LGBTQ+ Americans are significantly less likely to be religious than their straight and cisgender peers — but they’re still more spiritual.
Less than half of U.S. adults who are LGBTQ+ (48 percent) say they identify with a religion, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, compared to 73 percent of non-LGBTQ+ Americans. The majority of queer adults (52 percent) identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” compared to just 26 percent of their non-LGBTQ+ peers.
LGBTQ+ adults were also far less likely to say that religion is very important to them personally (17 percent vs. 42 percent), that they attend religious services at least monthly (16 percent vs. 31 percent), or pray daily (23 percent vs. 46 percent).
The majority of LGB adults (46 percent) also said that they believe religion does more harm than good in American society, the Center’s separate 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) found. Another 17 percent said religion does more good than harm, and 37 percent said it does equal amounts of good and harm.
Despite the lack of religious affiliation, LGBTQ+ adults still higher rates of spirituality. Around 80 percent of LGB adults said they believe “people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body,” and 69 percent believe “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.”
LGBTQ+ adults are also more likely to believe in astrology or horoscopes. Over half of LGBTQ+ Americans (54 percent) consult them at least yearly, according to a separate May survey from the Center — nearly twice the percentage of the general U.S. adult population (28 percent). Another 33 percent of LGBTQ+ adults said they consult tarot cards, three times as much as U.S. adults overall (11 percent).
The newest PRC report suggests that LGBTQ+ Americans may be less religious due to their age demographics, as young Americans are both more likely to be LGBTQ+ and less likely to be religious. Another factor is the treatment of LGBTQ+ people by religious institutions — specifically Abrahamic religions — whose doctrines are either not accepting of queer people or weaponized to reject them.
More than 20 hospitals and health systems have temporarily or indefinitely rolled back transgender care for minors and some young adults this year amid threats of federal investigations and cuts to government funding, an NBC News analysis found.
In addition to those 21 hospitals, another five have removed webpages dedicated to trans care for minors from their websites this year — one said it is still providing trans care to minors, one would only say it continues “to comply with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and three did not respond to requests for comment. And separately, a health center in Iowa stopped providing hormone therapy to trans adults due to a Trump order that prohibits federal funds from being used to “promote gender ideology,” the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
The changes have come as hospitals attempt to comply with state laws, which in many instances prohibit discriminating against trans people in medical care, as well as federal guidance, which in recent months has threatened to revoke hospitals’ federal funding or charge them with civil or criminal penalties if they continue to provide trans care to patients younger than 19.
A testosterone prescription used for gender-affirming care in 2023.Rory Doyle for The Washington Post via Getty Images file
Patients and families affected by these changes in care have described the effects as devastating.
One Florida mom, who asked that her name not be published due to fears that she could face harassment or be targeted by the federal government, recently bought one-way tickets to Berlin so she and her 15-year-old trans daughter could move there next month. The mom has acquired a language-learning visa, and her daughter will be able to live with her because she is a minor.
When her daughter first sought access to transition care, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and state Republican legislators were trying to ban it, so in September 2021, the teen and her dad started driving 11 hours to Alabama every few months so she could access care at the University of Alabama’s gender clinic. Then, in August 2023, a court allowed a care ban to take effect in Alabama. Last July, they began flying to Washington, D.C., to receive care at Children’s National Hospital.
Last month, the hospital announced in a message on its website that “in light of escalating legal and regulatory risks to Children’s National, our providers, and the families we serve, we will be discontinuing the prescription of gender-affirming medications” effective Aug. 30.
The mom said even if she could find another doctor in the U.S. for her daughter, she fears the family might have just one visit “before the government steps in again.”
“Where can we go?” she said. “Growing up, we were always told that America is the greatest country in the world, and now we’re having to flee so that my child can get the health care she needs, and for our safety.”
‘These threats are no longer theoretical’
Since 2021, 27 states have enacted measures prohibiting access to puberty blockers, hormone therapy and/or surgeries for trans minors as part of a wider effort to restrict trans rights.
Supporters of the legislation say the care has not been adequately studied, can have harmful long-term effects and that minors cannot actually consent to it. However, doctors who treat trans youth say puberty blockers and hormone therapy have been provided to minors who are not trans for decades to treat other conditions, such as precocious puberty. In addition, nearly all major medical associations in the United States support access to transition-related care for minors and oppose restrictions on it, with the American Medical Association calling government restrictions “a dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine.”
A study published earlier this year in JAMA Pediatrics found that less than 0.1% of adolescents in the U.S. with private insurance in the United States are trans and are prescribed puberty blockers or gender-affirming hormones. A 2024 study published by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that the rate of teens ages 15 to 17 undergoing gender-affirming surgery was 2.1 per 100,000.
The remaining states where care is legal — particularly California, Colorado, Oregon, Illinois, Washington, Connecticut and Pennsylvania — have seenan influx of out-of-state patients, with some parents of trans minors even relocating their families to those states to maintain care for their kids.
Parents of trans youths have seen those states — and hospitals such as the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which is home to one of the nation’s oldest gender clinics — as safe havens.
An emergency room nurse at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shows a lanyard decorated with pronoun pins and buttons during a protest against the closure of the hospital’s trans youth clinic on July 3.Jae C. Hong / AP
However, in January, the Trump administration began targeting providers of trans care, including an executive order that sought to bar federal funding from going to medical schools and hospitals that provide such care to people younger than 19. In March, a federal judge blocked that part of the order, and some hospitals resumed treatments.
But then, in April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo that said the Justice Department would investigate doctors who provide transition care to minors under existing laws, including laws against genital mutilation. In July, the DOJ sent subpoenas to more than 20 doctors and clinics that provide such care. A subpoena sent to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which was made public Monday as part of a legal filing attempting to block the investigations, requested the names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and parent/guardian information of all patients who were prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
The Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission have also taken action to restrict care, both for minors and adults.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles mentioned all of these actions and more in a June 12 letter to hospital staff detailing its decision to close the Center for Transyouth Health and Development, which has been running for three decades, effective July 22.
The letter, which a spokesperson for the hospital shared with NBC News, described an HHS review published in May “dismissing current evidence-based care protocols and standards of care while promoting alternative best practices for the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria.” The HHS review “included dozens of references to CHLA and the Center for Transyouth Health and Development,” the letter said.
“Taken together, the Attorney General memo, HHS review, and the recent solicitation of tips from the FBI to report hospitals and providers of [gender-affirming care] strongly signal this Administration’s intent to take swift and decisive action, both criminal and civil, against any entity it views as being in violation of the executive order,” this hospital’s leadership wrote. “These threats are no longer theoretical. The federal government has already cut off hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. academic and research institutions for noncompliance with executive orders, often with little to no warning.”
Earlier this month, more than a dozen states, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued the Trump administration to block investigations into doctors and hospitals who provide gender-affirming care to minors.
The complaint argued that the federal government was trying to institute a national ban on such care when Congress has not passed one, violating the 10th Amendment by trying to usurp the power of states that have not passed bans. It also argued that hospitals were being forced to either defy the federal threats or comply and violate state laws against discrimination in medical care.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement at the time that Americans support Trump’s efforts to stop “the despicable mutilation and chemical castration of children,” using inflammatory language to describe transition care.
“The President has the lawful authority to protect America’s vulnerable children through executive action, and the Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue,” Rogers said.
Protesters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2023.Jose A. Iglesias / Miami Herald via Getty Images file
Robin Maril, an assistant professor of constitutional law at Oregon’s Willamette University, said the Trump administration is attempting to restrict access to transition care through guidance issued by regulatory agencies. That guidance tells doctors and hospitals “exactly how the government is going to go after them,” Maril said.
Hospitals are weighing losing all federal funding, which could force them to close, Maril said, or standing up to the Trump administration.
“To stand up to the Trump administration at this point would result in kids losing care for all sorts of things,” Maril said.
‘That’s just not fair’
The climate created by the administration’s policies, the investigations and the legal battles have been surreal for Dr. Kade Goepferd, the chief education officer at Children’s Minnesota and a pediatrician in the hospital’s Gender Health Program, which has not ceased or paused trans care for minors.
Goepferd, who uses they/them pronouns, said their patients’ parents are scared, and the kids don’t understand why their friends can access any health care when needed, but they might not be able to access this specific type of care because they’re trans.
“They feel very singled out,” Goepferd said. “The teenagers feel a lot of hopelessness. The younger kids feel a lot of fear for what their future may or may not be like.”
Dr. Kade Goepferd.Sarah Wilmer for NBC News
Goepferd said they have several patients who have moved or plan to move out of the country due to the increasingly restrictive care landscape for trans youth, and the number of out-of-state patients they see has increased over the last few years. The clinic’s waitlist for a first appointment is about six months.
They said one of their greatest concerns “is that we are tying the ability of transgender young people to access care they need, and the ability of their parents to make medical decisions for them, to the general public’s ability to understand who they are and what their medical care is.”
“That’s just not fair,” they said. “We don’t do that with other areas of medicine. We rely on medical guidelines and expertise to make decisions. So we’re treating essential health care for transgender youth as exceptional in some way, and what I wish people knew more than anything is that it is not. I provide this type of health care the same way I provide any other type of health care.”
The waiting room at the Children’s Minnesota Specialty Center, where Dr. Kate Goepferd’s Gender Health Program is located.Sarah Wilmer for NBC News
As for the Florida mom, she said that as soon as her daughter could talk she would point to Daphne in the cartoon “Scooby Doo” and say, “I that girl.” A psychiatrist said the child was “persistent, insistent and consistent” in her gender for years, and they have supported her and spent at least $7,500 on travel to access care in other states.
But now, she said, it feels like they’re out of options, and she’ll be flying to Berlin with her daughter in September and leaving her three other children in the States with their dad.
“It was like a nice fantasy that I would live in Europe one day, but then it became this absolute necessity, and I have to leave my other kids, and I don’t even know how to explain how fearful I feel and how heartbreaking this is,” she said.
What began as a discussion about President Donald Trump’s unprecedented takeover of the Kennedy Center Honors unraveled into a live-television free-for-all on CNN, veering in minutes from arts programming to slavery, white supremacy, and transgender athletes.
On NewsNight, host Abby Phillip opened with the news that Trump had not only handpicked the 2025 honorees, boasting he was “98 percent involved,” but would also host the televised ceremony, a sharp break from decades of tradition in which presidents have sat in the balcony as spectators. “Usually when the honorees are announced, you don’t see the president doing a press conference at the Kennedy Center,” Phillip said. “It’s not a political thing. It’s a celebration of American art.”
U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a gay New YorkDemocrat, called the move “the opposite of the Oprah effect,” accusing Trump of “poisoning what is an iconic and historically bipartisan institution.” Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky went further, saying it was part of a larger cultural campaign: “He’s literally reviewing parts of American history… to make sure it comports with dear leader and what MAGA wants.” Earlier in the week, the Trump administration instructed the Smithsonian to conduct a review of its content and make “corrections” to exhibits that didn’t comply with Trump’s vision of American excellence.
That’s when Jillian Michaels, the lesbian fitness personality who wrote that she was not proud to be LGBTQ+ in a June Daily MailPride Monthop-ed that railed against “leather daddies, drag shows, and corporate stunts,” jumped in. “Can we address some of those things that are in there? Because have you looked at some of the things that are being reviewed?” she asked.
“Yes. Slavery,” Roginsky replied.
“He’s not whitewashing slavery,” Michaels shot back. “And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.”
Torres countered: “Slavery in America was white supremacy.”
“Less than 2 percent of white Americans owned slaves,” Michaels replied, adding that Americans were “the first race to try to end slavery.” Phillip pressed her on whether she was disputing that slavery in the United States was about race. “Every single thing is like, ‘white people bad,’ and that’s just not the truth,” Michaels insisted, citing a Cuban migration exhibit she claimed was framed that way.
Then, abruptly, Michaels pivoted to the Smithsonian’s Change Your Game exhibit, a family-friendly installation about sports innovation, to argue against transgender athletes in women’s sports. She dismissed the exhibit’s discussion of gender testing as “complex,” calling it “basic science… XX chromosome, XY chromosome.”
“Do you know that when you walk in the front door, the first thing that you see is the gay flag?” Michaels had complained earlier in the segment.
“First of all, we don’t have time to litigate all of this,” Phillip interjected.
“Of course we don’t,” Michaels replied, accusing Phillip of “trying to racialize” her comments.
“Just to be clear, you brought up race,” Phillip said. “This was a conversation about the arts, and you brought up slavery and the question of whether it was about race. The answer is yes. Slavery in the United States is about race.”
Axios media reporter Sara Fisher eventually steered the conversation back to the Kennedy Center, noting that while Trump’s honoree list wasn’t “the most MAGA ceremony ever,” his decision to host and his allies’ moves to rename the venue marked a new phase in politicizing an institution once considered above the partisan fray.
“Is that for yellow pride?” a man sneered at Seiya in the middle of Ptown’s tea dance, referring to a yellow bandanna he was wearing around his neck.
It wasn’t the first time Seiya, a 33-year-old gay Asian American, had experienced racism from other queer men. Years earlier at Rage, a now-closed gay club in West Hollywood, another white man asked him what he was doing there.
“It’s not Gameboi night,” the man said to him, referring to the Asian-themed weekly party the venue hosted.
Photo courtesy of Seiya.
“That was really the first time that I really felt some sort of divide,” Seiya told Uncloseted Media. “We’re already such a marginalized community, and then to just marginalize even further; it was just really disappointing.”
Seiya’s experience isn’t unique. A 2022 report from The Trevor Project found that more than half of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) LGBTQ youth reported discrimination based on their race and/or ethnicity in 2021. And another study from the Williams Institute found that nearly one in five AAPI LGBTQ adults do not feel safe in the U.S.
This discrimination is a silent epidemic, according to Gene Lim, a researcher at the Australian Research Center for Sex, Health and Society.
“There’s a lot of shame around experiencing sexual racism, on top of the fact that it’s an inherently distressing situation,” Lim told Uncloseted Media. “That congeals into a sense of isolation.”
Feelings of exclusion take a mental health toll: 40% of AAPI youth seriously considered suicide in the U.S. in 2021, and 16% attempted it.
Photo by Cody Kinsfather.
Seiya says he’s carried those instances of racism with him and that they’ve impacted his self-perception in queer spaces.
“[It gave] this sense of otherness and discomfort whenever I was in a predominantly white space. It’s still something I deal with to this day.”
Danny Maiuri, a 41-year-old queer Korean American man, says he’s conscious of his racial identity when he visits Fire Island, a popular gay vacation spot on Long Island, N.Y.
“I remember times just getting asked the really basic ‘Where are you from?’ And I just kind of explained, ‘I live in New York,’ and then you get the ‘But like, were you born here?’”
Sexual racism—or discrimination in romantic partner selection—is most common among men who have sex with men (MSM), according to Thomas Le, an assistant professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College.
“A lot of what Asian American men report in the U.S. is some ostracization because of the elevation of white men, and masculinity and muscularity being prized,” Le told Uncloseted Media.
Lim says this fixation on whiteness stems from racialized hierarchies in queer spaces, where Eurocentric features are often favored over Asian features.
“Asian MSM [must] navigate a sexual field where the hierarchy of desire is really racialized,” Lim told Uncloseted Media. “And they can feel disadvantaged in a way that is insurmountable.”
Nineteenth-century immigration laws and cultural norms in the U.S. excluded Asian American men from participating in male-dominant professions like mining and field work. Instead, they assumed roles typically associated with women.
This segregation fomented in the American mind an image of the Asian man as feminine and has translated into the racist stereotypes about body image and dating preferences of gay men.
Asian men are often assumed to be bottoms or twinks or to have small penis sizes because of this emasculated image. And a 2011 analysis on race-based partner preferences among MSM found that Asian men were preferred by 12% of participants, a dramatic drop off from preferences for white and Black men, preferred by 52% and 48% of participants, respectively.
Racist Stereotypes and the Media’s White Beauty Standard
In American media, Hollywood has reproduced caricatures of Asian people for years. Long Duk Dong, the Asian character in “Sixteen Candles,” was portrayed as sexually inept. Leslie Chow’s diction in “The Hangover” is heavily accented, and his nudity is the punchline of a joke with the implicationthat Asian men are sexually inferior.
While media representations have shifted away from overtly racist caricatures, and have even centered queer Asian male relationships like in Boys’ Love anime, the absence of Asian portrayals in the media and the abundance of white characters have shaped attraction among a generation of queer people.
Le says white, muscular men dominated popular media and defined what it meant to be attractive through the 1990s and 2000s.
“Representation is really important … it has this really understated effect on the erotic habitus for a lot of queer men,” says Lim, referring to the learned component of sexual desire. “A lot of queer Asian men do grow up implicitly measuring themselves against a Eurocentric standard.”
This experience was a reality for Filipino American Kalaya’an Mendoza in college.
Growing up in a majority non-white neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., Mendoza had never compared himself with white people. But at UC Santa Barbara, a school where AAPI people composed less than one-fifth of the undergraduate student body, Mendoza remembers attempting to fit in by adhering to white beauty standards.
“[I was] trying to be as American as possible and not to be seen as the other, not to be seen as a perpetual foreigner,” Mendoza, now 46, told Uncloseted Media. “No matter how much I tried and no matter how many times I bleached my hair, no matter how many blue contacts I bought—I would never be white.”
“I just remember feeling extremely depressed,” he says. “I almost dropped out.”
The pressure to assimilate to a white beauty standard is also ingrained in porn.
“Pornography is generally one kind of common avenue for young queer men to explore sexuality,” says Le. “Some develop racialized attractions based on that.”
White actors are far more frequently cast in porn than actors of color. Because of that, many queer men hold white people as the beauty standard.
This is what Mendoza discovered when he attempted to decolonize his dating preferences, which he describes as unlearning his racial biases shaped by colonialism. He says he questioned why he was so attracted to whiteness even though he grew up around people of color. “A lot of that was, quite frankly, because of the sexualized media or the porn.”
Seiya says he has experienced racism working in the porn industry.
“They just automatically assume that I am a bottom or submissive because I am Asian,” he says. “I just find it demoralizing and very limiting.”
Sex and Dating
When it comes to dating, queer Asian men often find it difficult to decipher if they are being seen for who they are or if they are being fetishized.
Dating apps compound these effects. The design of most platforms are such that users must make quick judgments based on minimal information on a user’s profile. Because of this, Lim says many users fall upon their prejudices.
As a way to receive more matches or chats, some Asian men attempt to fit into stereotypes that paint them as effeminate, such as the “lady boy” or the “femme boy.”
“Gay men do this all the time, they try to embody an archetype,” says Lim. “And an archetype is fertile ground for someone to project their own fantasies onto.”
Maiuri says he constantly questions whether his sexual interactions are shaped by his own desires or if he’s assuming a role based on preconceived notions.
He feels that many men assume that “all Asian men are bottoms and submissive,” and he constantly asks himself, “Am I fulfilling this role because this is what I actually enjoy? Or was this something that was just put on me and I’ve adapted to?”
Although gay culture remains white-centric, there are signs of change.
“A lot of queer Asian American men actually are creating their own communities,” says Le. “[They’re] really being intentional about finding a community with other queer men of color.”
Mendoza says that finding other queer people of color at college helped him to cultivate a positive self-image.
“That’s why, quite frankly, I feel like I’m alive today,” he says.
Maiuri says that while often criticized as a boogeyman of the mental health crisis, social media is actually having positive effects in facilitating connections between young men of similar experiences and slowly providing more examples of queer Asian men.
“The good part of it has been that connection and kind of finding identity and finding examples online for some folks to find ways to navigate [their] identity,” says Maiuri.
Seiya has come a long way from that weekend in Provincetown. He recently returned to the gay vacation hotspot for its fifth annual Frolic Weekend, a queer men of color takeover event.
“That was really special to recontextualize the space for myself,” Seiya says. “We deserve to take up space instead of shrinking ourselves.”
A couple of years ago, I wrote about Speaker Mike Johnson’s persistent fixation on gay sex. Sure, he loaths the LGBTQ+ community as a whole and abhors same-sex marriage, but the physical act itself really rubs Johnson the wrong way.
Pun intended.
Johnson seems unable to discuss queer people without conjuring up an image of what we might be doing in the bedroom. My conclusion then was simple, and that’s when a politician is this singularly focused on other people’s private, consensual sex lives, it says far more about them than about the people they’re condemning.
Now, it looks like Pete Hegseth is breathlessly itching to catch up to Johnson in the “how much can I talk about gay sex?” contest. There are underwear contests, measurement contests, and drag contests. But for Hegseth, Johnson, and other warped Christian conservatives, it’s all about who can outdo the other on condemning gay sex.
Hegseth, the waxed and tatted Defense Secretary “warrior” recently posted a video in which a preacher says that gay sex should be banned. The video featured another one of those “hell hath no fury like a pastor demonized” Doug Wilson, who is the co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).
According to the CREC’s “story,” they seek “to uphold traditional Reformed distinctives, resisting fundamentalist and modernist trends that dilute doctrinal purity and ecclesiastical structures.” What they mean, in a nutshell, is returning our society to the days of the repressed 19th century. What a bunch of forward-looking thinkers!
Sarcasm intended.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why would Hegseth, with all that’s going on in his world, wars, disclosing military secrets on Signal, and militarizing the streets of Washington, D.C. want to concern himself with gay sex?
Well, this isn’t the first time he’s bucked this bronco. It aligns perfectly with what Hegseth wrote in his book late last year, where he railed against the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the military, mocked trans service members, and insisted that women should not be in combat.
He claimed that diversity efforts and inclusive policies had weakened the armed forces and undermined their heterosexual “warrior culture.” In his telling and tome, the military is meant to be an all-male, all-cisgender, all-straight bastion of masculinity, a place where his idealized image of the warrior can reign unchallenged.
What’s he so afraid of? Is the sight of two men holding hands enough to send him reaching for a Bible and getting down on his knees? Or is it the thought of what they might be doing later making him ill?
Because to come out and say “gay sex should be banned” is not a broad, policy-based statement to be sure. He’s making a frantic leap into other people’s intimate lives, which makes you wonder who’s really doing the fantasizing here? After all, gay military and uniform porn is one of the most popular plot lines out there. Maybe Hegseth just saw something done by a subpar director.
This man is so obsessed with his own looks, his tattoos, his gym body, and his rugged, camera-ready image. Remember, he had a make-up studio installed in the Pentagon for himself.
His fixation on what other people do sexually is more than a little suspicious. It’s the same voyeuristic streak Johnson has, but wrapped in military fatigues, machismo, and his vaunted “warrior ethos.”
Finally, why does the top man at the Pentagon, with bottom-of-the-barrel leadership skills, who lacks versatility (he only has one title compared to others who have several), think he’s an expert of gay sex?
Because Hegseth is taking his cues from people like Doug Wilson, both longing for the days when our military rode around on horses, hurtling spears, and every man in the military was completely thought-to-be straight.
Hegseth appreciates that Wilson, the preacher, has painted LGBTQ+ people as predators and degenerates, preaching a gospel of exclusion that trades in fear and falsehood. Hegseth’s rhetoric fits neatly into that mold, moral outrage rooted in some strange personal preoccupation.
Which brings me to the real question. What makes a man so hateful toward men who have sex with men? Some studies have shown that intense homophobia among some straight men can be tied to insecurity about their own masculinity, fear of being perceived as feminine, or even unacknowledged same-sex attraction.
I don’t know where Hegseth lands on that spectrum.
Anyway, in authoritarian or hyper-religious environments like we are in today with Hegseth’s despot boss, Donald Trump, those feelings often get repressed and then projected outward as over-the-top anger toward queer people. In other words, the louder the condemnation, the deeper the personal conflict may run.
There was a guy I worked with years ago who made gay joke, after gay joke, after gay joke. I never told him about my sexuality, and bit my tongue. Then I saw him wasted one late night at a gay bar in NYC, and it all clicked!
This is why the Mike Johnson comparison is unavoidable. Both men wrap themselves in faith and patriotism, so much so, it just makes you want to doubt their sincerity.
If push came to shove, in a choice between outlawing gay sex or outlawing guns, it would be no contest. They’d argue that everybody should have guns, and no one should have gay sex. Things would be much better and safer if it were the other way around.
I can assure you, that in the end, Hegseth share of the ban-gay-sex video says far more about him than it does about any gay man. For a man desperate to prove his toughness, there’s nothing more revealing than how fragile he gets when faced with someone else’s sex life.
A judge in Florida has sided with authors and publishers in a lawsuit against the state’s book ban, determining that the law violates free speech protections.
Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. Middle District Court of Florida ruled Wednesday that “the removal of many of these books [is] unconstitutional,” noting that “many are classics, modern award winners, and tested on AP exams.”
“None of these books are obscene,” Mendoza wrote. “The restrictions placed on these books are thus unreasonable in light of the purpose of school libraries. And if so, the presence of these books in school libraries certainly does not materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”
The Florida state legislature passed HB 1069 in 2023, expanding the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill that prohibits discussion of LGBTQ+ identities fromkindergarten to high school. The bill also required that schools remove books that contain “sexual content” — a benchmark that was disproportionately applied to materials containing themes about race, gender, or sexuality.
Penguin Random House, PEN America, the Authors Guild, and parents in the Escambia County School District filed a lawsuit against the bill, asserting that it violated the First Amendment as well as the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They were joined by five authors whose books were removed from school libraries or challenged; Sarah Brannen (Uncle Bobby’s Wedding), George Johnson (All Boys Aren’t Blue), David Levithan(Two Boys Kissing), Kyle Lukoff (When Aidan Became a Brother and Too Bright to See), andAshley Hope Pérez(Out of Darkness).
Mendoza said in his ruling that the ban on material which “describes sexual conduct” is too broad, as the benchmark “does not evaluate the work to determine if it has any holistic value.” He also noted that “the statute does not specify what level of detail ‘describes sexual conduct,'” and could be applied to vague phrases such as “spent the night together” or “made love.” Mendoza’s reasoning was not far from reality, as schools in the state have used the law to censor Shakespeare and even the dictionary.
School libraries in Florida must now rely on the Miller Test to determine if a material qualifies as “obscene,” which was used before the passage of the law. The test, established in the 1973 Miller v. CaliforniaSupreme Court decision, defines obscenity as material that “appeal[s] to prurient interests as judged by the average person; depict[s] sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner; and lack[s] serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
“This victory affirms what we’ve always known—that literature has the power to expand worlds, foster empathy, and help young people understand themselves and their experiences,” Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, said in a statement. “Book bans don’t just censor words on a page; they silence authors’ lived experiences and deny students access to the stories that help them navigate an increasingly complex world.”
In fall 2025, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear three cases affecting LGBTQ rights, regarding the constitutionality of allowing states to ban transgender women and girls from participating in sports and the constitutionality of so-called “conversion therapy.” Oral arguments will likely be heard in the fall and winter, and opinions are expected by summer 2026.
Hecox v. Little challenges Idaho’s HB 500, the first state law in the country to outrightly ban transgender girls and women from participating in school sports. The Idaho law passed in 2020 and categorically bans girls and women who are transgender from participating in sports under any circumstances, and at all levels of competition. In August 2023, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted an injunction blocking the law, finding that it likely violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. A federal district court had previously also struck down the law.
At the center of the case is Lindsay Hecox, a college student who wanted to run track at Boise State University. As a result of the injunction, Lindsay has been able to participate in other sports including tryouts for club sports at her college and playing on the club soccer team. The lawsuit is also brought on behalf of Jane Doe, a senior at Boise High School who is cisgender and concerned about being subjected to the law’s invasive “sex verification” testing.
Hundreds of athletes, coaches, and businesses, as well as civil rights, legal, and medical experts all supported Lindsay by submitting friend-of-the-court briefs at the appellate court level. Lindsay is represented by the ACLU and the ACLU of Idaho, Legal Voice, and Cooley LLP.
West Virginia v. B.P.J. challenges West Virginia’s categorical ban on allowing transgender girls to participate in school sports. West Virginia’s ban, HB 3293, passed in 2021 and was signed by the governor despite his inability to name a single example of a transgender student participating in school sports in the state. The law was struck down in 2024 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which held that banning girls like the plaintiff, Becky, from playing sports violated Title IX; and that the district court should not have dismissed her equal protection claim.
Becky is starting high school and wanted to be able to participate in cross-country and track and field with her friends. As a result of a lower court injunction in the case, Becky was able to participate in middle school cross-country and track and field for the past three years. Becky and her mother are represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of West Virginia, Lambda Legal and Cooley LLP.
Reporters can find facts and data related to transgender youth and sports at GLAAD’s fact sheet here.
Anti-LGBTQ activists have falsely claimed for years that a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is a choice and changeable — but only for LGBTQ people. They often falsely claim that LGBTQ identities are not real, but rather an expression of mental illness or an emotional disorder that can be “cured” through psychological or religious intervention.
Conversion therapy practices are banned in 22 states and in dozens of municipalities for being discredited and harmful, causing negative impacts on youth including depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide. Such practices have been rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization for decades, and the United Nations has compared it to “torture.”
Additional Background – Status of Marriage at the Supreme Court
In late July, Kim Davis — a county clerk who made headlines decades ago for refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple — filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to review a lawsuit in which a same-sex couple was awarded emotional damages as a result of Davis’ refusal to follow the law and issue them a same-sex marriage license. As part of the petition, her attorneys included a request to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges,the 2015 Supreme Court decision that affirmed the freedom to marry for same-sex couples nationwide.
Kim Davis was an elected official who refused to follow the law and instructed her whole office not to follow the law. She has been married four times, divorced three times.
Most recently, Davis’s arguments were rejected for a third time by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. There is no reason to assume her petition has any significance compared to the thousands of other petitions filed. It is unlikely the Supreme Court would consider this case.
Delray Beach officials will change course and leave a Pride-themed intersection in place despite threats from Florida officials. The move comes weeks after the city and other Florida municipalities initially announced plans to remove the rainbow colors from the roadways.
The Florida municipality’s city manager, Terrence Moore, initially said the road décor would be sandblasted off after the Florida Department of Transportation issued guidance calling such Pride-themed infrastructure a safety concern. The state directive followed U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy publicly asserting rainbow crosswalks were “dangerous.”
But Delray Beach Commissioner Rob Long at the next meeting of the city board said such a removal of a landmark would leave a “legacy of cowardice and capitulation” in its place, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The roadway was painted to honor Pulse victims after the 2016 mass shooting just a few hours away.
“When do we stand our ground and when do we surrender without even a conversation?” Long said.
A majority of the City Commission agreed. The intersection, at least for now, will remain.
All this happened weeks after a man was arrested for defacing Delray Beach’s intersection, intentionally doing tire burnouts with his truck at the intersection.
Delray Beach isn’t the only city resisting Florida’s state-level direction.
Key West voted earlier this month to explore all legal avenues to preserve its own rainbow crosswalks at Duval and Petronia streets, according to Axios.
Meanwhile, Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach officials have so far ignored the state directive. The same goes for Orlando, where a rainbow crosswalk sits near the site of the Pulse shooting.
But in Boynton Beach and West Palm Beach, city officials have followed state direction to remove the road paintings.
Their most recent action is yet another example of the destructive policies that worsen LGBTQ+ health: President Trump signed anexecutive order instructing SAMHSA, the nation’s scientific agency administering behavioral health and substance use interventions, to defund harm reduction programs nationwide.
Harm reduction is a proven public health intervention that acknowledges that incremental steps toward healthy decision-making can save lives and prevent the spread of disease. Case in point: syringe access programs are an effective public health intervention for people who use drugs and who are not yet ready to quit.
By providing new syringes, harm reduction organizations prevent the spread of communicable blood-borne diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C. Harm reduction agencies also educate their clients about methods to prevent and reduce overdose as well. They distribute naloxone and provide training on its proper usage. They inform people of the drug consumption methods that are least likely to result in overdose. They provide care to people who are often forgotten about: people who actively use drugs, including those who are unsheltered or unhoused.
The Trump administration goes so far as to call for the forced institutionalization of homeless populations. Despite the constitutional concerns, this is not an effective public health strategy. It will worsen mental health and isolation. And the evidence is clear that the effectiveness of substance use treatment requires the person to want to quit. We can’t institutionalize our way out of this problem. We can address it by providing care, building trust, and helping people quit drugs when they are ready. And keeping them safe from HIV, Hepatitis C, and overdose until they are prepared to quit.
That’s harm reduction. That’s what Trump is defunding.
In the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published the first-ever federal Harm Reduction Strategy. It increased the federal investment in evidence-based harm reduction programs. This aligned with the National HIV/AIDS Strategy and efforts to respond to the opioid epidemic. President Trump’s executive order stated that harm reduction programs “only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.” This is a bold-faced lie.
The evidence is clear that harm reduction programs work as intended, preventing HIV, Hepatitis C, and overdose. Trump’s team just didn’t read any of it. There is no evidence that harm reduction programs increase drug usage or encourage non-drug users to start using.
While it’s reasonable to periodically reassess evidence-based programs to ensure that funded programs continue to be effective and aligned with current research, the people who should be deciding which programs to fund should be scientists at federal agencies that administer these grants, not political leaders and certainly not the President.
This is happening at the same time as the other components of the U.S. HIV prevention infrastructure are being systematically dismantled. The entire staff of the HHS Office of Infectious Disease and HIV Prevention was fired. The CDC / HRSA Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS was disbanded. Numerous grants in LGBTQ+ sexual health and HIV prevention have been cancelled.
LGBTQ+ Americans are disparately impacted by HIV and STIs. Our communities have increased rates of substance use compared to the majority population. So, harm reduction programs are of unique importance to the LGBTQ+ community because of these disparities. While harm reduction programs serve all people who need support equally, the existing health disparities in substance use mean that LGBTQ+ people are at increased risk for new cases of HIV and Hepatitis C, as well as overdose, as a result of Trump’s executive order.
Harm reduction works. Harm reduction saves lives and prevents the spread of disease. Harm reduction treats drug users with dignity and humanity. When people are ready to quit using, they have a trusted agency they can talk to for a referral for medically assisted treatment.
Defunding these programs will cost lives. We cannot afford for politically-driven decisions to undermine evidence-based healthcare that saves and improves LGBTQ+ health and well-being. President Trump is wrong about this and so much more. Preventing HIV and Hepatitis C and reducing mortality from drug overdose is actually a good thing.
Nepal has held its first Pride since President Donald Trump cut foreign aid funding. Hundreds of LGBTQ+ people and allies rallied in support of the queer community at Nepal’s Pride parade 2025.
During the annual Gai Jatra festival in the capital of Kathmandu, which honours relatives passed away throughout the year, the LGBTQ+ community and allies came together as part of Nepal Pride 2025 to advocate for queer rights.
Hundreds of people attended the event on Sunday (10 August), holding Pride, Trans Pride, Lesbian Pride and Asexual Pride flags, while signs proclaimed, “Pride for all intersectional queer identities”, “Transgender men are men”, and “Transgender women are women”. A large Progress Pride flag was also carried down the street by a group of people attending the event.
The country’s LGBTQ+ community has, in particular, been hit by Trump’s cuts to foreign aid, which saw over 80 per cent of USAID programs being cancelled as of March this year.
Members of the LGBTQ+ community participated in the Nepal Pride parade 2025. (Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Many help centres for Nepal’s LGBTQ+ community have remained closed since USAID was dismantled, leaving thousands without support, as per the Independent. The organisation partnered with local help centres to roll out HIV prevention and care and safe sex counselling.
Funds from USAID were said to be “vital” for the day-to-day operation of the centres and clinics, which helped distribute free condoms, sexual health screenings, and follow-up treatment for people living with HIV. The USAID office in Nepal is currently closed.
Cuts also affected LGBTQ+-inclusive programs in India and the UK.
LGBTQ+ people and supporters rallied for “Pride for all intersectional queer identities” at Nepal Pride parade 2025. (Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In 2023, Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage could be legally registered. Last year, a lesbian couple made history as the first sapphic pair to have their marriage recognised in Nepal.
Nepal is the second Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, following Taiwan, whose parliament passed a law to legalise equality in 2019.
