Tim Fitzsimons

The NYC Pride March has been canceled for the first time in its half-century history, along with all in-person events leading up to the annual June event, which draws millions of participants and revelers every year. Heritage of Pride, the organization that runs the march, made the announcement Monday, shortly after New York Mayor Bill De Blasio announced the cancellation of permits for all large events for the month of June. “This probably will not surprise you,” De Blasio said at a coronavirus briefing before announcing the cancellation of June’s Celebrate Israel, Puerto Rican Day and LGBTQ pride parades. The […]

As households across the United States start to receive their 2020 census packets, LGBTQ advocacy groups are ramping up efforts to ensure lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people living in the country are counted and understand what’s at stake when it comes to the decennial survey. “We want LGBTQ folks to know that census data are used to allocate political power,” said Meghan Maury, policy director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, which runs the Queer the Census campaign. The drive, formed just before the 2010 census, works to raise LGBTQ awareness and participation in the population count. The […]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans came out in disproportionately high numbers to vote in their states’ Democratic primaries this year, and they skewed younger and more liberal than non-LGBT Democratic primary voters, according to a review of the NBC News Exit Poll conducted in 18 of the states that have voted so far. While former Vice President Joe Biden has won the most delegates so far, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been the clear favorite among LGBT Democratic primary voters. Sanders was the pick of 41 percent of these voters, with Biden at 21 percent. The rest of the […]

Just over a year after launching his historic campaign for the White House, Pete Buttigieg on Sunday announced the suspension of his presidential campaign, saying that the best way to advance his campaign’s goal of defeating Donald Trump “is to step aside and help bring our party and our country together.” “By every historical measure, we were never supposed to get anywhere at all,” the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor said to a cheering crowd of supporters Sunday night, before turning to the still-unseen impact of his historic candidacy. “We send a message to every kid out there wondering if whatever marks them out […]

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, made history last week when he became the first governor in the state to appear at a rally for the Louisville-based Fairness Campaign, upholding a campaign promise to support LGBTQ rights. Each year since 1999, when Kentucky’s first-ever nondiscrimination ordinances were passed into law by the city councils of Louisville and Lexington, the Fairness Campaign has lobbied lawmakers to make such discrimination illegal statewide. While Beshear’s presence at the rally made headlines, it was a photo of him with local chapters of the activist drag troupe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence that launched a separate scandal that […]

For some, “queer” is a loaded word — a negative epithet from a less accepting time that was hurled at anyone perceived to be gay. But for others, particularly younger LGBTQ people, it is a reclaimed term and a less restrictive self-identifier. While the word’s use — and its 21st century reclamation — has been mostly anecdotal up to this point, a new report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has put scientific data behind the population of queer-identified people in the United States. According to its findings, nearly 6 percent of sexual minorities identify as queer, while […]

Seven Republican lawmakers in Florida filed anti-LGBTQ bills late Monday, just hours before the deadline to file new bills for the coming legislative session. If passed, the bills would ban gender-affirming health care for transgender children, repeal municipal and county ordinances protecting LGBTQ workers, and legalize so-called gay conversion therapy in places that had banned the medically debunked practice. The state lawmakers — Rep. Anthony Sabatini, Sen. Dennis Baxley, Rep. Bob Rommel, Sen. Joe Gruters, Rep Michael Grant, Sen. Keith Perry, and Rep. Byron Donalds — together introduced the four pieces of legislation, each with a companion bill in the […]