Out Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) has proposed legislation to grant LGBTQ+ military veterans coverage for in-vitro fertilization (IVF), something the federal Veterans Administration (VA) only allows for heterosexual couples.
Healey first introduced the legislation – dubbed the HERO Act – in November, and according toThe Boston Business Journal a hearing on the proposal is set to be held this month before the Joint Committee on Veteran and Federal Affairs.
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“Our veterans have sacrificed so much for our country, and this transformative legislation marks an important step toward ensuring that Massachusetts supports them in return,” Healey said in a press release after introducing the legislation.
Calling the bill “historic,” she added, “From day one, our administration has been committed to revitalizing veterans’ services in Massachusetts and ensuring that every one of these heroes receives the benefits, resources, and support that they deserve.”
The bill would no doubt have a massive impact, as veterans in same-sex marriages have made it clear the current policies affect them deeply. In August, Massachusetts veteran Ashley Sheffield filed a class action lawsuit against the VA arguing that the denial of fertility coverage to LGBTQ+ couples is unconstitutional.
“We are entitled to equal treatment and we should no longer be treated as second-class citizens,” Sheffield reportedly said when she filed the suit.
In addition to granting IVF coverage to same-sex couples, the HERO Act proposes a myriad of other benefits, including expanded access to mental health care treatment, an increase in the tax credits small businesses receive for hiring low-income and chronically unemployed veterans, an increase in flexibility for veteran property tax exemptions, and an expanded definition of a veteran dependent.
In November 2022, Healey became the first out lesbian governor in the country, as well as the first woman elected governor in her state. Before that, she was the country’s first out lesbian state attorney general.
As AG, she championed non-discrimination protections for trans people in Massachusetts and pushed for gender-neutral markers both federally and for the state. And as civil rights chief in the AG’s office, Healey brought the first successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, helping to lay the groundwork for marriage equality nationwide.
After she won the Democratic primary, she stood before a raucous crowd of supporters and told them, “I am so proud to be able to stand before you tonight as your Democratic nominee for governor of Massachusetts.” She nodded to the sound of her latest title and added, “That sounds good.”
The former professional basketball player and captain of her team at Harvard describes herself as a “baller” and was clear-eyed about the work ahead in her remarks that night: “I ask you, as a former point guard, to leave it all with me on the court.”
Florida Republicans’ book bans have resulted in thousands of books being yanked from school libraries statewide. The Duval County Public Schools system alone pulled more than 22,000 titles from circulation.
Over half of those books centered around LGBTQ+ history or characters and a contractor was hired to dispose of them. Instead of burning the books, they donated them to a radical anarchist bookstore that is going to redistribute them to any kids in Florida who ask for them.
Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina, was offered the books after Gov. Ron DeSantis‘ (R) radical agenda went into effect in the Sunshine State. But instead of letting the sun go down on the titles, the store has announced plans to ship them to Florida youth for free.
The Banned Books Back project will redistribute 22,500 titles to kids or parents who fill out an encrypted online form. They can choose picture books (grades 4-8) or chapter books (grades 8-12). Each shipment will include five or six books, stickers, and zines.
While the project is only currently welcoming Florida youth, they hope to expand to other states. The store is trying to raise $30,000 to help them cover the cost of shipping all the books to young readers.
“We understand book bans as a symptom of authoritarian power, so it isn’t effective to focus solely on access to individual titles without addressing the underlying power relations,” staff told Autostraddle. “Yes, we want kids in Florida to have these 22,500 books, but we also want to live in a world where there aren’t powerful adults imposing their worldviews through bans, punishment, and policing.”
A transgender man’s murder in August has become a teaching opportunity in progressive Wayne County, Michigan, as mourning friends and family members were forced to defend his gender identity after death.
The senseless killing of 26-year-old Jean Butchart, shot in the head by a stranger on a hot August evening in Belleville, shocked his loved ones. But a cascade of misinformation based on conflicting reports about his gender worsened their heartbreak.
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As police searched for Butchart’s killer, conflicting information on the victim’s driver’s license led police and the media to misgender him as a woman.
“It was an honest mistake,” Julisa Abad, a trans woman who serves as director of transgender outreach for the advocacy group Fair Michigan, told news outlet MLive.
On the day of his murder, Butchart had started a new job doing landscape maintenance at a mobile home park. First responders found him motionless on the ground with no pulse and a gunshot wound to the head. He was declared dead at the scene.
While Butchart’s driver’s license identified him as male, his name had yet to be changed on the document. As such, his license reflected his deadname. Though Michigan has made changing sex on identity documents relatively easy and affordable, a name change is more complicated, time-consuming, and, for some, prohibitively expensive.
Witnesses at the crime scene identified Butchart as Jean, using the French pronunciation common in the Great Lakes region close to Quebec, so police were aware of the victim’s male gender identity.
“They called him Jean,” Van Buren Township Police Chief Jason Wright said. “That’s how we knew.”
Over the next few days, as the crime was reported internally and to the public, conflicting information on his driver’s license became a source of grief.
First, the Van Buren Township Police Department posted a news release about Butchart’s death in association with the capture of Matthew Torrey Tiggs Jr., 22, who was charged with Butchart’s killing as well as an attempted murder and assault in two other incidents over 10 days in August.
That release identified the victim as “26-year-old Jean Butchart” with no gender indication.
Then, when the prosecutor’s office issued a news release, the release identified Butchart by their deadname with “Jean” added in quotes, as is customary with nicknames.
“Because the names were female names with no explanation of the gender identity of the victim, it was wrongly assumed that the entry ‘male’ [for Butchart] was a mistake,” explained Maria Miller, the prosecutor’s office director of communications.
That misinformation was amplified in news reports and on social media, leading to frustration and anger among Butchart’s friends and family, who overwhelmed officials with an email campaign demanding a correction and a formal apology.
“We apologize to his family, friends, and to the transgender community,” Miller said in an email. “We immediately corrected this error after we confirmed Mr. Butchart’s gender identity. There was never any intent to misgender Mr. Butchart.”
While the mistake was traumatic for Butchart’s friends and family, Miller called the case “helpful” in spurring cultural competence training for officials in Wayne County.
Now, 18 area police departments have attended a special training session, with more planned for other Wayne County police departments and the sheriff’s office.
“We have to realize that not everything is coming from a place of malice,” said Fair Michigan’s Julisa Abad. “We’re all still learning all the alphabets of the LGBTQ+ umbrella – I don’t even know all of it.”
Seattle has canceled a proposed plan to build a playground at a nude beach following backlash from the city’s LGBTQ+ community.
As The Seattle Times reported, funding for the proposed $550,000 project to build a children’s playground at Denny Blaine Park, a grassy lawn overlooking a secluded beach on Lake Washington, came from an anonymous donor. At a community meeting earlier this month, Seattle Parks and Recreation Deputy Superintendent Andy Sheffer said that the project would address a lack of playgrounds in the neighborhood without using public funds.
But opponents countered that a playground would jeopardize the beach’s status as a queer haven, where members of the LGBTQ+ community swim and sunbathe in the nude. While public nudity is legal in Washington state, it can be considered “indecent exposure” under certain circumstances, the Times noted, and opponents of the project feared the playground would be used as an excuse to target LGBTQ+ people.
Some even alleged that the purpose of the project was to displace the LGBTQ+ community, despite Seattle Parks officials’ insistence otherwise.
“It’s hard to even come up with a different reason beyond the one that feels most obvious, which is that this is someone trying to shut down the nude beach,” 30-year-old Milo Kusold told the Times.
“If you have a person who’s not in the community showing up with their kids, and there are people around who are naked, they’re probably going to call the cops,” Kusold continued. “This is kind of the weaponization of children to try to exclude or harm the queer community. This is just another example.”
An online petition opposing the playground garnered over 9,000 signatures, and the December 6 meeting was packed with members of the LGBTQ+ community who opposed the project, many of them holding signs that read “Don’t Displace Historic And Diverse Community,” “Gay Buns Over Shady Funds,” and “Save Denny Blaine.”
“I’m a Black transgender man and a homeowner in the city. Denny Blaine is the only park that I feel safe to swim in,” said Vince Reiman, a Seattle native. “When I transitioned, I thought that I would never be able to swim in Lake Washington again… Denny Blaine is my miracle.”
“After hearing from many community members who participated in the community process on the proposed play area project at Denny Blaine Park, Seattle Parks and Recreation has decided not to move forward with the play area project at Denny Blaine,” spokesperson Rachel Schulkin said in a December 8 statement. “While this area of our city still lacks accessible play equipment for kids and families, we understand the feedback that this particular park is not the best location, and we will evaluate other location alternatives.”
“Many members of the public spoke to the importance of this space and use as a beach, and the cohesion it has brought within the LGBTQIA+ community,” Schulkin’s statement continued.
According to the Times, Schulkin would not say whether the funds pledged by the anonymous donor would be used to construct a playground at another location. In response to the paper’s public records request to find out who the donor is, the city said that it would provide records identifying the donor in late February.
Sophie Amity Debs, an organizer with the “Save Denny Blaine” campaign, said that opponents of the playground project were “ecstatic.”
“We came away from the meeting feeling like there was absolutely no way they were going to go ahead with it,” Debs said. “I’m glad the parks department listened to the community.”
LGBTQ+ parents have existed for as long as LGBTQ+ people have been around. That is to say, forever.
We haven’t been visible until recent decades and haven’t had any rights until recent years, but we have been here. We have been able to have biological children as bisexual and transgender parents, as well as lesbian and gay parents (from various situations, including relationships before coming out). Before there were any legal rights, we’ve had step-children and children in different configurations of chosen family. And now, we can legally adopt and foster in every state.
But it’s been a long road to get here, and we still don’t have equality.
A brief history of queer parenthood
We know that queer people have existed all through history, so it’s not a stretch to imagine we’ve parented from ancient times, though the records don’t exist. In recent centuries, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)’s wife forced him to give up parental rights to their two sons after the indecency trials for his queerness. Audre Lorde(1934-1992) was proudly lesbian, but before she was with her female life partner for over 20 years, she had two children with an out gay husband. Bisexual icon Josephine Baker (1906-1975) adopted twelve children from nine countries and cited being too busy with motherhood as her reason for turning down Coretta Scott King’s offer to become a new figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Other queer historical figures had children within their straight-passing marriages, like Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). In one story of a documented transgender parent, American jazz musician Billy Tipton (1914-1989) adopted three children with one of his wives. The adoptions and the marriage weren’t legally recognized, and according to all five women who married him at different times and all three children, none of them knew of his trans identity until he passed away.
Wilde’s loss of custody and the lack of legal recognition over Tipton’s adopted children are indicative of the landscape of LGBTQ+ parentage rights in the 19th and 20th centuries. In cases documented as early as the 1950s in the U.S, a parent’s homosexuality was routinely used to take away custody of their children in a divorce because it was considered a mental illness to be gay or transgender. One mother lost custody because she “associated with female homosexuals and refused to change her ways.” In another, a wife’s “strange passions” made her an “unfit mother.” In another, a judge decided that a heterosexual environment was in “the best interests of the child.”
In the mid-1950s, the nation’s first lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, held the first known official discussion groups about lesbian motherhood. Group co-founder Del Martin (1921-2008) was divorced from a husband before her 50-year partnership with Phyllis Lyon (1924-2020), which was foundational to the lesbian rights movement.
Martin’s ex-husband retained primary custody of their daughter, Kendra. Martin went on to co-found another group, the Lesbian Mothers Union, with Pat Norman and others in 1971 in California. Chapters popped up around the country throughout the 1970s. The group helped lesbian mothers in their custody battles by raising legal fees, putting them in touch with sympathetic witnesses, and trying to change the perception of lesbians as deviants who could not provide a moral home for children.
The movement for queer women to start inseminations from sperm donors grew in the 1970s. Because clinics only served married women, they had to find sperm donors outside of fertility clinics by using friends, helpful queer men, or strangers (the Sperm Bank of California became the first in the country in 1982 to serve single people and queer women). On top of that, there were no legal protections against the donors claiming parental rights, and the co-parents who didn’t give birth had no legal claim to their child.
Adoption also started to become an option in a few areas around that time. In 1978, New York became the first state not to reject applications for adoption based on sexual orientation. One year later, a gay couple in California became the first same-sex couple to jointly adopt a child. A single gay man had already adopted a child in California in 1968.
The 1970s began a positive turning point in custody cases, with openly LGBTQ+ parents winning for the first time. In 1973, a transgender parent won his right to retain custody of his child in Colorado, the first known court opinion involving a trans parent. In 1974, a New Jersey court affirmed that a gay father’s sexual orientation was not a reason to deny him child visitation. It was the first time a U.S. court acknowledged the constitutional rights of LGBTQ+ parents. In 1976, Washington, D.C. became the first jurisdiction in the country to prohibit judges from making custody decisions based solely on sexual orientation.
With self-inseminations and the growth of visibility of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, the “gayby boom” began. The term appeared in print in a story in Newsweek in 1990. It noted that the AIDS epidemic was the top issue for the LGBTQ+ community, but that family issues like child custody and marriage equality were starting to be added to the agenda.
It goes on: “Many are already living the settled-down life of their ‘breeder’ peers. That includes children–either through adoption, artificial insemination or arrangements between lesbians and gay ‘uncles.’ There are an estimated 3 million to 5 million lesbian and gay parents who have had children in the context of a heterosexual relationship. But in the San Francisco area alone, at least 1,000 children have been born to gay or lesbian couples in the last five years.”
The children’s books Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate came out in 1989 and 1990, adding to the visibility of LGBTQ+ families.
Transgender men’s pregnancies started to make the news as sensationalist headlines in the 2000s, but today the field of trans fertility is growing with studies, trainings, and resources.
When marriage equality isn’t enough
Around the turn of the century, civil unions began popping up, then marriage state by state until there was federal recognition of these marriages in 2013. And finally, the Supreme Court granted national same-sex marriage rights in 2015. These relationship protections helped couples with children achieve legal rights for both parents. But it wasn’t automatic. National LGBTQ+ legal organizations still advise that a birth certificate is not enough to prove parentage or custody and recommend that non-biological parents go through a second-parent adoption as they did before marriage legalization.
Earlier this year, for example, an Oklahoma judge ruled that a nongestational mother who was on her child’s birth certificate, married to the child’s other mother, co-created the child, co-raised the child from birth, and had given the child her last name had no parental rights to the child — but the sperm donor did as the biological father.
“LGBTQ+ parents and our children are most definitely under attack, both as part of the general attacks on LGBTQ+ people right now and in terms of specific attacks on our families,” says Dana Rudolph, founder and publisher of the two-time GLAAD Media Award-winning site, Mombian and creator of LGBTQ Families Day.
She doesn’t see this as a moment of losing rights, but rather as ongoing inequality, since full equality for LGBTQ+ parents has never been reached.
“LGBTQ+ parents and our children have more visibility than ever, in our communities and workplaces, in the news, and in books and other media for children,” Rudolph says. “Despite current attacks on our families in many places, I think that broadly speaking, we have achieved greater acceptance over the past decades, making it easier to be visible.”
Nevertheless, bans of books showing LGBTQ+ families, state laws allowing discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in adoption and foster care, anti-trans laws, and outdated state parentage laws, all leave LGBTQ+ parents at risk.
But LGBTQ+ parents’ numbers are growing. One in three LGBTQ+ people has had a child at some point in their life and as many as six million Americans have an LGBTQ+ parent. Half of LGBTQ+ millennials are actively planning on having a first or additional child. And there are many famous LGBTQ+ parents today – including Lance Bass, Karamo Brown, Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Tan France, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Patrick Harris & David Burtka, Jesse Tyler Ferguson & Justin Mikita, Ricky Martin, and Wanda Sykes – who are doing wonders for visibility.
They all stand on the shoulders of the parents who came before and fought for the rights we have today to be able to adopt, appear on birth certificates, partner with surrogates, get married, and more. Today, we’re more visible and protected than ever today, even if we still have further to go.
The one real estate requirement for Giovanni’s Room was “a place with a big front window,” says co-founder Tom Wilson Weinberg. The vision — an LGBTQ+ bookstore — set a plan in motion that would change queer visibility in Philadelphia and open the door for access to diverse stories worldwide.
Weinberg and friends Dan Sherbo and Bern Boyle had begun engaging in LGBTQ+ activism and saw an unfulfilled niche for community engagement. It was 1973, and gentleman’s clubs, bars, and adult book shops — often hidden behind unmarked doors — dotted the city, but despite the Stonewall Riots just a few years before, queer life across the U.S. wasn’t all rainbows. (Gilbert Baker’s Pride flag didn’t even appear until 1978.)
At the time the trio conceived the idea, the American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental disorder. Pennsylvania still has yet to officially pass the Fairness Act, which includes protections against discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.
“It was hard to find a location,” Weinberg, now 78, told LGBTQ Nation. “Realtors didn’t have to give a reason; they’d just say no, though we insisted on saying it’d be a gay and feminist bookstore.” The twenty-somethings finally found a location on South Street — the first floor of a three-flat building with the requisite window, a physical manifestation of the visibility they hoped to achieve. And for a rent of $85 per month, Giovanni’s Room was in business. Over the decades, the storefront (named after James Baldwin’s novel) has changed owners and locations, proving a stalwart survivor of evolving economic and cultural times.
A receipt for the lease of Giovanni’s Room’s original Spruce Street location. Photo courtesy of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives.
Fifty years later, the skyrocketing impact of online retailers and social media consumption makes every purchase — from Lex Croucher’s New York Times best-selling YA novel Gwen and Art Are Not in Loveto the reissue of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance — a win for local, queer-owned small businesses. Still, the forecast remains precarious. Despite a slow and steady increase over the past decade, with nearly 2,600 independent bookstore locations reported in 2023, LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs face a Medusa-like backlash. Conservatives toe the line with a record number of book ban attempts against LGBTQ+ titles. Meanwhile, decreased print book sales continue despite a handful of industry insiders advocating for queer authors.
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One page at a time
Archival images courtesy of the John J. Wilcox Archives, William Way LGBT Community Center.
“In early 1973, to open a [LGBTQ+] bookstore was a utopian vision,” says Weinberg. “We didn’t think we needed an insurance policy, but we did insure the front glass window; nobody ever threw anything.”
Ninety miles north in New York City, Craig Rodwell had opened Oscar Wilde Bookshop and would prove a valuable ally once Giovanni’s Room was up and running. Weinberg says Rodwell, a member of the Mattachine Society, a pre-Stonewall activism organization, was instrumental in suggesting what might sell. Together, they visited a wholesale bookseller in Brooklyn and “bought anything we considered queer-worthy” — cash only. To balance Rodwell’s populist side, friend, activist, and author Barbara Gittings suggested other titles from the queer canon.
Hobbled together from used furniture and makeshift shelves, the store included a modest collection — Oscar Wilde, Gore Vidal, Radclyffe Hall, and, of course, James Baldwin — along with local papers and pamphlets like Boston’s Gay Community News and their own newsletter, the Philadelphia Weekly Gayzette. The founders each volunteered twice weekly, though they often spent days off at the store.
After 18 months, plenty of good times, and little profit, the men stepped aside, selling Giovanni’s Room to good friend Pat Hill, who gave up a job at the Department of Recreation to keep the store alive.
“It was not a viable business. It was a wonderful idea,” Hill said at a 50th anniversary founder’s event held in August 2023 at Philadelphia’s William Way LGBT Community Center. “It was a very courageous thing to get going but hard to keep going because things hadn’t been written yet,” referencing the limited number of published queer titles.
The bookstore’s next chapter began in 1979 with the arrival of Ed Hermance and Arleen Olshan, who bought the store and its meager stock for $500 and moved its location to 12th and Spruce Street. Shortly after, the building was sold, and the new landlords were none too happy with queer tenants. Another move was imminent.
Hermance’s eclectic life had led him from a “hippie commune” in Colorado to a teaching gig in Germany, a food co-op, and finally to being a clerk at the University of Pennsylvania’s main library. Olshan was an artist and leatherworker from a working-class family. They were not typical business owners. But Giovanni’s Room was not your typical bookstore.
From the onset, Giovanni’s Room had been fueled by volunteers and a steady stream of customers, many of whom would circle the block before summoning the courage to enter. They would prove instrumental in the bookstore’s legacy.
“Giovanni’s Room was a gift from the community to itself. People wanted it. They were willing to contribute to it, volunteer, and support it.” Ed Hermance
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“Time was running out, and we’re gonna have to do something,” recalled Hermance, 83, at the founder’s event. “I had seen a property on 12th and Pine Street, but we never thought about buying because we didn’t have any money. But the deadline was coming. So we borrowed the down payment from our customers. Giovanni’s Room was a gift from the community to itself. People wanted it. They were willing to contribute to it, volunteer, and support it.”
In addition to being literary-minded, Hermance also proved to be entrepreneurial. Driving to New York City to load up a trunk full of books whenever they needed inventory wasn’t sustainable. Bob Koen, an old friend from Hermance’s food co-op gig, had launched a book wholesaler business across the Delaware River in New Jersey and was the first person to give Giovanni’s Room credit. And by the late ‘70s, a wave of queer authors and publishers had emerged.
Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), called “a meditation on ecstasy” by the New York Times, portrayed New York City gay life through a brutal kaleidoscopic lens and became an instant queer classic. Rita Mae Brown’s Ruby Fruit Jungle, published by the lesbian-owned independent press Daughters, Inc., paved the way for today’s sapphic coming-of-age novels.
The impact of Giovanni’s Room extended far beyond Philadelphia’s local LGBTQ+ community. By the early ‘90s, Hermance and Olshan had leveraged their relationships with publishers and started a wholesale business of their own, distributing queer titles worldwide. With a master’s degree in comparative literature and work experience overseas, Hermance was a natural. “During our biggest wholesale year, we sold to more than 80 bookstores in 17 countries,” Hermance tells LGBTQ Nation.
From books to activism
Giovanni’s Room was more than a bookstore. It became a haven during the height of the AIDS crisis at a time when mainstream America was burying the news, as well as thousands of gay men. In a 1982 press briefing, journalist Lester Kinsolving asked President Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes about the “gay plague” as the press pool laughed. After some banter, Speakes said, “I don’t know anything about it.”
“The store carried every fragment of information we could about this plague,” says Hermance, including safer-sex cartoon booklets — discreet accordion-style pages that could easily slip into one’s pocket. Employees from a nearby city health clinic known for STI testing would come by, stock up, and surreptitiously distribute the materials to patients.
Hermance says newly diagnosed people would come to the store to gather their thoughts about the harrowing reality of what was to come. “In those days, you’d be dead in six months. There was no question about it,” he says. “The store was a [place] to get your thoughts together: ‘How am I gonna tell everybody I know, and what am I going to do about it?’”
AIDS also hit the Giovanni’s Room family.
Joseph Beam, editor of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (Alyson Press, 1986), worked as the store’s bookkeeper and left to travel and promote the book. After his return, Beam had hoped to get his old job back, but the position had been filled. A year later, Hermance reached out to reconnect and invite Beam to lunch, but the call was never returned. Beam, 33 and HIV-positive, had died in his apartment, discovered by friends on December 27, 1988.
“I had grown weary of reading literature by white Gay men,” Beam, who had interviewed luminaries like Audre Lorde and Samuel Delaney, once wrote, “More and more each day, as I looked around the well-stocked shelves of Giovanni’s Room… I wondered where was the work of Black Gay men.”
Beam said In the Life was for “the brothers whose silence has cost them their sanity” and “the “2,500 brothers who have died of AIDS.” To date, more than 700,000 people in the U.S. alone have died of HIV-related illnesses, including Giovanni’s Room co-founder Bern Boyle. LGBTQ+ bookstores remain valuable information hubs for HIV, MPOX, and other diseases disproportionally affecting the queer community.
A cliffhanger leads to the next chapter
New releases at Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room. Photo by Matthew Wexler for LGBTQ Nation.
Giovanni’s Room continued to prosper, but after a decade, Olshan was ready to move on. Hermance amicably bought out his partner and acquired the adjacent building to expand. As the bookstore’s popularity grew throughout the ‘90s, so did the canon of LGBTQ+ authors.
But the industry was quickly shifting. Borders and Barnes & Noble expanded their operations, opening sprawling bookstores in malls and standalone locations nationwide. And on July 5, 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon from his Bellevue, Washington, garage. Over the past three decades, the company, now valued at over $460 billion, has dominated the market, selling upwards of 300 million print books per year.
Hermance persevered, convinced that a personal connection with customers, authors, and publishers could keep the store afloat. But by 2014, the pressure had become too great. Original co-founder Weinberg and others tried their best to secure a buyer to no avail — until a creative solution emerged.
Local nonprofit Philly AIDS Thrift, led by co-founder and manager Christina Kallas-Saritsoglou, signed a two-year agreement to become the store’s proprietor and, in 2018, purchased the business and the building. Now officially called Philly AIDS Thrift@Giovanni’s Room, the bookstore’s legacy continues, with its proceeds distributed to communities in need.
Book lovers gather
The Philly Queer Book Club gathers at Philly AIDS Thrift & Giovanni’s Room, August 3, 2023. Photo by Matthew Wexler for LGBTQ Nation.
Locals and visitors think of Giovanni’s Room, an established anchor of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, as that reliable friend who’s always around in times of need. But volunteer Danny Maloney understands firsthand the importance of preserving queer books and queer spaces for the next generation.
Maloney, 29, grew up in nearby Bucks County, where he attended Catholic school. He developed an affinity for old movies and “campy things,” and, in turn, sought out novels in a similar style. He volunteered at the local library, but it wasn’t until pursuing a double major in English and Education at Philadephia’s Lasalle University that Maloney discovered explicitly queer characters and authors.
“This is a benefit of physical bookstores and physical libraries, that you don’t necessarily need to be looking for things, but you can browse and find what you didn’t know you needed at the time,” Maloney tells LGBTQ Nation.
Maloney began his teaching career in Baltimore, then moved back to Philadelphia in June 2020. He had occasionally frequented the bookstore during college and made a conscious effort to engage more with the queer community upon his return. He began volunteering, but the bibliophile wanted more.
“I had been volunteering at the store for over a year. I was finding it really fulfilling, but I wanted to meet more people and have certain types of conversations. Part of my mind gets animated and invigorated talking about texts,” says Maloney. “I approached one of the managers at the time, asking if there had ever been a [book club]. And in a classic instance, the following week, she was like, “Well, if you want to do this, it can happen.”
Philly Queer Book Club participants discuss Andrew Holleran’s “Dancer from the Dance.” Photos by Matthew Wexler for LGBTQ Nation.
In August 2022, The Philly Queer Book Club was born. Maloney’s educational background came in handy for setting a reading schedule and drafting discussion prompts. He reached out to “every queer person I knew” and set up an Instagram profile. That first meeting attracted 20 or so attendees, half of whom were Maloney’s friends, but the word caught on. By the time the group read the store’s namesake title by James Baldwin, the numbers were exponential. “People really showed up,” recalls Maloney. “It was actually kind of stunning.”
Throughout the book club’s evolution, Maloney has witnessed the excitement surrounding a range of subjects and authors, proving the value of diverse representation among LGBTQ+ narratives.
“A lot of the participants often very strongly identify with things that we are reading,” says Maloney, highlighting past picks that have included Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Homeand Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different, which portrays a Southeast Asian immigrant experience through a queer lens.
Maloney takes participant polls to inform book selections but also draws from his professional expertise, saying, “I want to make sure that we are reading from different eras, genres, and experiences to allow people to see themselves in the text if that is what they’re searching for.”
The future of LGBTQ+ bookstores
Violet Valley Bookstore proprietor Dr. Jamie Harker. Photos provided by Violet Valley Bookstore.
The resilience of Giovanni’s Room tells only part of the story. Rodwell’s Oscar Wilde Bookshop lasted until 2009. A Different Light Bookstore, at its height with locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, shuddered its last outpost in 2011. Washington D.C.’s Lambda Rising and Atlanta’s Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse also closed after decades-long runs. But a new crop of LGBTQ+ bookstores is emerging, sometimes where you’d least expect them.
Dr. Jamie Harker opened Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi, in December 2017. An English professor at the nearby University of Mississippi, Walker has lived in the state for 20 years. She spent seven of them writing The Lesbian South, which uncovers the legacies of Southern feminists and the Women in Print movement, which built a network of women authors, publishers, and bookstores.
Harker’s research inspired deeper contemplation about continuing the legacy of the women who came before her. The former railroad town had proven hospitable over the years, drawing residents who worked at the university 18 miles to the north. Located on Main Street, the long, narrow shop dates back to the late 19th century. A cigar shop, barbershop, and art gallery have occupied the space, but Walker saw the potential for something different.
Much like Giovanni’s Room, Harker, 55, and her wife, with the help of a former student, sought their community’s support. A crowdfunding campaign raised more than $8,000, affording them the ability to stock shelves and jumpstart the opening.
Harker acknowledges that Water Valley, population 3,301, may not have the same kind of resources as a big city, but LGBTQ+ visibility still exists. “It’s easy to think there’s no queer culture here,” she says, “but there is. You just have to find different entry points.”
“People are looking for places to build physical community.”Philly Queer Book Club founder Danny Maloney
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Violet Valley Bookstore and dozens of other LGBTQ+-owned shops, like Under the Umbrella in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Montana Book Co. on Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana, prove that queer business owners, authors, and readers have a place amid 21st-century capitalism.
Giovanni’s Room co-founder Weinberg says, “We’ve needed and wanted books, movies, and TV shows that reflect our world. Coming out of the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were — for many of us — tragic.” But the stories evolved, as has the face of the LGBTQ+ community. No longer seen as a monolith, more queer voices — trans, gender expansive, and nonbinary — continue to emerge.
Book club leader Maloney recognizes the value in not only telling such stories but also sharing them. “There’s a unique alchemy of the room, where everyone is there and able to meet and see each other,” he says. “There’s a real need and hunger for that — people are looking for places to build physical community. An actual meeting place like Giovanni’s Room is irreplaceable.”
Featured image: (from left) Pat Hill, Tom Wilson Weinberg, Ed Hermance, and Arleen Olshan — part of the legacy of Giovanni’s Room. Photos courtesy of Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room and the William Way LGBT Center. Photo illustration by Matthew Wexler.
Jeanne Hoff, a trailblazing transgender psychiatrist, died at her home in San Francisco at the age of 85 this past October.
Born to a working-class St. Louis family in 1938, Hoff received a master’s in science from Yale and a medical degree from Columbia University, the Advocatenotes. A doctorate in solid state chemistry at University College in London and training and residency as a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis followed, according to Gay City News.
Hoff had already begun her own transition in 1976 when she took over the New York practice of Dr. Harry Benjamin, the German-American endocrinologist and sexologist who coined the term “transvestite” in 1910 and later began referring to patients as “transsexuals.”
Hoff is considered the first openly transgender psychiatrist to treat trans patients—including punk rock singer Jayne County. She was a member of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
In 1978, she was the subject of an NBC documentary, Becoming Jeanne: A Search for Sexual Identity, which documented her own gender-confirmation surgery.
In a remembrance published by Gay City News earlier this month, Andy Humm, who knew Hoff personally, wrote that she “was a very serious person — though with a great sense of humor and warmth.”
Hoff, Humm wrote, was adamant that a person’s gender did not determine their sexuality and “took other psychiatrists to task when they would help a man transition to be a woman and then insist that as a woman, the patient had to form intimate relationships with men and not be ‘gay.’”
“Dr Hoff knew that erotic attraction was independent of gender identity and that there are, of course, trans women who are lesbians,” Humm wrote.
Humm knew Hoff through the Catholic LGBTQ+ group Dignity/New York. “Her fierce courage was unique at a time and in a Church institution that was and still can be so homophobic,” Rev. Bernárd Lynch, who also knew Hoff through the group, told Humm. “Yet she found warmth, companionship, and support from many. Jeanne inspired us by being herself — sparing no price and counting no cost in her integrity.”
In her 2018 book, Histories of the Transgender Child, historian Jules Gill-Peterson wrote that “Hoff cared deeply about the well-being of her clients.”
“Her work demonstrates a level of empathy entirely absent from transsexual medicine since its advent—not to mention its predecessors in the early twentieth century—an ethic of care that, although greatly constrained by the material circumstances and history of psychiatry and endocrinology, was also entangled with her situated perspective as a trans woman,” Peterson wrote. “It is important to underline that Hoff represents yet another trans person who took an active and complicated role in medicine, rather than being its object.”
During one poignant moment in Becoming Jeanne, Hoff was asked by Dr. Frank Field, who cohosted the film with Lynn Redgrave, how she wanted people to accept her.
“Well, it may not be necessary for you to go to a lot of trouble to learn about accepting transsexuals if you have a general principle, and that is: mind your own business, I suppose,” she responded. “If you are meddling in the life and freedom of someone else, you ought to do so very cautiously and make sure that you’re entitled to do so and that they’ll be better off for your having been there.”
“So if you take the position that people are all right until they have proved that they’re not, you’re not likely to harm them,” she added. “I’ll do my best to justify that confidence.”
Three LGBTQ+ advocacy groups in western North Carolina have fired an opening salvo in their effort to overturn the state’s discriminatory Don’t Say Gay law.
The Campaign for Southern Equality, Youth OUTright WNC, and PFLAG Asheville have joined forces to challenge the Buncombe County School District (near Asheville) over SB49, enacted in August after North Carolina Republicans overrode a veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.
The Don’t Say Gay legislation, also known as the Parent’s Bill of Rights, bans instruction on “gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality” in kindergarten through fourth grade and requires parents to be notified “prior to any changes in the name or pronoun used for a student in school records or by school personnel,” with some discretion accorded to school administrators.
The law went into effect immediately with its passage, and in the months since, school districts across the state have been grappling with how to implement it.
In a complaint addressed to the Title IX Coordinator for Buncombe County Schools, the three groups allege SB49 violates the education provisions of Title IX.
“The policies passed by the Buncombe County Board of Education to comply with the state law SB49 (alternately called the ‘Don’t Say LGBTQ’ law and the ‘Parents’ Bill of Rights’) create a hostile educational environment for LGBTQIA+ students, families, staff and faculty,” the complainants write, “and in doing so violate Title IX and Buncombe County Schools’ obligation to provide every student with a safe and non-discriminatory school environment.”
The complaint cites Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding, which includes discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
In October, the Campaign for Southern Equality addressed their allegations over Title IX to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, which responded, “Absent a determination by USED Office of Civil Rights or a court order affirming your position, neither the State Board nor DPI can knowingly fail to comply with a duly enacted state law.”
The groups’ strategy then moved to obtain just such a determination from a local official entrusted with enforcing Title IX. In Buncombe County, that responsibility falls to Shanon Martin, Title IX Coordinator for Buncombe County Schools.
“We request that, should these allegations of a Title IX violation be confirmed, the Buncombe County Schools Title IX Coordinator instruct the Superintendent to delay all implementation of the SB49-related policies passed on December 7, 2023, until such time as the federal complaint against DPI and SBE has been resolved,” the complaint to Martin reads.
Craig White, supportive schools director at Campaign For Southern Equality, told Blue Ridge Public Radio that his team expects to file a federal complaint in January.
Rob Elliot, chairman of the policy committee for the Buncombe County Board of Education, said figuring out how to enforce SB49 has been “very stressful” and a “noisy, big, complex legal discussion.”
“We don’t exist just under the confines of this one new law, Elliot said. “This doesn’t define our entire world. We exist under a whole universe of federal law and state law, all of which we have to abide by as well.”
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 establish the commission and has spent much of the last year working to protect LGBTQ+ and trans rights across the region.
Related:
A model for the nation
March 31, 2023: Justice Horn at the National World War Museum for Kansas City’s first Trans Day of Visibility event. Provided by Justice Horn.
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Horn is young and charismatic, with an infectious laugh and a sense of humor that puts you at ease. He’s quick to praise other activists and organizers for their work and continuously highlights the role of the Kansas City community in making change possible.
Earlier this year, Kansas City became a sanctuary city for gender-affirming care, after passing a resolution saying officials would not enforce state laws targeting trans people. Horn says he wrote the resolution himself, though he couldn’t stop himself from reflecting the victory back to the community at large.
The idea came after a BIPOC and trans-led organization called Transformationsled a town hall. Horn tells LGBTQ Nation the event fueled him to look at ordinances from Minneapolis and Seattle to find the best way to protect trans and LGBTQ+ people in Kansas City. “Gender affirming care is health care access. It is life saving care access,” he explains. “It’s both health care access and not complying with state agencies to target trans folks and care providers.”
The sanctuary resolution went through the normal process and came up for a vote before the city council.
“The community came out, and I thank them for that,” Horn says. On the same day it passed, the county prosecutor issued a statement in support, saying she would “seek to protect [trans people]” rather than criminalize them. A few weeks later, the Kansas City Police Chief said in a statement that a state law restricting access to gender-affirming care was “outside the jurisdiction” of the KCPD, and they would not try to enforce it.
“I think a lot of credit comes to Councilwoman Bough or myself,” Horn says, referencing Councilwoman Andrea Bough, who introduced the resolution, “But if not for the sheer force of this community coming out – I think that’s why the dominoes fell. Because people pushed for this to happen. Without a doubt, it’s a victory. We have folks across the nation reaching out, asking how we did this.”
Leading with humility
April 19, 2023: Justice Horn at the ceremony where the county executive signed the conversion therapy ban ordinance into law. Provided by Justice Horn.
In the last few months, Horn has spoken with officials in Lawrence, Kansas, which passed its own sanctuary ordinance over the summer; St. Louis, MO, where he says they are exploring their own sanctuary ordinance and creating a St. Louis LGBTQ+ Commission; and Springfield, MO, where they are trying to become an equality city under the Municipal Equality Index. He has also continued working with his own Kansas City government to pass a hate crimes ordinance.
“[Justice Horn] has single-handedly, I think, worked harder than anyone in City Hall on LGBTQ issues,” Merrique Jenson, a trans woman of color and activist in Kansas City, tells LGBTQ Nation. Jenson, the founder of Transformations, says she first worked with Horn approximately four years ago, and at first, she was not impressed.
“I always tell people, when I first met him, I didn’t like him,” she says. “You know, he was young and he was a go-getter. There’s a lot of younger activists who get in the work, and they just start barreling forward with what they think is needed and don’t take the time to ask what’s going on in the community or who has been doing the organizing, or what’s the history behind different issues,” she explains.
Jenson’s opinion started to change after Horn began to reveal his humility. It was after Kansas City had passed a resolution declaring it would recognize the Trans Day of Visibility for the first time, and she was slated to be the only trans activist to be honored that day. She wasn’t comfortable with that because she knew there were trans women and activists who had been doing the work for longer than she had. So she spoke to Horn about her worries.
“Justice said, ‘Yeah, I want to make sure, if this is the first time that the city is recognizing Trans Day of Visibility and trans activists, that we’re doing it right,’” she says. His openness to the conversation led her to broach another piece of the resolution.
“Somebody had actually put Justice’s name on the resolution, and I said “Hey, you know, I think you’re great. I don’t think your name has to be on this resolution recognizing trans people,” she tells us. “And Justice was like ‘Oh, yeah, I totally agree. Like, just take that off.’”
“You know, there was some humility involved,” she continues. “He leaned into it. You know, I’m a seasoned organizer. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I was very impressed to see him be willing to do that.”
That humility still shows up in Horn’s work today. At the start of the year, Jenson called Horn to talk about how the media was covering anti-trans legislation in Missouri. “I remember calling Justice and I was like, ‘I’m so sick of seeing, across the state, everyone who’s been interviewed, and who’s talking about trans rights, are cisgender people,’” she says. According to Jenson, Horn then started directing interview requests to trans women of color in the community. “He was de-centering himself out of those conversations,” she says.
Horn is keenly aware of the importance of letting oppressed groups speak for themselves. “I primarily identify as Black, although my dad is half Black and Indigenous. My mom is white and Polynesian,” he says. Horn looks up to his parents, who have been involved in his advocacy since the beginning. He also keeps a photo of Bayard Rustin, the Black gay civil rights activist and close ally of Martin Luther King Jr., in his office.
“I’m grateful I get to sit in so many communities because I don’t get bogged down on things,” he says. “My very existence as four ethnicities, being a young person and being LGBTQ – I fit in many groups. I like to build coalitions and consensus. I think the oppressor’s plan is to keep us divided, to keep us fighting over crumbs.”
An obligation to fight
March 11, 2023: Justice Horn joins a group of drag queens at the “All the colors of queerness” event at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Horn was the keynote speaker.
Horn describes himself as a fighter, saying it’s a skill he learned as an NCAA wrestler. He says he is usually fighting “someone who is trying to take our rights, attack kiddos, or alienate trans people, or ban drag.” His first experience in advocacy was defending trans athletes while he was in college.
“I was actually competing in South Dakota when the state legislature – well before the current conversation – introduced a trans sports ban,” he recalls. “That was my first instance where I really made a decision. Do I just hunker down? Or do I watch out for other people who are queer, trans, who want to play sports at all levels, especially kids, and sympathize and advocate for them?” He decided to go to the state legislature and testify against the bill, and LGBTQ+ activists stopped it from passing.
The scene repeated itself this year when Horn went to the Missouri state legislature in January, where he testified, he explains, “as lead opposition expert for Missouri’s trans sports ban.” Somewhat ironically, he was honored by the Missouri House of Representatives for his work on human rights the following day. “They were fine with me being a gay man fighting for gay rights,” he laughed, “but God forbid I speak up for the trans folks and the trans kids and their right to make health care decisions.”
Horn says he fights for trans rights because he sees the parallels between the fight for trans equality and the historic fight for gay equality. “They’re using the same playbook against our trans brothers and sisters,” he explains. “They’re groomers, they shouldn’t be in our classrooms. They shouldn’t be around kids. What did they say about us [gay men] in the 90s?”
“I think as allies, especially as gay men and the LGBTQ community, we should be one of their strongest advocates. We’re part of their community.”
Horn doesn’t just direct interview requests to trans women of color. He makes sure the LGBTQ Commission is an effective tool for change. “One thing I can say is we don’t just do Pride flags around City Hall and crosswalks,” he says of the commission. “We advance policy. We expand visibility and we ensure that folks know that there are fighters for them. That they don’t ever have to suffer alone.”
“I can feel it around me. Energy. So many different types of energy,” DC Comics’ Jules Jourdain notices as yellow, orange, and pink vibrations envelop him on a street corner, only visible thanks to their special powers.
“I still look the same on the outside,” Jules considers. Even though he’s gaining a reputation as the new superhero Circuit Breaker, the trans and nonbinary character (he/they) doesn’t yet know how to control the overwhelming power coursing through his body — it mostly just makes him feel isolated, scared, and dangerous.
Luckily, another well-known DC Comics superhero, The Flash, arrives and helps Circuit Breaker use his powers to control time and space. This isn’t the mainstream version of The Flash that most people know from old comics, TV, and film. They’re Jess Chambers, a non-binary variant of the well-known hero, just one of the many queer superhero variants that exist in the DC Comics multiverse.
Jourdain explains their trouble to The Flash: “Life or death… change or stasis… control or submission… man or woman. Thinking in binaries always feels limiting to me,” he says. The Flash encourages him not to overthink it, but to trust his intuition and let his power lead him from the inside.
Finally, having mastered his powers, The Flash takes him to a dance club. There, Circuit Breaker dances shirtless alongside his leather-clad friends — happy for the first time since coming out as a superhero. There, Jourdain realizes, “With the death of the old comes a chance at the new.”
In the real world, conservatives tell queer youth like Jourdain that they’re mentally ill and that books about their experiences “sexualize” and “indoctrinate”other kids just by existing.
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Censors have long accused comic books of corrupting young people. American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which blamed comic books for causing juvenile delinquency, resulted in a moral panic that compelled publishers to establish the self-censoring Comics Code Authority (CCA). The CCA forbade comics from any negative depictions of government as well as depictions of “gore,” “nudity,” “profanity,” or “sex perversion.”
Individuals who seldom encounter LGBTQ+ people or queer stories may interpret inclusive comics as indoctrination, finding it hard to “embrace what they don’t see,” gay comic book and young adult writer Rex Ogle told LGBTQ Nation. “[These people] lash out. And books are an easy target.”
If young readers and free-speech advocates are holding out for a hero, DC Comics, one of the United States’ oldest and largest comic book publishers, might just be the streetwise Hercules they need. In the past year, the powerhouse publisher behind such iconic heroes as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman has quietly stood behind and even increased its LGBTQ+ content.
Over the past several years, DC Comics has used its deep multiverse to introduce queer and gender-swapped variants of longtime characters like Superman (Jon Kent), Green Lantern (Sojourner Mullein), Aquaman (Jackson Hyde), and the Flash (Jess Chambers), as well as introducing new LGBTQ+ characters like Galaxy, Xanthe Zhou, and Circuit Breaker. Additionally, DC Comics’ multiverse sometimes results in different individuals assuming the same superhero identities on different timelines or universes, such as when Damien Wayne and Tim Drake both fight crime as Batman’s sidekick, Robin.
In June 2023, the company released a slew of new and re-issued material as part of its Pride Month offerings, including DC Pride 2023, its third annual Pride-themed anthology of new material. Two other releases – DC Pride: The New Generation and DC Pride: Through The Years – contain landmark queer-themed work with most of the writing and artwork by LGBTQ+ creators. The diversity of voices and visual styles make a strong case for the form – with its marriage of words and images – as a riveting place to discover contemporary queer storytelling.
“DC Pride: The New Generation.” Image courtesy of DC Comics.“DC Pride 2023.” Image courtesy of DC Comics.
DC Comics’ continued production of queer content feels especially important in an era when several large corporations have reconsidered (or outright scaled back) their outward commitments to LGBTQ+ communities in response to conservative boycotts and media pressure seeking to make LGBTQ+-allyship “toxic” to companies’ brands.
DC Comics’ releases provide a powerful reminder that comic book characters reflect more than just corporate trademarks. Superheroes can serve as symbols to help readers understand abstract concepts like justice, empathy, dignity, and diversity. And who doesn’t want to see themselves – or someone like them – as the hero of the story? For most of these narratives, representation is just the start. Some contain LGBTQ+ characters fighting bigotry, while others show queer heroes finding community in a classic team-up. For many younger characters, coming to terms with their powers draws a relatable parallel to the exploration of sexual and gender identity.
Young queer people often find agency and comfort in these dynamic and colorful stories, especially since they don’t always feel supported in their homes, schools, offline, and online communities. According to Dr. Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at The Trevor Project, “Recent political attacks aimed at transgender and nonbinary youth have not only threatened their access to health care, support systems, and affirming spaces at school, they’ve also negatively impacted their mental health.”
In addition to inspiring young people, some of DC Comics’’ recent LGBTQ+ stories also have a broader cultural impact. Some right past wrongs by giving killed, neglected, and forgotten characters a second chance. Others feature tributes to recently deceased LGBTQ+ pioneers of superhero storytelling, like gay actor Kevin Conway and transgender author and activist Rachel Pollack.
These themes explore what it means to be queer in a quarrelsome world and how real-life super-queeroes can survive, thrive, and cultivate their unique abilities and identities to become heroes in their stories.
Redefining ‘Justice for All’
DC Comics As Robin sulks during a Pride parade, the bisexual caped crusader Superman (Jon Kent) kisses his gay journalist boyfriend Jay Nakamura.
In addition to the 500+ anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced at state and local levels during the 2023 legislative session, reported hate crimes based on gender and sexual sexuality have steadily increased since 2014, rising by 70% between 2020-2021.
Phil Jimenez, one of the first out gay comic book writers and artists at DC Comics, in his introduction to DC Pride 2023, questions how to position anti-LGBTQ+ narratives in Superman or Wonder Woman’s universe. How would established queer heroes, anti-heroes, and villains respond to such attacks? Would pursuing “justice for all” seem like activism in that world or “just the right thing to do”?
Several writers in the DC Pride releases tackle this question by telling stories about the symbolic importance of having publicly out LGBTQ+ superheroes.
In “Super Pride (originally published in 2022), Jon Kent (Superman’s son) and Robin (Damien Wayne, Batman’s son) attend their first Pride march.
Robin prepares for the parade by bringing smoke bombs, electrified netting, and electromagnetic pulse generators because a community under political attack is “vulnerable to literal attack,” he argues.
On the other hand, Jon attends the parade in his Superman outfit but with a cape of different Pride flags. He says the iconic “S” shield symbolizes the hope and the possibility of making the world a better place. But for today, he tells his boyfriend, “I want [Pride] to mean that I see you. That I am you. That there’s no wrong way to be yourself.”
With that encouragement, Jon flies above the Pride-going crowd and creates a rainbow. Nick Robles’ artwork and Triona Tree Farrell’s vibrant color palette make the moment pop with joy.
Though endearing, the interaction almost feels like it comes from another era. In its annual crime report for 2022, the FBI noted a 19% increase in anti-LGBTQ+ incidents compared to 2021. Anti-transgender bias crimes increased by 35% overall. It’s no wonder that the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans during Pride Month last June.
Maybe Damien Wayne’s fears weren’t too far off the mark.
Compared to “Anniversary,” Josh Trijullo’s story published in DC Pride 2023, one gets a sense of how superheroic advocay has shifted over recent years.
DC Comics Apollo warns Midnighter as he faces off against anti-LGBTQ+ protesters in Josh Trijullo’s “Anniversary,” illustrated by Don Aguillo. Image courtesy of DC Comics.
“Anniversary” features married gay superhero couple Midnighter and Apollo considering their visibility as LGBTQ+ role models during their wedding anniversary. Don Aguillo’s expressive, painted artwork follows the duo as they mentor a group of drag queen vigilantes, visit the iconic Stonewall Inn, and step into the middle of a tense LGBTQ+ rights protest and counter-protest on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
Midnighter wants to bust skulls, while Apollo worries that the violence will spread. They’re joined by Alan Scott, the WWII-era Green Lantern, who advocates a more measured response, lecturing them on the history of LGBTQ+ civil rights. He encourages the couple to think of themselves as “more than costumed mystery men.”
Agreeing that visibility and pride are ways to start fighting back, the couple goes one step further, adopting a hacktivist approach. They remarry on the spot, broadcasting the ceremony to every conservative news network and social media channel they can jam in the DC universe.
One important thing hasn’t changed in the year between these stories’ publications: the underlying faith that comic book superheroes function best as symbols. But maybe it’s not enough just to be a symbol anymore.
In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud notes that comic books reinvent new symbols regularly in response to a changing society. Maybe some of these new superheroic symbols just give older ones new purpose and direction.
DC Comics’ take on chosen family
DC Comics Nonbinary spirit envoy Xanthe Zhou talks to lesbian superheroine Batwoman about healing familial wounds in Jeremy Holt’s “Lost & Found,” illustrated by Andrew Drilon. Image courtesy of DC Comics.
Not only has the increase in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation negatively affected 66% of LGBTQ+ teens and young adults’ mental health, but only 38% consider their homes as LGBTQ+-affirming spaces.
To fill the gaps of mutual support and love, many queer people cobble together a chosen family of non-biological kinship as a vital way to thrive. This search for a chosen community forms a key part of several of the DC Pride team-up stories, a convention in which two characters who typically appear independently take on a challenge together. In fact, some of the more interesting team-up stories gently subvert the conventions of this classic comic book staple in surprisingly queer ways.
The 2021 story arc of Robin (Tim Drake) acknowledging his bisexuality made national headlines. But writer Nadia Shammas’ “Hey, Stranger” picks up on Drake’s journey, flipping the traditional superhero team-up story to show that you never really stop coming out, even to those closest to you.
“Hey, Stranger” marks the first official meeting of Tim and Connor Hawke — a young asexual, BIPOC martial artist who calls himself Green Arrow — since each first discovered their individual queer identities.
This team-up is unusual in that it happens after Tim finishes battling some thugs. Bruka Jones’ artwork depicts a series of quiet but intense moments as the two characters test (and ultimately reaffirm) the value of their friendships, while Tamra Bonvillain’s dawn-tinged palette underscores the story’s emotional weight.
Another team-up story that plays with finding community appears in Jeremy Holt’s “Lost & Found,” featuring the new character Xanthe Zhou. As a nonbinary Chinese-American “spirit envoy” trapped in the realm of the living, they literally exist between several worlds and are unable to find their place. A magician and trickster, they conjure useful spirit world objects by burning small pieces of folded joss paper.
Like the team-up in “Hey, Stranger,” the fighting becomes secondary to the bigger story. Xanthe encounters Batwoman (Kate Kane) in a Gotham City graveyard, defending the Kane family mausoleum from would-be thieves. After trying to help, they listen to Kate mourn her mother’s death that occurred during her childhood.
Smitten, Xanthe gives Kate a folded joss paper tree to burn and shares their insight about the cycles of life and death, healing and rebirth. Leaving Kate in thought, Xanthe realizes they may have a place in the world after all.
In some stories, fighting villains becomes a metaphor for desire. Since depictions of healthy queer intimacy remain rare in visual media, it’s important to recognize that some queer heroes can be lovers as well as fighters.
Queer writer Stephanie Williams’ “Confessions” presents a sly and sultry take on this dynamic. In it, Nubia, Queen of the Amazons, recounts a “forgotten” team-up as pillow talk with Io, her beloved consort. The fight — in this case, a tag-team charity wrestling match for a women’s shelter — includes the aptly named Justice League giantess Big Barda as her teammate.
DC Comics Ghost-Maker stands back-to-back with his lover and colleague Catman while battling baddies on a rooftop in Rex Ogle’s “The Dance,” drawn by Stephen Sadowski.
Rex Ogle’s “The Dance,” drawn by Stephen Sadowski, also provides erotic subtext and a steamy twist on the superheroic team-up with a queer homage to every Batman/Catwoman rooftop tangle since the pair first met way back in 1940. The story features anti-hero Catman (Thomas Blake) and Ghost-Maker (Khoa Khan, from Batman Inc.) fighting baddies together on a Gotham City rooftop.
Sadowski’s fight sequences, full of kinetic pencil work and thicker inks, seem well choreographed. The push-and-pull dynamic between Khoa and Blake makes the pair’s familiarity with one another’s bodies exceedingly clear — and it’s just as clear where they’ll head after the fight.
“I wanted the conflict to marry the sensuality of the body,” Ogle explained to LGBTQ Nation. “We’ve seen the tension between Batman and Catwoman forever, so I wanted to show another coupling.”
In one final glorious splash page, the erotic subtext of the superhero team-up gets revealed at last in all its naked queer glory as Catman and Ghost-Maker embrace in bed.
When a growing sense of queer identity & superpowers converge
DC Comics Aquaman talks to his boyfriend about his closeted childhood and unaccepting mother in Alyssa Wong’s “A World Kept Just For Me,” illustrated by W. Scott Forbes. Image courtesy of DC Comics.
For many LGBTQ+ people, the closet remains a lonely and fearful place. Within superhero stories, the isolation that comes from having superpowers is an experience that has often functioned as a metaphor for the isolation of closeted life.
Marvel’s X-Men may have started as five white prep school kids from suburban New York, but, as comics critic Sara Century notes, queer readers could easy to see mutants through the lens of LGBTQ+ civil rights. Their powers make them different, which, in turn, makes them the targets of hate and bigotry. Some could pass as common humans; others couldn’t. But until a decade or so ago, few of the X-Men had actually come out. The X-Man Northstar came out in 2002, and the better-known Iceman made national headlines when he came out in 2015.
Comparatively, some of the most interesting Pride-themed releases from DC Comics move beyond easy metaphors by focusing on how the closet and the coming out process shape the ways in which heroes use their wondrous abilities.
Greg Lockard’s “Public Display of Electromagnetism” suggests that the closet can provide a place where queer kids begin to develop self-reliance. For a younger hero like The Ray (Ray Terrell), the closet’s isolation felt both figurative and literal. The character still wrestles with the trauma of his parents literally confining him in a dark room, away from others, so that his light-based powers won’t manifest.
While he’s out to his Justice League teammates, Ray still melts down when his boyfriend kisses him in front of them. He overcompensates during a subsequent fight with the villain Shadow Thief, who easily overwhelms him with a wave of darkness, snuffing out Ray’s powerful photon charges. Although Ray finds himself reliving the trauma of his closeted youth, he digs into the root causes of his inner darkness to find the inner spark that allows him to harness his powers, shatter the Shadow Thief’s trap, and save the day — after all, Ray still needs to return his boyfriend’s kiss.
Aquaman (Jackson Hyde) also faces a history of negotiating the caped closet in Alyssa Wong’s “A World Kept Just For Me.” In this melancholy story, Jackson shows his boyfriend the small desert town in New Mexico where he grew up. Like Ray’s parents, Jackson’s single mother kept him far away from anything that would trigger his water-bending abilities.
Jackson’s story illustrates queer resilience. His powers developed in tandem with his growing sense of queer identity. He’d practice them in the shower to avoid unwanted attention while publicly struggling to become what he felt his mother wanted: “Normal, Unassuming. Human. Straight.”
Yet, as Jackson shares the pain of his closeted life with his boyfriend, he realizes that those experiences shaped the sense of morality and justice that makes him a hero.
DC Comics Trans male hero Circuit Breaker begins to understand and accept his superpowers in “Subspace Transmission,” written and illustrated by A.L. Kaplan.
Compared to other characters, Circuit Breaker (Jules Jordain) is the new kid on the multiversal block. Hailing from the playas of rural Nevada, the ability to sense and absorb kinetic energy from the world around them paints a decidedly queer picture.
Jules’ second comic book appearance in “Subspace Transmission” (DC Pride 23) functions as a kind of queer superhero origin story, with writer and artist A.L. Kaplan wisely focusing on the best part: the hero discovering who they are and what they value in relation to their new abilities.
Strange and overwhelming at first, Jule’s powers are a conduit for entropy, the ability to sense and steal kinetic energy and reduce the world to stillness. As they struggle for control over their powers, Jules recalls the fears faced when coming to terms with their gender identity and body while transitioning.
“Bodies are mutable,” Jules realizes after another failed attempt to harness their abilities. “Life or death. Stasis or change. Control or submission. Man or woman. Thinking in binaries always felt limiting to me.” And with that insight, they come to peace with the strangeness of their new abilities.
It is in these moments that Kaplan’s artwork shines. As they explore their powers, the waves of energy swirling Jules evoke psychedelic posters and 1970s rock album art.
For decades, LGBTQ+ comic book fans could only see themselves as metaphors rather than well-rounded queer characters. Being queer may not be a superpower in itself, but it provides LGBTQ+ characters in the multiverse with unique perspectives on their extraordinary abilities. It also provides affirms that our lived experiences matter — maybe that awareness itself is the real superpower.
Dismantling old tropes
Comic books haven’t always been kind to queer characters. Consider Extraño, DC’s first openly gay superhero. First appearing in 1987, when industry standards prohibited writers from using words like “gay” and “homosexual,” Extraño became a pastiche of stereotypes.
Early stories depicted Extraño as a sassy Peruvian sorcerer whose architectural hair, flowing purple robe, and pirate boots made him look like Liberace cosplaying Doctor Strange. The character all but vanished a year or so later, but only after contracting HIV from an “AIDS vampire” called the Hemo-goblin. No, really.
Extraño’s fate became a textbook case of “bury your gays,” a storytelling trope that remains alive and well in current pop culture (just watch It: Chapter Two and cringe at the gay-bashing scene). But now, queer writers are digging those bodies back up and giving them new life.
In a terse Substack post from May 2022, nonbinary writer Grant Morrison took aim at writers who use alternate versions of major characters as cannon fodder. For them, burying queer characters “for no defensible reason” deprives them of their storytelling potential.
DC Comics The long-lost Red Racer kisses his partner Flashlight in “Love’s Lightning Heart,” written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Hayden Sherman.
One of the architects of the DC Comics multiverse, Morrison has created several LGBTQ+ and gender-swapped versions of major heroes in recent years. One of them, Red Racer (an alternate version of The Flash), was revealed to be happily married to his universe’s Green Lantern equivalent. Morrison had established the character as a founding member of a multiversal Justice League. However, Red Racer died in a Superman comic book, sacrificing his life to save the title hero.
In “Love’s Lightning Heart” (the lead story in DC Pride 2023), Morrison sets out to rectify this loss. The result provides a trippy, high-concept story of love overcoming death. It follows Flashlight, Red Racer’s grieving husband, on a mad, universe-breaking quest to return his beloved to the living. The story takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of an Art Deco-infused parallel universe and suggests that Red Racer’s return may herald the start of a new story arc brimming with possibilities.
Other LGBTQ+ writers strive towards the same goal as Morrison by reviving queer characters who have been buried, depowered, disfigured, or just plain forgotten. In Christopher Cantwell’s “My Best Bet” (DC Pride 2023), the wily magician and conman John Constantine plays a long game with Superman (Jon Kent) to rescue the soul of Oliver, a former boyfriend who had been dragged to Hell in the final issue of Constantine’s 2015 solo series and ignored … until now.
Queer villains get dug up and dusted off, too. Cannon and Saber — the antagonists in Rex Ogle’s story “The Dance” — have been depicted as an openly gay couple since their first appearance in 1984, but they last appeared over 30 years ago — welcome back, boys!
Even Extraño has returned from the comic book dead. Writer Steve Orlando reintroduced the character in his 2017 GLAAD Media Award-nominated series Midnighter and Apollo. Since then, Extraño has become a mentor for younger queer characters and the founder of a network of LGBTQ+ superheroes called Justice League Queer.
But don’t call him Extraño. Nobody has done that in years. “I’ve since buried that name,” he tells Midnighter, seeming to hint that he does the same to anyone who uses it. Now Gregorio de la Vega, he’s reclaimed his proud place as the first out queer superhero in the DC multiverse.
Grappling with justice & legacies reimagined
DC Comics For nearly two decades, Rachel Pollack’s Coagula was DC Comics’ only transgender superheroine. Apparently, the Justice League couldn’t handle her.
In an interview with Lambda Legal, queer poet and essayist Kay Ulanday Barrett argues that stories by and for LGBTQ+ people “honor our grief” as well as “help us remember our glory and community triumphs.” Recent book bans and content challenges seek to erase those histories. The DC Pride releases counter that threat by honoring the legacies of two recently deceased groundbreaking queer elders.
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Rachel Pollack, who passed away from non-Hodgkin lymphoma last April, is best known for her beautiful, strange, and spiritual run on Doom Patrol in the early 1990s, in which she introduced Kate Godwin, a trans lesbian superhero who went by the name of Coagula. Kate was the first — and for nearly two decades — the only transgender superhero published by DC Comics.
A former sex worker, Kate gained the ability to turn liquids into solids (and vice versa) after she spent a night with multi-gendered energy being Rebis. She initially tried to join the Justice League, but they rejected her. “I suspect they liked my powers,” she tells a friend, “but couldn’t handle me.”
Kate soon found her chosen family with the Doom Patrol, a collection of wounded heroes and superpowered outsiders whose adventures bordered on the surreal.
Pollack had been invited to contribute new material to DC Pride 2023, but the sudden progression of her illness prevented this. Instead, the anthology features tributes to her legacy from industry giants like Neil Gaiman and upcoming talents like transgender writer Jadzia Axelrod.
Gaiman reveals that Pollack created Kate Godwin as a response to Wanda Mann, a sympathetic but doomed transgender character in his Sandman story arc “A Game of You.” (Wanda will likely appear in the second season of Netflix’s adaptation, The Sandman.)
For Axelrod, reading that first comic with Kate Godwin in 1993 felt “like a lightning bolt from heaven.” Not only had DC Comics published a story featuring an out trans lesbian, but this smart, funny, kind person became the point of view character for the reader. The comic inspired Axelrod to create a trans-alien superhero named Galaxy, who currently appears in the Hawkgirl comics.
Kate Godwin seldom appeared after Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol ended. Another writer seemingly killed her off-panel a decade later.
However, Coagula may soon return. A trans woman named “Kate” (drawn in Godwin’s signature black tank top and jeans) appears briefly at the start of Axelrod’s 2022 story “Up At Bat” (reprinted in DC Pride: The New Generation). There, Kate runs a wellness group in Gotham City, and serves a friend and mentor to Alysia Yeoh, a trans urban vigilante and Batgirl ally.
What better way to honor Pollack’s legacy than reviving Kate Godwin, recognizing the achievements of these two pioneering women? Maybe the Justice League will finally accept her for her full, authentic self.
And anyone who grew up watching cartoons like Batman: The Animated Seriesor Justice League Unlimited, can instantly recognize Kevin Conroy’s rumbling, husky voice as Batman. Conroy passed away in November 2022 from intestinal cancer.
Before his death, Conroy collaborated with illustrator J. Bone on the autobiographical graphic story “Finding Batman.” First published in 2022, the story receivedwide fan acclaim and subsequently won the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Short Story. It also appears in DC Pride: The New Generation.
Conroy writes movingly about the need to maintain a public mask while struggling against homophobia within the entertainment industry while watching his family members succumb to mental illness and substance abuse. In his audition for Batman: The Animated Series, he used these experiences to channel the torment that Bruce Wayne faced as a child, the ones that led him to become a masked vigilante.
Conroy developed a voice from his own traumas that became one of the definitive takes on the character. J. Bone’s artwork – sharp, thick pencils and blue washes – provides a compelling screen for Conroy’s experiences.
“It is nearly impossible to write and draw heroes,” writer Jimenez says, “and not grapple with the very concept of justice and what it means to act heroically.” Although Conroy did not create heroes in the conventional sense, “Finding Batman” suggests that his celebrated portrayal of Batman came from a life of grappling with those same struggles.
