News

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A 25-year-old got in a taxi outside an N.Y.C. gay bar. He was dead an hour later.

Social worker Julio Ramirez, 25, met up with a friend on April 20 for a night out in Hell’s Kitchen, a Manhattan neighborhood near Times Square in New York known for its lively restaurant and bar scene. Their last stop was the Ritz Bar and Lounge, a popular, multilevel gay venue in the heart of the neighborhood’s Restaurant Row.  Surveillance footage from a nearby security camera shows Ramirez walking away from the venue with three unidentified men at 3:17 a.m., according to his brother, Carlos, who said he was briefed by investigators. The four men then entered a nearby taxi, […]

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North Carolina lawmakers advance bill to limit LGBTQ teachings in school

North Carolina lawmakers advanced legislation on Wednesday that would prohibit classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for some public school students, a move decried by opponents as harmful to LGBTQ youth. The “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” a broad piece of legislation that opponents say mirrors Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill, cleared the state’s Republican-led Senate and will head to the House of Representatives, which also has a Republican majority. It could reach the desk of Governor Roy Cooper as soon as this week. Cooper, a Democrat, has spoken against the bill and is all but certain to […]

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 The number of young gay and bisexual adults has doubled in four years in UK

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The UK’s respected Office for National Statistics says that the number of young people (aged 16-24) who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual has almost doubled in just four years. It’s risen from 4.1% in 2016 to 8% in 2020. The figures come from an analysis of the country’s large-scale Annual Population Survey, which surveys around 320,000 households annually. Breaking down that 8% figure, 2.7% of 16-24 year-olds identified as gay or lesbian, and 5.3% as bisexual. Looking more broadly at all age groups, the proportion of all adults identifying as LGB stood at 3.1% in 2020. This is an increase from 2.7% in […]

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Black Gay Candidates Make History With Primary Wins in Texas

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Thanks to victories in primary runoffs Tuesday, Texas is poised to have its first Black gay male state legislators — and one Black lesbian, who won a special election just weeks ago to fill a vacancy, is likely to be elected to a full term. Before Jolanda Jones’s victory in the special election, Texas had never had a Black member of the LGBTQ+ community in the state legislature. She won the special election May 7 in the Houston-area Texas House District 147 to succeed Rep. Garnet Coleman, who retired in February; that gave her the seat through December. In the Democratic primary […]

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Happening This Month at SF’s GLBT Historical Society Museum

Neon Comes Out: San Francisco’s Gay Bar SignsIllustrated Talk Thursday, June 96:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m.In-person programThe Tenderloin Museum398 Eddy Street, San Francisco$10 | $5 for members Gay bars were often hidden, unmarked enclaves for only those in the know. Often veiled behind tinted glass, with narrow entrances to allow doormen to screen patrons, they needed to hide the goings-on within from the general public, and the police, as a matter of survival. In the late 1960s, bars started coming out of the dark, announcing themselves with neon signs. In this talk co-presented by the GLBT Historical Society, historian Jim Van Buskirk will be joined […]

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Happening this Month at Marin’s Spahr Center

AIDS Memorial Quilt Display Golden Gate Park June 11 & 12 Marking the 35th Anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, formerly called the Names Project Quilt, nearly 3000 memorial panels will be on display in the park’s Robin Williams Meadow. A ceremonial Quilt unfolding begins at 9:30 am Saturday and a closing ceremony takes place at 4 pm Sunday. The opening ceremony will be followed by the continuous reading of the names of those whose lives have been lost to AIDS. There will be several community villages for visitors including a panel-making workshop and Quilt history village, a volunteer village, a social […]

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Sonoma County Pride Happens this Week

This Pride Month, following two years of subdued celebrations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sonoma County residents are getting ready to don their rainbow garb and spread the love at in-person events and festivals. Sparked by the 1969 Stonewall uprising in Manhattan and the first Pride march in New York City in June the following year, LGBTQ+ pride celebrations have long been held in June across the United States to recognize the impact of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people and the intolerance they often face. Sonoma County has its own unique LGBTQ+ history. While there has long been […]

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Gay music teacher was blackmailed. Instead of helping him, his school forced him to resign

A gay music teacher in Iowa was forced to resign from his high school after a blackmailer threatened him. Matthew Gerhold began working at Valley Lutheran High School in Cedar Valley, Iowa last year. Although he told school officials that he was gay before he was hired, they later compelled him to resign or face termination after he was blackmailed.  Gerhold’s phone was hacked in January 2022 and the hacker blackmailed him by threatening to share private information about his sexuality publicly. Gerhold alerted the school about the hack and the blackmail, then resigned from his position at the high […]

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An unlikely queer hero dodges bombs to deliver aid in Ukraine

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A pair of vans, cosmetically weathered but carrying an unmeasurable amount of personality along with over 12,000 lbs of food, medicine, and hygiene supplies, were used by a motley group of heroes to deliver critical supplies to two towns still under attack in northeast Ukraine. Agatha Williams, a metal fabricator from Denver, Colorado turned front-line aid worker aiding civilians amid the Russian invasion, joined the relief effort for the first time. Piloting one of the vehicles, Williams, who goes by the pronouns they/them and identifies as queer, left the United States for the first time to make a difference in […]

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Ukraine’s ‘unicorn’ LGBTQ soldiers head for war

As volunteer fighters Oleksandr Zhuhan and Antonina Romanova pack for a return to active duty, they contemplate the unicorn insignia that gives their uniform a rare distinction — a symbol of their status as an LGBTQ couple who are Ukrainian soldiers. Members of Ukraine’s LGBTQ community who sign up for the war have taken to sewing the image of the mythical beast into their standard-issue epaulettes just below the national flag. The practice harks back to the 2014 conflict when Russia invaded then annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, “when lots of people said there are no gay people in […]

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