Daniel Villarreal

Numerous colleges nationwide have shuttered their LGBTQ+ centers under political pressure to end all diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) programs, but not at Utah’s Salt Lake Community College (SLCC). Peter Moosman was hired at SLCC in 2019 to help open up its Gender and Sexuality Student Resource Center, an office supportive of LGBTQ+ and female students. The center is open to all students: It has a drop-in lounge, offers connections to community groups and resources, and hosts events, programs, and trainings for affinity months like LGBTQ+ History Month or Women’s Heritage Month. Moosman, who currently serves as the center’s manager […]

The municipal government of Naples, Florida has refused to grant Naples Pride an event permit, citing increased security costs due to a probable rise in anti-transgender protests. The city also asked event organizers not to allow admittance to anyone under 18 years of age — so, Naples Pride is now suing the city government. The all-ages event is scheduled for June 7. The city told event organizers that they’d need to pay $36,000 for security, much more than what’s required for similarly sized events or what had been charged annually since the event began in 2017, Advocate reported. The city based its […]

The Department of Education (DOE) has directed its workers to end all transgender-inclusive programs and policies in accordance with President Donald Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders. Trump has pledged to eliminate the DOE, Elon Musk, a Trump campaign donor who has been acting as if he were co-president, has given his underlings access to the DOE and its data, and LGBTQ+ congresspeople were denied entry into the DOE last Friday. In an unsigned email sent last Friday from “ED Internal Communications,” DOE employees were told to end all programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices that “fail to affirm […]

The Greater Houston LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce has said it may sue the Trump administration after the chamber was forced to relocate its annual event at the Federal Reserve Bank of Houston last week because of Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The chamber said the executive order violated its constitutional rights to free speech. The chamber had planned on holding its second annual Thrive Small Business Summit & Matchmaker event at the federal bank last Thursday. However, the bank forced the event to relocate fewer than 30 hours before its start, telling the chamber that […]

Police in Kannapolis, North Carolina, killed 36-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist who carried a gun into a gay-owned Washington, D.C., pizzeria in 2016 under the belief that the business’ nonexistent basement was a venue for a child-molestation ring that involved high-ranking Democrats. On January 4, two Kannapolis police officers lethally shot Welch during a traffic stop. One officer pulled Welch over to arrest him for an outstanding warrant for a probation violation. But when the officer opened Welch’s car door to apprehend him, Welch allegedly pulled out a handgun from his jacket and pointed it at […]

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to begin his new term by starting “the largest deportation program in American history,” aiming to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. But Aaron Morris — executive director of Immigration Equality, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting LGBTQ+ immigrants through legal services and litigation — has said it’s already preparing to combat Trump’s plans. “Unfortunately, we have survived and thrived through a previous Trump administration, so there are certain expectations that we will have, and steps he will take, that will hurt both immigrant communities at large and also target LGBTQ immigrants,” Morris told Gay City News. “We are […]