Virginia officials have agreed not to fully enforce a 2020 law banning conversion therapy for minors as part of an agreement with a faith-based conservative group that sued over the law, authorities said earlier this week.
The Virginia Department of Health Professions, represented by the state’s office of the attorney general, entered into a consent decree with the Founding Freedoms Law Center last month, saying officials will not discipline counselors who engage in talk conversion therapy.
Shaun Kenney, a spokesperson with the Virginia Attorney General’s Office, said on Tuesday his office was satisfied with the consensus.
“This court action fixes a constitutional problem with the existing law by allowing talk therapy between willing counselors and willing patients, including those struggling with gender dysphoria,” Kenney said in a statement. “Talk therapy with voluntary participants was punishable before this judgment was entered. This result—which merely permits talk therapy within the standards of care while preserving the remainder of the law—respects the religious liberty and free speech rights of both counselors and patients.”
A Henrico Circuit Court judge signed the consent decree in June. Two professional counselors represented by the law center sued the state’s health department and counseling board last September, arguing that the law violated their right to religious freedom.
The term “conversion therapy” refers to a scientifically discredited practice of using therapy in an attempt to convert LGBTQ people to heterosexuality.
The practice has been banned in 23 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ rights think tank.
The practice has been a matter of dispute in several states. A ruling is expected any day from the Wisconsin Supreme Court over whether a legislative committee’s rejection of a state agency rule that would ban the practice of “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ people was unconstitutional.
The U.S. Supreme Court decided in March to take up a case from Colorado to determine whether state and local governments can enforce laws banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ children.
According to the law center, the Virginia consent decree applies not only to the two counselors but to all counselors in Virginia.
“We are grateful to the Defendants in this case and to the Attorney General, who did the right thing by siding with the Constitution,” the law center said in a statement.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, who backed the 2020 bill, blasted the decree.
“This was a statute that was enacted to save lives,” he told reporters during a Zoom session on Tuesday. “All the research, all the professional psychiatric organizations have condemned conversion therapy. They say it doesn’t work, and they say it’s counterproductive.”
Hungary’s LGBTQ community is preparing for a face-off with the country’s autocratic government and plans to push ahead with a march in the capital on Saturday despite a government ban and threats of legal repercussions.
The populist party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in March fast-tracked a lawthrough parliament that made it an offense to hold or attend events that “depict or promote” homosexuality to minors aged under 18. Orbán earlier made clear that Budapest Pride — marking its 30th anniversary this year — was the explicit target of the law.
But on Friday, Pride organizers along with Budapest Mayor Gergely Karácsony, European Commissioner Hadja Lahbib and Vice President of the European Parliament Nicolae Stefanuta said the march will take place Saturday despite official threats of heavy fines for participants and even jail time for the liberal mayor.
They expect the march to be the largest ever Pride event in Hungary.
“The government is always fighting against an enemy against which they have to protect Hungarian people … This time, it is sexual minorities that are the target,” Karácsony told a news conference. “We believe there should be no first- and second-class citizens, so we decided to stand by this event.”
Hungary’s recent law allows authorities to use facial recognition tools to identify individuals that attend a prohibited event. Being caught could result in fines of up to 200,000 Hungarian forints ($586.)
Orbán, seen as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the European Union, has in recent years prohibited same-sex adoption and banned any LGBTQ content including in television, films, advertisements and literature that is available to minors.
His government argues exposure to such content negatively affects children’s development. But opponents say the moves are part of a broader effort to scapegoat sexual minorities and consolidate his conservative base.
Fines and facial recognition
After police rejected several requests by organizers to register the Pride march, citing the recent law, Karácsony joined with organizers and declared it would be held as a separate municipal event — something he said does not require police approval.
But Hungary’s government has remained firm, insisting that holding the Pride march, even if it is sponsored by the city, would be unlawful. In a video on Facebook this week, Hungary’s justice minister, Bence Tuzson, warned Karácsony that organizing Pride or encouraging people to attend is punishable by up to a year in prison.
At the news conference Friday, Karácsony sought to dispel fears that police would impose heavy fines on Pride attendees.
“Police have only one task tomorrow: to guarantee the safety and security of those gathered at the event,” he said.
Speaking to state radio on Friday, Orbán said that attending Pride “will have legal consequences, but it can’t reach the level of physical abuse.”
“The police could disperse such events, they have the right to do so. But Hungary is a civilized country,” he said.
Right-wing counterdemonstrations
On Thursday, radical right-wing party Our Homeland Movement announced it had requested police approval to hold assemblies at numerous locations across the city, many of them on the same route as the Pride march.
Later, a neo-Nazi group said it too would gather Saturday at Budapest City Hall, from which the Pride march is set to depart. The group declared that only “white, Christian, heterosexual men and women” were welcome to attend its demonstration.
European officials respond
Hungary’s Pride ban has prompted a backlash from many of the country’s partners and allies. Over 30 foreign embassies signed a joint statement this week expressing their commitment to “every person’s rights to equal treatment and nondiscrimination, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen posted on social platform X on Wednesday, calling on Hungarian authorities to allow Pride to proceed “without fear of any criminal or administrative sanctions against the organizers or participants.”
More than 70 members of the European Parliament, as well as other officials from countries around Europe, are expected to participate in Saturday’s march.
Lahbib, the European Commissioner, said Friday that “all eyes are on Budapest” as Pride marchers defy the government’s ban.
“The EU is not neutral on hate,” she said. “We cannot stay passive. We cannot tolerate what is intolerable.”
The monthlong celebration of LGBTQ Pride reached its rainbow-laden crescendo Sunday as huge crowds took part in jubilant, daylong street parties from New York to San Francisco.
Pride celebrations typically weave politics and protest together with colorful pageantry, but this year’s iterations took a decidedly more defiant stance as Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have sought to roll back LGBTQ friendly policies.
The theme of the festivities in Manhattan was, appropriately, “Rise Up: Pride in Protest.” San Francisco’s Pride theme was “Queer Joy is Resistance,” while Seattle was simply “Louder.”
Lance Brammer, a 56-year-old teacher from Ohio attending his first Pride parade in New York, said he felt “validated” as he marveled at the sheer size of the city’s celebration, the nation’s oldest and largest.
“With the climate that we have politically, it just seems like they’re trying to do away with the whole LGBTQ community, especially the trans community,” he said wearing a vivid, multicolored shirt. “And it just shows that they’ve got a fight ahead of them if they think that they’re going to do that with all of these people here and all of the support.”
In San Francisco, Xander Briere said the LGBTQ+ community is fighting for its very survival in the face of sustained attacks and changing public sentiment, particularly against transgender people.
“We’re slowly rolling back the clock, and it’s unfortunate and it’s scary,” the program specialist at the San Francisco Community Health Center said. “It feels like the world hates us right now, but this is a beautiful community celebration of resistance, of history to show the world that we are here and we are not going anywhere.”
California State Senator Scott Wiener, center, at the San Francisco Pride Parade on Sunday.Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images
Manhattan’s parade wound its way down Fifth Avenue with more than 700 participating groups greeted by huge crowds.
The rolling celebration passed the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village gay bar where a 1969 police raid triggered protests and fired up the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The first pride march, held in New York City in 1970, commemorated the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. The site is now a national monument.
Meanwhile, marchers in San Francisco, host to another of the world’s largest Pride events, headed down the California city’s central Market Street to concert stages set up at the Civic Center Plaza. Denver, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Toronto, Canada, were among the other major North American cities that hosted Pride parades Sunday.
Several global cities including Tokyo, Paris and Sao Paulo, held their events earlier this month while others come later in the year, including London in July and Rio de Janeiro in November.
Since taking office in January, Trump has taken specific aim at transgender people, removing them from the military, preventing federal insurance programs from paying for gender-affirming surgeries for young people and attempting to keep transgender athletes out of girls and women’s sports.
“We have to be visible. We have to come together. We have to fight. Our existence is trying to be erased,” said Jahnel Butler, one of the community grand marshals at the San Francisco parade.
Peter McLaughlin said he’s lived in New York for years but has never attended the Pride parade. The 34-year-old Brooklyn resident said he felt compelled this year as a transgender man.
“A lot of people just don’t understand that letting people live doesn’t take away from their own experience, and right now it’s just important to show that we’re just people,” McLaughlin said.
Gabrielle Meighan, 23, of New Jersey, said she felt it was important to come out to this year’s celebrations because they come days after the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark June 26, 2015, ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that recognized same-sex marriage nationwide.
Manhattan also hosted on Sunday the Queer Liberation March, an activism-centered event launched in recent years amid concerns that the more mainstream parade had become too corporate.
Marchers holding signs that included “Gender affirming care saves lives” and “No Pride in apartheid” headed north from the city’s AIDS Memorial to Columbus Circle near Central Park.
Among the other headwinds faced by gay rights groups this year is the loss of corporate sponsorship.
American companies have pulled back support of Pride events, reflecting a broader walking back of diversity and inclusion efforts amid shifting public sentiment.
NYC Pride said earlier this month that about 20% of its corporate sponsors dropped or reduced support, including PepsiCo and Nissan. Organizers of San Francisco Pride said they lost the support of five major corporate donors, including Comcast and Anheuser-Busch.
Atlanta police said Tuesday that three men and a juvenile could face hate crimes charges after they pulled down LGBTQ pride flags and cut them up at an intersection known as the center of the city’s LGBTQ community.
Police say they got calls at 1:40 a.m. Tuesday morning that six males were causing a disturbance near the corner of Piedmont Avenue and 10th Street, an intersection in the city’s Midtown neighborhood that is painted with rainbow crosswalks to honor its importance in Atlanta’s LGBTQ community.
The men coordinated their plan and drove to Atlanta from their locations northwest of the city, police said. Officers are still looking for two of the six people who they believe took part.
Investigators initially told news outlets that the men had pulled down flags outside Blake’s on the Park, a bar near the intersection, cutting them up with a knife and taking videos of what they were doing. The males fled from police on motorized scooters, investigators said, with officers catching and arresting four of them.
“They’re in the middle of the street popping wheelies, tearing up flags,” a man said in a 911 call that police released.
Two 18-year-olds and a 17-year-old from Dallas, Georgia, were taken into custody, in addition to a 16-year-old from Taylorsville. Police said all four were also charged with obstruction, criminal damage to property, conspiracy, and prowling. Georgia is one of three states where 17-year-old criminal suspects are automatically charged as adults.
Police said they have also cited the 16-year-old’s father for failing to supervise his son.
A prosecutor would have to decide whether to ask a judge or jury to add additional penalties to any conviction. Georgia’s hate crime law, passed in 2020, allows a court to impose additional prison time or fines when a judge or jury finds that a crime was motivated by the victim’s race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or other characteristics.
“As far as it being labeled a hate crime, that’s still under investigation,” Atlanta police Sgt. Brandon Hayes said at a Tuesday news conference. “We’re still looking at all avenues as far as how that charge will possibly come about.”
A phone call Tuesday to the bar, in operation since 1988, went unanswered.
The arrests come at the end of what is marked as Pride Month in many places, although Atlanta’s main festival is held in October.
In 2022, police arrested a man who they said had twice painted swastikas on the rainbow crosswalks. The crosswalks were first painted in 2015 and were made permanent in 2017 to memorialize the 49 people who were killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.
In October, a Fulton County grand jury indicted a Pennsylvania man, saying he had vandalized booths and defecated on a pride flag at a Global Black Pride event in Atlanta in August.
Tuesday’s ruling from U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick means that transgender or nonbinary people who are without a passport or need to apply for a new one can request a male, female or “X” identification marker rather than being limited to the marker that matches the gender assigned at birth.
In an executive order signed in January, the president used a narrow definition of the sexes instead of a broader conception of gender. The order said a person is male or female and rejected the idea that someone can transition from the sex assigned at birth to another gender.
Kobick first issued a preliminary injunction against the policy last month, but that ruling applied only to six people who joined with the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit over the passport policy.
In Tuesday’s ruling she agreed to expand the injunction to include transgender or nonbinary people who are currently without a valid passport, those whose passport is expiring within a year, and those who need to apply for a passport because theirs was lost or stolen or because they need to change their name or sex designation.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The government failed to show that blocking its policy would cause it any constitutional injury, Kobick wrote, or harm the executive branch’s relations with other countries.
The transgender and nonbinary people covered by the preliminary injunction, meanwhile, have shown that the passport policy violates their constitutional rights to equal protection, Kobick said.
“Even assuming a preliminary injunction inflicts some constitutional harm on the Executive Branch, such harm is the consequence of the State Department’s adoption of a Passport Policy that likely violates the constitutional rights of thousands of Americans,” Kobick wrote.
Kobick, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, sided with the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which stays the action while the lawsuit plays out.
“The Executive Order and the Passport Policy on their face classify passport applicants on the basis of sex and thus must be reviewed under intermediate judicial scrutiny,” Kobick wrote in the preliminary injunction issued earlier this year. “That standard requires the government to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest. The government has failed to meet this standard.”
In its lawsuit, the ACLU described how one woman had her passport returned with a male designation while others are too scared to submit their passports because they fear their applications might be suspended and their passports held by the State Department.
Another mailed in their passport Jan. 9 and requested to change their name and their sex designation from male to female. That person was still waiting for their passport, the ACLU said in the lawsuit, and feared missing a family wedding and a botany conference this year.
In response to the lawsuit, the Trump administration argued that the passport policy change “does not violate the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution.” It also contended that the president has broad discretion in setting passport policy and that plaintiffs would not be harmed since they are still free to travel abroad.
Southern Baptist delegates at their national meeting overwhelmingly endorsed a ban on same-sex marriage — including a call for a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 10-year-old precedent legalizing it nationwide.
They also called for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.
The votes Tuesday came at the gathering of more than 10,000 church representatives at the annual meeting of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The wide-ranging resolution doesn’t use the word “ban,” but it left no room for legal same-sex marriage in calling for the “overturning of laws and court rulings, including Obergefell v. Hodges, that defy God’s design for marriage and family.” Further, the resolution affirmatively calls “for laws that affirm marriage between one man and one women.”
A reversal of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision wouldn’t in and of itself amount to a nationwide ban. At the time of that ruling, 36 states had already legalized same-sex marriage, and support remains strong in many areas.
However, if the convention got its wish, not only would Obergefell be overturned, but so would every law and court ruling that affirmed same-sex marriage.
There was no debate on the marriage resolution. That in itself is not surprising in the solidly conservative denomination, which has long defined marriage as between one man and one woman. However, it marks an especially assertive step in its call for the reversal of a decade-old Supreme Court ruling, as well as any other legal pillars to same-sex marriage in law and court precedent.
Gender identity, fertility and other issues
The marriage issue was incorporated into a much larger resolution on marriage and family — one that calls for civil law to be based on what the convention says is the divinely created order as stated in the Bible.
The resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”
The same resolution calls for recognizing “the biological reality of male and female” and opposes “any law or policy that compels people to speak falsehoods about sex and gender.”
It urges Christians to “embrace marriage and childbearing” and to see children “as blessings rather than burdens.”
But it also frames that issue as one of public policy. It calls for “for renewed moral clarity in public discourse regarding the crisis of declining fertility and for policies that support the bearing and raising of children within intact, married families.”
It laments that modern culture is “pursuing willful childlessness which contributes to a declining fertility rate,” echoing a growing subject of discourse on the religious and political right.
The pornography resolution, which had no debate, calls such material destructive, addictive and exploitive and says governments have the power to ban it.
The sports betting resolution draws on Southern Baptists’ historic opposition to gambling. It called sports betting “harmful and predatory.” One pastor urged an amendment to distinguish between low-stakes, recreational gambling and predatory, addictive gambling activities. But his proposed amendment failed.
Andrew Walker, chair of the Committee on Resolutions, said at a news conference that the marriage resolution shows that Southern Baptists aren’t going along with the widespread social acceptance of same-sex marriage.
But Walker, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, acknowledged that a realistic rollback strategy would require incremental steps, such as seeking to overturn Obergefell.
“I’m clear-eyed about the difficulties and the headwinds in this resolution,” he said.
Whistleblower’s death casts pall on Dallas meeting
The two-day annual meeting began Tuesday morning with praise sessions and optimistic reports about growing numbers of baptisms. But casting a pall over the gathering is the recent death of one of the most high-profile whistleblowers in the Southern Baptists’ scandal of sexual abuse.
Jennifer Lyell, a onetime denominational publishing executive who went public in 2019 with allegations that she had been sexually abused by a seminary professor while a student, died Saturday at 47. She “suffered catastrophic strokes,” a friend and fellow advocate, Rachael Denhollander, posted Sunday on X.
Friends reported that the backlash Lyell received after going public with her report took a devastating toll on her.
Several abuse survivors and advocates for reform, who previously had a prominent presence in recent SBC meetings, are skipping this year’s gathering, citing lack of progress by the convention.
Two people sought to fill that void, standing vigil outside of the meeting at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas as attendees walked by. The pair held up signs with photos of Lyell and of Gareld Duane Rollins, who died earlier this spring and who was among those who accused longtime SBC power broker Paul Pressler of sexual abuse.
“It’s not a healthy thing for them (survivors) to be here,” said Johnna Harris, host of a podcast on abuse in evangelical ministries. “I felt like it was important for someone to show up. I want people to know there are people who care.”
Past attempts at reforms in the SBC
The SBC Executive Committee, in a 2022 apology, acknowledged “its failure to adequately listen, protect, and care for Jennifer Lyell when she came forward to share her story.” It also acknowledged the denomination’s official news agency had not accurately reported the situation as “sexual abuse by a trusted minister in a position of power at a Southern Baptist seminary.”
SBC officials issued statements this week lamenting Lyell’s death, but her fellow advocates have denounced what they say is a failure to implement reforms.
The SBC’s 2022 meeting voted overwhelmingly to create a way to track pastors and other church workers credibly accused of sex abuse. That came shortly after the release of a blockbuster report by an outside consultant, which said Southern Baptist leaders mishandled abuse cases and stonewalled victims for years.
But the denomination’s Executive Committee president, Jeff Iorg, said earlier this year that creating a database is not a focus and that the committee instead plans to refer churches to existing databases of sex offenders and focus on education about abuse prevention. The committee administers the denomination’s day-to-day business.
Advocates for reform don’t see those approaches as adequate.
It is the latest instance of “officials trailing out hollow words, impotent task forces and phony dog-and-pony shows of reform,” abuse survivor and longtime advocate Christa Brown wrote on Baptist News Global, which is not SBC-affiliated.
In a related action, the Executive Committee will also be seeking $3 million in convention funding for ongoing legal expenses related to abuse cases.
What else is on the agenda?
As of late Tuesday afternoon, attendance was at 10,541 church representatives (known as messengers). That is less than a quarter of the total that thronged the SBC’s annual meeting 40 years ago this month in a Dallas showdown that marked the height of battles over control of the convention, ultimately won by the more conservative-fundamentalist side led by Pressler and his allies.
Messengers will also debate whether to institute a constitutional ban on churches with women pastors and to abolish its public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission — which is staunchly conservative, but according to critics, not enough so.
Brent Leatherwood, president of the ERLC, said Tuesday he would address the “turbulence” during his scheduled remarks Wednesday but was confident in the messengers’ support.
A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing anti-diversity and anti-transgender executive orders in grant funding requirements that LGBTQ+ organizations say are unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar said Monday that the federal government cannot force recipients to halt programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion or acknowledge the existence of transgender people in order to receive grant funding. The order will remain in effect while the legal case continues, although government lawyers will likely appeal.
The funding provisions “reflect an effort to censor constitutionally protected speech and services promoting DEI and recognizing the existence of transgender individuals,” Tigar wrote.
He went on to say that the executive branch must still be bound by the Constitution in shaping its agenda and that even in the context of federal subsidies, “it cannot weaponize Congressionally appropriated funds to single out protected communities for disfavored treatment or suppress ideas that it does not like or has deemed dangerous.”
The plaintiffs include health centers, LGBTQ+ services groups and the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society. All receive federal funding and say they cannot complete their missions by following the president’s executive orders.
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation, one of the plaintiffs, said in 2023 it received a five-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to expand and enhance sexual health services, including the prevention of sexually transmitted infections. The $1.3 million project specifically targets communities disproportionately affected by sexual health disparities.
But in April, the CDC informed the nonprofit that it must “immediately terminate all programs, personnel, activities, or contracts” that promote DEI or gender ideology.
President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders since taking office in January, including ones to roll back transgender protections and stop DEI programs. Lawyers for the government say that the president is permitted to “align government funding and enforcement strategies” with his policies.
Plaintiffs say that Congress — and not the president — has the power to condition how federal funds are used, and that the executive orders restrict free speech rights.
Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty,” has died. He was 85.
White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details.
Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years.
Edmund White in Milan in 2010.Leonardo Cendamo / Getty Images file
A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Henry Green’s “Nothing.”
“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”
The age of AIDS, and beyond
In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who didn’t want him to touch their babies.
White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones suffer agonizing deaths. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from AIDS. As White wrote in his elegiac novel “The Farewell Symphony,” the story followed a shocking arc: “Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.”
But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives.
“We’re in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don’t need to write exclusively about that,” he said in a Salon interview in 2009. “Your characters don’t need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.”
In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others.
“To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,” White said during his acceptance speech.
Childhood yearnings
White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer “who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.” His mother a psychologist “given to rages or fits of weeping.” Trapped in “the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,” at times suicidal, White was at the same time a “fierce little autodidact” who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the essay “Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,” published in 1991.
Edmund White in 1986.Louis Monier / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images file
As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.
“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”
He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as “Mama Cass” of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for “A Boy’s Own Story” after he caricatured her in the novel “Caracole.”
“In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me,” he later wrote.
Early struggles, changing times
Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would “dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.” A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”
“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”
Edmund White in 2001.Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images file
Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” Classics such as William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” had “rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,” according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others.
White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”
With “A Boy’s Own Story,” published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with “The Beautiful Room is Empty” and “The Farewell Symphony,” some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in “The Farewell Symphony,” could “afford elusiveness.” But gays, “easily spooked,” could not “risk feigning rejection.”
His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and “Our Young Man” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”
“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told The Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”
LGBTQ people in the U.S. see lower social acceptance for transgender people than those who are lesbian, gay or bisexual, a new Pew Research Center poll found.
Pew found that about 6 in 10 LGBTQ adults said there is “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of social acceptance in the U.S. for gay and lesbian people. Only about 1 in 10 said the same for nonbinary and transgender people — and about half said there was “not much” or no acceptance at all for transgender people.
Giovonni Santiago, a 39-year-old transgender man and Air Force veteran who lives in Northeast Ohio and was not a participant in the survey, said he feels that acceptance for transgender people has declined in the last few years – roughly in step with the rise of state laws banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors, regulating which school and public bathrooms transgender people can use and which sports they can play.
He said he’s seen acceptance get worse nationally, following the lead of some places that were early adopters of restrictions.
“They were like the anomaly for ignorance and in hatred, especially towards trans people,” Santiago said. “But now we see that it’s just kind of sweeping the nation, unfortunately.”
Still, Santiago said he doesn’t fear for his own personal safety — a contrast with most transgender people, who said they have feared for their safety at some point.
“I guess I don’t feel it as much because I live a life that most people don’t know that I’m trans unless I specifically tell them,” said Santiago, who runs a nonprofit dedicated to supporting transgender youth.
The survey of 3,959 LGBTQ adults was conducted in January, after President Donald Trump was elected but just before he returned to office and set into motion a series of policies that question the existence of transgender people.
A “Rise Up for Trans Youth” rally in New York against President Donald Trump’s executive actions targeting transgender people on Feb. 7.Stephanie Keith / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
On his first day, Trump signed an executive order calling on the government to recognize people as male or female based on the “biological truth” of their future cells at conception, rather than accept scientific evidence that gender is a spectrum. Since then, he’s begun ousting transgender service members from the military, and tried to bar transgender women and girls from sports competitions for females and block federal funding for gender-affirming care for transgender people under 19, among other orders.
A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted in May found that about half of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling transgender issues, with a range of views on specific actions.
According to the Pew poll, about two-thirds of LGBTQ adults said the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationally 10 years ago boosted acceptance of same-sex couples “a lot more” or “somewhat more.” The Supreme Court is expected to rule in coming weeks on a major case regarding transgender people — deciding whether Tennessee can enforce a ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Transgender people are less likely than gay or lesbian adults to say they’re accepted by all their family members. The majority of LGBTQ said their siblings and friends accepted them, though the rates were slightly higher among gay or lesbian people. About half of gay and lesbian people said their parents did, compared with about one-third of transgender people. Only about 1 in 10 transgender people reported feeling accepted by their extended family, compared with about 3 in 10 gay or lesbian people.
Transgender people are more likely than gay, lesbian or bisexual people to say they feel “extremely” or “very” connected to a broader LGBTQ+ community and to say that all or most of their friends are also LGBTQ.
Some elements of the experience are similar. About one-third of transgender and lesbian or gay adults said they first felt they might be LGBTQ by the time they were 10 and most did by age 13. About half waited until they were at least 18 to first tell someone.
Audrey Campos hosts a Loteria game night at Jackie O’s Cocktail Club in Fort Worth, Texas, on Tuesday.Ronaldo Bolaños / AP
Aubrey Campos, 41, runs a taco truck near a hub of LGBTQ bars in Fort Worth, Texas, and also serves as a community organizer. She says her parents were supportive when she came out as transgender at about age 12. But the younger trans people she works with often have very different experiences — including some who were kicked out of their homes.
“Now the times are a little bit dark,” she said. “This is a time that we to come together and make it brighter and make it known that we aren’t going to just disappear.”
A memorial to the long-ignored gay victims of the Nazi regime and to all LGBTQ people persecuted throughout history has been unveiled in Paris on Saturday.
The monument, a massive steel star designed by French artist Jean-Luc Verna, is located at the heart of Paris, in public gardens close to the Bastille Plaza. It aims to fulfill a duty to remember and to fight discrimination, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said.
“Historical recognition means saying ‘this happened’ and ‘we don’t want it to happen again,’” Hidalgo said.
Describing the sculpture that looks like a big star wand lying on the ground, Verna, a visual artist who also is a LGBTQ rights activist, said: “There’s a black side in front of us, forcing us to remember. … At certain times of the day, it casts a long shadow on the ground, evoking the dangers looming over, sadly.”
The other side of the star, silvery, reflects the sky. It represents “the color of time passing, with the Paris sky moving as quickly as public opinion, which can change at any moment,” Verna said.
Historians estimate between 5,000 and 15,000 people were deported throughout Europe by the Nazi regime during World War II because they were gay.
Jacques Chirac in 2005 was the first president in France to recognize these crimes, acknowledging LGBTQ people have been “hunted down, arrested and deported.”
Verna speaking next to Paris’ mayor Anne Hidalgo on Saturday.Kiran Ridley / AFP – Getty Images
Jean-Luc Roméro, deputy mayor of Paris and a longtime LGBTQ rights activist, said “we didn’t know, unfortunately, that this monument would be inaugurated at one of the worst moments we’re going through right now.”
In Europe, Hungary’s parliament passed this year an amendment to the constitution that allows the government to ban public events by LGBTQ+ communities, a decision that legal scholars and critics have called another step toward authoritarianism by the populist government.
