The Florida Highway Patrol arrested three people on Sunday during a protest near the crosswalk outside of the former Pulse nightclub. The “Chalk For Pride” event was scheduled for 6 p.m. at South Orange Avenue and West Esther Street to protest the removal of “Pride crosswalks” and the “abuse of laws that threaten our freedom of expression,” according to a news release.
According to the FHP, 39-year-old Zane Aparicio , 25-year-old Mary Jane East and 26-year-old Donavon Short were arrested and taken to the Orange County jail.
On Friday night — Orestes Sebastian Suarez, 29 — was arrested after being accused of using chalk to color the bottom of his shoe before crossing the road, leaving footprints. Suarez faced a charge of defacing a traffic device ($1,000 or more) and was held overnight on a $5,000 bond until a judge on Saturday afternoon found no probable cause for the arrest and said that Suarez would be released.
Earlier this year, TikToker Kathryn Jones began a quest to visit every exhibit at the Smithsonian museums and read every plaque.Justine Goode / NBC News; Getty Images
Pausing next to a hulking steam locomotive at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on Friday, Kathryn Jones bent down to look at a tiny silk slipper.
“I’ve never seen one in person. It’s so small,” she said, pointing at the shoe once worn by a Chinese immigrant with bound feet. “That’s why I love museums. It takes those facts and solidifies it.”
The recording of a trail whistle hooted in the background, bringing to life the 1887 Jupiter steam engine that hauled fruit picked by immigrants in Watsonville, California.
“The immersion, the sounds, the small little touches that suck you in. I’m a sucker for small objects,” she said as she walked through “America on the Move,” her 100th Smithsonian exhibit this year.
In January, Jones began a quest to visit every exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington, D.C., and read every plaque. During the past eight months, she has visited 100 exhibits at 13 museums, meticulously logging her time on detailed spreadsheets. According to her records, that’s 73 hours inside the museums and almost 51 total hours reading signs.
She traverses each exhibit twice, first reading every description and watching every video, then looking at the exhibit again and filming video for her TikTok account.
Kathryn Jones visits the “America on the Move” exhibit at the National Museum of American History Behring Center.Fiona Glisson / NBC News
“My goal for that is almost to kind of provide a marketing sizzle reel for the exhibit,” she said. “A priority of mine is getting people in museums, getting people curious, reminding people that learning is fun as well as hopefully right, breaking down the stigma that museums and galleries are stuffy and exclusive and people can’t come.”
Jones paused to take in historic footage of a streetcar passing the White House. “This is what I love to see, D.C. streets which I recognize,” she said. “Look how close to the White House they are with a streetcar.”
She added, “People on roller skates! I did not expect that. A tour! This is so cool.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on April 3, 2019.Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP file
This year, Jones found herself at a professional crossroads after leaving her job as a vice president of marketing.
“I called it my grown-up gap year,” she said. “There were so many aspects of what I was doing that I loved, but I was just kind of burnt out and felt adrift. So, I took the year off with the intention to figure out what brought me joy in life, what I wanted to do.”
Making videos about the Smithsonian, she discovered a passion for content creation, which she intends to continue after filming her last Smithsonian exhibition.
“I tried, I think, three times and failed before I did my first exhibit. I went to a museum with the intention to read everything, and was either too anxious to do it, embarrassed to be filming in public,” she said. “I’m really proud of myself for the strides that I’ve made in my ability to focus, my confidence in myself.”
As Jones has built her channel, the Smithsonian has found itself under increased scrutiny. Last month, the Trump administration informed Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch that it would begin a systematic review to “remove divisive or partisan narratives” in advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” he wrote. “We are not going to allow this to happen.”
The first phase of the review will focus on eight Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Portrait Gallery.
In an interview with Fox News, Lindsey Halligan, one of the White House officials who signed the administration’s Aug. 12 letter to the Smithsonian, addressed the review.
“The fact that … our country was involved in slavery is awful — no one thinks otherwise,” she said. “But what I saw when I was going through the museums, personally, was an overemphasis on slavery, and I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”
A display featuring former slave Clara Brown at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
The Smithsonian Institution was in the administration’s crosshairs prior to last month’s review announcement. In March, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed the institution to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”
In April, an exhibit by African LGBTQ artists was abruptly postponed by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. The following month, NBC News documented more than 30 artifacts that were removed from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And in July, artist Amy Sherald canceled an upcoming show at the National Portrait Gallery after she said curators expressed concerns about a painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty.
“It became clear during my exchanges with the gallery how quickly curatorial independence collapses when politics enters the room,” she wrote on MSNBC.com. “Museums are not stages for loyalty. They are civic laboratories. They are places where we wrestle with contradictions, encounter the unfamiliar and widen our circle of empathy. But only if they remain free.”
This is not the first time that the Smithsonian has found itself in the crossfire of a culture war. In 2010, the institution withdrew part of an exhibition called Hide/Seek featuring works by LGBTQ artists after sustained outcry by then-House Speaker John Boehner and Catholic organizations.
The institution was also roiled by a debate over a National Air and Space Museum exhibit of the Enola Gay aircraft, which dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. Critics derided plans to include Japanese perspectives and information about the effects of nuclear warfare as an example of “politically correct curating.”
“The Smithsonian has faced crisis moments in the past … but the crisis moments have never come from a direct political assault, certainly not at the hands of the executive,” said Dr. Sam Redman, director of the public history program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “I know we use the word unprecedented a lot in this era, but this is truly unprecedented in terms of thinking about the Smithsonian.”
Kathryn Jones reads a plaque about Charlotte Hawkins Brown, an author, educator, and civil rights activist.Fiona Glisson / NBC News
Some museum scholars dispute the Trump administration’s claims that the Smithsonian overemphasizes narratives by Black and LGBTQ artists.
“We all know that museums are historically and culturally extremely conservative, and that there’s a striking lack of exhibitions devoted to women artists, or women’s history or Black artists or LGBTQ,” said Lisa Strong, director of the art and museum studies master’s program at Georgetown University. “Museums know this and have been working, working to fix this.”
A 2022 report by journalists Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns for Artnet found 14.9% of exhibits at 31 major U.S. museums, including the National Portrait Gallery, between 2008 and 2020 were of work by female-identifying artists, and 6.3 % were of work by Black American artists.
Jones said her priority on her TikTok channel is encouraging people to visit the Smithsonian museums and local museums that document history.
“Hearing those stories of people that have suffered before, problems that we face, that’s honestly why I kind of started doing this challenge,” she said. “Because when we read these stories and see things, the more we know, the better we can empathize with other people, because we have other experiences to pull from.”
She sat in the arched alcove of a railroad waiting room to listen to the story of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who traveled to the Jim Crow South on racially segregated railroad cars during the 1920s.
“She talks about how someone said to her, ‘This is God’s country. You can’t sit there,’” Jones said.
“Hearing those stories, I do think it’s important to confront those things, because that led to where we are now,” she said. “People are affected by that. Some people will carry the scars of that.”
As part of a wider rollback on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (DEI), the Ivy League university will no longer designate residential proctors or tutors specifically for LGBTQ+ or first-generation/low-income undergraduates, according to the college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
The tutors and proctors will have their tasks folded into “specialty” roles. The change was reportedly announced last week in an email from associate dean of students Lauren Brandt.
Proctors and tutors are live-in advisers who support and help plan activities for students in their first year at Harvard.
A document included with Brandt’s email informed students that “Culture and Community” proctors and tutors would now work to “foster cultivation of bonds and bridges to enable all members of our community to grow with and learn from each other”, The Crimson reported.
“The description of the responsibilities of the… tutors does not mention providing support to students with specific backgrounds or identities,” the report went on to say.
Texas Republicans‘ redrawn congressional maps will split up the district of the only out LGBTQ+ representative from the South.
Julie Johnson, an out lesbian elected to the state’s 32nd congressional district last year, condemned the GOP’s plans to pick up five seats in the U.S. House of Representatives by gerrymandering Democratic districts. She said the proposal, approved by the state House of Representatives Wednesday, would “decimate TX32, splitting my constituents into 8 different districts spreading all the way to the Oklahoma border and East Texas.”
“Today, Texas Republicans and Governor Abbott rammed through the Texas House a set of rigged and racist congressional maps that dismantle fair representation and silence the voices of millions of Texans,” Johnson said in a statement. “This is not democracy, it is a corrupt power grab designed to protect Donald Trump and his failed policies while ensuring Republican control for another decade. These maps were drawn behind closed doors with one goal in mind, to keep power in the hands of a New York felon while denying fair representation to Texans. It is an insult to every voter who believes their voices matter in our democracy.”
The new maps would go into effect in 2026, when every member of the U.S. House is up for reelection, severely limiting the possibility of Johnson maintaining her seat. She was first elected to the U.S. House in 2024 after serving in the Texas House for six years, becoming the first out LGBTQ+ person elected to Congress from the South.
In response to Texas Republicans’ plan, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a special election in November for voters to approve a plan that would also redistrict the state, adding five Democratic seats in the U.S. House and nullifying Texas’ gains.
Texas’ new districts must still be approved by the Republican-controlled state Senate and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Johnson said that she and other Democrats aren’t giving up, and that they intend to “fight back in the courts.”
“[Republicans] have diluted the voices of hundreds of thousands that call Dallas County home,” she continued. “This was a targeted attack on my district and every other congressional district represented by a Democrat in Texas. But let me be clear: this is a national fight and it is not over. Democrats refuse to be silenced. We will continue to fight back in the courts, in Congress, and in other states to offset the cheating that has occurred in Texas.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has appeared at least four times on the Reformation Red Pill podcast, a far-right podcast hosted by Joshua Haymes, an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist who was also a former pastor at the church that Hegseth attends, The Guardian reported.
The publication noted that Haymes wants to execute adulterers and people who have abortions, that he seemingly called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ Pride marchers, and also considers liberalism a greater threat to the nation than neo-Nazism.
Haymes is aligned with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a Christian Nationalist denomination that believes the United States should be subject to biblical law, and is both a member and former pastoral intern of the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship church in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, where Hegseth and his family are members.
On August 5, Haymes posted a statement on X, which said, “I used to say homosexuality is no worse than other sins. All sin separates us from God after all! I was wrong. Sexual sin is uniquely evil. Sodomy is an abomination to God, along with crossdressing… It’s important for Christians to say so.”
While Haymes’ post included a Bible verse calling cross-dressing an “abomination,” Biblical laws also require the death penalty for anyone who practices fortune telling, curses their mother or father, accidentally kills someone else’s animal, or commits blasphemy. Other Old Testament laws demand death for anyone who charges interest on loans or works on Saturdays.
Most contemporary Christians don’t follow these ancient Biblical laws and say that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ made them obsolete. However, conservative Christians tend to cite anti-LGBTQ+ Bible verses as proof that God shares their hatred of LGBTQ+ people while ignoring Bible verses against other “sins”, like eating shellfish and wearing clothing made of two different fabrics.
On August 13, Haymes posted an image praising Italy for banning lesbian couples from becoming parents, writing, “By the grace of God, we will see this done in these United States.”
In October 2024, Haymes wrote on X, “Mutilating children, Or being an accomplice to mutilating children should be a capital offense. Jesus recommends execution by drowning.”
The post included an image of a man being drowned in the ocean with a large millstone tied to his neck. The image refers to a New Testament Bible verse that says those who cause children to stumble or sin would be better off being drowned in the sea with a large millstone hung around their neck.
In a June 28 post, Haymes posted footage of marchers in the Nashville, Tennessee Pride Parade and wrote, “We’re short on millstones at the Nashville Pride parade. This is sick. This is child abuse.”
When asked about his post, Haymes told the aforementioned publication, “I do not advocate for violence against Pride marchers. I do not advocate for violence of any kind. I do not believe that anyone should be drowning anyone in this scenario… My role is simply to give that warning. Pride marchers who are sexualizing children are in for a very, very harsh judgment when they stand before their maker.”
When asked for a comment about Haymes, a Pentagon spokesperson pointed to a statement declaring that “[Hegseth] is a proud member of a church that is affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson. He is a very proud Christian and has those traditional Christian viewpoints.”
Earlier this month, Hegseth reposted a video in which Wilson said he’d like laws against homosexuality to be reinstated in all 50 states.
Illinois Pride Connect will provide resources for health care, education, immigration, family services, elder services, and more, Pritzker said, both informing individuals of their rights and advocating for them.
The organization will also host a hotline that can assist callers with legal issues, including but not limited to access to health care such as gender-affirming care, discrimination or harassment, public benefits like Medicaid or SNAP, identity documents, and housing or safety concerns.
The website states: “If you’re an LGBTQIA+ individual (or a concerned family member or friend), and you’re facing legal issues that impact your health, safety, or access to care, we’re here to help. The IL Pride Connect Legal Hotline offers free, confidential legal advice and referrals across Illinois.”
The hotline will be available at 855-805-9200 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. GMT Monday through Thursday, offering services in both English and Spanish. It launches August 25.
“Together, we are fighting ignorance with information,” Pritzker continued. “We’re fighting cruelty with compassion.”
More than 20 hospitals and health systems have temporarily or indefinitely rolled back transgender care for minors and some young adults this year amid threats of federal investigations and cuts to government funding, an NBC News analysis found.
In addition to those 21 hospitals, another five have removed webpages dedicated to trans care for minors from their websites this year — one said it is still providing trans care to minors, one would only say it continues “to comply with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and three did not respond to requests for comment. And separately, a health center in Iowa stopped providing hormone therapy to trans adults due to a Trump order that prohibits federal funds from being used to “promote gender ideology,” the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
The changes have come as hospitals attempt to comply with state laws, which in many instances prohibit discriminating against trans people in medical care, as well as federal guidance, which in recent months has threatened to revoke hospitals’ federal funding or charge them with civil or criminal penalties if they continue to provide trans care to patients younger than 19.
A testosterone prescription used for gender-affirming care in 2023.Rory Doyle for The Washington Post via Getty Images file
Patients and families affected by these changes in care have described the effects as devastating.
One Florida mom, who asked that her name not be published due to fears that she could face harassment or be targeted by the federal government, recently bought one-way tickets to Berlin so she and her 15-year-old trans daughter could move there next month. The mom has acquired a language-learning visa, and her daughter will be able to live with her because she is a minor.
When her daughter first sought access to transition care, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and state Republican legislators were trying to ban it, so in September 2021, the teen and her dad started driving 11 hours to Alabama every few months so she could access care at the University of Alabama’s gender clinic. Then, in August 2023, a court allowed a care ban to take effect in Alabama. Last July, they began flying to Washington, D.C., to receive care at Children’s National Hospital.
Last month, the hospital announced in a message on its website that “in light of escalating legal and regulatory risks to Children’s National, our providers, and the families we serve, we will be discontinuing the prescription of gender-affirming medications” effective Aug. 30.
The mom said even if she could find another doctor in the U.S. for her daughter, she fears the family might have just one visit “before the government steps in again.”
“Where can we go?” she said. “Growing up, we were always told that America is the greatest country in the world, and now we’re having to flee so that my child can get the health care she needs, and for our safety.”
‘These threats are no longer theoretical’
Since 2021, 27 states have enacted measures prohibiting access to puberty blockers, hormone therapy and/or surgeries for trans minors as part of a wider effort to restrict trans rights.
Supporters of the legislation say the care has not been adequately studied, can have harmful long-term effects and that minors cannot actually consent to it. However, doctors who treat trans youth say puberty blockers and hormone therapy have been provided to minors who are not trans for decades to treat other conditions, such as precocious puberty. In addition, nearly all major medical associations in the United States support access to transition-related care for minors and oppose restrictions on it, with the American Medical Association calling government restrictions “a dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine.”
A study published earlier this year in JAMA Pediatrics found that less than 0.1% of adolescents in the U.S. with private insurance in the United States are trans and are prescribed puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones. A 2024 study published by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that the rate of teens ages 15 to 17 undergoing gender-affirming surgery was 2.1 per 100,000.
The remaining states where care is legal — particularly California, Colorado, Oregon, Illinois, Washington, Connecticut and Pennsylvania — have seenan influx of out-of-state patients, with some parents of trans minors even relocating their families to those states to maintain care for their kids.
Parents of trans youths have seen those states — and hospitals such as the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which is home to one of the nation’s oldest gender clinics — as safe havens.
An emergency room nurse at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shows a lanyard decorated with pronoun pins and buttons during a protest against the closure of the hospital’s trans youth clinic on July 3.Jae C. Hong / AP
However, in January, the Trump administration began targeting providers of trans care, including an executive order that sought to bar federal funding from going to medical schools and hospitals that provide such care to people younger than 19. In March, a federal judge blocked that part of the order, and some hospitals resumed treatments.
But then, in April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo that said the Justice Department would investigate doctors who provide transition care to minors under existing laws, including laws against genital mutilation. In July, the DOJ sent subpoenas to more than 20 doctors and clinics that provide such care. A subpoena sent to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which was made public Monday as part of a legal filing attempting to block the investigations, requested the names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and parent/guardian information of all patients who were prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission have also taken action to restrict care, both for minors and adults.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles mentioned all of these actions and more in a June 12 letter to hospital staff detailing its decision to close the Center for Transyouth Health and Development, which has been running for three decades, effective July 22.
The letter, which a spokesperson for the hospital shared with NBC News, described an HHS review published in May “dismissing current evidence-based care protocols and standards of care while promoting alternative best practices for the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria.” The HHS review “included dozens of references to CHLA and the Center for Transyouth Health and Development,” the letter said.
“Taken together, the Attorney General memo, HHS review, and the recent solicitation of tips from the FBI to report hospitals and providers of [gender-affirming care] strongly signal this Administration’s intent to take swift and decisive action, both criminal and civil, against any entity it views as being in violation of the executive order,” this hospital’s leadership wrote. “These threats are no longer theoretical. The federal government has already cut off hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. academic and research institutions for noncompliance with executive orders, often with little to no warning.”
Earlier this month, more than a dozen states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued the Trump administration to block investigations into doctors and hospitals who provide gender-affirming care to minors.
The complaint argued that the federal government was trying to institute a national ban on such care when Congress has not passed one, violating the 10th Amendment by trying to usurp the power of states that have not passed bans. It also argued that hospitals were being forced to either defy the federal threats or comply and violate state laws against discrimination in medical care.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement at the time that Americans support Trump’s efforts to stop “the despicable mutilation and chemical castration of children,” using inflammatory language to describe transition care.
“The President has the lawful authority to protect America’s vulnerable children through executive action, and the Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue,” Rogers said.
Protesters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2023.Jose A. Iglesias / Miami Herald via Getty Images file
Robin Maril, an assistant professor of constitutional law at Oregon’s Willamette University, said the Trump administration is attempting to restrict access to transition care through guidance issued by regulatory agencies. That guidance tells doctors and hospitals “exactly how the government is going to go after them,” Maril said.
Hospitals are weighing losing all federal funding, which could force them to close, Maril said, or standing up to the Trump administration.
“To stand up to the Trump administration at this point would result in kids losing care for all sorts of things,” Maril said.
‘That’s just not fair’
The climate created by the administration’s policies, the investigations and the legal battles have been surreal for Dr. Kade Goepferd, the chief education officer at Children’s Minnesota and a pediatrician in the hospital’s Gender Health Program, which has not ceased or paused trans care for minors.
Goepferd, who uses they/them pronouns, said their patients’ parents are scared, and the kids don’t understand why their friends can access any health care when needed, but they might not be able to access this specific type of care because they’re trans.
“They feel very singled out,” Goepferd said. “The teenagers feel a lot of hopelessness. The younger kids feel a lot of fear for what their future may or may not be like.”
Dr. Kade Goepferd.Sarah Wilmer for NBC News
Goepferd said they have several patients who have moved or plan to move out of the country due to the increasingly restrictive care landscape for trans youth, and the number of out-of-state patients they see has increased over the last few years. The clinic’s waitlist for a first appointment is about six months.
They said one of their greatest concerns “is that we are tying the ability of transgender young people to access care they need, and the ability of their parents to make medical decisions for them, to the general public’s ability to understand who they are and what their medical care is.”
“That’s just not fair,” they said. “We don’t do that with other areas of medicine. We rely on medical guidelines and expertise to make decisions. So we’re treating essential health care for transgender youth as exceptional in some way, and what I wish people knew more than anything is that it is not. I provide this type of health care the same way I provide any other type of health care.”
The waiting room at the Children’s Minnesota Specialty Center, where Dr. Kate Goepferd’s Gender Health Program is located.Sarah Wilmer for NBC News
As for the Florida mom, she said that as soon as her daughter could talk she would point to Daphne in the cartoon “Scooby Doo” and say, “I that girl.” A psychiatrist said the child was “persistent, insistent and consistent” in her gender for years, and they have supported her and spent at least $7,500 on travel to access care in other states.
But now, she said, it feels like they’re out of options, and she’ll be flying to Berlin with her daughter in September and leaving her three other children in the States with their dad.
“It was like a nice fantasy that I would live in Europe one day, but then it became this absolute necessity, and I have to leave my other kids, and I don’t even know how to explain how fearful I feel and how heartbreaking this is,” she said.
What began as a discussion about President Donald Trump’s unprecedented takeover of the Kennedy Center Honors unraveled into a live-television free-for-all on CNN, veering in minutes from arts programming to slavery, white supremacy, and transgender athletes.
On NewsNight, host Abby Phillip opened with the news that Trump had not only handpicked the 2025 honorees, boasting he was “98 percent involved,” but would also host the televised ceremony, a sharp break from decades of tradition in which presidents have sat in the balcony as spectators. “Usually when the honorees are announced, you don’t see the president doing a press conference at the Kennedy Center,” Phillip said. “It’s not a political thing. It’s a celebration of American art.”
U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a gay New YorkDemocrat, called the move “the opposite of the Oprah effect,” accusing Trump of “poisoning what is an iconic and historically bipartisan institution.” Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky went further, saying it was part of a larger cultural campaign: “He’s literally reviewing parts of American history… to make sure it comports with dear leader and what MAGA wants.” Earlier in the week, the Trump administration instructed the Smithsonian to conduct a review of its content and make “corrections” to exhibits that didn’t comply with Trump’s vision of American excellence.
That’s when Jillian Michaels, the lesbian fitness personality who wrote that she was not proud to be LGBTQ+ in a June Daily MailPride Monthop-ed that railed against “leather daddies, drag shows, and corporate stunts,” jumped in. “Can we address some of those things that are in there? Because have you looked at some of the things that are being reviewed?” she asked.
“Yes. Slavery,” Roginsky replied.
“He’s not whitewashing slavery,” Michaels shot back. “And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.”
Torres countered: “Slavery in America was white supremacy.”
“Less than 2 percent of white Americans owned slaves,” Michaels replied, adding that Americans were “the first race to try to end slavery.” Phillip pressed her on whether she was disputing that slavery in the United States was about race. “Every single thing is like, ‘white people bad,’ and that’s just not the truth,” Michaels insisted, citing a Cuban migration exhibit she claimed was framed that way.
Then, abruptly, Michaels pivoted to the Smithsonian’s Change Your Game exhibit, a family-friendly installation about sports innovation, to argue against transgender athletes in women’s sports. She dismissed the exhibit’s discussion of gender testing as “complex,” calling it “basic science… XX chromosome, XY chromosome.”
“Do you know that when you walk in the front door, the first thing that you see is the gay flag?” Michaels had complained earlier in the segment.
“First of all, we don’t have time to litigate all of this,” Phillip interjected.
“Of course we don’t,” Michaels replied, accusing Phillip of “trying to racialize” her comments.
“Just to be clear, you brought up race,” Phillip said. “This was a conversation about the arts, and you brought up slavery and the question of whether it was about race. The answer is yes. Slavery in the United States is about race.”
Axios media reporter Sara Fisher eventually steered the conversation back to the Kennedy Center, noting that while Trump’s honoree list wasn’t “the most MAGA ceremony ever,” his decision to host and his allies’ moves to rename the venue marked a new phase in politicizing an institution once considered above the partisan fray.
“Is that for yellow pride?” a man sneered at Seiya in the middle of Ptown’s tea dance, referring to a yellow bandanna he was wearing around his neck.
It wasn’t the first time Seiya, a 33-year-old gay Asian American, had experienced racism from other queer men. Years earlier at Rage, a now-closed gay club in West Hollywood, another white man asked him what he was doing there.
“It’s not Gameboi night,” the man said to him, referring to the Asian-themed weekly party the venue hosted.
Photo courtesy of Seiya.
“That was really the first time that I really felt some sort of divide,” Seiya told Uncloseted Media. “We’re already such a marginalized community, and then to just marginalize even further; it was just really disappointing.”
Seiya’s experience isn’t unique. A 2022 report from The Trevor Project found that more than half of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) LGBTQ youth reported discrimination based on their race and/or ethnicity in 2021. And another study from the Williams Institute found that nearly one in five AAPI LGBTQ adults do not feel safe in the U.S.
This discrimination is a silent epidemic, according to Gene Lim, a researcher at the Australian Research Center for Sex, Health and Society.
“There’s a lot of shame around experiencing sexual racism, on top of the fact that it’s an inherently distressing situation,” Lim told Uncloseted Media. “That congeals into a sense of isolation.”
Feelings of exclusion take a mental health toll: 40% of AAPI youth seriously considered suicide in the U.S. in 2021, and 16% attempted it.
Photo by Cody Kinsfather.
Seiya says he’s carried those instances of racism with him and that they’ve impacted his self-perception in queer spaces.
“[It gave] this sense of otherness and discomfort whenever I was in a predominantly white space. It’s still something I deal with to this day.”
Danny Maiuri, a 41-year-old queer Korean American man, says he’s conscious of his racial identity when he visits Fire Island, a popular gay vacation spot on Long Island, N.Y.
“I remember times just getting asked the really basic ‘Where are you from?’ And I just kind of explained, ‘I live in New York,’ and then you get the ‘But like, were you born here?’”
Sexual racism—or discrimination in romantic partner selection—is most common among men who have sex with men (MSM), according to Thomas Le, an assistant professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College.
“A lot of what Asian American men report in the U.S. is some ostracization because of the elevation of white men, and masculinity and muscularity being prized,” Le told Uncloseted Media.
Lim says this fixation on whiteness stems from racialized hierarchies in queer spaces, where Eurocentric features are often favored over Asian features.
“Asian MSM [must] navigate a sexual field where the hierarchy of desire is really racialized,” Lim told Uncloseted Media. “And they can feel disadvantaged in a way that is insurmountable.”
Nineteenth-century immigration laws and cultural norms in the U.S. excluded Asian American men from participating in male-dominant professions like mining and field work. Instead, they assumed roles typically associated with women.
This segregation fomented in the American mind an image of the Asian man as feminine and has translated into the racist stereotypes about body image and dating preferences of gay men.
Asian men are often assumed to be bottoms or twinks or to have small penis sizes because of this emasculated image. And a 2011 analysis on race-based partner preferences among MSM found that Asian men were preferred by 12% of participants, a dramatic drop off from preferences for white and Black men, preferred by 52% and 48% of participants, respectively.
Racist Stereotypes and the Media’s White Beauty Standard
In American media, Hollywood has reproduced caricatures of Asian people for years. Long Duk Dong, the Asian character in “Sixteen Candles,” was portrayed as sexually inept. Leslie Chow’s diction in “The Hangover” is heavily accented, and his nudity is the punchline of a joke with the implicationthat Asian men are sexually inferior.
While media representations have shifted away from overtly racist caricatures, and have even centered queer Asian male relationships like in Boys’ Love anime, the absence of Asian portrayals in the media and the abundance of white characters have shaped attraction among a generation of queer people.
Le says white, muscular men dominated popular media and defined what it meant to be attractive through the 1990s and 2000s.
“Representation is really important … it has this really understated effect on the erotic habitus for a lot of queer men,” says Lim, referring to the learned component of sexual desire. “A lot of queer Asian men do grow up implicitly measuring themselves against a Eurocentric standard.”
This experience was a reality for Filipino American Kalaya’an Mendoza in college.
Growing up in a majority non-white neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., Mendoza had never compared himself with white people. But at UC Santa Barbara, a school where AAPI people composed less than one-fifth of the undergraduate student body, Mendoza remembers attempting to fit in by adhering to white beauty standards.
“[I was] trying to be as American as possible and not to be seen as the other, not to be seen as a perpetual foreigner,” Mendoza, now 46, told Uncloseted Media. “No matter how much I tried and no matter how many times I bleached my hair, no matter how many blue contacts I bought—I would never be white.”
“I just remember feeling extremely depressed,” he says. “I almost dropped out.”
The pressure to assimilate to a white beauty standard is also ingrained in porn.
“Pornography is generally one kind of common avenue for young queer men to explore sexuality,” says Le. “Some develop racialized attractions based on that.”
White actors are far more frequently cast in porn than actors of color. Because of that, many queer men hold white people as the beauty standard.
This is what Mendoza discovered when he attempted to decolonize his dating preferences, which he describes as unlearning his racial biases shaped by colonialism. He says he questioned why he was so attracted to whiteness even though he grew up around people of color. “A lot of that was, quite frankly, because of the sexualized media or the porn.”
Seiya says he has experienced racism working in the porn industry.
“They just automatically assume that I am a bottom or submissive because I am Asian,” he says. “I just find it demoralizing and very limiting.”
Sex and Dating
When it comes to dating, queer Asian men often find it difficult to decipher if they are being seen for who they are or if they are being fetishized.
Dating apps compound these effects. The design of most platforms are such that users must make quick judgments based on minimal information on a user’s profile. Because of this, Lim says many users fall upon their prejudices.
As a way to receive more matches or chats, some Asian men attempt to fit into stereotypes that paint them as effeminate, such as the “lady boy” or the “femme boy.”
“Gay men do this all the time, they try to embody an archetype,” says Lim. “And an archetype is fertile ground for someone to project their own fantasies onto.”
Maiuri says he constantly questions whether his sexual interactions are shaped by his own desires or if he’s assuming a role based on preconceived notions.
He feels that many men assume that “all Asian men are bottoms and submissive,” and he constantly asks himself, “Am I fulfilling this role because this is what I actually enjoy? Or was this something that was just put on me and I’ve adapted to?”
Although gay culture remains white-centric, there are signs of change.
“A lot of queer Asian American men actually are creating their own communities,” says Le. “[They’re] really being intentional about finding a community with other queer men of color.”
Mendoza says that finding other queer people of color at college helped him to cultivate a positive self-image.
“That’s why, quite frankly, I feel like I’m alive today,” he says.
Maiuri says that while often criticized as a boogeyman of the mental health crisis, social media is actually having positive effects in facilitating connections between young men of similar experiences and slowly providing more examples of queer Asian men.
“The good part of it has been that connection and kind of finding identity and finding examples online for some folks to find ways to navigate [their] identity,” says Maiuri.
Seiya has come a long way from that weekend in Provincetown. He recently returned to the gay vacation hotspot for its fifth annual Frolic Weekend, a queer men of color takeover event.
“That was really special to recontextualize the space for myself,” Seiya says. “We deserve to take up space instead of shrinking ourselves.”
A judge in Florida has sided with authors and publishers in a lawsuit against the state’s book ban, determining that the law violates free speech protections.
Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. Middle District Court of Florida ruled Wednesday that “the removal of many of these books [is] unconstitutional,” noting that “many are classics, modern award winners, and tested on AP exams.”
“None of these books are obscene,” Mendoza wrote. “The restrictions placed on these books are thus unreasonable in light of the purpose of school libraries. And if so, the presence of these books in school libraries certainly does not materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”
The Florida state legislature passed HB 1069 in 2023, expanding the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill that prohibits discussion of LGBTQ+ identities fromkindergarten to high school. The bill also required that schools remove books that contain “sexual content” — a benchmark that was disproportionately applied to materials containing themes about race, gender, or sexuality.
Penguin Random House, PEN America, the Authors Guild, and parents in the Escambia County School District filed a lawsuit against the bill, asserting that it violated the First Amendment as well as the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They were joined by five authors whose books were removed from school libraries or challenged; Sarah Brannen (Uncle Bobby’s Wedding), George Johnson (All Boys Aren’t Blue), David Levithan(Two Boys Kissing), Kyle Lukoff (When Aidan Became a Brother and Too Bright to See), andAshley Hope Pérez(Out of Darkness).
Mendoza said in his ruling that the ban on material which “describes sexual conduct” is too broad, as the benchmark “does not evaluate the work to determine if it has any holistic value.” He also noted that “the statute does not specify what level of detail ‘describes sexual conduct,'” and could be applied to vague phrases such as “spent the night together” or “made love.” Mendoza’s reasoning was not far from reality, as schools in the state have used the law to censor Shakespeare and even the dictionary.
School libraries in Florida must now rely on the Miller Test to determine if a material qualifies as “obscene,” which was used before the passage of the law. The test, established in the 1973 Miller v. CaliforniaSupreme Court decision, defines obscenity as material that “appeal[s] to prurient interests as judged by the average person; depict[s] sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner; and lack[s] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
“This victory affirms what we’ve always known—that literature has the power to expand worlds, foster empathy, and help young people understand themselves and their experiences,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, said in a statement. “Book bans don’t just censor words on a page; they silence authors’ lived experiences and deny students access to the stories that help them navigate an increasingly complex world.”
