Tim Fitzsimons

Five decades ago, thousands of gay and transgender activists marched from New York City’s Stonewall Inn to Central Park on the last Sunday of June. The 3-mile journey, honoring the first anniversary of the iconic 1969 Stonewall uprising, established a tradition of LGBTQ pride marches that would continue uninterrupted for 50 years and spread around the world. The political and cultural changes that followed the first march a half-century ago — and the Stonewall rebellion against police harassment that preceded it — have changed the lives of millions of LGBTQ people. Same-sex marriage has been legal across the United States since 2015, the […]

Senator James Lankford, R-Okla., on Thursday blocked Senate consideration of the Equality Act, an LGBTQ civil rights bill, by citing “Harry Potter” author J. K. Rowling’s recent blog post, which has been criticized as a “transphobic manifesto.” “To say in the words of J.K. Rowling this past week where she wrote, ‘All I’m asking, all I want is for similar empathy, similar understanding to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats or abuse,’” Lankford said on the Senate floor, as first reported by The Washington Blade. “Let’s […]

LGBTQ advocates rejoiced Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an unexpectedly broad ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — specifically, Title VII of the act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sex — bars employment discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Chase Strangio, deputy director of Trans Justice at the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, called the ruling “a truly important rebuke” of conservative efforts to roll back LGBTQ legal protections established during the Obama administration. “This is a major blow to the interpretation that anti-trans forces are looking to advance,” Strangio said. “You […]

Joe Biden on Monday announced the formation of his presidential campaign’s LGBTQ steering committee, Out for Biden, an initiative “aimed at turning out a record number of LGBTQ+ voters this November to elect Joe Biden.” The announcement comes days after the former vice president formally clinched the Democratic nomination for president by securing more than 2,000 of the total 3,979 pledged delegates. The committee has over 30 members, including most of Congress’ LGBTQ delegation: Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Reps. David Cicilline, D-R.I., Angie Craig, D-Minn., Sharice Davids, D-Kan., Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., Chris Pappas, D-N.H., and Mark Takano, D-Calif., are all […]

Over the past several days, President Donald Trump has issued presidential actions proclaiming June as National Homeownership Month, Great Outdoors Month and Caribbean-American Heritage Month, among others. On Monday, amid protests across the country, the White House still managed to issue a statement recognizing June 1 as Global Coptic Day — but two days in, nothing, so far, for LGBTQ Pride month. In the nearly four years since he has been president, Trump has acknowledged Pride Month once, last June, notably becoming the first Republican president to do so. But his acknowledgement was not in an official presidential proclamation, as President […]

LGBTQ advocacy groups Monday hastily reoriented planned Pride Month programming, already significantly altered by the coronavirus pandemic, to address the anti-racism protests that have erupted across the United States. In statements declaring support for #BlackLivesMatter protests against racism and police brutality, organizations including the Human Rights Campaign, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAAD pointed to the radical roots of the early gay rights movement. They called for solidarity with the black and brown communities and many of them cited the now-iconic uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn in June 1969, which led to the country’s first Pride marches the […]

A newly engaged couple, Stephanie Mayorga, 27, and Paige Escalera, 25, disappeared in mid-April under “suspicious” circumstances, the police in Wilmington, North Carolina, said Wednesday at a news conference. Their roommate filed a missing persons report several days after the women were last seen on April 15. Capt. Thomas Tillman said surveillance footage showed the couple leaving their Wilmington home and driving a gray 2013 Dodge Dart with two stickers on the back windshield and South Carolina plates. Tillman described the disappearance as “suspicious” based on undisclosed information received in the past week. He said detectives had spoken to family […]