Jo Yurcaba

The drag show at a Tennessee pride festival will go on Saturday — but not in the way organizers had planned it.  After weeks of criticism, online threats from far-right groups and a legal complaint, the Jackson Pride Committee and the city of Jackson, which sits about 70 miles northeast of Memphis in Madison County, reached a compromise with state Republican representatives and community members who had complained about the pride festival’s drag show. The annual pride festival was supposed to be held in the city’s public Conger Park, as it was in 2019 and 2021, but now it will […]

The Human Rights Campaign announced Tuesday that Kelley Robinson will serve as its ninth president — the first Black queer woman to lead the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization. Robinson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said she was honored to lead HRC and its 3 million member-advocates during “a pivotal moment in our movement for equality for LGBTQ+ people.” “We, particularly our trans and BIPOC communities, are quite literally in the fight for our lives and facing unprecedented threats that seek to destroy us,” Robinson said in a statement Tuesday, using an acronym for Black and Indigenous […]

More than 1,600 books were banned in over 5,000 schools during the last school year, with most of the bans targeting titles related to the LGBTQ community or race and racism, according to a new report.  PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for free expression in literature, released a report Monday, the start of Banned Books Week, that shows the sweeping scope of efforts to ban certain books during the 2021-22 school year.  It found that there were 2,532 instances of individual books’ being banned, which affected 1,648 titles — meaning the same titles were targeted multiple times in different districts and states. […]

Though public support for pro-LGBTQ policies is at an all-time high, many queer people living in the South report that a caregiver tried to change their LGBTQ identity, a new survey found.  More than half, or about 58%, of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in 13 Southern states reported that a parent or caregiver tried to change or repress their sexual orientation or gender identity, according to a survey published this week by the Campaign for Southern Equality, which promotes LGBTQ equality across the South. Some groups were more likely to report experiencing such efforts: More than two-thirds […]

In March of 1947, a Florida court ordered the Ha Ha Club — a nightclub famous for its “female impersonators,” as they were called at the time — to close after declaring it a public nuisance.  The order came just a month after Frank Tuppen, a juvenile probation officer with political ambitions, filed a complaint against the venue. He argued that the club’s performers were “sexual perverts” who had embedded “in the minds of the youngsters” who lived in the area “things immoral” and were “breaking down their character.” The owner of the club, Charles “Babe” Baker, appealed to the […]

Anti-LGBTQ hate surged online following the passage of a Florida law that limits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, a new report found. This particular surge involves rhetoric implying that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people are “grooming” childrenand includes such slurs as “groomer,” “pedophile” and “predator” in relation to the LGBTQ community.  The month after the Florida Senate passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, or what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill,  on March 8,  tweets mentioning the LGBTQ community  alongside these slurs increased 406%, according to the report, which was conducted by the LGBTQ advocacy group Human […]

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed an executive order Tuesday to ban conversion therapy, a discredited form of therapy that seeks to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, for minors. The executive order directs state agencies to discourage conversion therapy for people of all ages, and to instead promote evidence-based practices for supporting LGBTQ people. The order also directs the Department of Human Services, among other agencies, to ensure that state funds are not being used to provide or reimburse for conversion therapy.  “Conversion therapy is a traumatic practice based on junk science that actively harms the people it supposedly seeks to […]

A southwest Florida school district added warning labels to more than 100 books, many of which touch on issues related to race or the LGBTQ community.  Collier County Public Schools, a district that includes part of Naples, added the labels both on physical copies of the books and in Destiny, the district’s online catalog, according to the nonprofit Florida Freedom to Read Project. The top of the label, according to a photo shared with NBC News by Florida Freedom to Read Project, says “Advisory notice to parents” in capital letters.  “This Advisory Notice shall serve to inform you that this book […]