Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has appeared at least four times on the Reformation Red Pill podcast, a far-right podcast hosted by Joshua Haymes, an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist who was also a former pastor at the church that Hegseth attends, The Guardian reported.
The publication noted that Haymes wants to execute adulterers and people who have abortions, that he seemingly called for the deaths of LGBTQ+ Pride marchers, and also considers liberalism a greater threat to the nation than neo-Nazism.
Haymes is aligned with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a Christian Nationalist denomination that believes the United States should be subject to biblical law, and is both a member and former pastoral intern of the Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship church in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, where Hegseth and his family are members.
On August 5, Haymes posted a statement on X, which said, “I used to say homosexuality is no worse than other sins. All sin separates us from God after all! I was wrong. Sexual sin is uniquely evil. Sodomy is an abomination to God, along with crossdressing… It’s important for Christians to say so.”
While Haymes’ post included a Bible verse calling cross-dressing an “abomination,” Biblical laws also require the death penalty for anyone who practices fortune telling, curses their mother or father, accidentally kills someone else’s animal, or commits blasphemy. Other Old Testament laws demand death for anyone who charges interest on loans or works on Saturdays.
Most contemporary Christians don’t follow these ancient Biblical laws and say that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ made them obsolete. However, conservative Christians tend to cite anti-LGBTQ+ Bible verses as proof that God shares their hatred of LGBTQ+ people while ignoring Bible verses against other “sins”, like eating shellfish and wearing clothing made of two different fabrics.
On August 13, Haymes posted an image praising Italy for banning lesbian couples from becoming parents, writing, “By the grace of God, we will see this done in these United States.”
In October 2024, Haymes wrote on X, “Mutilating children, Or being an accomplice to mutilating children should be a capital offense. Jesus recommends execution by drowning.”
The post included an image of a man being drowned in the ocean with a large millstone tied to his neck. The image refers to a New Testament Bible verse that says those who cause children to stumble or sin would be better off being drowned in the sea with a large millstone hung around their neck.
In a June 28 post, Haymes posted footage of marchers in the Nashville, Tennessee Pride Parade and wrote, “We’re short on millstones at the Nashville Pride parade. This is sick. This is child abuse.”
When asked about his post, Haymes told the aforementioned publication, “I do not advocate for violence against Pride marchers. I do not advocate for violence of any kind. I do not believe that anyone should be drowning anyone in this scenario… My role is simply to give that warning. Pride marchers who are sexualizing children are in for a very, very harsh judgment when they stand before their maker.”
When asked for a comment about Haymes, a Pentagon spokesperson pointed to a statement declaring that “[Hegseth] is a proud member of a church that is affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson. He is a very proud Christian and has those traditional Christian viewpoints.”
Earlier this month, Hegseth reposted a video in which Wilson said he’d like laws against homosexuality to be reinstated in all 50 states.
Conservatives are threatening boycotts of Cracker Barrel after the company swapped its rustic logo for a cleaner design, accusing the chain of betraying its “middle-American values.” But LGBTQ+ historians say the uproar ignores a deeper irony: Just three decades ago, the Tennessee-founded restaurant was notorious for firing queer employees and became the target of one of the country’s longest-running equality battles.
The chain, famous for its biscuits, rocking chairs, and Southern nostalgia, introduced a new logo last week, retiring the mustached man leaning against a barrel in favor of a simplified yellow-outlined wordmark. The update was part of a $700 million rebrand meant to freshen stores and attract younger diners. Instead, it triggered a stock dip and a wave of backlash from conservatives who claim the company has abandoned its roots.
Far-right activist Robby Starbuck, who has had success targeting brands he deems too “woke” by calling for boycotts, described the redesign as proof of cultural betrayal. Over the weekend, Starbuck said on his web series that Cracker Barrel had shifted from “old American nostalgia to cold, dead, lifeless, and modern.” He mocked the change, adding that a friend asked what remained after removing “the cracker and the barrel,” and he answered, “nothingness, the same nothingness that the left wants you to stomach in every other facet of your life.” Starbuck then argued that Cracker Barrel was “infested with left-wing activists who are more interested in safe spaces, pronouns, and virtue signaling than they are in their customers.”
He pointed to the company’s rainbow-colored rocking chairs, its sponsorship of Nashville Pride and River City Pride in Evansville, Indiana, and its engagement with the Human Rights Campaign and Out & Equal as evidence of what he calls a betrayal of the brand’s so-called middle-American values. He concluded, “A conservative can’t give their money to Cracker Barrel. A Christian cannot give their money to Cracker Barrel, and so we won’t.”
A forgotten past
For many LGBTQ+ people, the outrage is heavy with irony. In January 1991, Cracker Barrel adopted a written policy stating that employees “whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values” would be terminated. At least 11 workers lost their jobs, including Georgia cook Cheryl Summerville, who was handed a dismissal slip that read, “The employee is being terminated for being gay.”
Summerville’s firing made national news, landing her on Oprah and 20/20 and turning her into a reluctant face of the fight for workplace equality. Protests quickly followed, and in August 1991, about 150 demonstrators occupied nearly every table at Cracker Barrel’s flagship location in Lebanon, Tennessee, effectively shutting down Sunday brunch. Activists also took the fight to Wall Street.
But the movement soon expanded beyond protests. That December, Carl R. Owens, a member of Queer Nation Atlanta, published a letter in Southern Voiceunder the headline “Buy Cracker Barrel.” He noted that the company had fired “at least 17 people on the basis of their sexual orientation” and praised Queer Nation activists who had “formed picket lines, experienced arrest, taunts and threats of physical violence.” Owens urged individual lesbians and gays across the United States to “purchase a (one) share of Cracker Barrel Inc. stock.”
The goal, Owens wrote, was “to have thousands, hundreds of thousands of single share owners of Cracker Barrel stock“ — adding, “This will create some serious problems for the company.“ He argued that a nationwide “Buy One” campaign would send “a strong message that gays and lesbians are not going to tolerate continued discrimination,” calling it “a remarkable empowerment for our community” and “a vivid example of our presence and power.” He also suggested that once the campaign succeeded, participants could donate their shares to groups such as the Lambda Legal Defense Fund.
The proposal, though ambitious for the pre-Internet era, caught on. Along the way, it gained unexpected allies like the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic order that managed hospital endowments.And by 1993, Cracker Barrel’s shareholder base had more than doubled.
After a decade of shareholder battles, Cracker Barrel’s board amended its nondiscrimination policy in 2002 to include sexual orientation.
Amanda W. Timpson and Yesterqueers
That history has reemerged thanks to Amanda W. Timpson, a public historian and the creator of the viral project “Yesterqueers.” In a video that circulated widely on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube after Timpson posted it on Saturday, she explained that “Cracker Barrel’s decade-long journey from blatant homophobia to being the ‘front porch of Pride’ was driven by queer activists using brunch and the stock market as their weapons.”
In a Monday interview with The Advocate, Timpson said she had first researched the Cracker Barrel controversy years ago and returned to it because it connected current headlines with overlooked queer history. “One of the things that’s happening right now is people are feeling hopeless and beaten down, and the problems feel so big — especially for younger queer people who do not have the in-person community that a lot of us had growing up,” she said. ”So I think the thing that was so engaging about this video is that it was a very long fight, and it was a very unconventional fight.”
She pointed to Owens’s shareholder strategy as precisely the kind of creative activism people find compelling. “It was this one guy who looked at the problem and was, like, I think there’s another way to do this,” she said. “And one of the things I learned the first time I was researching this video is that there are a lot of funds, especially retirement and pension funds, that use their investing as a way to change the world. So the fact that the New York City ERS and the Sisters of Mercy were the first two to come on board is actually not all that surprising.”
Timpson emphasized that the fight also exposed how few protections queer workers had at the time. “Cheryl Summerville didn’t know it was legal for her to be fired for being gay until she was fired for being gay,” Timpson said. “She just assumed that was not legal — which is a reasonable assumption — but it was totally legal everywhere except Wisconsin. And we only recently got those federal protections in 2020 with [the U.S. Supreme Court case] Bostock.”
In response to some commenters accusing her of being a “Cracker Barrel apologist,” Timpson pushed back. “They’re still a mostly terrible company. They never crossed 80 on the HRC rating, and then they dropped out of being rated,” she said before turning back to why the story is still a compelling one. “But a bunch of queer activists worked together with allied activists, and they did it for a decade, and then they saw real, tangible change.”
Manufactured outrage
Regarding Starbuck’s comments on the company’s recent move, Timpson said the far-right commentator is using a familiar playbook. “I sure do wish he’d use his powers for good,” she said. “Unfortunately, he has tapped into something that works really well. He basically followed the [Focus on the Family founder James] Dobson and [televangelist Jerry] Falwell models of ‘let’s get people really riled up so that they are operating from a place of emotion and not a place of logic and reason.’ He is dangerous. He causes demonstrable, measurable harm with the things that he does.”
For Timpson, the antidote is education. “My goal with Yesterqueers is to celebrate the broadest possible expanse of queer history and to bring queer history out of the shadows,” she said. “History is humanity. You cannot be a human successfully without a sense of connection to whatever your history is.”
The Human Rights Campaign, which Starbuck repeatedly attacked in his video, dismissed the controversy. Eric Bloem, the HRC’s vice president of workplace equality, through a spokesperson, told The Advocate, “Like most things Robby Starbuck is concerned about, this is a manufactured non-issue.”
In the United States, June has long been recognized asPride Month — a time for LGBTQ individuals and allies to celebrate identity, progress, and resilience. Historically, this month has also been a time for partners in government and the private sector to voice their support for our community, not just with words but with action.
After the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality in 2015 with theObergefell v. Hodges decision, corporate sponsors rushed to align with the outcome. And, with them, visibility, funding, and the power of mainstream recognition for hundreds of Pride celebrations across America. But lately, that momentum has stalled, and what’s replacing it is deeply troubling.
In 2024, many corporations cited “budget constraints” as their primary reason for scaling back theirPride sponsorships. But this year, the reasons are unmistakable. The current administration’s open hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion has created a chilling effect. Support for LGBTQ+ communities is being withdrawn, not because companies can’t afford to support us financially, but because they’re afraid to.
While many allies continue to show solidarity through actions like marching, volunteering, or attending Pride events, the previous rapid rise and now sudden fall of tangible financial support, such as sponsorships and corporate donations, is most revealing.DEI policies have become a lightning rod for political controversy, prompting large corporations to retreat from public support to avoid being targeted. These sponsors are not unaware of the optics. They’re choosing to step back because standing beside us comes with political consequences in 2025.
This drawback from corporate sponsors of as much as$200,000 to $350,000 per event sends a dangerous message to corporate America: support for the LGBTQ+ community is secondary to external political pressure.
This phenomenon raises a problematic question for LGBTQ Americans: How sincere was the corporate support, whether intangible or tangible, in the first place?
And many of us are asking this question.
How sincere was the rainbow logo on your company’s social media pages? How earnest was the big donation to our festival after the 2020 election? Did these companies ever care about us, or were their pre-2025 actions just performative virtue signaling? To be clear, performative allyship is not a new concept. But we wonder: was it all just “rainbow capitalism?”
Support and allyship for our community should not be confined to one month – that is what makes people question its authenticity. Sure, anyone can produce a feel-good video about how their company supports LGBTQ staff. But if it all stops on July 1, it does nothing for LGBTQ individuals.
And we aren’t blind to it. Pew Research Center reported that68% of LGBTQ adults think corporate promotion of Pride is just as they believe it is good for business. We know the difference between performative allyship and real, courageous support. Real allyship doesn’t disappear under pressure. It doesn’t end when the month does. It shows up 365 days a year, especially when it’s hardest. We know how to ask the hard questions: What backs this up? How does this support go beyond Pride Month? How can organizations show their support during the other eleven months of the year?
The lack of sponsorship and support during this year’s Pride answers these questions. It shows that too many corporations never truly cared about the LGBTQ community but chased public sentiment when it was “in style” to support us.
As a festival organizer and LGBTQ executive, I’ve felt firsthand how these retreats sting, especially for our Trans siblings, who the current administration has relentlessly targeted. We’re not dismissing the value of past support; many Pride events genuinely could not have happened without it. But when that support evaporates in the face of political backlash, it’s hard not to wonder if it was ever genuine to begin with.
This moment is a loyalty test. Who will stand with us now, not just when it’s popular, but when it’s hard? Who will invest in our future, even when it’s under attack?
Allyship doesn’t need to come in the form of a float or a flag. But it does need to be consistent. It needs to be visible in boardrooms, in hiring practices, in advocacy, and in year-round support of the grassroots organizations doing the work on the ground. If you genuinely care about the LGBTQ community, help us access the spaces historically off-limits to us and show your support for the companies that celebrate our lived experience.
The implications of corporate withdrawal go beyond the immediate loss of funds. Paired with a recentSupreme Court decision weakening protections for transgender individuals, it signals that political agendas are again taking precedence over the fundamental rights and dignity of vulnerable people. Pride was never just a party; it has always been a protest. And while we still celebrate, we are once again reminded that our joy is a form of resistance.
Rather than joining in celebration, our community is once again forced to rise above political hostility and cultural backlash. We will continue to rebuild, advocate, and celebrate ourselves in ways that reflect our worth — not only in June, but all year long. True allyship doesn’t retreat; it shows up when it’s needed most.
Illinois Pride Connect will provide resources for health care, education, immigration, family services, elder services, and more, Pritzker said, both informing individuals of their rights and advocating for them.
The organization will also host a hotline that can assist callers with legal issues, including but not limited to access to health care such as gender-affirming care, discrimination or harassment, public benefits like Medicaid or SNAP, identity documents, and housing or safety concerns.
The website states: “If you’re an LGBTQIA+ individual (or a concerned family member or friend), and you’re facing legal issues that impact your health, safety, or access to care, we’re here to help. The IL Pride Connect Legal Hotline offers free, confidential legal advice and referrals across Illinois.”
The hotline will be available at 855-805-9200 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. GMT Monday through Thursday, offering services in both English and Spanish. It launches August 25.
“Together, we are fighting ignorance with information,” Pritzker continued. “We’re fighting cruelty with compassion.”
Roughly 2.8 million Americans who are 13 or older identify as transgender, according to a new study.
The figure represents 1% of the U.S. population in that age group, according to the report published by the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, which has been estimating the transgender population size since 2011.
According to the study’s findings, transgender individuals tend to be younger than the overall U.S. population.
More than 75% of transgender people ages 13 and older are under 35, compared with 34% of the entire U.S. population in the same age group.
Jody Herman, the report’s lead author and a senior scholar of public policy at the Williams Institute, said this trend of younger generations being more likely to identify as transgender is expected to continue.
“Youth and young adults are more likely to identify as transgender due to a variety of factors, including a greater willingness among younger individuals to disclose that they identify as transgender on surveys,” Herman said in a news release.
Improvements in data collection for youth have helped provide more accurate estimates of youth who identify as transgender, according to study co-author Andrew R. Flores, a distinguished visiting scholar at the Williams Institute and an assistant professor of government at American University.
“Federal datasets that include questions about sexual orientation and gender identity have provided critical information to researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and the public,” Flores said in the news release.
The number of adults who identify as transgender has remained “fairly consistent” over time, according to the study.
The breakdown of adults who identify as transgender is almost an even split between transgender men, transgender women and nonbinary people — coming in at 34.2%, 32.7% and 33.1%, respectively.
The study also noted that the race and ethnicity distribution of transgender individuals “appears similar to that of the U.S. population.”
At the state level, Minnesota was estimated to have the highest percentage of transgender adults, making up 1.2% of the population of people ages 18 or older, while Hawaii is reported to have the highest percentage of transgender youths, comprising 3.6% of the population in the 13 to 17 age group.
Researchers used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-administered public health surveys called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the study said.
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.
