National

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New York governor signs bill expanding assistance for LGBTQ seniors

Access to physical and mental health care, free or discounted meal deliveries, caregivers and other forms of support are now easier for LGBTQ seniors in New York state to get.  Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law this week making New York the latest state to expand the accessibility of services to LGBTQ people ages 60 and over, who are disproportionately affected by poverty and isolation.  The legislation requires the state’s Office for the Aging to consider gender identity and expression, sexual orientation and HIV status when it calculates which seniors need the most help. It now considers other noneconomic factors […]

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The U.S. has never had a lesbian governor. These two women could change that.

Gubernatorial candidates Maura Healey and Tina Kotek are no strangers to political firsts. In 2009, Healey, who is now the Massachusetts attorney general, led the nation’s first successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages. And in 2014 she broke barriers again, becoming the nation’s first out lesbian elected state attorney general. Nearly 3,000 miles west, Kotek became the country’s first out lesbian speaker of a state House of Representatives in 2013. She made history again by becoming Oregon’s longest-serving House speaker, before stepping down in January to run for […]

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School tried to cancel LGBTQ musical ‘The Prom’ adaptation over ‘inappropriate’ content

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A New Jersey high school tried to cancel an adaptation of the LGBTQ+ musical The Prom due to “community concern” over its themes. Officials at Cedar Grove High School in Essex County, New Jersey planned to cancel a student production of The Prom – which sees a lesbian student try to bring her same-sex date to a school prom – but were forced to backtrack after opposition from the community. The district’s superintendent Anthony Grosso told those concerned in a Friday (14 October) statement that the play would not be cancelled, but that students would perform a “High School Edition” of the play. “After further inquiry with the […]

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Gay couple beaten and bloodied outside Connecticut gay bar

A gay couple was beaten and bloodied in front of the Connecticut gay bar they own. The two men say the incident was a hate crime, but local authorities disagree.  In a statement shared Tuesday, Casey Fitzpatrick said he and his husband, Nicholas Ruiz — the owners of Troupe429 in Norwalk, Connecticut — were violently assaulted by a male bar patron who also disparaged them with anti-LGBTQ slurs. The incident, which occurred in mid-September, resulted in Ruiz being sent to the hospital and requiring over 50 stitches across his face and $20,000’s worth of plastic surgery, Fitzpatrick said in the statement, […]

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Gay couple’s Pride flag was burned in hateful act. But their neighbors rallied in support.

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“Well, fuck ’em, we’ll hang another one, right?” That was the message from Brett Perry and his husband John Michael Schert while they surveyed the remnants of a Progress Pride hanging on their front porch that was burned overnight last week. The couple has lived on their street in the North End neighborhood of Boise since 2011. In 2020, the first of three Pride flags the couple has hung on their porch was stolen. A second was defaced. On October 5, the third was set on fire. “This is our progress flag,” said Perry in a video posted to Instagram […]

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LGBTQ beach sanctum faces demolition in New York

LGBTQ beachgoers are wrestling with New York City’s plan to tear down a long-abandoned tuberculosis hospital that has served as a landmark for the community. Graffiti on the outer walls declare “QUEER TRANS POWER” and “KNOW YOUR POWER.” Air conditioning units rust in the shattered windows of Neponsit Beach Hospital, once also a nursing home, but empty since 1998. A shrine on the chain-link fence memorializes a queer icon found dead off the waters nearby. The city wants to create a park on the site, wiping out the decrepit structure facing a clothing-optional beach in the borough of Queens. The […]

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Lesbian-Feminist Press Firebrand Books’ Former Home Now a Landmark

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The building that once housed lesbian and feminist press Firebrand Books in Ithaca, N.Y., has been designated a local historic landmark. The city’s Common Council approved the designation unanimously last Wednesday, acting on a recommendation from the Ithaca Landmarks Preservation Commission, The Ithaca Voicereports. Nancy Bereano founded Firebrand Books in 1984, and it was housed in a building at 143 E. State St. on the Ithaca Commons until 2003, the Voice notes. The move came under new leadership. “As an editor and publisher, Bereano influenced not only feminist and LBGTQ publishing but print culture as a whole,” the preservation commission’s resolution says. “Her […]

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GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker mocks transgender people who serve in the military

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Herschel Walker – the former NFL player running for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia as a Republican – mocked transgender people who serve in the military. “Hey, just think about it: Pronoun? In our military?” he joked at a campaign event on Tuesday. “How do you identify? In our military? These are war times. What happened to push-ups? Sit-ups?” “Because I can tell you right now, China, Iran, and Russia are not talking about pronouns,” Walker said, referring to three countries with poor records on human rights, especially when it comes to LGBTQ people. “They got us believing we […]

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Kevin Spacey accuser Anthony Rapp details ‘frightening’ alleged sexual assault as trial continues

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Anthony Rapp testified in federal court about an “incredibly frightening” encounter, in which Kevin Spacey allegedly climbed on top of him when he was a teen.  Rapp, who is suing Spacey for $40 million in a civil trial over alleged sexual misconduct, described to the court on Friday (7 October) how he first became acquainted with Spacey as a teenager on the New York City theatre scene. He testified that Spacey invited him to a party at the actor’s loft in 1986 when Rapp was 14 and the disgraced actor was 26. Rapp, now 50, told jurors he decided to go because he […]

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Lawmaker complaint forces Tennessee pride festival indoors

The drag show at a Tennessee pride festival will go on Saturday — but not in the way organizers had planned it.  After weeks of criticism, online threats from far-right groups and a legal complaint, the Jackson Pride Committee and the city of Jackson, which sits about 70 miles northeast of Memphis in Madison County, reached a compromise with state Republican representatives and community members who had complained about the pride festival’s drag show. The annual pride festival was supposed to be held in the city’s public Conger Park, as it was in 2019 and 2021, but now it will […]

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