Si...
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A West Virginia food bank's shelves are bare after refusing supplies from organizations that are allegedly “part of the gay rights movement" because they support LGBTQ+ people. “To let you know the reason why we’re in this position is because I done some research, I made the phon...
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Spark Social will host “Open Mic Night” on Thursday, Aug. 13 at 8 p.m. Get ready to share your talent or just kick back and enjoy some great performances. This event is a fun, laid-back vibe where everyone’s welcome to take the stage. Sign-ups are first-come, first-served, but yo...
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When Cody Daigle-Orians's editor asked if he wanted to write a children's book about asexuality, he knew it would be a big challenge. Despite devoting the past five years to building an online community educating young people on the aromantic-asexual (aroace) spectrum, he wasn't ...
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Young conservative activists "furiously" booed anti-LGBTQ+ MAGA Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy offstage after he delivered just 14 minutes of his scheduled 30-minute speech at the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) conference in Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday evening,...
