For 150 years, LGBT people in India have had to live with the threat of spending their lives in jail for having sex. On Thursday, a year after ruling that sexual orientation is a privacy right, India’s Supreme Court struck down the dehumanizing colonial-era law in a landmark ruling legalizing gay sex.
Last month, Progressive Conservative (i.e. just very conservative) politician Doug Ford, brother of late former Toronto mayor Rob Ford (who is not actually Damien Lewis much as it seems that way), won his bid for Ontario premier, ousting 15 years of governance by the Liberal party. This is working out pretty much as…
On Sunday, May 13, the International Day Against Homophobia, an activist under the alias Piaoquanjun distributed rainbow badges outside Beijing’s 798 art district in celebration. It seemed harmless enough—but according to the Guardian, security guards employed by the district told the activist to stop, barring those…
Documents obtained by Right Wing Watch detail how Focus on the Family, a religious conservative and anti-abortion organization, convinced the IRS in 2016 to classify the nonprofit as a church, releasing it from financial transparency rules and requirements like unemployment benefits.
Call Me By Your Name, Luca Gudagnino’s 2017 film about a romance between two young Americans in 1980s Italy, was pulled from the Beijing International Film Festival’s lineup. While neither festival spokespersons nor the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures International, have provided a reason for the film’s sudden…
A public library in Iowa is reviewing policies on including LGBTQ literature after more than 340 residents petitioned to stop the acquisition of books that explore gender identity and sexual orientation.
Here’s more proof that your local elections, even in a town of 25,500, can make a difference: On February 20, the Board of Aldermen in Starkville, Mississippi, rejected a request to hold its first-ever gay Pride parade with a 4-3 vote.
You might think that after the Migos’ first brush with accusations of homophobia, which provoked an outcry that in turn prompted an apology, the hip-hop group’s three members would do their best to avoid another headache. But here we are, united by headache over a lyric that seems homophobic and its shoddy ensuing…
According to a new report by LGBT legal advocacy group Lambda Legal, nearly one-third of Donald Trump’s judicial nominees are overtly hostile towards LGBT rights, and if confirmed, could curb workplace protections, healthcare access, equal protections in public spaces, voting rights, and several other protections for…
In a recent interview with Vulture, Eminem said he uses Grindr, the geolocation app primarily used by men who have sex with men (though it recently did a big virtue-signaling marketing show of trans/non-binary-inclusivity). Big if true from a man who once rapped, “My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge/That’ll…
Georgia State Rep. Betty Price, the wife of recently-resigned Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, has followed in her husband’s footsteps (jet stream?) by demonstrating ideas about health care that are callous and discriminatory.
Illinois Rep. Jeanne Ives, who once described gay marriage as “a completely disordered relationship,” has shared an extremely transphobic and homophobic op-ed on her personal Facebook page that warns Illinois families that legislation protecting against gender identity-based discrimination will erode public schools.
After last year’s Pulse massacre, it was fairly common to hear those on the right discuss the great threat Islam posed toward gays (some even called it the “greatest threat”) because of Omar Mateen’s pledge of allegiance to Isis. It was no coincidence that this rhetoric surfaced during the presidential campaign of…
Finally some good news for gays in Russia: The European Court of Human Rights has found Russia’s gay propaganda law “discriminatory and, over all, served no legitimate public interest.” Additionally, it has ordered Russia to pay three activists who staged demonstrations from 2009 to 2012—Nikolai V. Bayev, Aleksei A.…
Out of all of the takes commemorating the first anniversary of the Pulse massacre in Orlando, none was as... singular in its vision as that from the Orlando Sentinel called “As Disney reports drop in guests, is Orlando’s post-Pulse embrace of LGBT too tight?” by one C. Britt Beemer. In it, Beemer suggested that a…
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov says investigators have found no evidence that gay men are being rounded up, detained, and in some cases murdered in the republic of Chechnya, according to NBC News.
Elena Milashina, a journalist for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, published two stories about gay men being rounded up, detained, tortured, and sometimes killed in Chechnya that made international headlines. Now, Milashina says she’s fleeing Russia in fear of her safety.
In recent weeks, a humanitarian crisis in the Russian republic of Chechnya, where authorities are reportedly rounding up gay men to torture and kill them, has been a subject of increasing media scrutiny. Earlier this week, after an April 4 story in the Russian paper Novaya Gazeta detailing the prison camps in which…
Tonight, ABC will air a 20/20 report on gay conversation therapy camps around the U.S., where parents send their kids in attempt to exorcise them of their same-sex attraction. If that already sounds abusive—keeping in mind that so-called “reparative therapy” has been denounced as at least unnecessary by a laundry list…
Queer rapper Mykki Blanco took to Twitter Friday evening to describe an extremely disturbing incident that took place on his Delta flight from Toronto to Detroit. According to Blanco, he was woken up at the end of the flight by a cop who’d been called by the man sitting next to Blanco. The man’s explanation for…
