LGBTQ+

If like me you have zero parenting and fathers day is painful try !dadforaminute@lemmy.world It's a great group of dads there for pep talks, big hugs or dad advice. Totally lgbt inclusive

The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the U.S. aren’t just affecting American Pride celebrations this year. Events across Europe are reportedly also feeling the pinch as corporate sponsors pull back their financial support for fear of crossing the president.

Zee Pepper, a trans and aboriginal man in Melbourne, Australia, is speaking out after experiencing allegedly blatant transphobia in a restaurant at the start of Pride Month. [...] Pepper was dining at the Soho restaurant in Australia’s second city with his mother and stepsister when he went to use the restroom. He opted for the unisex handicapped bathroom, as he usually does when there’s a choice between unisex and men’s bathrooms.

Four drag performers were greeted with applause when they showed up to opening night of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, while President Donald Trump arrived to a mixture of boos and cheers from the crowd.

This funding will expand Lambda Legal’s capacity, helping the organization fight against immediate threats to LGBTQ+ people in the courts, win new rights and protections, and prepare a defense for the future. By the end of 2026, the organization will build up its legal team by 42%, growing from 36 to 51 members, effectively expanding the organization’s case docket capacity by 86%.

Lambda Legal is stretching its dollars to the maximum to meet the moment, and continued support will go toward critical strategic and expanded legal action. Already, the organization is in court fighting back, litigating for the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ communities all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

This includes:

• Arguing in front of the Supreme Court to force an end to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, including the United States v. Skrmetti case.
• Litigating six separate cases against the current Trump administration for its anti-LGBTQ+ policies and executive orders targeting transgender rights and inclusion in the military, access to HIV medication and gender-affirming care, and DEI.
• Maintaining an impressive 86% success rate against the last Trump administration.

Of the $285 million raised by Lambda as part of the Unstoppable Future campaign, 30 percent — roughly $80 million — is available as current-use cash to support strategic growth. The remaining 70 percent are long-term legacy commitments from donors that will help ensure the organization’s continued growth and protect the future rights of the LGBTQ+ community

Across the U.S., a dangerous movement is brewing, one that seeks to silence trans folks and push them into the shadows. One of its leaders is the Alliance Defending Freedom.

On May 20, the right-wing organization ADF sued Minnesota over its advocacy for trans rights. ADF argues that allowing trans girls and women in women’s sports discriminates against cis girls and women. ADF, a Project 2025 adviser, has been at the helm of several anti-trans initiatives, its lawyers authoring model bathroom bills that would force trans people into the bathrooms of their assigned sex at birth. In 2025, lawmakers have already passed more than 100 anti-trans bills across the U.S., including 13 bathroom bills.

But where is ADF getting money for its anti-trans advocacy? These days, it's almost impossible to tell due to regulations that allow nonprofits to hide their donors, but one verifiable source is the fossil fuel industry. Between 2013 and 2022, Shell USA Company Foundation donated $58,002 to ADF, per an investigation by the Guardian. Phil Anschutz, a billionaire who built his wealth on fossil fuels and now owns Anschutz Entertainment Group, Inc., which puts on live entertainment events like Coachella, also donated $110,000 to ADF between 2011 and 2013.

ADF isn’t the only anti-trans organization with financial ties to the fossil fuel sector. An independent analysis of 45 right-wing groups advocating against trans rights found that 80% have received donations from fossil fuel companies or billionaires. The analysis, conducted by two independent researchers in 2023 and not peer-reviewed, was shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED. Through a qualitative search, the researchers identified 45 groups advancing anti-trans lobbying, events, and publications and checked reports about their donor disclosures for fossil fuel funding.

archive.is link

A highly significant Supreme Court decision is approaching, and the lives of trans teens and their families hang in the balance. United States vs Skrmetti will decide, once and for all, whether state bans on gender-affirming treatments are constitutional. If the court sides with Tennessee, its ban and other similar laws will remain in place. Nationally, access to gender affirming care has also been threatened by a presidential executive order and the Republican-dominated congress, but these efforts thus far have fallen short of a full ban.

At stake in Skrmetti, advocates say, is safety and stability for trans youth and their families. If the conservative-leaning court upholds state care bans, loving families fear the prospect that their children could be removed by state child protective services. (Due to the seriousness of these potential legal threats, this piece uses pseudonyms for trans youth and their families in states with bans.)

Why have some families decided to risk everything for these treatments? The answer, families say, is as simple as love. Those Teen Vogue spoke to describe how decisions to seek gender-affirming treatments sprang from the trust trans youth placed in their parents, and parents’ drive to do what’s best for the health of their children.

Posters advertising a “bear weekend” cling to the utility poles on Fire Island, punctuating the wooden boardwalks that meander through a lush dune landscape of beach grass and pitch pine. It’s not a celebration of grizzlies, by the looks of the flyers, but of large bearded men in small swimming trunks, bobbing in the pools and sprawled on the sundecks of mid-century modernist homes. You might also find them frolicking in the bushes of this idyllic car-free island, a nature reserve of an unusual kind that stretches in a 30-mile sliver of sand off the coast of Long Island in New York.

Over the last century, Fire Island Pines, as the central square-mile section of this sandy spit is known, has evolved into something of a queer Xanadu. Now counting about 600 homes, it is a place of mythic weekend-long parties and carnal pleasure, a byword for bacchanalia and fleshy hedonism – but also simply a secluded haven where people can be themselves.

“My most vivid memory of my first visit here in the late 90s is being able to hold my boyfriend’s hand in public without fear,” says Christopher Rawlins, architect and co-founder of Pines Modern, a non-profit dedicated to celebrating the modern architecture of the island. The palpable sense of community and liberation here is, he says, “what happens when people who are accustomed to a certain degree of fear no longer feel it.”

We’ve invited a host of LGBTQIA+ talent to reflect on how they came into their identity, reflecting on all the joy, confusion and breakthroughs which led them to a place of self-love and radical acceptance.

For three years, Garnier has proudly partnered with Just Like Us, a UK charity which works to support schools and empower younger people within the LGTBQIA+ community nationwide.

Below, Bel Priestley, Vanity Milan, Mitchell Halliday, Jason Kwan, Way of Yaw and Charley Marlowe share heartfelt pieces of advice to their younger selves.

The setting of this year’s WorldPride resulted in many setbacks and challenges for the organizers. Washington, DC, after all, is the epicenter of the administration currently doing everything it can to roll back LGBTQ+ rights. [...] Despite the fears facing the LGBTQ+ community, the Capitol Pride Alliance (CPA), the event’s primary organizer, pushed through in a show of defiance, resulting in a tempered, but still joyous celebration.

If you like 70's disco and queer liberation anthems, then I'm sure you'll enjoy this. I just found out about this while browsing the news and I'm excited to share it.

Carl Bean (May 26, 1944 – September 7, 2021) was an American singer and activist who was the founding prelate of the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, a progressive Protestant denomination that is particularly welcoming of LGBTQ+ Black Americans.

Lady Gaga first mentioned that Carl Bean's song inspired Born This Way on Instagram in 2021. In an exclusive clip of the documentary I Was Born This Way, Lady Gaga honors queer music icon Carl Bean and the legacy of “I Was Born This Way". (from Rolling Stone)

The phrase “Be Gay, Do Crime” is such a current mood that there are actually two books with that title coming out this year. One of these, published by PM Press, is Be Gay, Do Crime: Everyday Acts of Queer Resistance and Rebellion. It offers a historical and sociological overview of queer rebellion and uprising, from the life and work of anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman to Stonewall to the first Toronto Trans March in 2009, and beyond. Meanwhile, Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley’s anthology, Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos, is a collection of fiction rather than a historical summing up, and is more concerned with individual acts of gay transgression than with political disobedience and resistance.

Though political disobedience is not the focus of most of these stories of queer criminality, the material conditions that lead to political dissent are present across many of these tales. The characters in these pieces are often living in subpar housing situations, feeling stressed and anxious about crumbling buildings and neglectful landlords, fighting with their roommates and partners in cramped quarters, and weathering the constraints of lockdowns and economic crises. They work dead-end jobs and despair at saving up enough money to access gender-affirming surgeries or start families or make down payments on houses. They bear the rejection of queerphobic and transphobic families and covet the seemingly easy lives of richer, more normative people than themselves. They grit their teeth through racism, institutional and interpersonal, and long for “fuck you money”—a term used in ekwuyasi’s story of the same name to describe an amount of funds impressive enough that it will shut up the racists and haters around you.

The stories in Be Gay, Do Crime bring us from London to Los Angeles; Vancouver to Washington, D.C.; Miami to the Arizona desert. The crimes chronicled in these pages include the mild (weed-dealing, pickpocketing, shoplifting, voyeurism), the more serious (blackmail, stealing a dog, stealing a baby, bank robbery, political assassination) and the zany (impersonating a child in order to win children’s drawing contests, pelting MAGA protestors with rotten beer hops, stealing a billionaire’s experimental anti-dysphoria drug). In Blackburn’s masterful piece of microfiction, “Black Jesus,” the main character’s transgression is spiritual rather than material. A young girl uses Wite-Out to erase the ten commandments in her grandmother’s Bible in order to write in her own, which are more relevant to her life, such as “Thou shalt not drip milk on the carpet.”

The crimes featured in these stories are often born of frustration or resentment, and don’t, with some exceptions, actively harm other people. We aren’t in the realms of Dennis Cooper or Gary Indiana here—there are no snuff films featuring underage characters (real or imagined) or gay serial killers within these pages, or even much that could be deemed smutty. However, many of the characters in Be Gay, Do Crime do get horny when they transgress, with crime becoming an erotic act in and of itself.[...]

[...]this year, Lowe's ended its participation in surveys conducted by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation's largest LGBTQ organization. Lowe's also shuttered an employee resource group for LGBTQ employees and ended its sponsorship of Pride parades.

A Lowe's spokesperson said the company "will continue to strive to cultivate a workplace that reflects the customers and communities where we operate and where everyone feels welcomed, valued, and respected."

Lowe's is just one of 19 companies that have ended their support of Pride parades, in whole or in part, this year.

The corporate pullback has left several Pride parades short on cash. NYC Pride faces a $750,000 budget gap after losing corporate sponsors. Pride parades in San Francisco and Kansas City are each about $200,000 short. Smaller parades are faring even worse. Eve Keller, co-president of USA Prides, a network of parade organizations, said that "rural Prides are down 70% to 90% when compared to the average year."