Columns

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Rising anti-LGBTQ+ censorship efforts pull directly from the playbooks of modern authoritarian leaders

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Across the U.S., a campaign to seclude and suppress queer and trans lives from public visibility is continuing to spread. In public schools, libraries, universities, art galleries, museums, government websites, and national monuments, we are seeing art, books, terms, and symbols of LGBTQ+ identity disappear at a quickening pace. We don’t need to wonder where this is coming from or where it’s going. Wielding state power against LGBTQ+ communities has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.  Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email newsletter, in your inbox five days a week. In Nazi Germany, LGBTQ+ culture and literature was purged as “un-German.” More recently in […]

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Donald Trump built a White House spectacle around beautiful men and muscle. During Pride Month

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I’ve been covering Donald Trump for The Advocate since 2019, through his first term, through his off years sulking and griping at Mar-a-Lago, and now through his nightmare return to the White House over the last two years. In that time, one thing has become unmistakably, almost comically clear: Donald Trump loves a beautiful man. Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email newsletter, in your inbox five days a week. Not that he would ever say so out loud. “Women, I like. Men, no, I don’t have any interest,” Trump actually felt like he had to announce that, […]

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Corporations & leaders are retreating to safe choices. They will be the death of us.

When there are threats against trans rights and the climate feels so inhospitable to the very existence of marginalized communities, it can be easy for people to retreat to safe choices. Groups might argue that it’s best to hold on to something that feels secure and solid rather than draw attention by fighting for those most under attack. But what might be claimed as small acts of safe defiance against the regime are simply complicity in disguise. We need to be fighting this endless attack on trans rights, not questioning how much we can step back with the idea that […]

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Viktor Orbán won’t be the last anti-LGBTQ+ strongman to topple

One of the world’s most openly homophobic and misogynistic leaders just lost power. Viktor Orbán is out. For years, Orbán, as prime minister, held up Hungary as proof that a country could be tightened, simplified, and brought under control — a place where national identity came first and anything that complicated it could be pushed out. That message did not stay in Hungary, it moved, was studied, repeated, and turned into strategy by political movements that wanted the same kind of power. A sitting prime minister stands in front of an international conservative audience, calls liberalism a virus, lays out a governing formula built on […]

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Don’t fall for WSJ’s ‘normal gay’ whitewashing of queer life

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, titled “I’m gay, but that doesn’t make me queer,” contributor Ben Appel draws a clean line between being gay and being “queer,” casting queerness as an ideological project built on rejecting what is normal and legitimate. On its own, the argument might read like a personal distinction, but placed alongside the Journal’s broader cultural coverage, it begins to look like something more deliberate: an effort to define which versions of queer life are acceptable and which ones are not. The problem is not that Appel’s argument is controversial. It is that it is reductive, historically thin, […]

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Trump stole our Pride flag but he cannot steal our Pride!

President Donald Trump directed the National Park Service (NPS) to remove the Rainbow Pride Flag from the Stonewall National Monument in New York City on February 5, 2026. This came just one year after the NPS deleted all references to transgender and queer people from its website of the Stonewall National Monument through Trump’s executive order. The initialism that once read LGBTQ+ has been reduced to LGB, standing for lesbian, gay, and bisexual. Local and state elected officials, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D), are planning to re-raise the Pride Flag in defiance of the […]

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“Erasure is not neutral”: The inextricable link between LGBTQ+ rights & a functioning democracy

As the second Trump administration passes the one-year mark, LGBTQ+ people across the United States are living through a profound and destabilizing shift. What has unfolded over the past year is a deliberate reorientation of federal power away from civil rights and toward state-sanctioned exclusion.  According to advocates at the Human Rights Campaign, this moment is best understood not as a collection of disconnected policy fights, but as a coordinated effort to roll back decades of progress. “This administration has shown a glaring lack of care for human life,” Bentley Hudgins, Georgia State Director for the Human Rights Campaign, told LGBTQ Nation. […]

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An HIV breakthrough is here. Let’s not let it go to waste

As Congress nears a January deadline to pass a continuing resolution and avert a government shutdown, critical health programs hang in the balance. The now-expired Affordable Care Act subsidies and proposed cuts to the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program could undermine access to lifesaving services and medications, including Lenacapavir, a breakthrough drug offering new hope in the fight against HIV. Nearly 40 million people worldwide, and more than one million people in the United States, are living with HIV, with more than 30,000 Americans newly infected each year. A drug like Lenacapavir has the potential to change that trajectory, preventing the global spread of […]

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If 2025 tested our resolve, 2026 will prove our resilience

They say with age comes wisdom. When I was much younger, I laughed at that idea. I was convinced I already possessed all the wisdom I’d ever need. Now, with time behind me, lots of it, I laugh for a very different reason, and at how little I truly understood back then. One of the gifts of getting older is perspective. You begin to recognize that while the trials you’re facing may feel overwhelming in the moment, chances are you’ve survived something harder before. Not always, but often enough to matter. I was reminded of that recently while talking with a young […]

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Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel started the frightening return of the Lavender Scare

I am a firm believer in history stupidly repeating itself, particularly bad history, because for some reason men in power don’t think history applies to them. Or they think something that was universally agreed upon as bad is something good they want to bring back and shove down people’s throats.  After World War II and the horrific destruction caused by the Nazi Party, the world said never again, so much so that the party was banned in Germany. But now you have the AfD, which works around the edges in the country and is shockingly but not surprisingly endorsed by Elon Musk. […]

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