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Poland: Veto Bill Targeting Sex Ed

President Andrzej Duda of Poland should veto a regressive and discriminatory bill that threatens sex education, including about sexual orientation and gender identity, Human Rights Watch said today. The proposed legislation is a revised version of a bill including similar provisions that Duda vetoed earlier this year, calling for unity at a time of crisis due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Duda should swiftly veto this harmful new bill,” said Kyle Knight, senior LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Accurate and inclusive age-appropriate sex education is a crucial element of the rights to health and education and is critical to promoting healthy relationships and reducing […]

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Same-sex couples have less stressful marriages, according to science

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Same-sex married couples handle stress better than different-sex spouses do, according to a new study. The study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships by researchers at the University of Texas Austin, found that while stress is common in all kinds of marriages, same-sex couples are able to deal with it better together. By analysing survey responses of 419 couples on dyadic coping – coping as a couple – in both same-sex and different-sex marriages, researchers revealed that same-sex spouses were able to be more positive and collaborative in handling stress compared to their counterparts. Same-sex married couples handle stress […]

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Keeping hope alive as a long-term survivor

If you were diagnosed with HIV in the first fifteen years of the AIDS pandemic, your doctor might as well have handed you the diagnosis with one hand and with the other a death certificate, just waiting for the appropriate date to be filled in. Having HIV was an almost certain death sentence. Those of us who were diagnosed as HIV-positive in those years were told to “get your affairs in order,” meaning, “prepare to die.” Many of us did exactly that: we quit work, lived on SSDI payments, settled debts if we could, alerted our friends, and learned to […]

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LGBTQ+ Liberal Democrats quitting over party’s controversial definition of transphobia

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LGBTQ+ Liberal Democrats are quitting the party after senior officials revised a transphobia statement to protect “gender critical” views. There was outcry among LGBTQ+ Liberal Democrats and allies when the party’s revised “formal definition” of transphobia leaked online. Days later, the party formally published its new statement during Trans Awareness Week. On their website, the Liberal Democrats say the definition was revised in light of “recent legal cases” which have brought “greater clarity to the interpretation of the law in this area”. The new definition says the party rejects “all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, ethnicity, caste, heritage, class, religion or belief, age, […]

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The infuriating experience of PrEP discrimination

Did you know that you could be discriminated against by insurance companies for taking PrEP?  I didn’t.  Recently, I have been searching for long-term disability insurance options while living in California. Long-term disability insurance could offer some peace of mind if some tragic, unforeseeable event left me unable to work. I chatted with an insurance broker, who scanned providers nationwide, and reported back to me that because I took PrEP daily, most insurers wouldn’t allow me to participate in their program. Drugs prescribed for PrEP such as Truvada, Descovy, and Apretude are on a list of “unaccepted” medications. I received what […]

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Can Meditation Help Heal Queer Communities of Color?

Many of us have been cut from our usual networks of care, affection, pleasure and exchange during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of queer life, this seems especially palpable: So much of how we engage with each other centers around community, contact, and proximity, conditions which now might evoke potential danger and anxiety, risk even. One of the many transformations undergone in the pandemic, then, relates to the amount of time we’ve been forced to spend in isolation, barred from care and kin. I, like others, found myself yearning anxiously for the outside world. And yet, in those same […]

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Lesbian refugee on fleeing Zimbabwe, brave way she found acceptance and joy of finally being out

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Developing your first crush as a teenager should be an exciting experience, but for Beverly, it was terrifying. The problem was that the person she harboured feelings for was a girl. Growing up in Zimbabwe, Beverly knew same-sex relationships were not accepted. Like so many before her, Beverly tried to convince herself that it was just a phase, but a couple of relationships with men between the ages of 19 and 21 left her with no doubt that she was a lesbian. That realisation was a painful one for Beverly. Homosexuality is criminalised in Zimbabwe, and public attitudes to queer people are unkind. She […]

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Fired Transgender Twitter Employee Speaks Out About Content Moderation

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At Twitter, Melissa Ingle worked on civic integrity and political misinformation as a senior data scientist. Before the U.S. and Brazil elections, she wrote algorithms to moderate harmful content on Twitter. She was one of the 4,400 contract staff who was denied access to Twitter’s internal systems last month because of Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform and then fired. She tells The Advocate that her job involved a lot of data analysis.  “I would help to write the machine learning algorithms and monitor any kind of report on these algorithms that that scroll through Twitter for tweets that violated our […]

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Bar targeted with drive-by shooting after conservatives rage about drag & queer bingo events

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A Seattle-area pub was hit by gunfire yesterday, days before a scheduled drag queen story hour and bingo night. The Brewmaster’s Taproom in Renton, Washington, just south of Seattle, was hit a single gunshot to their front window in a drive-by shooting around noon on Wednesday. The pub’s monthly Drag Queen Storytime and Rainbow Bingo events will go on as planned on Saturday. Brewmaster’s owner Marley Rall told LGBTQ Nation she was working at home when she got a text from an employee at the coffee stand next door to the pub. “They just texted me and said, ‘Hey, I just watched […]

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Brian Sims Takes Gig With LGBTQ Public Policy Group

The Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports: As the first out, gay member of the state Legislature, Democrat Brian Sims represented Philadelphia’s 182nd District from 2012-2022. During the last election cycle, he ran an unsuccessful primary campaign for lieutenant governor, taking second place in the contest. Sims announced last week that he’s taking on the newly-created position of managing director of public policy & government Affairs for Out Leadership, a 98-member business and nonprofit organization urging state-level conversations on LGBTQ+ issues and public policy. His goal is to connect the dots of lobbying and policy in a way that members will be prepared for discussions […]

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