Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas received formal approval from the city’s Landmark Commission last week after officials, members, and volunteers painted the Late Gothic Revival building’s staircase the colors of the rainbow in October.
The building has local landmark status, and it’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The dramatic gesture reimagining the church steps was executed as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) carried out the Trump administration’s order to tear up rainbow crosswalks across the state, including one in front of the church’s historic building, home to a large and welcoming Methodist congregation.
Church officials and members at Oak Lawn called painting the stairs an act of faith.
“Silence in the face of harm always sides with the oppressor,” Oak Lawn Senior Pastor Rachel Griffin-Allison said at the time.
“Painting our steps in the colors of the rainbow is a visible witness to the gospel we preach: that every person is created in the image of God and worthy of safety, dignity, and belonging,” she said.
At a packed meeting last Monday, members of the Landmark Commission agreed, granting a three-year approval to the “temporary art installation.”
All of the speakers at the public forum spoke in favor of keeping the rainbow steps.
“This is religious expression,” said former Landmark Commissioner Cindy Steiner.
One speaker after another used the word “safe” to describe how the rainbow steps to the church made them feel, including at least one straight congregant, the Dallas Voice reports. They asked the commission to “respect the wishes of the congregation.”
A gay congregant from Denton, north of Dallas, said he was speaking because he was shunned at his former church after he came out. He knew he was welcome at Oak Lawn.
“Keeping the rainbow steps is Christlike,” he said.
The church’s petition originally requested a one-year approval for the rainbow-painted staircase. Asked by a commission member if the church would reapply again after the year was up, Senior Pastor Griffin-Allison replied yes, and the member asked for an amendment extending the certification to three years.
The approval was granted unanimously.
Following the meeting, Griffin-Allison said the turnout and the commission’s action “filled my heart.”
When Amaka Agwu’s little brother was three years old, he turned to his darker-skinned father one night and warned that his lighter-skinned grandmother was coming to get him. “That’s what white people do to Black people,” the little boy said.
“It was a very funny thing to hear a three-year-old say,” Agwu reflected, “and very interesting to tell him, ‘That’s not how that works.’”
Agwu, an 18-year-old gay student activist at George Washington University in D.C., laughed at the recollection, but who could blame a young person today for thinking that white people are coming after people of color? Or, perhaps, that the so-called “normal gays” are targeting trans folks? It’s on screens everywhere – from the couches and kitchens where three-year-olds roam, to the college campuses targeted by the likes of Turning Point USA and the young conservatives enchanted by its mission.
Dinner conversations like the one her brother sparked are what spurred Agwu to activism. “My parents were always very cognizant about teaching us about different political systems and inequalities that exist in the United States,” she said.
Nowadays, Agwu feels disappointed that her fellow students aren’t rising to the moment that Donald Trump has forced upon them.
“We just need to do better,” she said.
Since the Civil Rights Movement, young people have been at the vanguard of political protest in the U.S., from North Carolina college students launching nationwide lunch counter sit-ins, to the death of four Kent State undergraduates who were shot by National Guard troops while demonstrating against the Vietnam War, to encampments on college campuses across the country protesting Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In all of these, students came to symbolize not just the causes they were fighting for but a generational struggle for change.
But those and other iconic protest movements, like nuclear disarmament, the invasion of Iraq, apartheid in South Africa, and Occupy Wall Street, involved single issues or ideas to rally around. This time, it’s been harder for students to focus amid Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy.
Add to that attacks on higher education (including student visa restrictions) explicitly designed by Trump advisors like Stephen Miller to undermine a liberal worldview on college campuses, and you have a successful effort to divide and conquer dissent.
Agwu saw the writing on the wall during the Biden administration, with the slew of anti-trans state legislative attacks and the passage of Florida’s notorious Don’t Say Gay law that inspired copycat legislation around the country. “I was seeing all that, and I was like, ‘Wait, there’s now a president in office who actually isn’t going to fight against it, but on all that will actively support those types of things?’”
She describes Trump’s inauguration one year ago as “scary.”
“I just felt like this deep-seated fear entangled with how the country would go.”
“He’s kind of exposing underlying currents of conservatism that have already existed in the United States that just haven’t been fully addressed,” she said. “Now we have a president who’s willing to exploit those to get power.”
“I think he’s just making us fully aware — and the people who weren’t aware of it to begin with — that these deep-seated, hateful notions still exist, and that we just need to do better to fight back against them.”
Agwu is fighting back as the head of logistics for the “startup” activist group Revs Rise Up, a play on the school’s revolutionary school mascot.
“Basically, we’re trying to fight against authoritarianism with the Trump administration,” she said.
Their latest action was a banner signing and letter drop demanding that GW refuse to join Trump’s so-called university “compact” dictating anti-diversity initiatives and assaulting academic freedom.
“No one’s really gone out and rejected it, right? And we’re saying our school should preemptively reject it before you start requiring that all schools start to accept it.”
For Agwu, Trump’s requirement for sex assigned at birth on passports ranked as his most egregious attack on the LGBTQ+ community, a literal manifestation of his effort to erase trans identity from American society.
“In a very legal sense, it delegitimizes someone’s transition journey, and it’s inherently harmful to thousands upon thousands of trans people who have gone through the process of medically and/or legally transitioning,” she said.
It’s one example, Agwu explained, of Trump’s thirst for power.
Asked if change can be effected on screens, Agwu, who’s studying international affairs and English, replied, “Not entirely.”
Social media is “a very easy and very powerful tool to help people learn more about issues,” and to “see themselves as though they’re being involved,” Agwu said.
But she cautioned against “hashtag activism.”
“If people only engage in that, it doesn’t enact effective change,” she said.
“You still need to get people who are going out onto the streets, or who are lobbying to their Congress members and going and saying, ‘We need this to change, because this matters to me, and this is hurting thousands of people.’ So I do think it’s a great tool, but it’s not entirely what will generate change.”
Cailey Chin, a freshman studying economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says Trump has dominated her history and politics education since elementary school.
“My first memory, I guess, was my library elective, and they made us debate the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump race, and we had a fake election about it, which I think was a little bit too advanced for third graders, but nonetheless, it was still a debated topic within my school.”
Chin’s activism started several years later, in high school, with a failed effort to expand sex education in her Pennsylvania school district. By that time, a previously bipartisan issue had become contentious in her swing state county.
The growing red-blue divide “definitely affected” her efforts, Chin said. “I was pushed back. I was ignored oftentimes.”
At Penn, she works with a group called Our Space, which connects Philadelphia-area high schoolers and her school’s LGBT center through educational sessions focused on comprehensive sex ed, “like healthy boundaries, communication, and things targeted specifically at queer youth.”
That’s a segment of the population under direct attack by the Trump administration and its allies, with executive orders attacking gender beyond the binary, bans on queer content in school libraries, and federal funding slashed for gender-affirming care.
“Just being able to connect and having a safe space to talk about these topics and educate our youth” ensures they’ll be “well-equipped to fight back,” she said.
Chin called Trump’s first year back in office “harrowing” and cited cuts to HIV funding and his failure to acknowledge World AIDS Day as two of his most grievous actions.
“HIV is a very bipartisan issue that obviously does not just affect the LGBTQ community, but disproportionately affects it,” she said. “Cutting these funds only harms the entirety of our nation and really hurts the health of not just queer people, but people in marginalized communities, people of color, people in poor communities.”
Chin said there’s a clear understanding among students at Penn of the harm caused by the Trump administration, but thinks the Ivy League’s competitive culture is holding students (including herself) back from public protest, both IRL and online.
“UPenn’s pre-professional culture, alongside just like fear in general, makes people very quiet in terms of political issues,” she said, “and I can relate to that. Sometimes I’m hesitant to talk about my activism or just do simple things like this interview, because of my digital footprint.”
“If employers see that I’m outspoken and that I’m passionate about the things that I am passionate about, it might lead to me losing a job.”
Ironically, though, Chin has a large online presence focused on another cause that’s been caught in the Trump administration’s crosshairs: equity in education.
She counts over 34,000 followers on Instagram and hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok for her content advising high schoolers on how to ace college admissions applications.
Chin said her work online is a matter of accessibility.
“Social media, obviously, is accessible to a large amount of people with their phones. Via my content creation, I’m able to provide information at no cost to anybody following me, and those people following me and viewing my content come from a very diverse set of backgrounds. So that really helps in spreading information and getting things out there, whether it be advocacy or not.”
Trans student-activist Amber Va describes Trump’s worst actions as legion, and defined by the tragic flaw in his “Make America Great Again” slogan.
“Truth be told, it was never that great in the first place,” Va said.
“And now you have this great big bill that’s enacted, along with attacks on trans people and the trans community, and the passport recognition, and right now, especially, with the ICE raids — you know, it’s just really insane.”
For Va, a 24-year-old sidelined from school by the pandemic and now a freshman at Valley College in Los Angeles, “The [anti-trans] stigma that’s been going on in the media that we’re forced to believe” is personal. She was already facing it among her Cambodian family.
“It’s all intertwined,” she said. “The intergenerational trauma and now the political climate.”
Her own experience living as a trans woman and queer person of color inspired her advocacy work. She serves on the queer youth advisory committee for the Foundation for California Community Colleges and partners with nonprofit organizations to get resources to young people in her work as a grassroots community activist.
She wants to parlay a communications degree into a queer-focused public relations specialty.
Regarding the attention economy, Va agreed that young adults and teenagers are focused on social media but need to exercise discretion in who they listen to.
“There’s a bunch of social influencers who will do it just for clout, you know, just for attention,” she said of some influencers’ advocacy. “It depends on who you talk to and who’s a credible source.”
But community is where you find it, she said.
“There’s a lot of people throughout the nation who can’t attend protests because of the era we’re in, or where they are. We’ll take as much support as we can for the rallies, the marches, for protests, for sit-ins and all of that, you know? I mean, that’s what I count as community. There’s only so much you can do within your power and for your safety.”
Va likened the choice to resist Trump’s onslaught to Neo’s in The Matrix, before the right-wing manosphere co-opted that movie’s message.
“You have the red pill, or you have the blue pill, take your pick.” Either way, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Then Va turned to a more definitive movie analogy.
“Like, in Star Wars terms, I’ll join the resistance, right?”
However young people may choose to resist, Va advises them, “Everything takes time.”
“Something I learned from my activism is that patience is a virtue,” she said.
Students may be in some kind of interregnum right now, caught between the rise of the #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and trans rights movements and Trump’s broad assault on everything “woke,” along with the overall radicalization that historically follows similar illiberal backlash.
If young people like Va are looking to movies for their cultural cues, One Battle After Another is another more contemporary example, drawing on militant groups of the 1960s and 70s, like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army — all armed in deed or simply rhetoric — to depict a level of resistance equal to the assault they’re confronted with; orthodoxy on both sides of the political spectrum comes in for a critical beating.
The message, like Va’s, is that the struggle is never-ending.
Despite a portion of Agwu’s student body “who seem a bit jaded, like there’s nothing we can do,” she does see fresh evidence of young people stirred to action. An appearance by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on campus in December inspired a “huge protest” against Trump administration policies, even during finals.
“We are the closest school to the White House. I can see it from my dorm,” she said. “Because there’s such a large population of students who came here specifically because they want to study political science or international affairs in the capital of the U.S., it’s a very politically charged environment.”
While “there hasn’t been enough protest and action,” fellow students are “willing to fight for or against whatever they personally believe,” she said. It’s her role as an activist “to empower and inspire other people to enact change and participate in their own way.”
“So many students are very energized to fight back.”
Chin considered whether the Trump era is a “blip” in history or an enduring turn to authoritarianism.
“In the face of resistance, you still have the ability to make change in your local community, in your state, at the national level. It’s not impossible,” she said after cataloguing her own efforts and disappointments. “I think that it’s important to remember that this is just a temporary wave.”
“You might feel discouraged, and you might feel like you’re helpless, but there are still people that want to connect with you. They want to fight back with you, and they want to unite to make change.”
Va reached back to words spoken by Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur from prison in 1973, a call to action for those ready for a reckoning.
“It is our duty to fight for freedom,” Va said, quoting Shakur. “It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis – who was among several employees who publicly resigned from a leadership position at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August – is returning to the local health sector. He has been appointed Chief Medical Officer for the historic NYC health organization, Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.
“My career has taken me from local to federal,” the out physician told health and science publication STAT10 after his appointment. “This is when it’s time to go back to local.”
“Demetre has a wealth of experience that will help him guide Callen-Lorde through new clinical initiatives and challenges while remaining steadfast to our mission to care for our communities regardless of ability to pay,” Callen-Lorde said in an announcement of Daskalakis’ appointment. “His passion and experience make him particularly suited for this new role.”
The infectious disease specialist started his career doing HIV clinical work in New York City as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital. He moved on to the NYC Department of Health, where he served as deputy commissioner before joining the CDC.
Daskalakis came to public prominence as head of the Biden administration’s Mpox outbreak response in 2022, which employed a successful strategy of “Education and outreach, as well as vaccination” based on hard data.
Now Daskalakis is “taking his skills back to the city where they were honed.”
For the moment, Washington is “an environment where I really don’t think that federal public health is able to actually execute on its mission,” he said.
Daskalakis reached a breaking point at the CDC over the summer as the full extent of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science agenda was coming into view.
Citing “radical non-transparency,” “unskilled manipulation of data,” and “people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor,” Daskalakis, then the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the agency, resigned in August, following Kennedy’s firing of CDC director Susan Monarez.
“After much contemplation and reflection on recent developments and perspectives brought to light by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I find that the views he and his staff have shared challenge my ability to continue in my current role at the agency and in the service of the health of the American people,” Daskalakis wrote in a searing condemnation of the current administration’s stewardship of the nation’s public health agencies.
“Enough is enough,” he said.
Daskalakis was introduced to the clinics at Callen-Lorde as an NYU medical student on rotations in 1997. More than 25 years later, the organization honored him at this year’s annual Community Health Awards for his numerous contributions to public health.
Reflecting on his early years as a physician, Daskalakis said, “At Callen-Lorde, I learned the true meaning of service: to uplift and protect the very community I hold most dear. I witnessed a safe space based in science, a mission lifted by and for community.”
Aaaaaand he’s back…. Disgraced gay former Congressman George Santos has inserted himself in the presidential election with his “expert” take on hard-right, culture-warring Republicans with a drag-addled past.
The onetime Republican New York representative, who’s facing multiple campaign finance indictments following his expulsion from the U.S. House of Representatives, shared his reaction to the revelation that Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), attended a party while he was a student at Yale Law School dressed as a woman in an interview with TMZ.
According to Santos, the controversy surrounding Vance’s cross-dressing at a costume party is “disingenuous” and “most dudes at some point have played around” dressing up as a woman.
“It’s definitely not drag,” Santos said of Vance’s amateur ensemble.
Photos shared by a former Yale classmate revealed Vance posing seductively wearing a long blonde wig, black knit blouse, a colorful skirt and a chunky chain necklace. In one photo, he carries a black purse over his shoulder.
“Holy crap, is that bad drag,” Santos commented about the photos.
“I mean, the guy went to a costume party, put on a freakin’ cheap wig from Party City, or something similar,” the one-time Brazilian drag queen posited. “To call that drag is disingenuous, and I think most dudes at some have played around with costumes that were gender-bender.”
Straight “couples do that all the time,” Santos claimed. “The wife will dress up as a guy. Husband will dress up as a woman. So it’s not drag. It’s definitely not drag.”
Like the self-loathing Santos, Vance has been consistently hostile to the LGBTQ+ community.
Last year, along with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in the House, Vance introduced legislation in the Senate to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth at the federal level and to make such care more difficult for trans adults to obtain.
Vance has expressed his support for Don’t Say Gay legislation prohibiting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identities in schools, writing, “I’ll stop calling people ‘groomers’ when they stop freaking out about bills that prevent the sexualization of my children.”
Vance spoke out against laws protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination following the 2020 Supreme Court Bostock v. Clayton County ruling, which found that anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination is a form of sex-based discrimination. He called the legal reasoning behind the decision a “betrayal of social conservatives and traditionalists.”
Vance also opposes the Equality Act, legislation to include sexual orientation and gender identity in federal anti-discrimination laws.
News of Santos’ own drag past in Brazil — as a pageant queen named Kitara Ravache — surfaced amid a tsunami of larcenous revelations about the Long Island Republican in 2023. The newly-sworn-in rep spent weeks denying the rumors before eventually owning up to his alter ego.
Roz Keith found out her son was transgender on his terms.
The suburban mom was asking about haircuts, and Hunter, just shy of 14 at the time, texted her some photos. “He started texting me pictures of boys with short haircuts. And I said, ‘Oh, these are very masculine. And Hunter said, ‘Uh huh,’ and walked out of the room.”
It was typical teenage behavior, but the conversation that followed was life-changing, Keith said.
“I went upstairs, knocked on his door, and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And that’s when he told me. He said, ‘I’m a boy. I’m transgender.’ That was how he came out to me.”
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Keith was caught off guard on multiple fronts. “All the little things from the time he was super little then became the hammer over the head.” She thought about Hunter playing with boy dolls, preferring time with boys to girls, choosing Narnia’s Prince Caspian over all the Disney princess costumes.
“I saw this one male avatar in a game, this buff, masculine character that he had created, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s a guy.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ You know, no explanation. So, all along, I just kept saying ‘Okay,’ too.”
Keith wasn’t a helicopter parent. “We really encouraged our kids to be independent,” she said, “and we wanted them to be happy and successful and productive, whatever that meant for them.” But she also said a transgender child “just wasn’t in my consideration set.”
“In my world, I didn’t have a friend who had a trans child. We didn’t have any adult in our community who was trans or in the process of coming out or identified in any way remotely that way. So it was really a foreign concept from that perspective.”
While those conversations weren’t happening in Keith’s world, they certainly were in her precocious online teenager’s.
“He figured it out because he was watching YouTube, and he saw a trans person on this show talking about their coming out. And that was his light bulb moment. And he said, ‘Oh my God, that’s me.’”
Hunter spent a long time contemplating his revelation and researching what to do about it before he shared anything with his family.
“He’d been researching for two years,” Keith recalled. “He had a checklist of everything he wanted to do.”
With Hunter’s declaration, his state of mind came into focus for his mom.
“Based on things he shared when he was younger, he felt different, and he didn’t know why he felt different, and he didn’t have language to explain it,” Keith realized. “And it created a lot of struggle and conflict, and, I think, anger for him.”
“He said, you know, ‘I just felt like the weird kid.’”
Keith decided to close that gap – for her son and for others.
In 2015, she founded Stand with Trans, a support network devoted to trans kids and their parents and caregivers. The nonprofit provides transgender and nonbinary youth with life-saving programs like mental health services, peer support groups, educational resources, and, most importantly, Keith says, “validation and empowerment.”
Stand With Trans also provides critical support to parents or guardians of trans youth. Its Ally Parents program allows loved ones to text, call, or email other parents of trans youth for connection and advice.
Letting go
“Parents can have a hard time when their child comes out and wants to transition to a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth,” Keith said.
“They struggle to let go of the child they thought they had and the dreams that they had, right? If a child was assigned female at birth, a parent might say, ‘I just imagined her walking down the aisle in the white dress,’ you know? And they grieve this child as if the child has died.”
“I never took that approach,” Keith said, “because I knew that my child was very much alive and that it was my job to make sure that he stayed that way. You know, it was my job to make sure that he was mentally well and that he got what he needed so he could thrive.”
For Hunter and his family, checking off those steps to transition wouldn’t come easily.
“There were no pediatric gender clinics who were seeing trans youth covered by our insurance. There were no therapists who we could find who were trained to see trans adolescents. There were no support groups. There were no parent groups. There was nothing for youth. Like, literally every phone call was a brick wall,” Keith said.
But Hunter wasn’t waiting on the details. He decided to come out on Facebook.
“My daughter came to me and said, ‘Did you see what Hunter posted?’ And I said, ‘No.’”
While Keith and her husband had talked to a few close friends about Hunter, the family hadn’t been sharing much “because it wasn’t our story to share — that was up to him.”
With Hunter’s announcement, “It was like the floodgates had opened,” Keith said.
The family agreed to tell their story.
They began speaking publicly about their experience. “And there was just like this swell of relief, I guess, and joy from families in the community who had been trying to manage this process with their kiddo and had no one to talk to. There was really nobody — medically, psychologically emotionally — just literally no one was there.”
“Families like mine, trans adults, multi-generational families, like, every member of the community were reaching out and saying, ‘Oh, my God, I could have uttered those words. Your son reminds me of my son.’”
Hunter’s story had inspired an outpouring of empathy and recognition, but the story he shared online didn’t address his lingering sense of isolation.
“Even my son said, ‘I don’t know anyone like me.’ And so as we started to meet families,” Keith said.
Stand With Trans founder Roz Keith | Stand With Trans
“I was literally arranging play dates for my 14-15-year-old. Like, I was inviting kids to come over and just hang out, and — fly on the wall — they talked about stupid stuff, like, ‘Oh, don’t you hate getting socks for Christmas presents?’ And it showed these kids that being trans didn’t mean that you weren’t like other kids. You know, you were just another teen.”
Those interactions became the heart of the mission that guides Stand with Trans today.
The rise of parents’ rights
The founding of Stand With Trans accompanied a rising awareness of gender diversity in the 2010s, but with that also came a conservative backlash wrought with anti-trans animus.
Before Hunter came out, “Nobody was talking about bathroom bills and trans girls in sports. Those conversations weren’t happening,” Keith said.
Since then, trans kids like Hunter have been buried under an avalanche of discriminatory legislation, from gender-affirming care bans to a trans-erasing, book-banning frenzy organized by groups like Moms for Liberty to an online hate campaign led by accounts like Libs of TikTok.
Adding fuel to the fire: the president’s obsession with “gender ideology” and his “us” vs “them” politics of division.
The right has hawked its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda under the same, one-sided banner: parents’ rights.
Keith said the phrase is self-serving.
“I don’t think that any government should be allowed to say what my child has or doesn’t have access to, because I’m the parent. They’re not in my home parenting my child, so they don’t know what they’re going through. How do you make that global statement?” she asked.
“It is up to me to make a decision about my child’s medical care,” Keith said. “And as far as my child goes, if he was denied the opportunity to go on testosterone and not medically transition, I think our conversation would be very different.”
Keith points to a perversion of theology as one basis of the far-right’s anti-trans animus.
“I’m not Christian. I was raised Jewish. But my understanding from my friends who are Christian and very affirming and very accepting, their response is, ‘The Jesus I know would open the door for everyone, and would welcome everyone to the table.’ There’s really a disconnect between saying you’re a Christian and then not being open to accepting people as they are, as they show up.”
“Far be it for me to tell anyone what they should believe,” Keith added, “but you don’t get to bring it into my home and tell me how to care for my child, because those aren’t my beliefs. That’s not what I understand, right? It’s a secular society.”
“Your belief system should not infringe on my rights.”
Seeing around the corner
Stand with Trans was born to help protect trans kids from the attacks by providing love, knowledge and support — and power over their own lives.
“Our mission is so simple,” Keith said. “It’s empowering and supporting trans youth and their loved ones. So that’s it. We know that if we educate and support the caregivers, the loved ones, the parents, that the young people are going to do better, and if we find ways to make life better and easier for them, they’re not only going to survive, but they’re going to thrive.
“I know with my own kid, they couldn’t see themselves having a future. I think it’s hard enough for young people who don’t see around the corners, right? It’s hard to even imagine, like, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up.’ But for trans kids, it’s even harder.
“So it’s really important for us to show these young people that they can do whatever they want to do,” Keith said.
“Being trans is one part of their identity. It doesn’t define who they are.”
Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love” and birthplace of American democracy, is adding an inclusive destination to the celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding next year: the Philly Pride Visitors Center, one of the country’s first LGBTQ+ visitor centers.
“We don’t just welcome diversity — we celebrate it,” said Kathryn Ott Lovell, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation. “Philadelphia is a city that shows up for everyone.”
The new LGBTQ+ destination will open early next year in the heart of the city’s LGBTQ+ neighborhood in Midtown Village.
The 2026 Semiquincentennial is expected to draw record tourism to the “Cradle of Liberty.”
As well as being the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia has a storied history in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. The city’s Independence Hall was one of the first venues to see public demonstrations for gay rights, while the country’s first LGBTQ+ sit-in took place in 1965 at the infamous Dewey’s restaurant, where “avowed homosexuals” weren’t welcome.
“The Philly Pride Visitor Center reflects our commitment to inclusive tourism and to making sure every traveler feels seen, welcomed and celebrated,” said Angela Val, President and CEO of Visit Philadelphia.
“This new center gives visitors and residents a place to connect with Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ history, discover affirming businesses, and see how this city helped shape a national movement. It is both a resource hub and a testament to Philadelphia’s role in advancing LGBTQ+ rights.”
Plans for the Pride-themed center include services like itinerary planning, attraction ticketing, and travel information, with a special focus on LGBTQ+-affirming destinations, businesses, and cultural institutions. The gift shop will offer a curated selection of souvenirs from LGBTQ+ artists, designers, and businesses.
Historical content will be curated by Mark Segal, founder of Philadelphia Gay News, with the goal of presenting an authentic representation of the city’s LGBTQ+ legacy based on input from the community.
“Philadelphia has always been a trailblazer in LGBTQ+ history, from the first Reminder Day marches in 1965 (four years before Stonewall) to the Dewey’s sit-in, where LGBTQ+ youth stood up to a restaurant’s refusal to serve them,” Segal said.
“Our city helped launch the fight for representation in media, shaped national policy, and created safe, visible spaces for our community,” he added. With the new visitor center’s founding, “Philadelphia proudly honors that legacy.”
Said CEO Lovell: “Our hope is that the Philly Pride Visitor Center becomes a place where LGBTQ+ visitors feel like they belong from the moment they arrive.”
Following a playbook from Hungary and Russia’s leaders, Slovakia’s populist government on Friday passed an illiberal ragbag of measures in a constitutional amendment that defines sex as binary, bans adoption by same-sex couples, outlaws surrogacy, and asserts the E.U. member’s “national sovereignty in cultural and ethical matters.”
Prime Minister Robert Fico, whose coalition of populist, leftist, and nationalist parties has faced mounting demonstrations in the country’s capital, Bratislava, promoted the amendment as a bulwark against liberal ideology that was “spreading like cancer” in the central European state.
His populist-nationalist government argued the amendment was necessary to protect “traditional values.”
Fico said he would celebrate with a shot of liquor following the amendment’s knife-edge passage in the 150-seat Slovak National Council on Friday.
“This isn’t a little dam, or just a regular dam – this is a great dam against progressivism,” he declared to followers.
Fico leads a precarious coalition of parties across the political spectrum. His own Smer-Social Democracy party has morphed into a nationalist party far removed from the progressive values of Europe’s center-left mainstream that it was founded on.
Smer was suspended from the Party of European Socialists in 2023 after forming a coalition government with the country’s far-right Slovak National Party. It’s expected to be expelled at a gathering of European Socialists next month.
“The Slovak constitution has fallen victim to Robert Fico’s plan to dismantle the opposition and divert attention from the real problems of society, as well as the austerity measures he had to pass,” Beata Balagova, editor-in-chief of the Slovak daily SME, told the BBC.
“Fico does not genuinely care about gender issues, the ban on surrogate motherhood, or even adoptions by LGBTQ people,” she added.
Fico has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin four times in the last year.
Passage of the amendment was in doubt as late as Thursday.
The amendment required a three-fifths majority in the 150-seat National Council, or 90 votes, while Fico’s coalition only comprises 78 members. In the end, 12 opposition members, including several from former Prime Minister Igor Matovič’s movement, added their votes.
Igor Matovič described them as traitors.
Amnesty International said the vote brings Slovakia’s legal system closer to the authoritarian governments of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Putin’s Russia.
“Today, the Slovak government chose to follow the lead of countries, such as Hungary, whose policies have led to an erosion of human rights,” it said in a statement.
Legal scholars in Slovakia have said that the amendment enshrining the primacy of the Slovak constitution over E.U. law sets up a direct challenge to the European Union and will doubtless lead to a showdown.
“Seeking to disapply specific rights because they touch upon ‘national identity’ would be fundamentally incompatible with the Slovak Republic’s international obligations,” said Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty before the vote.
The current presidential administration is slashing the lifesaving PEPFAR program for HIV relief, despite earlier public assurances to lawmakers and advocates that funding for the program was secure.
Funding will be cut by half for both this and next year’s federal budgets, before he shuts down the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) completely, according to members of the program’s staff as well as budget documents viewed by The New York Times.
PEPFAR has saved an estimated 26 million lives since it was introduced by President George W. Bush in 2003.
The massive cuts come after PEPFAR’s supporters were lulled into thinking that the program was secure. Last July, the White House relented and restored $400 million in cuts to the program.
That fight, in the face of bipartisan Senate opposition, was a distraction, according to staff members who work for PEPFAR, because they’ve been repeatedly told by the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that the program would be receiving less than half of the $6 billion appropriated by Congress for the 2025 fiscal year — even after the $400 million was officially restored.
But even that money hasn’t been restored, according to a federal budget tracking website that was disappeared by the presidential administration in January and restored by court order just last week.
Failure by OMB Director Russell Vought to appropriate the money is a de facto spending cut, according to Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who serves as vice chair of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee.
“Even after promising Republican lawmakers that the program would be protected, Russ Vought has choked off a huge chunk of funding provided by Congress for PEPFAR,” she said. “And he’s managed to hide this cut from lawmakers and the public until now because he took down a key spending transparency website.”
According to PEPFAR staff, they were told that the program would be given a maximum amount of $2.9 billion out of the original $6 billion commitment to the program. PEPFAR staff were told that they should make plans with implementing partners around the globe accordingly. Those staffers spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Further dilution of PEPFAR’s mission, mandated by Congress to cover HIV prevention alone, is occurring alongside budgetary cutbacks for preventing other diseases worldwide. Funds are being cut for “Global Health security, Tuberculosis, Malaria, and Polio eradication and prevention,” according to an OMB document.
The massive funding cuts coincide with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to shut PEPFAR down completely, cutting some countries off within just two years, and shuttering the entire program within eight.
Observers have said that the cuts will worsen HIV epidemics abroad, destabilizing African regions, and making them more susceptible to warlords and other national security risks.
Ottawa’s Pride parade ground to a halt on Sunday afternoon when Queers4Palestine protesters blocked the route and demanded to negotiate with parade organizers over their stance on the war in Gaza.
After nearly an hour of talks, and with the route still blocked, the two sides failed to reach an accommodation. Capital Pride, the event’s organizers, decided to cancel the remainder of the march.
“We are bummed, of course, but we had a blast for the block and a half that we walked,” said Stefania Wheelhouse, who marched in the short-lived parade with a local theater company.
“We sang, we spread the word,” she told the Ottawa Citizen. “Everyone was so positive, so it was still a net win for us,” Wheelhouse said.
The atmosphere was less positive for parade and protest leaders, who tried and failed to come to terms over Israel’s continuing occupation of Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, and Capital Pride’s response.
Last year, the group was resolute in its support of Palestinians, issuing a letter that condemned both the “acts of terrorism” committed on October 7 by Hamas and Israel’s “endless and brutal campaign in Gaza,” which the letter said had caused the deaths of “innocent Palestinians.”
The Jewish Federation of Ottawa called the 2024 statement “antisemitic” and vowed to boycott last summer’s Pride parade in response. Other groups, and Ottawa’s mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, withdrew their support and sponsorship as well.
This year, that statement quietly disappeared from Capital Pride’s website.
“This is what a village looks like!” the pro-Palestinian protesters chanted from Parliament Hill in the Canadian capital, a reference to this year’s “We Are a Village” parade theme. The parade ground to a halt there, Q4P said, with the ascent of Grand Marshall Patience Plush.
Protesters unfurled Palestinian flags and a giant pink-and-black banner that read “All of us or none of us” and “Stonewall was an intifada.” Many signs read, “No pride in genocide.”
Demonstrators also chanted slogans including “Free, free Palestine!” “Long live the intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
Queers4Palestine issued several demands of Capital Pride, including a commitment to join the long-running boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
They also demanded that Mayor Sutcliffe and other elected officials publicly apologize for the 2024 boycott of Capital Pride and called on them to “stand with us and all oppressed peoples, including Palestinians.”
“We are in the parade today to affirm very clearly that our Pride is not for sale, and that 2SLGBTQIA+ communities will not accept sponsors and elected officials dictating what we stand for, how we celebrate ourselves, and how we claim our space,” a press release from the group said.
“CP had multiple discussions with those who boycotted over the last year, not with Q4P and allies. Why prioritize corporations and right-wing politicians over the queer community?” the group asked.
“CP’s board voted to publish last year’s solidarity statement. This year’s removal was not voted on. One board member even quit in protest.
“Mayor Sutcliffe and others boycotted Pride last year, hurting our community financially. Now he wants to show up without apology — using Pride for political gain,” the group said.
Capital Pride can’t say it wasn’t aware of Q4P’s demands. Sunday’s stoppage came after at least a week of public calls to reinstate the statement.
But Capital Pride organizers slow-walked a response, as former sponsors and Ottawa’s mayor returned in the absence of the polarizing document.
Belatedly, the group said it stood by the views expressed in last year’s letter about Israel’s actions in Gaza, and said the statement was missing online due to a website “refresh,” reiterating Executive Director Callie Metler’s description of the removal as part of the organization’s annual process of “refreshing their online environment.”
By that time, the parade had launched and was aborted.
Capital Pride released a “Clarification on Parade cancellation” message to social media that said that Q4P was marching in the parade as “guests invited by the parade garnd marshall,” before the group forced the parade to stop.
“As a community organization, we strive to engage with our community members in good faith and to balance the various interests and demands that are made of us while also organizing one of the largest festivals in our city,” the statement said. “Throughout the summer, we had several meetings with Q4P along with other community groups to discuss the issues that are important to them.
“Unfortunately, the group refused to have a meaningful discussion about how to move forward. After over an hour of attempting to resolve the stoppage, it became clear that Q4P was unwilling to engage in a good faith conversation and was insistent on misrepresenting our discussions.”
“Rerouting the parade mid-way was not possible and the street closures for the parade route were only permitted to 4:00 pm. Given the constraints we were facing and the nature of the discussion with Q4P, we were left with no other choice than to cancel the remainder of the parade.”
The message said that other parts of Ottawa’s Pride festivities would continue as planned.
In a statement, Mayor Sutcliffe said it was “deeply regrettable that a group of activists chose to block the parade, ultimately leading Capital Pride officials to cancel the event.”
“My heart goes out to the many people in our city who were deprived of the opportunity to participate in this celebration of joy, resilience, and community.”
Germans turned out in huge numbers for Berlin’s Christopher Street Day Pride celebration on Saturday, a rebuke to rising far-right anti-LGBTQ+ activists who have cast a pall over many of this year’s commemorations of the Stonewall Riots and the fight for LGBTQ+ equality.
The turnout was also a warning to German lawmakers hoping to assuage far-right voters by dialing back their support of the LGBTQ+ community.
In May, Bundestag President Julia Klöckner of the Christian Democrat party announced she would ban the rainbow flag from flying atop Germany’s Parliament building for Pride, calling it a “political demonstration,” according to Le Monde.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz added to the controversy when, in a July interview, he declared that the Bundestag was not “a circus tent” on which “any flag” could fly.
Thomas Hoffmann, a member of Berlin’s Christopher Street Day Executive Board, estimated the 2025 crowd for Saturday’s Pride march was bigger than in past years.
“We want to stand up for our rights together here,” Hoffmann told the Associated Press.
German news agency dpa reported that a right-wing counter-demonstration drew 30 to 50 protesters to Saturday’s march. Six people, including the protest’s organizer, were arrested on their way to the counter-demonstration for alleged weapons and explosives violations, as well as for displaying anti-constitutional symbols, including the Nazi swastika.
Police have been vigilant in the face of a concerted anti-LGBTQ+ campaign this year under a banner co-opting the German translation for Pride Month, Stolzmonat, to celebrate “straight Pride.”
The counterdemonstrations are attracting a collection of aggrieved Germans, including neo-Nazis and members of the country’s rising far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who are using the events as recruiting tools for young, disaffected German youth.
More than 200 Pride events are scheduled across Germany this year.
“Stolzmonat is an alternative that seeks to consciously counter the forced change… setting an example of traditional values, family ties and stability in uncertain times,” reads a statement from AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt promoting the anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations.
AfD won a state election for the first time last year and became Germany’s largest opposition party in the federal parliament in February.
The relative calm at Saturday’s massive march was in contrast to another local pride celebration across town in the Marzahn district last month, where the mood was tense.
“There was a massive police presence to shield us from anti-Pride protests. We only felt safe because the police kept us apart,” attendee Georg Schmidt told NPR.
Police in Berlin reported an attempted attack at that celebration, while the western city of Gelsenkirchen cancelled its Pride event in May after authorities were tipped off to an imminent threat.
The largest protest outside Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebration on Saturday was an Internationalist Queer Pride for Liberation rally in the Kreuzberg district of the city, where an estimated 10,000 people joined the pro-Palestinian demonstration, German broadcaster DW reported.
The gathering was disbanded “due to ongoing unrest, including repeated attacks on law enforcement officers and the shouting of antisemitic slogans,” Berlin police posted on X.
