Tim Fitzsimons

The American Medical Association on Tuesday voted to support state and federal efforts to ban gay conversion therapy, throwing the weight of America’s medical establishment behind ending the scientifically discredited practice of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. “It is clear to the AMA that the conversion therapy needs to end in the United States given the risk of deliberate harm to LGBTQ people,” AMA board mMember Dr. William E. Kobler said in a statement shared with NBC News. “Conversion therapy has no foundation as scientifically valid medical care and lacks credible evidence to support its […]

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer on Wednesday submitted a letter to HIV drugmaker Gilead Science’s board of directors demanding a shareholder “clawback” policy. The shareholder proposal, if approved by the board, would empower the board to “recoup” some of the money paid to top Gilead executives, like CEO Daniel O’Day. Stringer, as comptroller of America’s largest city, is responsible for administering New York City’s vast pension funds, estimated in June to comprise $208 billion in investments. Acting as a fiduciary for the funds’ exposure to stocks like Gilead’s, Stringer also represents a large number of the pharma giant’s shareholders. […]

Of the 7,120 hate crime incidents reported in 2018, more than 1,300 — or nearly 19 percent — stemmed from anti-LGBTQ bias, according to the FBI’s latest Hate Crime Statistics report. According to the FBI data, of the nearly 1,200 incidents targeting people due to their sexual orientation, the majority targeted gay men (roughly 60 percent), while approximately 12 percent targeted lesbians, 1.5 percent targeted bisexuals, 1.4 percent targeted heterosexuals and the remaining incidents targeted a mixed group of LGBTQ people. Transgender and gender-nonconforming people were the targets in 168 reported incidents, approximately 2.4 percent of all reported hate crime incidents […]

The “rainbow wave” of the 2018 elections continued Tuesday, with 99 of 200 known LGBTQ candidates winning their races — including a number of successes in historically conservative states such as Virginia and Kentucky. The Victory Fund, a group that trains, supports and advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer candidates who are pro-choice, said 80 of its 111 endorsed candidates emerged victorious Tuesday. So far in 2019, the organization found 144 LGBTQ contenders won in 382 races, for an overall victory rate of 38 percent. LGBTQ men ran in much higher numbers than their women counterparts, though queer […]

A new report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found the relatively high rate of poverty in the LGBTQ community is not evenly distributed, with bisexual women and transgender people shouldering a disproportionate poverty burden. When grouped together, almost 22 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people reported earning less than the federal poverty level of $12,490 per year for a single-person household. The cisgender straight community, on the other hand, reported a poverty rate of almost 16 percent. When researchers separated the L, G, B and T, however, they found cisgender (or non-transgender) gay men and […]

Shortly after Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi died by suicide in 2010, Canadian teen Brittany McMillan decided to do something about it: She created a Facebook event calling on people to wear purple — the “spirit” color of the rainbow pride flag — on the third Thursday of October to show that they stand against anti-LGBTQ bullying. By the time the first Spirit Day took place on Oct. 20, 2010, it was already a worldwide phenomenon. “Since then, it has evolved into more than just wearing purple, but ‘going purple,’ which is really quite amazing,” McMillan told NBC News in 2016. Sarah Kate […]