Tim Fitzsimons

This year was the first time an openly gay candidate participated in a presidential debate, and both NBC’s debate in June and CNN’s debate this week included openly LGBTQ moderators. However, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer issues earned barely a mention during nearly 10 hours of debate over four nights involving 21 Democratic candidates for president. On Night 1 of this week’s debate in Detroit, CNN anchor Dana Bash asked Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, about the student loan debt still held by him and his husband. Buttigieg dove into an answer about debt-free college. Aside from […]

In heavily Democratic New York City, the toughest part of political elections typically takes place in the primaries, long before the general election. Indeed, after Rep. José Serrano, a longtime congressman representing the southern Bronx, captured the Democratic nomination for New York’s 15th Congressional District in 2018, he went on to beat his Republican opponent with 96 percent of the vote; Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both won the district with over 90 percent of the vote. But Serrano is retiring, and when New York Democrats go to polls in the June 2020 primary for the 15th Congressional District, they […]

In May 1933, the Nazi-sympathizing German Student Union entered Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin. Hirschfeld’s expansive library of sexual and gender studies was confiscated and later burned in the streets of the German capital, one of many book burnings in Nazi Germany that would decimate the records of this pioneering institute. Some of the Institute’s records were of the countless sexual and gender minorities who passed through its doors between 1919 and 1933, and even earlier, when Hirschfeld ran the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the institute’s predecessor and world’s first LGBTQ rights organization. “The Nazis tried to destroy information […]

After a string of successful general and special elections, the number of LGBTQ elected officials in the U.S. today stands at 698 — the highest number ever, and an increase of nearly 25 percent over last year, according to the Victory Institute, which tracks openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer elected officials. The data was released as part of Victory’s 2019 Out for Americareport; in last year’s report, there were 559 out LGBTQ officials. Some of the most well-known LGBTQ officials to take office this year are Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Rep. Sharice Davids of […]

Stacy Feintuch, a mother of two in suburban New Jersey, said she didn’t know what was wrong when her oldest daughter, Amanda, 17, began to withdraw. “I confronted her and said, ‘You need to talk to me,’” Feintuch said: “She said, ‘It’s not what you think. I’m fine, it’s not that.” “I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you.’” Feintuch said her mind raced: “Is she pregnant? Is she in trouble?” Finally, Amanda buried her head in her pillow and said, “I’m gay.” “I was just dumbfounded, just shocked. It wasn’t even a thought in my head,” Feintuch said. “I […]

This year New York City will host dueling pride marches on the same day: the official NYC Pride March and the activist-run Queer Liberation March. The schism that resulted in two separate events on June 30, the last Sunday of LGBTQ Pride Month, is the product of a longstanding political disagreement within the community: whether pride is a demand for acceptance and integration into broader society or whether it’s a radical demand for the liberation of all LGBTQ people. For those paying attention, this tension has been on full display during the past two NYC Pride Marches — while the roots of the broader debate […]

Therapy that seeks to change minors’ sexual orientation or gender identity is now illegal in Colorado. Gov. Jared Polis, the first openly gay man ever elected governor in the U.S., signed the ban into law on Friday. “Colorado has joined a growing list of states that have banned so-called conversion therapy. It’s a horrific practice that has long been widely-discredited by medical and mental health professionals and has scarred many survivors for life,” Polis said in a statement emailed to NBC News. “Today Colorado took an important step forward in recognizing our diversity as a strength. These bills truly underscore […]

According to Michael Williams, much better known as “Sister Roma,” the story of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began in San Francisco on Easter Day of 1979. Back then, just a year before the city’s gay community was struck by the AIDS epidemic, four friends found themselves fed up with what Roma called the “Castro clone look.” “Gay men in San Francisco in the 70s all presented very masculine, leather jackets, moustaches, sort of like the Marlboro Man, you know?” Roma told NBC News. “So they were very fed up with that, and they thought, ‘Let’s put on these nun’s […]