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‘Bury them in fruit jars.’ A gay mass murder and the cover-up that followed

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Flames shot through the crowded Up Stairs Lounge as bartender Buddy Rasmussen opened the front door to see who had been ringing the downstairs buzzer. Someone had lit the popular bar’s stairwell carpet on fire, and it burned its way up the wooden stairs into the bar, quickly igniting the lounge’s red wallpaper, curtains, and posters of Burt Reynolds naked on a bearskin rug and Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz wearing his seven gold medals, a star-spangled Speedo, and a smile. Some patrons saw the blaze and ran for the nearest exits or down the stairwell, emerging with their clothes on […]

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Florida penalizes transgender student for playing on girls volleyball team

Florida officials temporarily barred a transgender student from participating in any of her high school’s sports teams, saying the teenager violated state law by playing on the girls volleyball team. In a letter sent Tuesday to the unnamed student’s school, Monarch High School in Coconut Creek, officials from the Florida High School Athletic Association said the trans teenager was “declared ineligible to represent any member school” and therefore barred from competing on any school sports team for just under a year. Officials also placed the South Florida high school on probation for 11 months, fined it $16,500 and mandated that […]

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What It’s Like To Be a Pregnant Trans Man in America

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Three days after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Sam Guidogave birth to his first child. His doctors, unsure of what was still legal, didn’t prescribe misoprostol — a drug used in medication abortions — to help with contractions. That was another blow, another way in which Guido felt he wasn’t in control of his labor. Guido hadn’t wanted to give birth in a hospital at all — he was afraid to be there. As a transmasculine and nonbinary person, they have faced the same ignorance and discrimination in medical institutions that many trans people in the United States experience. But a home birth just wasn’t […]

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This bisexual Black anarchist escaped from prison twice in the name of radical revolution

On November 2, 1979, a group of three arrived at Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in Dannemore, New York sometime between one and four pm. Their IDs were checked at a nearby state school so they could visit an inmate in South Hall, a maximum security wing of the prison.  During the guard-sanctioned trip to South Hall, the three visitors took over the prison van transporting them to the unit. In a November 3, 1979 New York Times article, Captain Gordon Hector of the state police revealed, “They came in with guns at the guards’ heads. They got the drop on the guard inside […]

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Police Questioned a Prime Suspect in a Utah Gay Man’s Murder. Why Is the Case Still Cold?

Some cold cases linger for decades without any leads. But in one unique case out of Utah, a prime suspect was identified in the murder of 24 year-old Douglas Ray Coleman and all but admitted to the killing – but was never charged.  Coleman was an openly gay man who was shot dead less than a month after Anthony Adams, a black gay activist and member of the Salt Lake City Socialist Workers Party was found stabbed to death in his apartment. Friends and colleagues of Adams called his death an “assassination” and claimed he was killed for his political […]

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One of the world’s most iconic Asian nightclubs has been celebrating queerness for almost 3 decades

When I first started questioning my sexuality and identity, I didn’t feel butterflies. I didn’t feel excited or even the strong desire to understand more about these new feelings. I felt scared. Terrified even. I knew that even the first tendrils of these thoughts had the capability to unravel my entire life. And unravel it they did. My past world had revolved closely around my community and my family. When you grow up in a Pakistani Muslim household as I did – and strictly Muslim at that – there is often a great reverence and respect placed upon relatives and […]

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State Economies Suffer When Lawmakers Pass Anti-LGBTQ+, Anti-Abortion Laws: Study

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States that pass anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion laws may be undermining their economies, according to a new study from the University of Houston. Researchers from the university surveyed 1,061 people of varying backgrounds about whether these laws would affect their willingness to move to a given state. The survey was conducted after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, striking down the national right to abortion and allowing states to ban or severely restrict the procedure. Efforts to restrict LGBTQ+ rights were gathering steam then as well and have greatly ramped up this year. “The majority […]

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Hospital forces trans teens to de-transition after caving to right-wing political pressure

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At the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), a noxious combination of political ambition, billionaire privilege, and bureaucratic cowardice led the academic hospital to cut off gender-affirming care to minor patients, including patients younger than what the institution’s right-wing detractors had demanded. In September 2022, opponents of gender-affirming care in South Carolina latched onto a parenthetical included in a medical student’s graduate research at MUSC. The parenthetical comment described the youngest transgender patient to visit the hospital’s pediatric endocrinology clinic, just 4 years old, according to a report from ProPublica. Related: That fact morphed into fiction as far-right critics inaccurately claimed […]

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Queer men flocked to these secret 18th-century gay clubs to mingle, have sex, & mock straight people

Until the repeal of the Buggery Act in 1861, gay sex was a capital offense in England, forcing queer people out of public life. However, even during the extremely hostile environment before the repeal, ‘Molly Houses’, often coffeehouses, pubs or taverns, were created where queer people could meet and socialize. Named after the slang term molly, which was usually used to refer to effeminate, homosexual men, Molly Houses quickly became the go-to meeting place for queer men in 18th-century England. In court records from a buggery trial in 1724, a policeman named Joseph Sellers who visited a Molly House reported seeing “a […]

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Transphobic Republican Debate Condemned as ‘Failure of Leadership and of Journalism’ by GLAAD

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Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate was bad politics and bad journalism, says GLAAD. “The debate did not include any substantive questions that address the safety and freedom of LGBTQ Americans and instead devolved into a competition between candidates — and between candidates and one moderator — as to who could prove the most transphobic,” says a GLAAD analysis. The debate, held at the University of Alabama and televised by NewsNation, featured Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. It was moderated by Megyn Kelly and Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation and Eliana Johnson, […]

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