Julie Compton

Brooklyn’s last remaining lesbian bar, Ginger’s, sits on a busy avenue that cuts through the borough’s gentrified Park Slope neighborhood. Over the past two decades, it has endured 9/11, the Great Recession and skyrocketing rent, but owner Sheila Frayne is unsure it will survive COVID-19. “Realistically, I’m saying maybe this is the end,” Frayne, 53, told NBC News. In compliance with citywide guidelines for nonessential businesses, Frayne locked the doors of Ginger’s on March 15, two days before St. Patrick’s Day and what would have been the bar’s 20th anniversary. Through the darkened windows, she peered at the shamrock decorations that […]

Since they married in 2015, Jonathan Hobgood, 37, and his husband, Kerry Johnson, 36, have wanted to be dads. At first, the couple saw adoption as the best path to parenthood, but South Carolina, where they live, is one of 10 states with religious exemption laws that make it more difficult for same-sex couples to foster and adopt, and they worried that adopting would set them up for a legal nightmare down the road. “Our concern was that if we did a private adoption and the birth mother decided a couple of years later that she wanted her child back, we would […]

For the first time last June, residents in Heber City, Utah, saw their downtown adorned in rainbows. Sky Elizabeth Smith, 15, remembered driving with her family through the tiny Rocky Mountain town in northern Utah where she grew up, and finding herself surrounded by dozens of rainbow banners on both sides of Main Street. “It made me feel really, really happy,” she told NBC News. Smith, a high school student who identifies as pansexual, attempted suicide last year after what she described as routine bullying from classmates. Some classmates, she recalled, told her that Jesus was going to return and […]

Samantha Boucher is on her way — both to Iowa for the 2020 U.S. Senate race there and to becoming the first openly transgender person to manage a U.S. senatorial campaign. Boucher, 24, will head Democratic candidate Kimberly Graham’s Senate campaign in the state against the Republican incumbent, Joni Ernst. “Just the opportunity to do something so huge, to have a national impact, potentially, that really excites me, and I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth in,” Boucher told NBC News. Trans people are entering the political arena during an era when their rights are increasingly under attack — from […]

  Imagine you are a young man alone in a park. Another man approaches you. He flirts with you. You flirt back, flattered that the handsome stranger likes you. He asks you to come back to his place. When you accept the invitation, he slaps handcuffs on your wrists and says you are under arrest. Yes, it’s unlawful for police to arrest someone for being gay, but it still happens. In its landmark ruling Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court ruled that antisodomy laws —sometimes referred to as “crimes against nature” laws — are unconstitutional. But 12 states, including Louisiana, […]