Stephen Balch, a former professor who also has opposed the 2015 Supreme Court ruling overturning state bans on same-sex marriage, is a content adviser for the revision of the standards that will guide social studies courses from kindergarten through 12th grade.
The Texas Freedom Network, a liberal group promoting religious freedom and education, is calling on the State Board of Education to withdraw Balch’s appointment, citing his writings calling the 2020 election a “literal coup,” among other things.
The group also pointed to Balch’s support of a letter urging officials to disregard the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against bans on same-sex marriage as an example of another “attack on our constitutional system of government”.
The national LGBTQ advocacy group GLSEN has appointed Melanie Willingham-Jaggers as its executive director — the first Black and nonbinary person to lead the organization.
GLSEN was founded by a group of teachers in 1990 with the goal of making schools safer for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer K-12 students. It has 38 chapters in more than half the states, and it has registered thousands of gender-sexuality alliances, or GSAs (formerly known as gay-straight alliances).
Willingham-Jaggers, 39, who joined the group as deputy executive director in 2019, is taking on the new position at a time when LGBTQ students have become part of a larger culture war taking place at school board meetings and in classrooms around the country. More than 30 statesconsidered bills last year that would ban transgender students in middle schools, high schools and colleges from playing on the sports teams of their gender identities. Ten states — nine in the last year — enacted such measures.
More than half of all the statesalso considered legislation that targets curricula, by either limiting how schools can teach race or barring LGBTQ topics from classroom discussion. Some school districts have also banned books that discuss race or LGBTQ topics.
The fights are continuing this year. But rather than focus on or respond to those efforts, Willingham-Jaggers, who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns, is excited about supporting young people in schools across the country so they have the power to make their schools safer.
“LGBTQ+ young people in schools and their student groups, like GSAs, have always been the hub, kind of the breeding ground, the soil from which these sparks of activism come up,” they said. “What we understand is that young people — period — are going to help us understand the vision forward and the way forward to the future.”
She noted that the group was founded to stop harassment, discrimination and bullying of LGBTQ youths. In the 1990s, she said, LGBTQ young people were often told that bullying is just a “part of life” and that they simply shouldn’t be gay. Over the last 30 years, the group has shifted the narrative so bullying LGBTQ kids is no longer culturally accepted, she said.
Since 1999, the group has also conducted extensive research and released its National School Climate Survey, a national survey of LGBTQ middle school and high school students’ experiences with harassment, bullying and discrimination. It uses the findings to suggest school policy solutions.
More recently, the group has changed its approach from “getting rid of the bad stuff” to “building safety,” Willingham-Jaggers said. The organization plans to do that by centering its three new pillars, which it created in a strategic refresh in 2020. They are advancing racial, gender and disability justice outcomes and education; building digital connections to extend reach; and unifying the organization and its 38 chapters to ensure that its grassroots work is effective.
“We know that our young people are not little rainbow-colored stick figures,” they said. “They are Black and brown and Indigenous and white. They are cis and gender expansive. They are kids living with disabilities and folks who are not. We know that they come from families and communities that have immigrant experience, that experience violence from various systems.”
She said that most of the group’s chapters are in the South and the Midwest and that the network is disproportionately white but that that’s where she sees beauty in the work.
“Now, imagine a Southern and Midwestern, largely suburban, largely white network that is deeply connected to making sure that education advances racial, gender and disability justice outcomes,” she said. “That is beautiful to me. That is exciting. That is deeply powerful.”
Intersectionality has always been central to Willingham-Jaggers’ work. She said she identifies as both a Black woman and a nonbinary person, in part because she was raised and socialized as a girl and because Black women are her “political North Star.”
She noted that GLSEN was founded by a white man who is cisgender — a word that describes people who identify with their assigned sexes at birth — and that he was succeeded by a cis white lesbian.
“And then here I come, and it’s not by accident, and it’s not inevitable,” she said. “So I just want to honor the journey that this organization has taken and the on-purpose choice that it took to hire a person of my identity and of my life experience.”
Eliza Byard, the group’s former executive director, said Willingham-Jaggers’ experience as an organizer and “deep connections across movements” are invaluable to its future work.
“The world of K-12 schools has been turned completely upside down over the past few years, and Melanie’s vision and experience will provide the essential ingredients of new strategies for a new time,” she said.
Willingham-Jaggers has been working with LGBTQ youths unofficially since they were a camp counselor in Southern California when they were 17 years old. But officially, they began the work in 2009 when they moved to New York City from Cincinnati to work for an organization that supported runaway and homeless youths whose family and caregivers had rejected them because they identified as queer or transgender.
Their experience in that job continues to inform their work today, they said. After a year on the job, Mosey Diaz, a young person whom they were close to, died by suicide, during a time when an increasing number of LGBTQ youths were dying by suicide — many in connection to harassment.
“It was really kind of a formative moment for me to understand that, yeah, I was working with runaway and homeless kids, but this is part of a larger LGBTQ+ movement to really change the world so that these young people know that the world is worth sticking around in,” they said.
Willingham-Jaggers said Diaz also helped her understand that people who work in service of other people have to come with more than their “good intentions.”
“We can’t just come with a pocket full of hope,” she said. “We have to be good at our work, because the stakes are incredibly high.”
A teacher at a Christian K-12 school has resigned and pulled her own son out of the school after the administration asked parents to sign a contract condemning homosexuality and comparing it to bestiality and pedophilia.
“Not only could I not sign that as a parent, I couldn’t agree to be a teacher in a school that had that vocabulary and language around some of the most vulnerable kids that we interact with,” Helen Clapham Burns, who worked at the Citipointe Christian College in Brisbane, Australia, said on the news program The Project, while close to tears.
Burns also expressed devastation that she had to pull her son from school and away from his friends.
“We have been in trauma and stress this weekend as I am having to blow my son’s world apart, because he’s not going to get to do year 11 and 12 with his mates. I have to find him a new school,” she said.
The contract says that “any form of sexual immorality (including but not limiting to adultery, fornication, homosexual acts, bisexual acts, bestiality, incest, pedophilia and pornography) is sinful and offensive to God and is destructive to human relationships and society,” and says the school has the right to “exclude” any student from the school who doesn’t agree with these principles.
The contract also includes a refusal to acknowledge students’ gender identities other than the sex they were assigned at birth.pedophilia%2F&sessionId=df86bf620bd25003d0dae8b1a52d02400722bd6b&siteScreenName=lgbtqnation&theme=light&widgetsVersion=75b3351%3A1642573356397&width=500px
But Burns isn’t the only angry one.
Over 80,000 people have signed a petition demanding that the school amend the enrollment contract.
“Citipointe is using their religious beliefs to openly discriminate against queer and trans students,” the petition states, “as well as threatening to take away their education. Sign the petition to show Citipointe that we will not stand for such blatant transphobia and homophobia.”
The school’s principal pastor, Brian Mulheran, defended the contract in a statement, saying that Citipointe has “always held these Christian beliefs and we have tried to be fair and transparent to everyone in our community by making them clear in the enrollment contract.”
LGBT+ people in Ukraine are afraid of what’s to come as tensions escalate between their country and Russia.
Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other since 2014, but there are fears that conflict could spill over after Russia deployed tens of thousands of troops to its border with Ukraine in recent days.
Since then, the United States has put 8,500 of its own troops on alert to send to Ukraine if the war worsens, and NATO announced that it was sending ships and fighter jets to eastern Europe in preparation for a potential conflict.
A Russian attack, or potential invasion, would spell disaster for Ukraine’s LGBT+ community. Queer activists are worried about what could happen if the war escalates and if Russia was to ultimately seize additional Ukrainian territories. They fear that progress on LGBT+ rights would grind to a halt and that, in the event of a Russian invasion, they could see their freedoms restricted and rolled back.
Many are ready and willing to fight if they need to – they feel a patriotic sense of duty to their country – but they’re also painfully aware that the fight for LGBT+ rights could end up on the back burner.
Lenny Ensom, director of Kiev Pride, tells PinkNews that LGBT+ people, and wider Ukrainian society, is prepared to “step forward against the aggression” if the need arises.
“On this point we are united,” Ensom says. “It doesn’t matter what your gender identity is, your sexual orientation – all together, we are stepping forward.”
The effects of the conflict are far-reaching for queer people, Ensom says. Fear and aggression “accumulate” in society in times of war, and people inevitably look to minority groups to scapegoat. He is worried that LGBT+ people could end up bearing the brunt of aggression, and their movement for equal rights could ultimately be set back.
“On one hand the Ukrainian LGBT+ movement is very successful. We have a very successful Pride march, 7,000 people marched with us in September last year. We have Pride marches in a few other cities in Ukraine. We have over 30 LGBT+ organisations working in different regions of Ukraine. But the community is really threatened, and what we see now is that all members of the community are currently under threat, every day.”
LGBT+ people are already dealing with discrimination in Ukraine’s army
Edwards Reese, another LGBT+ rights activist working with Kiev Pride, says that queer Ukrainians are “ready to fight” if the war escalates – however, they’re also concerned about the potential for discrimination.
“There are a lot of LGBTQ people in the army right now, and also there is a problem that if the war gets bigger, then there will be more discrimination to LGBTQ people in the army, because there is discrimination – we know about it, but if there is a massive call to the army, there will be more queer people in the army and more discrimination,” they point out.
The Mayor of a Mississippi city is accused of withholding $110,000 from a public library because they carry LGBTQ+ books, according to the Executive Director for the Madison County Library System.
Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee reportedly said that he had received complaints from citizens about three children’s books and one adult book at the Ridgeland Public Library, according to NBC affiliate WLBT of Jackson.
The books either had titles referencing the LGBTQ+ community or depicted them in the book, executive director Tonya Johnson said, according to the news station.
NBC News could not immediately reach McGee for comment on Friday, but the mayor told WLBT that his decision in withholding the funds was because of complaints he received from Ridgeland residents. He did not say if the complaints were about LGBTQ+ books.
Madison County Library System, which oversees the library, released a statement on its website saying that its mission is “to provide library resources and services necessary to meet the evolving informational, recreational, and cultural needs of the public, thus enhancing individual and community life.”
“Madison County Library System has earned a strong reputation for award-winning, best in the state library service because of the outstanding services, programming, and collection of library materials it provides for all the residents of Madison County,” the library system said. “As such, we remain committed to excellence in all aspects of public service, which means that everyone can depend on us for their informational needs. All members of our community are represented and welcome in our libraries.”
The library system went on to say that the library’s collection of books “is for people of all ages, races, gender identities/expressions, and orientations.”
“Our books are not only a mirror to reflect our community but a window into different worlds and different experiences that enable us to learn. Our materials are available for all. Censorship has no place here in Madison County Library System. Our library is for everyone,” the statement said.
A defiant but still very much defeated Donald Trump vowed to ban trans athletes nationwide if elected to a new term as president.
Trump, the former firebrand Republican president, took to Conroe, Texas Saturday night (29 January) for his first Texan MAGA rally since 2019.
In a meandering speech that stretched more than an hour-long, Trump laid out a string of promises certain to roil his critics – LGBT+ people included – at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds.
“We will ban men from participating in women’s sports,” he told his toadying supporters dressed in “Trump 2024” t-shirts and hats. “So ridiculous.”
“Have you heard about the man who is on the swim team that I know well?” he said, misgendering Thomas and doing so as he mention how Thomas shattered two women’s records with a 38-second margin against her closest competitor.
Trump then took aim at trailblazing trans weightlifters such as Laurel Hubbard, who, like Thomas, saw their wish to compete in the sport they love turn them into walking targets for a snickering right-wing media.
“But the best is the weightlifting records – they’re going,” Trump said. “One guy walks in with one hand [and] he broke the record that held up for 20 years.”
“Take a look at the weightlifting record,” he told bystanders, “two ounces is unacceptable. They beat ’em by many, many, many, many, many, many pounds.”
Hubbard, who became the first openly trans woman to compete in the Olympics, raised alarm among right-wing weirdos for existing last year. She bowed out of the competition after failing to lift 125kg in the +87kg women’s weightlifting final.
Donald Trump promises to pardon 6 Jan rioters in roiling rally speech
To Trump, a second term in the White House would be a return to law and order. To squash undocumented migrants, criminals and, er, those not prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on 6 January last year.
“If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan 6 fairly,” he said near the end of his inflammatory and vastly incoherent speech. It’s Trump, after all.
“And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Speaking of unfair treatment, Trump singled out immigrants with a level of vitriol all too typical among populist leaders, saying they are “invading” the US and causing the death of “countless” Americans.
Thousands of onlookers cheered after.
In what amounted to a MAGA Reddit user bingo card, Trump rattled on about critical race theory, his controversial tax dealings, Joe Biden and his completely debased claims of electoral fraud.
“We will take back America and in 2024 we will take back this beautiful, beautiful home that is white,” Trump ended. “He’s so great. We all love him.”
Arnie Kantrowitz, a pioneering activist for LGBTQ+ rights and founding member of GLAAD, has died at age 81.
Kantrowitz died January 21 at a Manhattan rehabilitation center, his life partner, Dr. Lawrence D. Mass, told The New York Times. The cause of death was complications of COVID-19.
Kantrowitz was “an early champion of gay rights and an indefatigable campaigner for fairer treatment of gay people by the media,” the Times notes. Mass, a founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, called Kantrowitz “a true sage and champion.”
He became vice president of the Gay Activists Alliance, one of the first groups founded in the wake of the Stonewall riots, in 1970. That was also the year he came to terms with being gay, according to the Times. He helped found GLAAD, then known as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, in 1985.
He was a professor in the English department at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island from 1965 to 2006, and while there he created one of the first gay studies courses in the nation. He promoted the work of Walt Whitman and other gay writers.
In 1977 he published a memoir, Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay, in which he chronicled the difficulties he and other gay people faced in mid-century America. He twice tried to take his own life, he reported. He also described events in the gay rights movement, including New York City’s first Pride march. Much later, in 2009, he was grand marshal of the Staten Island Gay Pride Parade.
He was a contemporary and friend of many fellow activists, including Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet. He appeared in Vito, a 2011 documentary about Russo, and several other documentaries about the LGBTQ+ community, including Gay Sex in the ’70s and After Stonewall.He also was one of the first out gay guests on popular radio and TV talk shows, speaking to Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, and more.
Tributes are pouring in. “Arnie Kantrowitz’s activism paved the way for the growing visibility, protections, and acceptance of the LGBTQ community that we see today,” said a statement from Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD. “At a time when LGBTQ people were villainized in the public sphere, Arnie bravely used his personal story to educate the public about our community and its history, ultimately fighting for the fair and accurate representation of LGBTQ people and our issues in the media. His legacy inspires us to continue fighting for a future where the most marginalized among us are seen, heard, and protected.”
“He was thoughtful, charming, and like any good professor (he was among the first to teach a course in gay literature, in 1973), a lifelong student and teacher,” former White House staffer Jeremy L. Léon, who interviewed Kantrowitz for a book, wrote on Facebook. He noted that after the formal interview was over, “we spent another six hours talking into the night like old friends.”
“So much of LGBTQ history has been documented, explored, shared, & preserved because of the actions of a handful of people, and he was one of them,” LGBTQ+ media scholar Lauren Herold wrote on Twitter. Also on Twitter, journalist Jay Blotcher commented, “The #LGBTQ community owes this man a great deal for our current #liberation.”
A group of rowdy men told a gay man and a trans women they would stab them and demanded they leave a London takeaway all while filming them.
An alarming and since-deleted TikTok video shows the moment Valentino Kyriakou and Naya Martinez were targeted by a group of men in Wembley, west London.
According to the BBC, the pair said that as they waited for their food at Tasty Chicken along Bridge Road on Saturday (29 January), the group targeted them.
A Metropolitan Police Service spokesperson confirmed to the BBC that “inquiries are underway to identify those shown in the video”. PinkNews has also contacted the police for comment.
“They were calling us every name and then threatening to ‘shank’ us,” 20-year-old Kyriakou told the broadcaster, “which is obviously stab us in the shop, so we just had to leave without even getting all our food.”
Grabbing the food they’d been served so far, Kyriakou and Martinez fled from the shop – but the incident soon spilt out onto the street, as the men yelled: “Get the f**k out not. Get out now. Get out the shop now.
“You come back, I’ll shank you both. I’ll shank you up. Get out. Take your f**king bag and get out.”
“Don’t f**king come here again,” one of the hooded men added. “Don’t f**king come here again.”
“They were so, so angry, I don’t know why,” Martinez recounted. “They literally were so threatened by us – it was crazy. And all we were doing was standing there waiting to pick up our food.
“All I felt in that moment was: ‘Oh my God, I am going to get touched soon, this is going to be physical.’”
During the incident, the men brashly videoed themselves abusing the pair. The clip later went viral on Twitter and Facebook.
Seemingly comfortable enough to film himself hurling abuse at two people, the TikTok video, Kyriakou and Martinez said, shows the impunity homophobic people increasingly feel in Britain to openly hate.
“Stuff like this within London in the LGBT+ community happens every day,” Martinez said.
“I was surprised the video went that viral and it’s getting people’s attention.”
Hate crimes against LGBT+ people overall have soared by 210 per cent in the last five years. The greatest and most startling surge was seen with transphobic attacks that have quadrupled in the last six years.
Only 14 per cent of reported anti-LGBT+ hate crimes are actually resolved by the police, the investigative journalism unit Liberty Investigates found.
But Martinez, for one, refuses to feel defeated.
On Instagram Monday (31 January), she uploaded a bathroom mirror selfie wearing a breathtaking bodysuit in defiance of her attackers.
“I see why they wanted me out of the chicken shop,” she joked.
“We were made aware of this video on Saturday, 29 January which shows an incident at a takeaway restaurant in Bridge Road, Wembley,” a Met Police spokesperson told PinkNews. “The incident happened on Thursday, 20 January.
“Officers have now spoken to the victims and enquiries are ongoing to identify others in the video.
“The incident is being treated as a hate crime. No arrests have been made.
Four men face charges that they were members of the drug distribution crew that supplied a deadly mix of drugs to Michael K. Williams, the renowned actor from “The Wire” who overdosed just hours after buying fentanyl-laced heroin in a sidewalk deal recorded on surveillance video.
All four were arrested Tuesday and are accused of distributing fentanyl-laced heroin of the kind that caused the death of Williams, who gained fame playing Omar Little on the HBO series that portrayed drug crews like the one authorities say the four defendants belong to.
Three of the defendants are accused of belonging to the crew that sold to Williams and made initial appearances Wednesday in Manhattan federal court. A crew member accused of handing Williams the drugs, Irvin Cartagena, was also charged with causing the actor’s death and was arrested in Puerto Rico, authorities said.
His initial court appearance is scheduled for Thursday in Puerto Rico, and it was not immediately clear who would represent him or who could comment on his behalf.
The arrests were announced in a news release from U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell.
The U.S. attorney said the crimes and charges resulted from a “public health crisis.”
“And it has to stop. Deadly opioids like fentanyl and heroin don’t care about who you are or what you’ve accomplished. They just feed addiction and lead to tragedy,” the prosecutor said.
Sewell said police detectives in Brooklyn “lived this case, never relenting in their investigation until they could bring a measure of justice to Michael K. Williams and his family.”
New York City’s medical examiner earlier ruled that Williams, 54, died of acute drug intoxication Sept. 6. Relatives found him dead in his penthouse apartment. At that time, the medical examiner’s office ruled Williams’ death an accident.
But according to court papers, Williams’ death resulted from drugs sold by a drug trafficking organization known as DTO that has operated since at least August 2020 in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood.
Members of the organization sold the actor heroin laced with fentanyl Sept. 5, authorities said in a criminal complaint, with Cartagena handing Williams the drugs in a transaction captured on nearby surveillance video, screen shots of which were released by authorities.
The video showed that Williams met Cartagena and other people a block from his apartment the day before his body was found, according to the complaint.
Williams talked with the group, and one of the people placed his hand on Williams’ shoulder to show he recognized him, according to the complaint. Williams then appeared to speak with Cartagena, who walked around a row of trash cans, retrieved a plastic bag and handed it to Williams, the court papers said.
The men continued to sell fentanyl-laced heroin in broad daylight amid apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan even after knowing that Williams had died from one of their products, authorities said.
The others charged were identified as Hector Robles, 57, Luis Cruz, 56, and Carlos Macci, 70, all of Brooklyn. Their lawyers did not immediately return messages seeking comment. It wasn’t clear whether they were the men seen in the surveillance video.
All three were ordered detained at their initial court appearances.
The conspiracy charges against all four carry a mandatory minimum of five years in prison and a maximum sentence of 40 years. The charge against Cartagena accusing him of causing the actor’s death carries a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum of life.
Cartagena had been arrested in February 2021 on state drug charges in Brooklyn after selling four small waxy paper bags to an undercover investigator, according to a federal complaint against him. At the time, he was on pretrial release from a gun charge arrest in August 2020.
He pleaded guilty Aug. 26 to disorderly conduct in both crimes and was sentenced to time served, the complaint read.
Williams’ “stick-up boy” Omar Little on “The Wire” — a fictionalized look at the underpinnings of Baltimore that ended in 2008 but remains popular in streaming — was based on real-life figures. He created another classic character as Chalky White in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” and appeared in the films “12 Years a Slave” and “Assassin’s Creed.”
He had spoken frankly in interviews about his experiences with addiction.
Yet again, podcast host Joe Rogan is using his platform — an estimated 11 million listeners per episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast — to spew harmful anti-trans rhetoric and false information while platforming bigotry.
On his January 25 episode, Rogan hosted Jordan Peterson, a retired Canadian psychology professor turned right-wing provocateur who posited that being trans is both a “sociological contagion” and similar to the now-debunked “satanic panic” of the 1980s.
When Rogan steered the discussion to the subject of transgender people, Peterson explained his opposition to Canadian federal Bill C-16, which amended the country’s human rights protection to include gender identity. “I knew full well as a clinician that as soon as we messed with fundamental sex categories and changed the terminology, we would fatally confuse thousand of young girls. I knew that because I knew the literature on sociological contagion,” Peterson said.
In response, Rogan said it was similar to the work of anti-trans author Abigail Shrier, who also claimed that trans people are a contagion, and who had previously appeared on his podcast. In her work, Shrier discusses the concept of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” which comes from a since-corrected study by Brown University researcher Dr. Lisa Littman that initially suggested trans youth began identifying that way due to “social and peer contagion.” The study was deeply flawed, however, as it was conducted by surveying the parents of the trans youth, who had visited anti-trans websites, rather than the trans youths themselves.
Later in his conversation with Peterson, Rogan suggested that the acceptance of trans people is a sign of society collapsing, citing the work of right-wing British author and political commentator Douglas Murray, who claims that trans acceptance will someday be seen as “a late-empire, a bad sign of things falling apart” — an assertion Rogan has frequently repeated on his show. “[Murray] had an amazing point about civilizations collapsing, and that when they start collapsing they become obsessed with gender. And he was saying that you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks,” Rogan said on his January 25 episode.
In addition to his continued anti-trans remarks, Rogan has come under fire for hosting discussions about discredited claims about the COVID-19 pandemic.