Opinions

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Virginia’s HIV Safety Net is Fraying. Lawmakers Must Act.

This past Friday, I was asked point blank: “What would happen if we don’t have funding for your Ryan White Part B program in April?”  It was framed as a hypothetical. For our organization, it is not.  As Executive Director of Health Brigade, I have led through uncertainty before. We are one of Richmond’s longstanding providers of HIV prevention and care, and the need for our services has always exceeded available resources. But in May 2025, Virginia cut $20 million in Ryan White Part B (RWB) funding at the state level. For Health Brigade, that meant a 75% reduction in […]

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Does the American Dream Still Exist for People Like Me?

“That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.” Those are the first and last words I heard Renee Good say, seconds before she was brutally murdered on Jan. 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. I came across the video as I watched my fiancée scroll through her social media feeds while sitting in our Brooklyn apartment. We proceeded to scour TikTok to gather more information. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of videos of the shooting—all from various angles—I asked her to put the phone down. We sat in silence as I interrogated the pit forming in my stomach. I was […]

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The mental health system is failing queer kids of color—and we’re letting it happen

Jayden is a 16-year-old Black queer teenager living in a low-income neighborhood on Atlanta’s west side. When he was unable to attend school because of his worsening panic attacks, he finally asked for help, but his cries went unanswered. The mental health system in this country wasn’t made for queer kids of color, which is why even when they go out to search for mental health care, too many are met with doors closed or closed minds. Jayden isn’t real, but his story is. It is built from interviews, national survey data, and the experiences of BIPOC LGBTQ+ youth in low-income communities […]

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Lonely in plain sight: Why so many gay men feel unknown

Loneliness is one of the most common issues that comes up in the work I do with gay men. Regardless of age, it’s a topic that comes up repeatedly in therapy. Loneliness is rarely about being alone, though. More often, it’s about carrying thoughts, feelings, or experiences we don’t feel safe to share. Psychologist Carl Jung, a pioneer in understanding the human psyche, said, “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” Stay up to date with the latest in LGBTQ+ news with The Advocate’s email […]

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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 Hudson, Georgia State Director for the Human Rights Campaign, told LGBTQ Nation. […]

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The far right thinks kids are property, not people. This is the heart of the anti-trans moral panic.

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Secretary of Education Linda McMahon got to the heart of the moral panic over trans kids in a statement earlier this week, where she attacked California for protecting trans kids from getting forcibly outed to their parents: “Children do not belong to the State—they belong to families. We will use every available mechanism to hold California accountable for these practices and restore parental rights.”  That is, the right sees children as property, and, to them, the only debate is whose property they are. The possibility that they’re actually human beings who belong to no one is simply unthinkable. Liberals, on the other hand, […]

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Transphobia backfired at the ballot box last year. Has the culture-war rhetoric lost its power?

Every time an extremist politician attacks a transgender kid to score political points, they are counting on silence. They expect no one to fight back. They assume cruelty will go unanswered. They’re wrong. Transgender Americans make up roughly one percent of the U.S. population, yet in a moment defined by economic anxiety and political dysfunction, the trans community, especially kids, has been turned into a punching bag by extremist politicians. In 2025 alone, more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures. These are coordinated attempts to legislate fear, erase dignity, and villainize trans people out of public life. Elected officials […]

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Donald Trump wants LGBTQ+ people to feel hopeless. Don’t let him win.

This second term of the Trump administration has been brutal in so many ways. For the LGBTQ+ community, it has meant a year of relentless legal and social attacks — scapegoating transgender people, pushing laws meant to strip us of our rights, and attempting to erase us altogether. The daily weight of it all can feel overwhelming. As an older lesbian, it’s heartbreaking to witness such a coordinated and malicious effort to undo decades of progress – progress I saw, fought for, and experienced us win firsthand. And yet, the more I sit with what’s happening, the clearer the bigger […]

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Renee Good’s murder is a warning: We could be next … unless we act urgently

Who was Renee Good, the woman murdered by ICE this last week? She was a mother, a wife, a poet, a creative. She was queer. She was a U.S. Citizen, “jus soli” (translation: having rights to the soil). She was present during an ICE operation on January 7. And, from a certain standpoint, her very existence as a queer person in America today doesn’t just make her an activist; it makes her a voice for the voiceless. On that same day she was killed, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security deemed her a “domestic terrorist.” There is something deeply unsettling with the many […]

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Just show up: How to join the fight for LGBTQ+ rights when you don’t have a queer loved one

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When my family first moved to West Texas a little over five years ago, it became clear that our new hometown was not a welcoming place for every member of our family. The local school district had a bullying problem, and for their own safety, we chose to remove our then-teenage child from public school.  In the midst of that experience, however, we felt a glimmer of hope as we witnessed another local school district host a collaborative forum to make policy changes that would ensure every student felt safe at school. They reached out to parents with students who […]

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