House Of Lush Dance Party Happens at The Flamingo Resort Saturday Night
Gary Carnivele
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Aging Mindfully: Zen-Inspired Senior Living Takes Shape in Simi Valley
Two Zen-inspired senior living communities are embracing the reality of aging — consciously. Ensō Village, open since 2023 in Sonoma County, and Ensō Verde, now taking shape in a hidden corner of Simi Valley.
These communities — a collaboration of the renowned San Francisco Zen Center and Kendal, a visionary provider of communities, programs and services founded on Quaker values — focus on mindful aging, the joys of nature, environmental stewardship, contemplative care and healthy life choices for adults aged 60 and higher.
Former actor and film producer Susan O’Connell spent a lifetime living, creatively in the film industry, and then intentionally as a Zen Priest and President of the San Francisco Zen Center. Now, in her third professional chapter, she is the visionary behind Ensō Verde and Ensō Village. Encouraging elders to gracefully and consciously age, she oversees the development of Ensō Verde and resides at Ensō Village.
Different from conventional retirement communities, Ensō Village and Ensō Verde provide contemplative spaces for encouraging meditation, acreage to sustain a healthy farmer-to-chef-to-consumer relationship, and core programming that promotes mindfulness.
ZEN AND QUAKER VALUES
Based on Quaker and Zen values, both communities encourage residents to explore spirituality, as part of “whole body wellness.” Welcoming diversity, inclusion and belonging, each living community strives to create a safe, non-judgmental space for individuals to be themselves.
“We say Zen-inspired, not required. We’re setting a baseline emphasis on contemplative practices and mindfulness, but you can go as far in or away as you want. We have a wide variety of people on different spiritual paths, including no spiritual path,” O’Connell says.
FARM FRESH FOOD
Ensō Verde sits on 20 acres of pristine land that’s never been built on — a purchase that O’Connell considered rare to find and in perfect alignment with the values and mission of Ensō Verde.
“The beauty of this land, it’s not far from Los Angeles, so you’re not isolated from cultural activities, and you’re immersed in nature. “We insisted on having an area where we actually grow food, so the awareness of the cycle of food and composting and sustainability is very strong here.”
CONTINUUM OF CARE
Both properties offer memory support, assisted living and in-home health services for residents.
“The goal, of course, is to provide high-quality healthcare up through assisted living. We’re a place that supports the continuum of care. You can age in place without necessarily needing to leave where you are for assisted care because of our Residential Care for the Elderly (RCFE) license,” O’Connell says.
WORTH THE INVESTMENT
As people age, the burden to maintain their homes given limited resources and decreasing mobility is heavy. When considering independence versus living in community, the tradeoff is beneficial both socially and financially, O’Connell says.
“Residents essentially sell their homes as an entrance fee, but when you leave the community, or if you pass away, the beneficiaries of your estate will receive 75-80% of the value back. It’s an investment in your health.” O’Connell says.
To learn more about Ensō Village in Sonoma County and Ensō Verde, coming soon to Simi Valley, visit https://verde.kendal.org/.
Britain Rolls Out “World-First” Gonorrhea Vaccine
The BBC reports:
Gonorrhoea vaccines will be widely available from Monday in sexual health clinics across the UK, in a bid to tackle record-breaking levels of infections. The jabs will first be offered to those at highest risk – mostly gay and bisexual men who have a history of multiple sexual partners or sexually transmitted infections.
NHS England say the roll out is a world-first, and predict it could prevent as many as 100,000 cases, potentially saving the NHS almost £8m over the next decade. The Terrence Higgins Trust, who campaigned for the vaccine to be introduced in the UK, told the BBC it was “a huge win” for sexual health.
The vaccine, known as the 4CMenB vaccine, was designed for preventing meningitis B in babies, but the bacteria that causes the two diseases are so closely related that the jab is also effective against gonorrhoea.
Cherry Vann becomes first woman and LGBTQ cleric named archbishop in Britain
Bishop Cherry Vann has been elected as archbishop of the Church in Wales, becoming the first woman and LGBTQ cleric appointed to lead any of Britain’s Anglican churches.
While the broader, international Anglican Communion has had openly gay bishops before, most notably Gene Robinson in the United States, Vann will be the first lesbian to serve as archbishop globally.
The Church in Wales, which broke away from the Church of England in 1920, elected Vann to the post on Wednesday.
Vann was among the first women ordained as priests in the Church of England in 1994 and later served as Archdeacon of Rochdale, in northern England, before moving to Wales.
She is affiliated with the Open Table Network, a Christian initiative that offers worship and support for LGBTQ people.
According to her official biography, Vann lives with her civil partner, Wendy, and the couple’s two dogs. While the Church in Wales does not conduct same-sex marriages, it permits clergy to enter into civil partnerships.
Vann will replace Andrew John, who resigned in June following the publication of two internal church reports in May which raised concerns about governance and safeguarding. There was no suggestion of any wrongdoing by John.
“The first thing I shall need to do is to ensure that the issues which have been raised in the last six months are properly addressed,” Vann, 66, said in her first statement after her appointment.
More than a dozen states sue Trump administration to block trans care investigations
Officials in 16 states and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit Friday to block the Trump administration’s investigations into hospitals and doctors who provide transition-related care to minors.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the administration, by threatening to prosecute providers, is trying to institute a national ban on puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for transgender minors even though Congress has enacted no such federal ban.
“The federal government is running a cruel and targeted harassment campaign against providers who offer lawful, lifesaving care to children,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the coalition of states in the suit, said in a statement. “This administration is ruthlessly targeting young people who already face immense barriers just to be seen and heard, and are putting countless lives at risk in the process. In New York and nationwide, we will never stop fighting for the dignity, safety, and basic rights of the transgender community.”
More than half of states have laws that restrict or completely ban transition care for minors. Care is legal in all of the states that joined Friday’s complaint. They are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as Washington, D.C.
Within days of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict such care nationwide for anyone under 19 years old. Among its provisions, the order sought to bar federal funding from going to medical schools and hospitals that provide such care. As a result of the order, several hospitals announced they were pausing transition care for people under 19. Multiple judges blocked that part of the order, and many hospitals resumed care.
Despite the injunction, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo in April that said the Justice Department would use a variety of existing laws to investigate providers of gender-affirming care for minors. According to Friday’s complaint, the DOJ has issued guidance that “threatens baseless civil and criminal prosecution” of providers, and, just last month, issued more than 20 subpoenas to providers of such care across the country demanding that they give the federal government private patient information.
The lawsuit, which names Trump, Bondi and the DOJ as defendants, challenges Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict access to transition care for minors, Bondi’s April memo and another June memo from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate that directed the DOJ’s Civil Division to prioritize investigations into doctors who provide such care.
The complainants, 16 attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania, argue that transition care is legally protected in all of their states and that federal attempts to block the care “trammel on State power” in violation of the Tenth Amendment. They also argue that the administration’s actions force providers to make “an impossible choice” of either defying the federal threats or complying and violating their state’s laws against discrimination in medical care.
“These efforts to chill the provision of healthcare for adolescents — even in states where such care is legal and protected — show that the Agency Defendants have adopted and are engaged in a systematic effort to leverage the threat of criminal and civil enforcement to eliminate medically necessary care for transgender adolescents in the United States,” the complaint states.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement 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.
A DOJ spokesperson, when asked to comment on the lawsuit, said in a statement, “As Attorney General Bondi has made clear, this Department of Justice will use every legal and law enforcement tool available to protect innocent children from being mutilated under the guise of ‘care.’”
As the DOJ has opened investigations into some providers of transition care for minors, a rising number of hospitals — including those in states without laws that restrict trans health care — have announced that they plan to close their youth gender clinics.
Just in the last two months, the Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU, Yale New Haven Health, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Children’s National Hospital, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, UChicago Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles have announced they will end gender-affirming care programs for minors and, in most cases, anyone under 19.
The complaint notes that the administration has celebrated these announcements, pointing to a press release from the administration last weektitled, “President Trump Promised to End Child Sexual Mutilation — and He Delivered.”
“These changes have been touted by Defendants as precisely what was intended by their unlawful and disingenuous targeting: the end of healthcare for transgender individuals under 19,” the complaint states.
The plaintiffs ask the court to declare unconstitutional the portion of Trump’s order that would bar federal funding from going to hospitals that provide transition care to people under 19 and prohibit the DOJ from enforcing the memos from Bondi and Shumate.
Nearly all major medical associations in the United States, such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, support access to transition-related care for minors and oppose restrictions on it.
Some European countries have restricted access to such care, but only the United Kingdom has indefinitely banned new prescriptions of puberty blockers to treat minors for gender dysphoria, the medical term for the distress caused by a misalignment between someone’s birth sex and gender identity.
Over 100,000 people march in biggest trans Pride event in history
Over 100,000 people marched in London’s Trans+ Pride event on Saturday, making it the biggest trans Pride march in the world, according to The Guardian. The event’s theme, “Existence and Resistance,” was developed in response to the recent U.K. Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman in non-discrimination law is based on biological sex rather than gender identity.
“It was an emotional and powerful day,” the event’s co-founder Lewis G. Burton told the aforementioned publication. “At a time when the Supreme Court is making sweeping decisions about trans people without consulting a single trans person or organisation, and when a small, well-funded lobby of anti-trans campaigners continues to dominate headlines and waste public resources, our community came together to show what real strength, solidarity and care looks like.”
The march began at 1 p.m. local time on Saturday and proceeded for just under two miles, from near the BBC Broadcasting House to the Parliament Square Gardens. The event’s speakers included Heartstopper actress Yasmin Finney and activist Caroline Litman, whose trans daughter took her life in 2022 after waiting nearly three years for gender-affirming healthcare, the BBC reported.
London Trans+ Pride began in 2019 as an alternative to the city’s more commercial Pride march. This year’s event gained over 40,000 additional participants, compared to last year’s crowd of 60,000, the BBC noted.
“The message was clear: We will not be erased,” Burton said. “Our existence is natural, historic and enduring. You can try to take away our rights, but you will never remove us from society. We are a part of humanity – and the public will not stand by while harm is done to our community.”
The event occurred in the aftermath of a recent Supreme Court case in which For Women Scotland (FWS), an anti-trans organization, mounted a legal challenge over the definition of a woman under the country’s 2010 Equality Act. After the court ruled that the law’s definition of a woman is based on “biological sex,” the U.K.’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said trans women and men “should not be permitted to use” the public restroom facilities that align with their gender.
Alex Parmar-Yee, from Trans+ Solidarity Alliance — one of the groups that marched in the weekend event — said the EHRC’s guidance “has not provided any additional clarity, and actually is going to devastate the lives of trans people [who] will lose access to essential services and spaces.”
“The main concern really here is that it feels like there’s not been a consideration of trans members of the community, and that this guidance will pass behind closed doors, without the scrutiny, and without visibility, and without democracy,” Parmar-Yee added, saying that she and other trans organizations are pushing for the government to provide greater transparency around trans-related policies and guidances.
Speaking with Attitude magazine, activist Litman expressed concern over The Online Safety Act, a newly enacted U.K. law that requires websites with explicit adult material to conduct user age checks. Critics of the law worry it’ll be used to block age-appropriate LGBTQ+ resources for minors.
“It’s really scary,” Litman said. “[My late daughter] Alice got a lot of help and support online, whilst feeling very isolated in her own lived experience world that didn’t really have anything for her. Her online world really protected her – and so both these legislations are really concerning and need to be seriously looked at for reversal.”
When asked what she would tell her daughter now, Litman said, “Find your community. That’s what I’d say – find your community. Because they’ll save you, they’ll look after you, they’ll nurture you and support you and get you through this. To do this together. That’s what I’d say to her. And I love her. Love. I love, I love, love, love, I love.”
Trump Administration Hits Shameful Milestone of 300 Anti-LGBTQ Actions, Statements, and Policies Against the Community
This week, GLAAD’s Trump Accountability Tracker reached a milestone of 300 shameful anti-LGBTQ actions, statements, and policies against the community, from the start of the Trump administration’s first term until today.
The list includes approximately 77 anti-LGBTQ actions since January 2025, when the administration began its second term.
GLAAD is holding Trump and his administration accountable in the media for every piece of vile rhetoric and every hostile proposed or enacted policy seeking to harm or erase LGBTQ people and the issues that matter to us. Most recently and notably, the administration eliminated the 988 suicide and crisis hotline’s specialized services for LGBTQ youth, a federal program that provided services to approximately 1.5 million youth. Since 2022, the 988 Lifeline provided evidence-backed, specialized services to the country’s highest risk groups for suicide, including veterans and LGBTQ youth. As of July 17, 2025, the option to connect to specialized services for LGBTQ youth is no longer available. (LGBTQ youth in crisis can continue to access the Trevor Project’s crisis services line 24/7 at TheTrevorProject.org/Get-Help at any time.)
The administration’s cruel efforts to target, dehumanize, and create fear and infighting among the LGBTQ community are at odds with the growing cultural visibility of LGBTQ people taking place on a larger scale – according to 2025 polling by Gallup, 9.3% of all American adults identify as LGBTQ – and a high number of changemakers who are accelerating acceptance and resisting hostility, as chronicled in GLAAD’s ongoing Heroes of the Resistance series.
GLAAD will continue to hold the Trump administration accountable in the media as our movement partners hold them accountable in court. Learn more on GLAAD’s full tracker here, and make sure to keep following on GLAAD’s social channels for ways to get involved and speak out against the harms perpetuated by the current administration.
Cuba’s huge leap forward in trans rights – citizens can now legally choose gender without surgery
Cuba has taken a significant step forward in trans rights by approving a law that allows individuals to self-declare their gender without requiring surgery.
The law, approved earlier this month by The National Assembly of People’s Power, also amends Cuba’s national civil registry, giving legal recognition to common-law partnerships and setting out a process for digitising paper records.
Minister of justice Oscar Silvera Martínez wrote on X/Twitter last week that the law “will allow the country to have a modern civil registry,” including “the issuance of digital documents with full validity and efficiency”.
The president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, also took to X, where he praised a separate new law which establishes protections for youngsters.
The latest move in trans rights for Cubans marks one of the most significant LGBTQ+ legal reforms since 2022, when citizens approved a broad family law code that ushered in same-sex marriage and other LGBTQ+-inclusive measures, including the right to adopt children.
Minister of foreign affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla welcomed the family code, saying: “Our people opted for a revolutionary, uplifting law that drives us to achieve social justice for which we work every day. Today, we are a better country with more rights.”
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
Meet the gay Navy veteran trying to flip a red congressional seat in Virginia
Mike Pruitt knows what he’s up against. Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, which stretches from Charlottesville to the North Carolina border, hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress since 2008. The district is vast, rural, and deeply conservative, characterized by some localities with shuttered hospitals, deserted main streets, and long-neglected infrastructure.
But Pruitt, a 33-year-old gay Navy veteran, attorney, and a member of the board of supervisors for Albemarle County in central Virginia, says he isn’t running to hedge his values.
He’s running to represent places like the one he came from — rural, working-class communities left behind by both parties. His campaign centers on defending Medicaid, regulating artificial intelligence, challenging corporate profiteering, fixing a tax system that privileges capital over labor, and he’s refusing to walk away from transgender rights, even as some in his party signal retreat.
“It would cost me nothing to cut tackle, and I’m not,” Pruitt told The Advocate in an interview. “I want to be able to communicate to my very red district: If I’m sticking by this population that would be so easy for me to walk away from, because I think it’s the right thing to do, because I think they’re vulnerable and hurting and being threatened in a really serious way, I hope people look at that and they say, this is a man that we can actually trust.”
Mike Pruitt on the campaign trailCourtesy Mike Pruitt for Congress
His opponent, Republican Rep. John McGuire, is a first-year lawmaker and former Navy SEAL who won after President Donald Trump’s endorsement. McGuire has cosponsored the PROTECTS Act, which would ban federal funding for gender-affirming care for minors, and voted for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” an exhaustive budget proposal that cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid.
Pruitt warns that the impact on the 5th District will be devastating. “This bill will almost certainly kick people off Medicaid,” he said. “People are going to die from treatable diseases.” In a district where clinics are often scarce, he added, even the closure of one provider can mean the difference between access and none. He cited a child psychologist in Louisa County, “the only person providing child mental health services in that entire county,” who may be forced to shut down. In Farmville, the local hospital faces cuts that could ripple across multiple counties.
“Rural health care doesn’t have redundancy,” Pruitt said. “When you lose one provider, you lose the system.”
Pruitt’s political identity is shaped by the same small-town roots he sees across the district. He grew up in what he described as “the ruins of a former mill town” in South Carolina’s Blue Ridge foothills, where the textile industry had collapsed and, as a queer teenager in the 1990s, he didn’t always feel safe. He earned a Navy ROTC scholarship during “don’t ask, don’t tell,” reentered the closet to serve, and deployed twice to combat zones. Later, he worked at the Office of Naval Intelligence before earning his law degree at the University of Virginia School of Law.
He now works as a housing attorney, suing corporate landlords. “I’ve got the career I dreamed of. I married a great guy. I have the community I love and get to give back to,” he said. “But I got here with a little bit of grit and a lot of luck. And most people in this district don’t have that kind of luck.”
Pruitt’s husband, Will, 30, an Episcopal priest from Spotsylvania County, has been a steady source of support and perspective throughout Pruitt’s public service journey,
He draws a direct line between his experience hiding his identity under DADT and the harm he believes policies like the renewed Trump transgender militaryban inflict on today’s service members. He called it “baffling” that McGuire and other Republicans claim to support a stronger military while excluding qualified recruits based on gender identity.
“All they do is lean into the performative cruelty that I worry has become too much of what my opponent is leaning into.” For Pruitt, forcing transgender people to hide who they are isn’t just discriminatory, it’s dangerous. “We know from the data that forcing people to hide harms their mental health,” he said. “I don’t see how that gives us a stronger fighting force.”
Pruitt views the 5th District as a reflection of the place he came from: rural, economically strained, and often discussed but rarely heard. “We’re a district that industry has left behind, but the people are still there,” he said. “They know the Rite Aid in town is closing. They know their paycheck hasn’t gone up in a decade. They feel like there’s a boot on the back of their neck, and they’re not wrong.”
While he said some Democrats treat rural voters as charity cases or data points, Pruitt speaks from lived experience. “People in rural America aren’t helpless, they’re angry,” he said. “And I understand that anger.”
He calls Virginia’s 5th District a “sacrifice zone” for corporate and political disinterest. As AI infrastructure and data centers expand into other counties, Pruitt warns rural jobs are at risk, and Congress isn’t paying attention.
“All this technology is going to try to take away our jobs,” he said. “And Congress is doing nothing about it.”
He said large data centers, drawn by cheap land and access to natural gas, are now being sited in central and southern counties like Buckingham and Pittsylvania. “These companies aren’t putting them in Northern Virginia anymore. The land’s too expensive,” he said. “So they’re coming here.”
He recalled a conversation with a local official in Prince Edward County, also in central Virginia, who asked how to explain AI’s threat to a long-haul trucker. “I said, ‘That trucker’s job is in the crosshairs,’” Pruitt said.
Court blocks Trump admin’s anti-LGBTQ+ restrictions on grants for domestic violence and homeless shelters
A federal judge in Rhode Island has granted a temporary restraining order blocking conditions the Trump administration had placed on grants to organizations serving survivors of domestic and sexual violence, LGBTQ+ youth, and people experiencing homelessness.
U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose issued the order Thursday in Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence v. Kennedy, which was filed just four days earlier. While the case is named for the Rhode Island group, it was brought by a nationwide coalition of organizations that serve these populations.
The plaintiffs will submit a proposal for the scope of the restraining order for the court’s review, focused on the organizations that must decide whether to accept the conditions of Donald Trump’s orders as soon as Wednesday, according to a press release from Democracy Forward, one of the legal groups representing them.
The defendants in their lawsuit include the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its secretary, Scott Turner; and other federal government departments and officials.
Their suit challenges the executive orders that place restrictions on grants administered by HHS and HUD, with the administration denying funding to organizations with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and those supposedly promoting so-called gender ideology, that is, recognition of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex identities.
The suit notes that the grants were authorized by Congress and that “the executive branch cannot unilaterally leverage funding Congress appropriated for use on programs Congress created to advance the executive’s own policy goals.”
“The separation of powers does not allow that — and, here, Congress did not authorize the Departments to impose the new funding conditions,” the suit continues. “What’s more, the new conditions violate due process in using vague terms that provide Plaintiffs and their members no clarity on the actual conduct that is prohibited. They also violate the First Amendment by forcing grantees to voice the Administration’s views on gender and by chilling grantees from promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion even when not using federal funds.”
The plaintiffs issued this statement through Democracy Forward: “We welcome the court’s decision to grant our motion to halt the Trump-Vance administration’s unlawful and dangerous funding restrictions. These conditions threaten to undermine decades of progress in supporting survivors of violence, LGBTQI+ youth, and unhoused individuals. Our organizations exist to serve everyone with compassion and equity, and we will not be forced to choose between our values and mission and the communities we serve. The court’s order is a critical step in protecting life-saving programs and ensuring that the providers across the country can continue their work without political interference. We brought this case because we have seen firsthand the harm these restrictions would cause. This ruling affirms what we have long known, that the law does not permit any government to use its funding power to force service providers to abandon their core principles.”
Besides Democracy Forward, the plaintiffs are represented by Jacobson Lawyers Group, National Women’s Law Center, Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Rhode Island.