Jeff Fuentes Gleghorn

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Lessons in resistance: How AIDS activism can teach us to save ourselves from hate

The Reagan Administration was determined to ignore the AIDS epidemic. As the death toll climbed across the country, Reagan refused to even say the word “AIDS,” waiting until 1985 to name the deadly illness. It wasn’t until 1987 that he formed a task force to address the disease, and his administration did not implement a single one of its 597 recommendations.  In response, a group of four gay men in Minneapolis came together to form the Philanthrofund Foundation, or PFund for short, in 1987. Aaron Zimmerman, the current Executive Director of the organization, told LGBTQ Nation the founders’ primary principle: “We need to save […]

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This gay commissioner has inspired cities across the nation to protect trans folks

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Kansas City, Missouri – the home of bebop jazz and the self-proclaimed “Barbecue Capital of the World” – also has some of the most LGBTQ+-friendly laws in the country, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). For the third consecutive year, HRC gave Kansas City a perfect 100 on its Municipal Equality Index, which measures LGBTQ+ equality in municipal laws, policies, and services. Residents have been working for LGBTQ+ equality for years and made major progress after the city’s LGBTQ Commission was created in 2020.  The commission’s current chair, a queer Black man named Justice Horn, was deeply involved in the fight to […]

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VA started the school year with new anti-trans policies. The state’s largest district won’t comply.

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Referring to the Virginia Department of Education’s (VDOE) 2023 model policies for the treatment of transgender students, attorney Wyatt Rolla of the ACLU of Virginia said Governor Glenn Youngkin’s (R) administration is “throwing school districts under the bus to advance its own dangerous anti-trans political agenda.” The new model policies, which replace the ones published by the VDOE in 2021, require teachers to use a student’s legal name and the pronouns associated with their “biological sex” unless a parent submits written instructions to use a different name or pronoun. Even when parents do submit written instructions, the policies allow teachers to ignore them and […]