Trudy Ring

The GLO Center, an LGBTQ+ community center in Springfield, Missouri, closed for the day Monday after receiving a threat of violence, but it will go on with a Pride event Saturday as planned. Executive Director Aaron Schekorra found two bullets on the ground when he opened the center Monday. “Scratched on them — there’s a word on each of them. One of them says in all caps, ‘DIE,’ and the other one says a slur for queer people, and it starts with an f, that I’d rather not repeat on the radio,” he told public radio station KCUR. “We realized that these were left — they were […]

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t appear inclined to overturn marriage equality — but can she be trusted? Barrett calls the right to marry “fundamental” in her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, which comes out Tuesday. However, she has previously said the matter should be up to each state. And in her confirmation hearings in 2020, she was cagey about whether she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion nationwide, butin 2022 she voted to overturn it. Meanwhile, panelists at the National Conservatism Conference, held this week in Washington, D.C., discussed the possible reversal of Obergefell […]

Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes remain high despite a drop in violent crime overall in the U.S., according to the latest report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released Tuesday. In 2024, law enforcement agencies sharing data with the FBI reported 2,278 single-bias hate crimes based on sexual orientation and 527 based on gender identity. For sexual orientation-motivated crimes, that’s a drop of 5 percent from 2023’s tally of 2,402. For crimes based on gender identity, that’s a drop of 3 percent from 2023’s total of 547. Crimes in both categories had risen from 2022 to 2023. But the numbers are still unacceptably high, activists say, and anti-LGBTQ+ political […]

FreeState Justice, a legal-services nonprofit in Maryland, filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s failure to investigate anti-transgender job discrimination. Under the Trump administration, the EEOC has abandoned trans workers, says the suit, in which FreeState Justice is represented by Democracy Forward and the National Women’s Law Center. It was filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland and names the EEOC and Acting Chair Andrea Lucas as defendants. The EEOC, established in 1965 by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is tasked with investigating all forms of workplace bias. Filing a discrimination complaint with the EEOC is a precondition to filing […]

Wallis Annenberg, the Los Angeles-based philanthropist who died Monday at 86, is being remembered for her generosity to arts, culture, and wildlife. But most obituaries are not mentioning that she was a lesbian — albeit semi-closeted — and how much she did for LGBTQ+ and HIV and AIDS charities. An exception is a Substack column written by L.A. journalist Karen Ocamb, who was in a relationship with Annenberg for two years. Ocamb also emailed remembrances of Annenberg to The Advocate. “I met Wallis in 1986 when she was the speaker at a 12-Step meeting at Cedars-Sinai,” Ocamb wrote in the email. “Truthfully, my back was up because she was this rich […]