The Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale has been collecting since 1973. It holds roughly 30,000 volumes, including close to 1,000 rare books, plus 2,700 linear feet of archival material that adds up to more than six million pieces of paper. Its collection runs from the Stonewall uprising through 1980s AIDS activism to the court fights happening right now.

All of it sits in a building that opened before the Korean War.

Museum leadership says it is raising $40 million to move. That figure comes from the museum itself, and I could not find a public campaign document or filing that confirms it. What is confirmed, in detail and from multiple sources, is the financial squeeze that produced it.

Fort Lauderdale’s Stonewall Museum Lost Every Federal and State Grant It Had

“In federal and state funds, we are down 100%,” president and CEO Robert Kesten told WLRN in October 2025.

The itemized version is worse than the headline number suggests, because the grants were small and steady. That is exactly what a working archive runs on. According to the museum’s accounting of its losses:

• National Endowment for the Humanities: $10,000 to $25,000 a year

• U.S. Department of Education: $10,000 to $25,000 a year

• Florida Division of Arts and Culture: $50,000

• Florida Humanities, an NEH state affiliate: $25,000 to $50,000 a year

Roughly $100,000 in corporate sponsorship went with it. The museum’s total operating budget is about $1 million. Three staff positions sit unfilled.

The corporate retreat showed up first at the gala. Sponsors dropped from between six and ten in previous years to a single sponsor, Kesten told Axios in February 2025. About a quarter of the seats went unsold. “This is stretching into places that we really have not seen before,” he said. “Our future is threatened now.”

The museum also canceled its $475 Visit Florida membership after the state tourism agency deleted the section of its site aimed at LGBTQ+ travelers. Visit Florida refunded the money. Small dollars, loud signal.

What $40 Million Buys: Climate Control, Shelf Space and a Building Younger Than the Collection

The physical problem is not abstract. The museum occupies a 77-year-old building with inadequate climate control, and Kesten has said the operation is “10,000-plus feet too small”.

Paper, photographs, textiles and film all degrade faster in unstable heat and humidity. South Florida supplies both. Off-site storage units solve the space problem and make the preservation problem worse, because commercial storage is not built for archival material.

There is a working cost too. Pulling together a single exhibition can mean hunting through multiple warehouses for pieces that should sit on one shelf.

Kesten has said the museum needs roughly $1.5 million a year to run at 90% capacity. It has about $1 million.

How a $25,000 NEH Matching Grant for a Gay Revolutionary War General Got Approved

Here is the part that complicates the story.

In April 2026, the same National Endowment for the Humanities that had stopped funding the museum awarded it a $25,000 matching grant. The money supported “Von Steuben: Architect of American Independence,” which ran April 17 through May 15 at the Fort Lauderdale campus. The museum plans to tour it.

Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben landed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Dec. 1, 1777. He was broke, spoke no English, and had left Prussia under a cloud of accusations about his relationships with men. George Washington made him inspector general. He drilled the Continental Army at Valley Forge and wrote the manual it trained on. Historians point to his long relationship with his aide-de-camp Benjamin Walker as evidence he was gay.

The museum got in through the door marked America 250. “OK, they’re telling us that they’re not interested, but there is Baron von Steuben,” Kesten told the Miami Herald.

One narrow award for a semiquincentennial program is not a reversal of policy. It is a $25,000 match against a six-figure hole. But it does show something useful: queer history is fundable when it is framed as American history, because it is American history.

Subscribe now

Trump’s FY27 Budget Would Zero Out IMLS and Cut the NEH to $39 Million

Fort Lauderdale is not an isolated case, and the pattern is documented.

On March 14, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14238, directing the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. On April 1, 2025, IMLS terminated a $250,000 grant to the Ohio History Connection for ten historical markers commemorating LGBTQ+ sites and figures.

The White House FY27 budget request, released April 3, 2026, would eliminate IMLS entirely, cut the National Endowment for the Arts from $208 million to $29 million, and cut the NEH from $192 million to $39 million.

That is a proposal, not law. Congress has not adopted it, and for FY26 lawmakers actually passed a $1.4 million increase for federal library programs. Appropriations are still moving.

The erasure has been more literal elsewhere. On Feb. 14, 2025, the National Park Service stripped “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument website and replaced “LGBTQ+” with “LGB.” In February 2026, the Park Service removed the Pride flag from the monument. Lambda Legal and the Washington Litigation Group sued on behalf of the Gilbert Baker Foundation, Village Preservation, and Equality New York. On April 13, 2026, the administration settled and agreed to restore the flag permanently within seven days.

Note who got cut first, both times. Trans history was the opening target at the federal monument named for a riot trans women helped start.

That is the argument for the archive in Fort Lauderdale. Its collection focuses on the American Southeast from 1950 forward, which means it holds regional queer material that no federal institution duplicates. Small-city Florida newsletters. Bar ephemera. AIDS-era organizing records from a state that spent that decade legislating against the people making them. If the federal record thins, private archives are the record.

DeSantis Vetoed $3 Million More in Florida Arts Grants in the 2026-27 Budget

The state pressure is separate and stacked on top.

Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed $32 million in arts and culture grants in June 2024, zeroing out the program that had funded organizations like Stonewall.

In 2025, House Bill 1011 and Senate Bill 1524 proposed restoring grants with conditions attached. The governor would appoint nine of 15 council members instead of seven. The secretary of state would gain power to review and edit the list of recipients. The minimum qualifying score would jump from 80 to 95, a change that would have cut previously funded groups including Arts Garage and the Gay Men’s Chorus. The phrase “appropriate for all age groups” appeared five times. I was not able to confirm the exact language of the final enacted version, so treat those specifics as proposed, not settled law.

On June 30, 2026, DeSantis signed the 2026-27 budget with $20 million in programming support for 121 organizations. He vetoed $3.06 million, including $3 million for Culture Builds Florida grants. Another $7.5 million sits undistributed, waiting on a secondary list from the Florida Council on Arts and Culture.

Our Fund Foundation and a New Women’s Fund Are Replacing the Museum’s Lost Grants

The replacement money is local, private and slower.

In October 2025, the Our Fund Foundation gave the museum $40,000 for programming and operating costs, part of $370,000 distributed across 19 LGBTQ+ organizations in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

The Stonewall National Women’s Fund launched to court affluent women donors directly. F. Kendall Sharp chairs it, with writer Rita Mae Brown as honorary chair. Roughly 40 members commit $1,000 a year for three years. The March 2025 gala cleared more than $300,000.

Sharp has said many supporters were discouraged by the political landscape and wanted to get involved but did not know how.

“The sharing of history, the sharing of traditions, the sharing of culture is what keeps us alive” as a community, Kesten has said.

Florida’s Undistributed $7.5 Million and the Stonewall Museum’s Unfunded Site Search

Three things will tell you where this lands.

Whether the museum names a site. The search is ongoing and unfunded, and a $40 million campaign without an address is a wish.

Whether Florida distributes the remaining $7.5 million, and to whom. That list is a direct readout on which organizations the state considers fundable.

Whether Congress adopts the FY27 request. IMLS elimination and a 79% NEH cut would end small operating grants for community archives nationwide, not just this one.

How to Donate Materials or Money to the Stonewall National Museum

If you have a shoebox of queer South Florida history in a closet, the archive wants it more than it wants your money, and it is the harder thing to replace. Contact the museum at Inquiry@Stonewall-Museum.org or 954.763.8565. If you want to give financially, stonewall-museum.org takes donations directly. And subscribe to The Queer Agenda. We follow these stories past the news cycle.

That protection is gone.

On Tuesday, the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 8 to 5 to vacate the injunction entirely. The law is enforceable statewide right now, while the underlying lawsuit continues in district court.

If you run an all-ages venue in Florida, book drag performers, or organize a Pride event, your legal exposure changed on Tuesday afternoon. Here is what the law actually says, what it does not say, and what the ruling leaves unsettled.

What Florida’s Protection of Children Act Actually Bans, and What It Doesn’t

The word “drag” appears nowhere in the statute.

Florida Statute 827.11 makes it a first-degree misdemeanor to “knowingly admit a child to an adult live performance.” An adult live performance means a show depicting nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, specific sexual activities, lewd conduct, or “the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts.”

Three conditions must all be met. The performance must predominantly appeal to “a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest.” It must be patently offensive to prevailing adult community standards “for the age of the child present.” And it must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, again “for the age of the child present.”

That last phrase is doing enormous work, and it is the crux of the whole fight.

The statute also strips away the defenses you would expect. Under subsection (2), you cannot argue you did not know the child’s age. You cannot argue the child lied about their age. You cannot argue a parent consented.

A parent who brings their own kid does not violate the law. The venue that lets them in might.

Worth stating plainly, because coverage keeps blurring it: drag is a performance art, not a gender identity. Many drag performers are cisgender. Some are transgender or nonbinary. Most transgender people have never performed drag. The GLAAD Media Reference Guide is explicit on this point, and the conflation is not incidental to how these laws get sold.

How the 11th Circuit Split 8-5 and Vacated the Statewide Injunction

Judge Andrew Brasher wrote for the majority. He treated the statute as ordinary obscenity regulation rather than a speech restriction demanding heightened scrutiny.

“Preventing children from attending adult live performances obscene for them is rationally related to Florida’s interest in safeguarding the well-being of minors,” Brasher wrote. Because the act tracks the Miller obscenity test as adapted for minors, he concluded, it gets rational basis review and is presumptively constitutional.

On the vagueness question, Brasher leaned on a 1971 Florida Supreme Court definition of “lewd” to argue the term is adequately cabined. On the age-variable standard, he wrote that “it is difficult to imagine any sex-based performance that predominantly appeals to a prurient interest being suitable for a child of any age.”

He also argued the district court had no authority to issue a statewide injunction protecting non-parties, citing the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA.

That argument did not command a majority. Judges Britt Grant and Kevin Newsom, both Trump appointees, declined to join that section. Their reasoning: once the court found the statute likely constitutional, ruling on the injunction’s scope would be an advisory opinion. Counting the five dissenters, seven of thirteen judges rejected reaching the question.

The universal injunction analysis is therefore not binding circuit law, whatever the opinion’s framing suggests.

Why Judge Rosenbaum Called the Age Standard a “Mess-Around-and-Find-Out” Statute

s

She also flagged the internal contradiction. The statute requires knowledge, then removes every knowledge-based defense. “What the Act gives with one subsection, it takes away with another,” she wrote.

Judge Abudu dissented separately on legislative history. “The act did not arise in a historical vacuum,” she wrote, pointing to lawmakers’ own statements about drag during the 2023 session.

Florida Venues Now Face $5,000 Fines and Liquor License Revocation

The misdemeanor charge is not the main financial risk. The licensing penalties are.

Senate Bill 1438 amended two other statutes when it passed in 2023. Section 509.261 lets the state fine, suspend, or revoke the license of any lodging or food service establishment that admits a child to an adult live performance. Section 561.29 does the same for alcoholic beverage licenses.

The schedule: $5,000 for a first violation, $10,000 for a second or subsequent violation.

Both provisions classify a violation as “an immediate, serious danger to the public health, safety, or welfare.” That language matters procedurally. It is the standard that lets the state move to suspend a license on an emergency basis rather than waiting out a full hearing.

For a small bar in Ocala or Pensacola, an emergency liquor license suspension is not a fine. It is closure.

The exposure is not evenly distributed. A large venue with counsel on retainer can absorb an investigation. A single gay bar serving a rural county cannot. Neither can an unpaid Pride committee that books a lip sync number for a downtown block party.

James Uthmeier Already Subpoenaed a Vero Beach Wine Bar While the Law Was Blocked

The most useful evidence of how Florida will enforce this law is what the state did when it could not.

In July 2025, with the injunction still in place, Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a subpoena to The Kilted Mermaid, a Vero Beach wine bar owned by the city’s vice mayor, Linda Moore. The subject was a June 29 Pride event.

The demand was expansive. Video of the event. Camera operator logs. Employee schedules. Lists of performers and DJs. Guest lists and ticket sales records. Security documentation. Written policies and training manuals.

Uthmeier said there was evidence the event had been promoted as “all ages welcome.” He added: “In Florida, we don’t sacrifice the innocence of children for the perversions of some demented adults.”

That investigation happened under a blocked law. Uthmeier celebrated Tuesday’s ruling in a post on X, calling it a “huge victory for our team at the 11th Circuit” and writing that the full court “affirmed the constitutionality of Florida’s ban on children attending sexualized drag shows.” Governor Ron DeSantis posted that “this shouldn’t even be controversial.”

Read the state’s own description of the statute against the statute’s actual text. Officials call it a ban on children attending drag shows. The law regulates obscene-as-to-minors performances of any kind, and never mentions drag. The gap between those two descriptions is where enforcement discretion lives.

Subscribe now

Texas and Tennessee Drag Restrictions Are Also Back in Force

Florida is not an outlier anymore. It is part of a pattern that consolidated fast.

Texas Senate Bill 12 took effect on March 18, 2026, after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined rehearing. The panel there noted that most plaintiffs had not shown they intended to stage a “sexually oriented performance,” which cuts both ways: it narrows the law’s reach while leaving performers to guess where the line falls.

In Tennessee, the Supreme Court declined in 2025 to hear a challenge to the Adult Entertainment Act. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled 2 to 1 that the Memphis theater troupe challenging the law lacked standing, never reaching the constitutional question.

Three federal circuits, three different routes, the same practical result. The facial challenge is losing as a strategy. What has not been tested is an as-applied challenge brought by a specific performer prosecuted for a specific show.

Hamburger Mary’s Returns to District Court After Losing Its Injunction

The plaintiff here is HM Florida-ORL, the operator of Hamburger Mary’s Orlando, which ran family drag shows for roughly 15 years before the law passed. It closed its downtown Orlando location in June 2025 during the litigation and has been working toward reopening in Kissimmee.

The 11th Circuit sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell, who issued the original injunction. The preliminary injunction stage is over. The merits stage is not.

“This litigation is not over, and we will continue fighting to protect free speech,” said Melissa Stewart, an attorney for Hamburger Mary’s.

Three things to watch. Whether the plaintiff seeks Supreme Court review, and whether the fractured universal injunction holding gives them a hook. Whether the state brings its first enforcement action, and against whom. And whether Judge Presnell reaches a final judgment that produces a cleaner record than a preliminary injunction ever could.

The most likely near-term effect is not a prosecution. It is cancellation. Venues will pull all-ages shows, organizers will add age restrictions, and performers will lose bookings, all without a single charge being filed. Rosenbaum’s dissent argues that outcome is not a side effect of the law. It is the design.

If you run or book a Florida venue: read the statute yourself before you rely on anyone’s summary of it, including this one. Then talk to a lawyer about your specific programming. The text and the political description of the text are not the same document.

If you want to follow this: the case is HM Florida-ORL, LLC v. Secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, back before Judge Presnell in the Middle District of Florida. Subscribe and we will track the first enforcement action when it comes.

The former transportation secretary told podcaster Steven Bartlett he is “more inclined than not” to run for president in 2028. The episode of “The Diary of a CEO” published Monday, Aug. 3.

Bartlett got the answer by narrowing the options. He asked Buttigieg to pick one of four: strongly not inclined, not inclined, inclined, or strongly inclined. Buttigieg had already met a direct question with “I don’t know.”

“I think I’m, like, more inclined than not,” he said.

Then came the hedge. “There’s so much we don’t know,” Buttigieg said. He also said becoming a father to twins “changed all of my equations.”

That is the entire news event. It is not a launch. Federal Election Commission records show no 2028 presidential filing for Buttigieg. His only presidential registration remains the 2020 committee, since converted into Win the Era PAC.

Buttigieg Signaled 2028 One Day Before Michigan’s Senate Primary

The timing has gone mostly unremarked, and it is the sharpest thing about this story.

Buttigieg has been a Michigan resident since 2022, when he changed his residency to his husband’s home state. In March 2025 he ruled out running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. He passed on the governor’s race too.

Michigan Democrats have now nominated Abdul El-Sayed for the U.S. Senate. But the day before that primary, Buttigieg took a step that looked far more like the opening move of a presidential campaign than a Senate one.

So a man who declined the race in his own state chose the day before that primary to move closer to a presidential bid. Read that however you like. It tells you which office he is actually organizing around.

New Hampshire Polling Now Shows Ocasio-Cortez Edging Past Buttigieg

Much of this week’s coverage leaned on a February poll that had Buttigieg on top. Newer numbers say something different.

The University of New Hampshire Survey Center released a poll July 22. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took 22 percent. Buttigieg took 21 percent. Sen. Mark Kelly followed at 9 percent, Gov. Gavin Newsom at 8 percent, Sen. Bernie Sanders at 6 percent and former Vice President Kamala Harris at 5 percent, according to the Boston Globe.

A one-point gap is not a lead. It is a tie.

National surveys disagree with each other, too. Emerson College put Buttigieg first at 19 percent on July 19 and 20. A Manhattan Institute survey from July 1 to 6 put him third at 13 percent, behind Harris and Newsom, Newsweek reported.

Two and a half years out, these polls mostly measure who voters can name.

In Provincetown, Buttigieg Told Healey Donors That Beating Trump Is Not the Whole Job

Buttigieg made both moves on the same day. Hours after the podcast dropped, he headlined a fundraiser at the Gifford House in Provincetown for Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s re-election campaign.

He used the room to argue against nostalgia.

“What our task is before us is not just to reconstruct the broken pieces of the previous status quo,” Buttigieg said. He added, “An opening is not the same thing as an answer.”

He closed on belonging. “If you believe that in a free country, you get to be who you are and love who you love without anybody else telling you what to do or who to be, then you are not alone.”

Healey was blunter about November. “He’s going to try to steal the midterms,” she said of the president.

Two out politicians, one of them the first lesbian elected governor of Massachusetts, raising money in the gayest town in New England. The optics were the message.

Subscribe now

Trans Advocates Have Not Let Go of Buttigieg’s School Sports Comments

Here is the part a friendly write-up leaves out.

On NPR’s Morning Edition on July 28, 2025, Buttigieg said “most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.” He argued the calls belong to “sports leagues and school boards and not politicians.”

The backlash was immediate and specific. Writing in Out on Aug. 7, 2025, journalist Mey Rude accused him of “capitulating to anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives.” Rude noted that “there is no scientific evidence that trans athletes have an inherent advantage over cis athletes,” and called the fairness framing a Trojan horse.

Buttigieg pushed back days later. “I see this issue being used to divide. I see it being used to hurt people,” he said. He described trans people as “one of the smallest, as well as one of the most vulnerable minorities in this country.”

Both things are on his record. A 2028 primary will surface both, repeatedly, and trans voters are under no obligation to grade on a curve.

Marriage Equality Is Still Standing, and That Is Not the Same as Safe

A second Buttigieg run would happen with his own marriage inside the political argument.

Obergefell v. Hodges remains good law. The Supreme Court declined to hear Kim Davis’s petition asking the justices to overturn it. The Respect for Marriage Act requires the federal government and every state to recognize marriages lawfully performed elsewhere. It would not require states to issue licenses if Obergefell ever fell.

Justice Clarence Thomas has written that the court should reconsider the ruling. As of June 2026, no case squarely challenging Obergefell is before the court.

That is the backdrop against which a married gay father is weighing a national campaign.

What Has to Happen Before Buttigieg’s 2028 Decision Becomes Real

Ignore the adjectives. Watch the paperwork and the plane tickets.

Three concrete signals matter. A statement of candidacy filed with the FEC. Win the Era’s next disclosure report, which shows whether money is moving toward staff in early states. And where he travels after the November midterms, when a real schedule replaces a hypothetical one.

Until one of those changes, “more inclined than not” is a mood, not a campaign.

The Queer Agenda tracks what candidates say about us when they think the room is friendly, and what they say when it isn't. Subscribe free to get it. If you want the primary sources yourself, the FEC candidate page and the UNH Survey Center release are both linked above and both take about two minutes to read.

The state didn’t fight it. Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office signed the stipulation.

That makes Michigan the first state to formally surrender a conversion therapy ban since the Supreme Court decided Chiles v. Salazar in March. It will not be the last. The attorney who won the case said so out loud.

Michigan Signed a Stipulated Order Rather Than Defend a Law It Had Already Lost

Michigan’s law took effect after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed Public Act 117 of 2023 on July 26, 2023. It barred state-licensed mental health professionals from trying to change a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Michigan was the 22nd state to pass one.

Catholic Charities and Emily McJones, a licensed therapist who runs a counseling practice in Jackson, sued to overturn it. U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering refused to block the law. On Dec. 17, 2025, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed her.

Judge Raymond Kethledge wrote for the majority. “We hold, therefore, that HB 4616 is subject to the strictest of scrutiny, under the First Amendment, as a content- and viewpoint-discriminatory restriction upon speech.” Judge Rachel Bloomekatz dissented.

After the Supreme Court ruled in March, the case went back to Beckering with the outcome effectively settled. The July 30 judgment closed it.

Kimberly Bush, a spokesperson for Nessel, told Michigan Public: “We remain deeply disappointed in this decision and have grave concerns for the implications this could bring for the safety and welfare of Michigan’s children.”

One clarification worth having, because a lot of coverage has blurred it. The Legislature didn’t repeal anything. Public Act 117 is still on the books. A court has declared it unenforceable against licensed clinicians doing talk-based conversion therapy, and the state has agreed to stand down. The parts of the law reaching aversive or physical practices were not at issue and were not struck.

What the Supreme Court Actually Held in Chiles v. Salazar, and What It Left Open

The Supreme Court decided Chiles v. Salazar on March 31, 2026, by a vote of 8-1. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority. Justice Elena Kagan concurred, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented alone.

Here is the part that keeps getting reported wrong. The Court didn’t rule that therapists have a constitutional right to practice conversion therapy on children. It ruled that Colorado’s law regulates speech based on viewpoint, that the 10th Circuit applied the wrong standard, and that the case had to be reconsidered under a far tougher one.

Gorsuch wrote that Colorado’s statute “does not just regulate the content of Ms. Chiles’s speech. It goes a step further, prescribing what views she may and may not express.”

The Court reversed and remanded. Colorado’s law is still on the books. It has not been struck down.

The ruling also stayed narrow on purpose. It addressed talk therapy by a licensed counselor. It didn’t touch bans on physical or aversive practices, malpractice liability, or professional licensing discipline. Legal analysts have flagged those as the routes that remain open.

Virginia Stopped Enforcing Its 2020 Law a Year Before Michigan Did

Michigan is the first state to give up a ban after Chiles. It is not the first state where one went dark.

On June 4, 2025, a Henrico County Circuit Court judge in Virginia entered a consent decree in a case brought by counselors John and Janet Raymond. The order, announced publicly on July 1, 2025, allows licensed counselors to conduct talk-based conversion therapy with minors. Attorney General Jason Miyares’ office signed it.

No merits ruling. No appeal. A settlement.

That matters for anyone tracking what happens next, because it shows the fastest way a ban dies is not a court striking it down. It is an attorney general deciding not to defend it.

Where the Other 22 States and Washington, D.C., Stand Right Now

Twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia prohibit licensed providers from subjecting minors to conversion therapy, according to the Movement Advancement Project. Michigan is counted in that number. Roughly 49% of LGBTQ+ youth ages 13 to 17 live in a state with a prohibition on the books.

Every one of those laws now sits under the same constitutional cloud. None has been repealed. None has been struck down nationwide. Each one is only as durable as its state’s willingness to defend it, and the pace of the next lawsuit.

The exposure is not evenly distributed. States inside the 6th Circuit, meaning Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, are bound by binding circuit precedent. States elsewhere face Chiles as a Supreme Court holding on standard of review, not as an automatic loss. That difference will decide how long some of these laws survive.

Becket’s Lead Counsel Told Other States to “Take Note”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty represented the plaintiffs. Senior counsel Luke Goodrich didn’t treat the outcome as the end of anything.

“Michigan is acknowledging that its law is unconstitutional,” Goodrich said. “It is illegal for Michigan to muzzle these counselors and deprive children of the help they need.”

He added that “states still trying to censor that care should take note.”

Goodrich has also described the bans as pushing young people toward medical intervention. That framing is contested. Every major U.S. medical and mental health association, including the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, has rejected conversion therapy as ineffective and harmful.

Jay Kaplan, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Michigan, put it plainly to Michigan Public: “We know that there are studies showing this is pretty much a fraudulent, discredited practice.”

The Trevor Project’s research found that LGBTQ+ young people who went through conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to attempt suicide.

Colorado’s HB26-1322 Shows States a Way to Regulate Without Banning Speech

Colorado lost at the Supreme Court and immediately started building something else.

State Reps. Alex Valdez and Karen McCormick introduced HB26-1322, which creates a civil cause of action for people harmed by conversion therapy. It reaches licensed professionals and the entities that hired or supervised them. It removes the statute of limitations. It lets a representative sue within five years of a survivor’s death.

The Colorado House passed it on April 3, 2026. It moved to the state Senate.

The design is the point. A ban tells a counselor what she may not say, which is exactly what the Supreme Court called viewpoint discrimination. A liability statute lets a survivor sue for the damage a practice caused. Those are different legal machines.

Rep. Matt Soper, a Republican, called the bill “a slap in the face” to the Supreme Court and “a de facto ban on conversion therapy moving forward.”

Whether it survives its own First Amendment challenge is untested. No court has ruled on this approach post-Chiles. Anyone telling you it is bulletproof is guessing.

More Than Half of Conversion Therapy Practitioners Were Never Covered by These Laws

The bans reached licensed clinicians. That was always a fraction of the problem.

The Trevor Project’s 2023 report “It’s Still Happening” identified more than 1,320 active conversion therapy practitioners across 48 states and Washington, D.C. Of those, 605 were licensed professionals. The other 716, about 54%, were ministerial or religious practitioners.

State licensing laws never touched that majority. Clergy, unlicensed life coaches and lay ministries operated outside them before Chiles and operate outside them now.

The researchers also called their own count a floor, not a ceiling, since much of this work happens quietly.

What Michigan Families and Survivors Can Still Use

The order removed one tool. It didn’t remove all of them.

Malpractice claims remain available. A licensed clinician in Michigan is still bound by the standard of care, and conversion therapy is rejected by the profession’s own bodies. Consumer protection law is another route Michigan officials have raised. Licensing boards still handle complaints about competence and harm.

Nessel’s office has not said whether it will appeal. Given that the state signed the stipulation and entered final judgment, an appeal looks unlikely, though her office has not closed the door publicly.

For a parent looking for care right now, the practical question is not what a statute says. It is whether a specific therapist will affirm your kid. Ask directly. Ask what their approach is to a young person questioning their identity. A clinician who deflects that question, unfortunately, answered it.

If this is the kind of story you want more of, stories that fact-check the headlines and add to the conversation, subscribe to The Queer Agenda.

If you or someone you love needs support, the Trevor Project runs a free 24/7 crisis line at 1-866-488-7386, and Trans Lifeline is at 1-877-565-8860.

Sources: Chiles v. Salazar, 6th Circuit opinion, Michigan Public, Virginia Mercury, Movement Advancement Project, The Trevor Project, Michigan AG

The trans actress and content creator posted a nearly four-minute video on Sunday, answering the president’s jokes about her two nights earlier at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “The president said my name in his speech four times on Friday night,” she said in the video. Instead of asking him to stop, she used the moment to talk to her supporters instead of to him.

The exchange happened at a dinner that was supposed to be about something else entirely.

How a Shooting Rewrote This Year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was originally set for April 25, 2026, at the Washington Hilton. It never happened that night. A gunman identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, opened fire outside the ballroom. Secret Service Police Officer Victor Gonzalez was shot in the chest and survived because he wore a bulletproof vest. He engaged the shooter to protect roughly 2,000 people inside, according to the Deseret News.

The WHCA postponed the dinner, then rescheduled it as a smaller gathering on Friday, July 24, at the Waldorf Astoria Washington, D.C., built around the Old Post Office building Trump’s company once operated as a hotel before selling it in 2022. The night was framed as a tribute to Gonzalez and to hotel staff who stayed on duty during the shooting. It also marked the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner Trump has attended as president. He skipped every one during his first term.

Trump opened by joking about the bulletproof vests some attendees wore and said, “In America we do not yield to political violence,” according to Axios. Then his tone shifted.

Trump’s Bud Light Joke About Dylan Mulvaney and Kaitlan Collins

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had just accepted the Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for broadcast, for CNN’s reporting on the tense February 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Just the News. Collins wrote on X that she was “honored to win this award for our coverage of President Zelensky’s historic visit to the Oval Office.”

Trump used her win as a setup. “I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney,” he said, reviving the 2023 backlash over Mulvaney’s brief partnership with the beer brand.

He added that Mulvaney “cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap,” called the partnership “the worst commercial ever made,” and said he “wouldn’t want to hire Dylan anytime soon,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Earlier in the speech, he told Collins, “You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile,” per The Advocate.

Collins later said she didn’t want the moment to become personal. “It’s really not about me,” she told reporters, adding she’d rather remind people “about the question I asked or the reporting that I did,” according to Newsweek. CNN backed her in a statement, calling her “an exceptional, trusted journalist” with “real strength and tenacity.”

Fact-Checking Trump’s $35 Billion Mulvaney Claim

Two of Trump’s core claims don’t hold up.

First, Mulvaney never starred in a Bud Light commercial. In 2023, the brand sent her a single personalized can marking her first year since coming out as trans, as part of one sponsored Instagram post. It was never a nationally aired TV commercial, and her image never appeared on cans sold to the public, according to The Advocate.

Second, no credible source has verified a $35 billion loss tied to Mulvaney or the boycott that followed. Snopes found Anheuser-Busch’s market cap fell roughly $6.33 billion over one week in April 2023, but concluded “there was no demonstrable connection” between that dip and the boycott specifically, since stock prices move for many reasons. A year later, CNN Business reported the boycott likely cost the company just over $1 billion in lost sales, a real but far smaller number than the one Trump cited from the podium.

Trump’s Anderson Cooper Joke Was Part of a Pattern That Night

Mulvaney wasn’t the only target. Trump also told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who is gay, “I like Anderson, actually, because he’s covered me well for many years. Then he went bad as soon as I went for politics…. Ya know he’s got a different persuasion than me, in many ways,” according to The Advocate He also called Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television” and referred to CNN’s Jake Tapper as “Fake Tapper.”

Coverage of how the room reacted splits along predictable lines. CNN Business and an Alabama outlet both described Trump’s jokes about Collins as landing to scattered laughter or silence. Conservative outlets covered the same night by mocking Mulvaney’s response instead. Both things can be true at once: a room can go quiet on a joke and a video can still go viral days later.

Dylan Mulvaney’s Response: “More Powerful Than I Even Knew”

Mulvaney posted her response on Sunday, the same day Trump shared an AI-altered image on Truth Social that placed Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body from the 2023 Bud Light photo. In her video, she congratulated Collins directly. “I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way, and I hope that she keeps doing all the great work,” she said.

She said she’d been “flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile” since 2023. “Yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later,” she said. “It seems to me that I might be like the one that got away for these men. Like, I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.”

She reframed the mockery as proof of something else. “Maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually like the greatest compliment of all,” she said, before asking why it matters so much to Trump that she not succeed. “What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience, and they want to use their power to take away my freedom.”

She said that freedom isn’t something Trump can give or take. “My freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self,” she said. “Sharing that with the world, it’s just icing on the cake.”

Dylan Mulvaney’s Three Asks for Trans and Nonbinary Supporters

Mulvaney closed the video with three requests.

First, to allies: “We need you to stand up for us, vote for us, donate to our causes, hire us, and support the businesses who hire us. But most importantly, love us. That is what we need more than anything right now, publicly and proudly.”

Second, to young trans and nonbinary viewers: “I need you to hold onto every piece of yourself tightly, especially the parts that they are trying to make you feel guilty about or trying to scare you into abandoning. And I need you to find people who will help you carry those pieces into a kinder day.”

Third, on the criticism itself: “When they tell you that you look like a trans woman, wear it like a medal.” She referenced Hillary Duff’s 2008 anti-slur PSAs with GLSEN and the Ad Council, telling men who get mocked for being attracted to trans women to shut down the insult the same way. “And to the dolls,” she added, using slang some trans women use for one another, “let’s have each other’s backs.”

She ended where she started. “And lastly, to the president: thank you for reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew,” she said, before dancing to trans musician Shea Diamond’s song “I Am America.”

On Saturday, before any of this, Collins had posted her own message on Instagram: photos from the dinner and her award, captioned with a line from Eleanor Roosevelt. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

If this is the kind of story you want more of, stories that fact-check the president in real time and center trans people as more than a punchline, subscribe to The Queer Agenda. And if you know someone who needs the reminder that mockery from the top doesn't get the last word, send them Mulvaney's three asks.

Sources: Axios, CNN Business, Deseret News, Hollywood Reporter, Just the News, Newsweek, Snopes, The Advocate, CNN Business (2024), Kaitlan Collins on X

German federal prosecutors are investigating the attack as Islamist terrorism. The suspect, 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, was shot dead by police Sunday evening after a day-long manhunt. On Monday, prosecutors released a second man they had briefly held, saying the theory that he rode in the vehicle “could not be upheld.”

None of that is the detail that should stop you. This is: Ballout had already been convicted, two months earlier, of preparing a serious act of violence and posting ISIS propaganda online. A German court gave him a suspended sentence over prosecutors’ objections. He was free when he drove into the crowd at Pride.

A Vehicle Struck the Crowd as Berlin’s Record Christopher Street Day Wound Down

The attack happened shortly before 10 p.m. Saturday, July 25, near Berlin’s Tiergarten, as the city’s two-day Christopher Street Day celebration was closing out for the night. Organizers estimated close to 500,000 people had marched earlier that day, Berlin’s largest CSD on record. Police gave a more conservative estimate of “several hundred thousand.” The closing stage at the Brandenburg Gate ran late into the evening, capped by an unannounced appearance from singer Sarah Connor.

According to German broadcaster Tagesschau, a vehicle, described by police as a white van, drove along a path through the park and struck several people before crashing into a tree. The driver fled on foot. Investigators are also looking into reports that some victims were wounded with a bladed weapon, which CBS News reported investigators believe was a machete.

Casualty figures were revised upward through the weekend as authorities completed their assessment. Berlin police now say at least 29 people were injured, and at least 30 witnesses received psychological care at the scene. Officials said Sunday that none of the surviving victims remained in immediate danger of dying, though several had been reported in life-threatening condition the night before. The woman who died has not been publicly identified. Officials have not said whether Ballout chose the crowd because of its connection to CSD, or because it was simply a large public gathering.

Berlin’s Christopher Street Day, like Pride events across Germany, traces its name and lineage to the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York.

Police Shot Suspect Abdul Ballout Dead After a Day-Long Manhunt in Spandau

Police identified the suspect as Abdul Ballout, 21, a German citizen born in Germany to a mother who was naturalized in 2002, three years before his birth. Investigators said he was known to law enforcement and connected to Berlin’s Islamist scene. Police released a description: 6-foot-2 with black hair, last seen in a black hoodie and white pants, and warned the public not to approach him.

The search spanned nearly 24 hours and reached train stations, airports, and border crossings. Officers located Ballout around 6 p.m. Sunday in an allotment garden complex in Berlin’s Spandau district. Police said he ran toward officers while armed with a bladed weapon, and officers opened fire. Berlin’s fire department attempted resuscitation, but he died at the scene.

Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner called the end of the manhunt “a major success” while continuing to describe the attack itself as “an attack on our free and cosmopolitan society.”

Ballout Was Convicted of Plotting Extremist Violence Two Months Before the Attack

This is the part the first wave of coverage mostly missed. According to court information reported by CBS News and PBS NewsHour, Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 attempting to make contact with people connected to ISIS, intending to reach Syria. He was arrested there and convicted by a Lebanese military court of incitement to religious and sectarian conflict, serving three months.

Back in Germany, a Berlin juvenile court convicted him in May 2026 of preparing a serious act of violence that endangered the state, tied to ISIS propaganda he posted on Instagram. The court gave him a suspended sentence of one year and ten months in youth custody, weighing his time already served and his confession. Prosecutors had pushed for a longer sentence. Ballout was released.

Roughly two months later, he drove into the crowd at Christopher Street Day.

German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters, “Everything we see here indicates that we are dealing with an Islamist terrorist attack.” He has also said Germany will review security at major public events going forward. Neither Dobrindt nor federal prosecutors have said whether the suspended sentence factored into how closely, if at all, authorities were monitoring Ballout before the attack.

A Second Suspect Was Released as Germany’s Investigation Continues

Investigators initially could not rule out that Ballout had help. Witness accounts differed on how many people got out of the vehicle after it crashed, and police searched an apartment without finding him. A second man was briefly detained on suspicion of having been a passenger.

On Monday, July 27, German federal prosecutors released that man, saying the passenger theory “could not be upheld,” according to reporting citing Der Spiegel. Prosecutors said only that they “continue to investigate broadly.” It remains unconfirmed whether anyone assisted Ballout before or during the attack.

Subscribe now

German Leaders and Berlin’s Queer Community Respond to the Attack

Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the attack “abhorrent” and said, “This is an attack on our society.” He urged people not to be intimidated: “There are more of us, we are stronger, and we will stay together.”

Andre Lehmann, a spokesperson for LSVD+, Germany’s national LGBTQ+ advocacy federation, said, “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.” At a public mourning event Sunday at the Brandenburg Gate, thousands gathered to lay flowers and grieve together. One attendee, Ashley Jump, told reporters, “They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone.”

Berlin Joins a Pattern of Deadly Attacks on Pride Events and Queer Spaces

The Berlin attack is the latest in a string of deadly assaults on Pride celebrations and LGBTQ+ gathering spaces in recent years, though the people behind them have had different backgrounds and motives, and not every attack on a queer space has been confirmed as anti-LGBTQ+ in intent.

In 2022, a gunman opened fire near Oslo’s London Pub hours before that city’s Pride parade, killing two people and injuring 21, according to police accounts reported by the Times of Israel. That same year, a gunman killed two people, Juraj Vankulič and Matúš Horváth, outside the Tepláreň bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in an attack Slovak officials called anti-LGBTQ+ extremism. In the United States, a gunman killed 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, and another killed five people and injured 25 at Club Q in Colorado Springs in 2022, according to updated police tallies reported by NPR.

The pattern extends beyond mass-casualty attacks. Germany’s federal crime data, compiled by LSVD+, recorded 2,070 politically motivated crimes targeting sexual orientation in 2025, up 17 percent from the year before, including 284 violent crimes. A separate 1,294 offenses targeted gender diversity, up 12 percent, including 112 violent crimes. Right-wing extremism was tied to the largest identifiable share of both categories, though authorities also logged crimes connected to religious and foreign extremism.

Across the European Union, more than 1 in 10 LGBTIQ people said they had been physically or sexually attacked in the previous five years, and more than half reported hate-motivated harassment in the past year, according to a 2024 survey of over 100,000 people by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. In the United States, FBI data analyzed by GLAAD show LGBTQ+ people were the third most targeted group in 2024 hate crime reports, with 1,950 incidents motivated by sexual-orientation bias and 463 by gender-identity bias.

Both the EU agency and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have said official numbers likely understate the problem, since many victims don’t trust police or don’t want to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity.

None of that made Sunday’s vigil at the Brandenburg Gate feel like defeat. Thousands showed up anyway.

If you want to support Berlin’s queer community directly, LSVD+ (lsvd.de) is the national LGBTQ+ federation coordinating outreach in the wake of the attack. Subscribe to The Queer Agenda for updates as the investigation continues and as Pride organizers elsewhere respond.

Sources

• Suspect in Berlin Pride attack shot dead in police operation, authorities say, The Washington Post

• Berlin Pride attacker served less than 2 years in prison for wanting to join ISIS, prosecutors say, CBS News

• Suspect in deadly Berlin Pride attack is killed in confrontation with police, PBS NewsHour

• Police shoot dead Berlin Pride car-ramming attack suspect, Al Jazeera

• Berlin Pride Attack Suspect Dies in Police Confrontation After Daylong Manhunt, Time

• Attack on the CSD: Suspected perpetrator dead, Berlin.de (official city government site)

• What we know so far about the attack at Berlin CSD, Euronews

• Germany releases second suspect in deadly Berlin Pride parade attack, South China Morning Post

• “Haltung ist hot”: Berlin feiert den größten CSD seiner Geschichte, Berliner Zeitung

• Bundesweite Fallzahlen 2025: Politisch motivierte Kriminalität, LSVD+ factsheet

• Harassment and violence against LGBTIQ people on the rise, EU Agency for Fundamental Rights

• GLAAD Responds to 2024 FBI Hate Crime Statistics, GLAAD

• 2 dead, 21 hurt in Oslo terror attack near gay bar, The Times of Israel

• Colorado Springs shooting: The official injured toll climbs to 25, NPR

• 2022 Bratislava shooting: Years of LGBT Intolerance in Slovakia Culminate in Two Killings, Balkan Insight

In World War II, the U.S. Army didn’t just tolerate drag. It funded it, scripted it, and shipped it overseas. Soldiers built pony ballets out of tutus and combat boots. GIs in the South Pacific turned mop heads and coconut shells into wigs and props. President Franklin D. Roosevelt watched a striptease impersonation act at the White House and reportedly loved it.

None of this happened because the military was ahead of its time on gender. It happened because women weren’t allowed anywhere near the stage, and because a man in a dress was the era’s most reliable laugh. What’s less remembered is who paid for that laugh once the curtain came down.

How the Army Turned Drag Into Official Wartime Entertainment

By early 1942, military leadership had decided that live theater for troops was “a necessity, not a frill.” The Army’s Special Services division, working with the USO and American Red Cross, built an entire production pipeline around it. Special Services even published “Blueprint Specials,” handbooks that gave units pre-written scripts, dress patterns, and choreography so any base could stage its own variety show, according to research compiled by the National WWII Museum.

Historian Allan Bérubé, whose 1990 book “Coming Out Under Fire” remains the foundational study of gay and lesbian GIs in the war, put it simply: “From Broadway to Guadalcanal, on the backs of trucks, makeshift platforms, and elegant theater stages, American GIs did put on all-male shows.” A typical bill mixed comedy sketches, celebrity impersonations, and full drag numbers, sometimes with soldiers performing in makeup made from rice powder and black pencil.

These shows weren’t fringe entertainment. They were treated as morale infrastructure, on the same tier as USO tours, and leadership framed them as one more job a soldier could be assigned to do.

Inside ‘This Is the Army,’ Irving Berlin’s Drag-Filled Broadway Fundraiser

The biggest of these productions was “This Is the Army.” Irving Berlin wrote the music and co-wrote the book, built around his earlier World War I show “Yip Yip Yaphank.” It opened July 4, 1942, at the Broadway Theatre in New York, ran for 113 performances, and toured nationally to raise money for the Army Emergency Relief Fund, according to Wikipedia’s production history, corroborated by contemporary trade coverage.

The cast ran roughly 300 soldiers deep, directed by Staff Sgt. Ezra Stone, a working actor before he enlisted. Berlin performed in it himself and pushed to integrate the cast racially, a position that put him at odds with standard military practice at the time. The show’s routines ranged from comic sketches to a full “pony ballet” of GIs dancing in tutus, and its national tour eventually became a 1943 film that pushed total fundraising toward $2 million on stage, with the film adding substantially more.

Why Ronald Reagan Never Actually Performed in Drag

Ronald Reagan appears in the 1943 film version of “This Is the Army,” alongside George Murphy, 37 years before he was elected president. But Reagan did not perform in drag in the film, and he wasn’t part of the Army’s theatrical unit that staged the original production. He served as a liaison officer with the San Francisco Port of Embarkation.

That distinction matters because a set of photos went viral on social media in 2023 claiming to show Reagan in women’s clothing during his Army service. Fact-checkers at Snopes traced the images to unidentified Army Signal Corps soldiers and to actor Alan Manson, who did appear in a dress in the film. Reagan’s connection to WWII drag is real, but it’s a producer’s credit next to famous castmates, not a costume he ever wore.

The Real Reason Women Were Banned From Army Drag Shows

It’s tempting to assume men played every female role because the military was racially segregated. That’s a different policy getting credited for the wrong outcome.

The actual barrier was gender, not race. Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, who ran the Women’s Interest Section of the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations, issued directives blocking members of the Women’s Army Corps from “singing and dancing in connection with any presentation.” Officials worried WAC performers would read as “too sexually risqué” for audiences of homesick soldiers overseas. WACs were permitted to teach costuming and makeup workshops, but not to take the stage themselves, per the National WWII Museum’s research. Racial segregation was very real in the wartime military and shaped who performed for whom, but it’s a separate fact from why men, not women, filled every female role.

‘Jumping with Jodie’: The Black Soldiers Who Built Their Own Drag Tradition

That segregation did produce its own overlooked chapter. About a month after “This Is the Army” opened on Broadway, soldiers of the 3966th Quartermaster Truck Company, an all-Black unit stationed in Germany, staged “Jumping with Jodie,” believed to be the first all-Black soldier drag production of the war. It featured a Harlem nightclub-style number built and performed entirely within a segregated unit, separate from the white-led productions that got the national press and the presidential audience.

The Army’s entertainment machine ran on the same segregated lines as everything else in the military. Black GIs built their own drag culture inside it, largely uncredited at the time and still rarely mentioned when this history gets retold.

Why the Same Military That Staged Drag Shows Discharged Gay Soldiers

The uncomfortable irony sits right at the center of this history: the Army that paid soldiers to wear dresses onstage was simultaneously screening recruits for homosexuality and discharging those it identified.

Wartime psychiatric screening classified homosexuality as a disqualifying condition, and as the war went on, commanders increasingly moved away from court-martialing suspected gay soldiers for sodomy and toward discharging them administratively as psychiatric cases, a shift Bérubé documented through veteran interviews, letters, and military records. Many received “blue discharges,” a designation that cut them off from GI Bill benefits and veteran status without ever facing a formal charge.

Drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys, who teaches at The New School’s Eugene Lang College (not, as sometimes reported, New York University), studies how these shows functioned differently depending on who was watching. He notes that the shows were built for heterosexual audiences first, as broad wartime comedy in an era when a man in a dress read as an automatic punchline, the same comic register Milton Berle worked in and that “Some Like It Hot” would later mine for laughs. For closeted gay soldiers, though, the same stage could double as one of the only places in military life where gender rules briefly loosened, even as the rest of the institution was actively trying to identify and remove them.

The Legacy These Shows Left Behind

Drag didn’t start in the military, and the Army didn’t intend to build queer culture when it greenlit these shows. It wanted cheap, reliable entertainment for homesick troops, and a man in a dress was the easiest laugh available. But the shows still gave thousands of soldiers, gay and straight, a shared experience of gender play that peacetime American culture rarely offered anywhere else.

That contradiction, sanctioned onstage and surveilled off it, is the real story underneath the photos of GIs in tutus. It’s worth knowing the next time someone claims drag has nothing to do with military tradition. The Army wrote the script.

If you want more of this kind of buried queer history in your inbox, subscribe to The Queer Agenda.

It was supposed to shame queer families. Instead, it did the opposite. Within a week of going viral, a Dayton LGBTQ+ nonprofit had raised more than $15,000 to put up a billboard of its own, and Ohio’s queer community had a new rallying point.

Here’s what’s actually going on, who’s paying for it, and why a sign in a small Ohio city connects to a national fight over marriage equality that’s bigger than most people realize.

A Seattle Group Put “No Child Has Two Dads” on a Billboard in Lima, Ohio

Megan Tucker-Manly first saw the billboard while leaving a Walmart in Lima about three weeks before it went viral. She didn’t believe what she was reading. When she saw it again the following week, she pulled out her phone.

Her Facebook post, with a photo of the sign, took off. It’s been shared widely and has racked up more than 7,000 likes.

Tucker-Manly, who has stage IV cancer and spends much of her time in clinical trials, told The Buckeye Flame the billboard’s message goes further than most people realize. It doesn’t just target same-sex parents. Read literally, “no child has two dads, no child has two moms” also erases kids in foster care, kids with divorced parents, and kids being raised by a parent and a stepparent.

“I’m not sitting down, even though I should be the one to sit down because I have stage IV cancer and should be focused on other things,” she said. “Instead, this has just lit a fire in me.”

The sign is the work of Them Before Us, a Seattle-based advocacy group that describes itself as defending “children’s right to their mother and father.” Billboards with the same message have also gone up elsewhere in northwest Ohio, according to local reporting, though Lima’s has drawn the most attention.

Who’s Behind the Billboard: Katy Faust and a Nearly $1 Million Campaign

Them Before Us was founded in 2018 by Katy Faust, an activist based in West Seattle who has spent more than a decade arguing against marriage equality, in vitro fertilization, no-fault divorce, and surrogacy. The organization is classified as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremism, and it has documented financial and coalition ties to two other SPLC-designated groups, Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, according to reporting from Uncloseted Media.

Faust often frames her work around her own childhood. Her parents divorced when she was 10, and her mother later had a relationship with a woman, an experience Faust has written and spoken about publicly as the basis for her advocacy.

Them Before Us isn’t a small operation. Uncloseted Media’s investigation found the group brought in close to $900,000 in revenue in 2024, with a $300,000 gift from the Servant Foundation, a donor-advised fund financed by Hobby Lobby founder David Green. That reporting has not been independently disputed by Them Before Us.

Subscribe now

Them Before Us Wants the Supreme Court to Overturn Obergefell v. Hodges

The Lima billboard isn’t a standalone stunt. It’s a local outpost of something much bigger.

In January 2026, Faust launched what she’s calling the Greater Than campaign: a coalition she says includes roughly 100 anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, though public reporting has confirmed at least 47, including Focus on the Family, Liberty Counsel, the Heritage Foundation, and the Southern Baptist Convention. Its stated goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The strategy is explicitly modeled on the anti-abortion movement’s playbook before Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: grind away at public opinion state by state, then wait for the right case and the right court.

To be clear about where things actually stand: Obergefell is still the law of the land. The Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge to it, most recently rejecting a petition from former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in 2025 by a near-unanimous vote. The 2022 Respect for Marriage Act also requires the federal government and every state to recognize marriages that were legally performed elsewhere, even in a world where Obergefell someday falls. But Faust’s campaign isn’t hiding its ambition, and the billboard in Lima is one of its cheapest, most visible tools.

Ohio’s 2004 Marriage Ban Is Still on the Books, and a 2026 Fix Just Got Pushed to 2027

Here’s the part that makes this more than a symbolic fight for Ohioans specifically: Ohio’s state constitution still contains a 2004 amendment defining marriage as only between one man and one woman. Obergefell makes that language unenforceable today, but it hasn’t been erased.

A coalition called Ohio Equal Rights spent the first half of 2026 collecting signatures for two proposed constitutional amendments, one repealing the 2004 marriage ban and one adding broad nondiscrimination protections covering sexual orientation and gender identity. In June, the group announced it would not submit those signatures in time for the November 2026 ballot. Executive co-chair Lis Regula cited the cost of a statewide campaign and a preference for a less crowded ballot cycle, not a shortfall in signatures. The group says it will try again in 2027.

That means Ohio’s dormant marriage ban stays in the state constitution for at least another year, a detail that gives Them Before Us’s national ambitions a very specific local target if Obergefell is ever weakened.

Have a Gay Day Raised $15,000 to Answer the Billboard With Its Own

Have a Gay Day, a Dayton-based LGBTQ+ nonprofit, resource center, and popular meme page founded by Michael Knote, bought its own billboard space about a week after Tucker-Manly’s post went viral. When the group asked its followers to help fund the space, Knote said, donations came in fast, and the total passed $15,000.

Glen Strobel and Jeff Givan on Why the Sign Struck a Nerve in Lima

Lima Pride Alliance secretary Glen Strobel called the billboard “divisive” and “cruel,” and said the group fielded a wave of messages from residents asking how to respond. He helped promote the Have a Gay Day fundraiser to LPA’s followers.

“In some ways, it seems to pull people together in response to such a cruel message,” Strobel said.

Jeff Givan, a Lima Pride Alliance co-founder who is also running for Ohio House District 78, was more pointed. “It just really astounds me that people can put things up that stir up so much hate,” he told 13ABC. He questioned the timing, noting the billboard appeared as Ohio heads toward another election cycle, and argued it ignores the reality that LGBTQ+ families have stepped up to adopt children other families won’t, including kids considered harder to place.

Equality Ohio also weighed in with a statement: “These billboards don’t just attack LGBTQ+ families; they erase every Ohio kid whose home doesn’t fit a narrow, manufactured mold. They tell real children with real families that they don’t count.”

Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Delphine Luneau called the campaign “disgusting” and “desperate,” and told The Buckeye Flame that a majority of Ohioans support marriage equality. On that point, some added context is useful: PRRI’s most recent American Values Atlas data puts Ohio support for same-sex marriage at 53%, a majority, but a narrower one than “two-thirds” suggests. Support for LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination protections specifically runs higher, around 76% in a 2023 Ohio-focused study.

“These outside groups targeting the Buckeye State with fear and disinformation won’t ever win,” Luneau said.

What the Research Actually Shows About Kids With LGBTQ+ Parents

Them Before Us’s core claim, that children need one mother and one father to thrive, doesn’t hold up against the weight of the research. Major child welfare authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, have found that a parent’s sexual orientation or gender identity has no bearing on their ability to raise a healthy, well-adjusted kid.

A 20-year evidence review published by RAND in May 2024 found no negative effects on marriage, divorce, or cohabitation among different-sex couples in states that legalized same-sex marriage, alongside improved health and economic outcomes for LGBT people. The same research found a small positive shift in marriage attitudes among high school seniors generally in states after legalization, a more modest finding than the framing some outlets have used to describe it.

Conservative commentators have pushed back on the backlash itself. Trending Politics co-owner Collin Rugg shared the billboard widely on social media, and the outlet Louder with Crowder ran a piece defending the sign as biological fact and dismissing objections to it. Those arguments treat “a mother and a father” as a neutral, scientific standard. The research on LGBTQ+ parenting says otherwise.

What Happens Next in Lima and at the Ohio Statehouse

Tucker-Manly, whose public Facebook presence had mostly centered on her cancer treatment (her most-shared post before this had been about her dog’s dental surgery), now plans to speak at an upcoming Lima City Council meeting about the billboard and what the city can do about hate speech at the local level.

Meanwhile, the fight Them Before Us is actually waging plays out on two tracks: a national push toward the Supreme Court that has, so far, gone nowhere, and a slower campaign to keep state-level bans like Ohio’s alive in case that changes. Ohio Equal Rights’ amendments won’t reach voters until at least 2027. Have a Gay Day’s fundraiser is still active. And Them Before Us has made clear this billboard is one of many.

Ohio’s marriage ban stays on the books for at least another year, and the group behind the Lima billboard isn’t going away. If you want to see what a community pushing back looks like, check out Have a Gay Day’s ongoing campaign, or look up your own city council’s next meeting. Subscribe to The Queer Agenda for more of this reporting as it develops.

Sources

• Jodway, Ben. “’No child has two dads’ billboards spark outrage across rural Ohio.” The Advocate, originally published by The Buckeye Flame, July 24, 2026.

• Jodway, Ben. “Anti-LGBTQ+ billboards pop up in rural Ohio. Communities are immediately pushing back.” The Buckeye Flame, July 23, 2026.

• “Lima billboard message draws criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates.” 13ABC, July 22, 2026.

• “Lima Billboard Fires Up LGBTQ+ Community.” Mercer County Outlook, July 23, 2026.

• “Hate Group Launches Anti-LGBTQ Billboard Campaign.” Joe.My.God., July 2026.

• “Anti-marriage equality campaign is installing billboards attacking queer families across the country.” LGBTQ Nation, July 23, 2026.

• “How a Former Blogger Became the New Leader of America’s Anti-Gay Marriage Movement.” Uncloseted Media.

• “Hobby Lobby Founder Linked to New Campaign Seeking to Overturn U.S. Marriage Equality Ruling.” EDGE Media Network.

• Katy Faust. Wikipedia.

• “Legalizing Marriage for Same-Sex Couples Benefited LGBT Individuals and Their Children: Twenty Years of Evidence.” RAND, May 13, 2024.

• “Map: Legal Status of and Support for Same-sex Marriage in Each State.” PRRI.

• “Proposed Ohio Equal Rights Amendment clears hurdle from Attorney General, heads to Ballot Board.” Ohio Capital Journal.

• “Ohio Equal Rights will try to get two amendments on 2027 ballot.” Ohio Capital Journal, June 22, 2026.

• “11 years after Obergefell, marriage equality remains under scrutiny.” Washington Blade, June 26, 2026.

For weeks, the Department of Veterans Affairs told LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinators the same thing: nothing was really changing. Titles would shift. Jobs would stay the same.

That was not true.

An internal email sent July 22 by Veterans Health Administration official Mark A. Koeniger confirms the VA is dismantling the national infrastructure behind its LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinator program. Monthly coordinator calls end this week. So do regional leadership calls, new coordinator orientations, and the program’s community of practice. Dedicated Microsoft Teams channels and SharePoint resources are being archived. Coordinators were told to save anything they wanted to keep before it disappears.

For veterans who rely on these coordinators to find providers who understand their health needs, resolve care problems, or simply get treated with respect at a VA facility, the network that supported that work is going away.

Monthly Calls, Training, and Shared Resources End This Week

Koeniger’s email spells out what changes in practice. “National communications, processes, and procedures specific to the LGBTQ+ VCC program will be discontinued,” he wrote. LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinator roles convert to generic Care Coordinator positions “with an expanded focus on supporting all Veterans.”

The email does not say LGBTQ+ veterans will be turned away from care. It also does not explain how veterans will find coordinators trained in LGBTQ+ health needs once the network that trained and connected them stops functioning.

VHA Directive 1340 Has Required These Coordinators Since 2022

The program has a specific legal foundation. VHA Directive 1340, issued September 21, 2022, requires every VA medical facility, more than 140 of them nationwide, to designate at least one LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinator with dedicated weekly hours: a minimum of 12 hours at smaller facilities and up to 20 hours at the largest. The directive calls coordinators essential to “culturally competent, Veteran-centered care” and isn’t scheduled for recertification until September 2027.

That directive hasn’t been formally rescinded. What’s disappearing is the national support system, training, and communication network that made it functional. A facility can technically still have a designated coordinator on paper while losing every resource that trained and connected that person to the rest of the program.

The Executive Orders Behind VA’s June 12 Compliance Memo

The July 22 email carries out a directive Veterans Health Administration Under Secretary for Health John Bartrum issued June 12, titled “Reiterating Executive Order Compliance Responsibilities.” Bartrum’s memo cites two orders President Trump signed in his first days back in office in January 2025: one declaring that federal policy recognizes only two sexes, and one ending federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. It directed VA facilities to stop funding meetings, training, or materials related to what the memo calls “gender ideology” or “gender identity,” and gave leadership until June 26 to confirm compliance.

“VA must ensure all Veterans are treated based on their clinical needs and without discrimination,” Bartrum wrote in the memo, according to Military Times.

VA Said It Was Only a Title Change. Its Own Spokesperson Said Otherwise.

VA leadership spent weeks telling coordinators the June 12 memo meant a title change and nothing more. One VA health care provider involved with the program, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly and feared retaliation, said the message from leadership had been consistent: “No changes to our job scope or functions, just a title change, with Directive 1340 still in effect.” The provider said staff repeated that reassurance to the veterans in their care.

But VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven told Government Executive in June that redesignating LGBTQ+ care coordinators as generic care coordinators was “the plan, full stop,” and that the compliance deadline applied to “anything you read on the website.” That statement, on the record from VA’s own press office, lines up with what the July 22 email now confirms: this was never just a name change.

The provider described the reversal as “moral injury on top of moral injury.” “I and others communicated this to our veterans,” they said, “and now we have to go back and tell them that’s not true.”

Why LGBTQ+ Coordinators Are the Only Program Being Eliminated

The VA runs several other population-specific coordinator programs, including Women Veteran Program Managers, Intimate Partner Violence Assistance Program coordinators, and Caregiver Support coordinators. None of those have been restructured or eliminated alongside the LGBTQ+ program.

“No other specialty population coordinator or program has been singled out or dismantled this way,” the provider said, describing the move as “a cruel erasure of LGBTQ services” carried out in a way that “lets the VA avoid explicitly saying they don’t provide LGBTQ veteran care.”

This Follows the VA’s March 2025 End to Most Gender-Affirming Care

This isn’t the administration’s first move against LGBTQ+ veterans’ health care. In March 2025, the VA rescinded VHA Directive 1341(4), a 2018 policy that had guaranteed transgender and intersex veterans access to hormone therapy, prosthetics, and related care, along with “dignity in care” standards barring staff from misgendering patients. Veterans already receiving that care could continue, but the VA cut off access for anyone starting treatment after the change.

Rep. Mark Takano, ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, called the rescission “both shameful and cruel” and said VA leadership was “abandoning” its mission to support every veteran, according to a statement from his committee office. Modern Military Association of America Executive Director Rachel Branaman called it, in a joint statement with other veteran groups, “a direct assault on the well-being of vulnerable LGBTQ+ veterans, jeopardizing their access to essential care.”

The care coordinator rollback continues that pattern. This time it targets the infrastructure connecting LGBTQ+ veterans to any specialized care at all, not only gender-affirming treatment.

AFGE’s Tiffany McPherson Warns of a Chilling Effect on Veterans’ Mental Health Care

Tiffany McPherson, PRIDE chair for the American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing VA employees, has warned that eliminating the specialized coordinator network risks deterring LGBTQ+ veterans from seeking care, particularly mental health care. “For a community already facing higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, those consequences aren’t hypothetical,” she said, according to Military Times.

What LGBTQ+ Veterans Can Still Do While VA Directive 1340 Remains in Effect

As of this writing, VA’s press office hasn’t issued a public statement addressing what the July 22 email means for LGBTQ+ veterans specifically. Takano has pressed VA leadership on its treatment of LGBTQ+ veterans before, and as both House Veterans’ Affairs ranking member and Congressional Equality Caucus chair, he’s positioned to do it again.

For now, VHA Directive 1340 remains technically on the books, and coordinators still nominally exist at VA facilities nationwide. What no longer exists is the national network that trained them, connected them to each other, and gave veterans a reliable way to find them. Veterans who need support can still contact their local VA patient advocate directly, or call the Veterans Crisis Line at 988, then press 1, which remains staffed regardless of these changes.

If you’re a veteran who has relied on an LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinator, or you work at a VA facility watching this program dissolve, I want to hear from you. Reply to this email or leave a comment below. Share this with a veteran in your life who needs to know their coordinator’s job just changed. And subscribe to The Queer Agenda for continued coverage as this story develops.

Sources

• Government Executive, “VA redesignates LGBTQ+ care coordinators and limits further ‘gender-ideology’ services,” June 2026: https://www.govexec.com/management/2026/06/va-redesignates-lgbtq-care-coordinators-limits-gender-ideology-services/414292/

• Military Times, “VA eliminates gender-identity initiatives, reclassifies LGBTQ+ care coordinators,” June 18, 2026: https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2026/06/18/va-eliminates-gender-identity-initiatives-reclassifies-lgbtq-care-coordinators/

• Military Times, “VA leaders announce end to all transgender-related care for vets,” March 17, 2025: https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2025/03/17/va-leaders-roll-back-policy-ensuring-medical-care-for-transgender-vets/

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, VHA Directive 1340 (LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Coordinators), issued September 21, 2022: https://www.va.gov/vhapublications/ViewPublication.asp?pub_ID=9944

• KFF, “Overview of President Trump’s Executive Actions Impacting LGBTQ+ Health”: https://www.kff.org/lgbtq/overview-of-president-trumps-executive-actions-impacting-lgbtq-health/

• House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs (Democrats), “Ranking Member Takano Slams VA’s Latest Attack on Trans & Intersex Veterans,” March 15, 2025: https://democrats-veterans.house.gov/news/press-releases/ranking-member-takano-slams-vas-latest-attack-on-trans-and-intersex-veterans

• Modern Military Association of America, “Military and Veteran Groups Denounce VA Rollback of Transgender, Nonbinary, and Intersex Protections for Veterans,” March 2025: https://modernmilitary.org/2025/03/press-release-military-and-veteran-groups-denounce-va-rollback-of-transgender-nonbinary-and-intersex-protections-for-veterans/

• Congressional Equality Caucus, About the Chair: https://equality.house.gov/about-cec/about-chair

That line isn’t from a terrorist group. It’s from the Trump administration’s own 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy, released May 6. The document lists “radically pro-transgender” ideology alongside cartels and Islamist terror networks as a national security threat, and vows that “violent secular political groups” tied to that ideology will be targeted for “rapid identification and neutralization.”

Trans Americans didn’t become a federal security concern overnight. They’ve been navigating a country that didn’t know what to do with them since before it was a country. This July marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. Trans and gender-nonconforming people have been part of every one of those 250 years: sometimes visible, mostly criminalized, and right now, named directly in a federal strategy document.

Here’s what that history actually looks like, and exactly where things stand today.

The Trump Administration’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Names “Radically Pro-Transgender” Ideology as a Threat

The 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy groups “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist” ideology with cartels and Islamist terrorism as priorities for “national CT activities.” It closes with a direct warning, attributed to President Trump: “If you hurt Americans, or are planning to hurt Americans, ‘We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.’”

The strategy doesn’t name a specific plot, attack, or organization tied to transgender people. Civil liberties groups and legal observers have called the language an escalation, warning it opens the door to treating trans advocacy itself as a security threat rather than a political viewpoint. The document is real, current U.S. government policy as of this writing. It’s also the most direct language a federal strategy document has used against transgender Americans.

That’s where the country stands in the summer of 2026. To understand how it got here, and why this moment is an escalation rather than something entirely new, it helps to look back. Trans Americans have been organizing, testifying, and surviving in this country since 1776.

Trans Life in Revolutionary and 19th-Century America Meant Arrest, Not Acceptance

In 1776, Jemima Wilkinson, a Quaker preacher, survived a severe fever and emerged with a new identity: the Public Universal Friend. The Friend rejected she/her pronouns, presented as gender-nonconforming, and preached across the Northeast for decades. It’s one of the earliest documented gender-nonconforming identities in what would become the United States.

The 19th century treated that kind of identity as a crime. Lucy Ann Lobdell, born in 1829, began living as Joseph Israel Lobdell in 1854. Arrested in 1858 for “impersonating a man,” Lobdell was acquitted only because a judge decided he could perform men’s work. In 1880, he was committed to an asylum, where he continued to insist he was a man until his death.

In 1836, a sex worker named Mary Jones was arrested in Manhattan after a physical search revealed a prosthesis under her clothing. Newspapers and lithographs, including one from publisher H.R. Robinson, mocked her as a “man-monster.” She was sentenced to five years at Sing Sing for grand larceny; the extensive record from her case focuses almost entirely on her gender rather than the theft charge itself.

By 1843, St. Louis had become the first U.S. city to criminalize cross-dressing outright, making it a misdemeanor to appear in public “in a dress not belonging to their sex.” Dozens of other cities passed similar ordinances over the following decades.

Not every 19th-century story was one of persecution alone. We’Wha, a Zuni lhamana born in 1849, became a cultural ambassador to Washington, D.C., met President Grover Cleveland, and helped document Zuni artifacts, all while embodying a recognized third-gender role within Zuni culture, distinct from how white American society understood gender at the time.

During the Civil War, at least 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight; historians believe most did so to serve, not out of a trans identity. One soldier, Albert Cashier, continued living as a man for the rest of his life, until his death in 1915.

In 1866, Frances Thompson became, by most historical accounts, the first trans woman to testify before Congress, describing being assaulted during the Memphis massacre, in which 40 people were killed over three days of racist violence. Congress didn’t know she was trans at the time. A decade later, after being outed, she was arrested, fined, and forced into an all-male chain gang to work off the fine she couldn’t pay.

Lucy Hicks Anderson, born in 1886, lived as a woman from childhood with her mother’s support. In 1945, after her identity became public, her marriage was voided, and she was prosecuted for perjury. “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman,” she told reporters during the trial.

New York City’s Cercle Hermaphroditos, believed to be the first informal transgender advocacy group in the country, formed in 1895 around Paresis Hall, a Bowery bar. When politician Murray Hall died in 1901, a coroner’s inquest revealed he was a transgender man; The New York Times reported it as a man who had “masqueraded in male attire.”

Subscribe now

Christine Jorgensen’s Surgery Made Trans Visibility a National Story in the 1950s

In 1917, Dr. Alan Hart, a trans man, underwent a hysterectomy performed by Dr. Joshua Allen Gilbert, who wrote afterward that Hart had emerged with “a new hold on life and ambitions worthy of his high degree of intellectuality.”

The country’s understanding of trans identity changed fastest after 1952, when Christine Jorgensen became the first American to become a household name for gender-affirming surgery. The New York Daily News ran the story on its Dec. 1, 1952, front page: “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Bronx Youth Is a Happy Woman After Medication, 6 Operations.” Jorgensen’s surgeries had actually begun the year before, in Copenhagen.

That visibility built infrastructure. Virginia Prince launched Transvestia magazine in 1960, giving readers a place to share their experiences for the first time. Reed Erickson, a wealthy trans man, founded the Erickson Educational Foundation in 1964, funding counseling services and the first three International Symposiums on Gender Identity. In 1965, psychiatrist John F. Oliven coined the term “transgender” in his book “Sexual Hygiene and Pathology.” A year later, Johns Hopkins University opened the first Gender Identity Clinic in the country, where a team of 10 physicians and psychologists provided gender-affirming care, including surgery, to trans Americans.

That same year, in August 1966, trans women and drag queens fought back against police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, a riot that predates Stonewall by nearly three years and is often left out of mainstream timelines entirely. In direct response, Conversion Our Goal launched in 1967, later becoming the Transsexual Counseling Unit, giving trans people in San Francisco a critical point of contact for medical care.

Stonewall and STAR Turned Trans Survival Into Trans Organizing

Police raided the Stonewall Inn in 1969, sparking days of resistance from New York City’s LGBTQ community. Accounts of exactly how many days the unrest lasted vary by source, generally somewhere between five and six. Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera became leaders of the broader liberation movement that followed, though historians still debate the precise details of their roles on the first night itself.

In 1970, Rivera and Johnson founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, known as STAR, to help homeless trans people find shelter. Member Bubbles Rose Lee opened STAR House that November. It closed roughly eight months later when the group couldn’t make rent.

The APA Called Being Trans a Mental Disorder for 33 Years, From 1980 to 2013

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association classified transgender identity in the DSM as “gender identity disorder.” That classification stood for more than three decades. In the meantime, trans communities kept building their own institutions: FTM International launched in 1986 as the first organization for trans men in the U.S.; the Southern Comfort Conference held its first Atlanta gathering in 1991; and Riki Wilchins formed GenderPAC in 1995, the first national political advocacy group focused on gender identity rights.

1999 brought three lasting milestones. Gwendolyn Ann Smith held the first Transgender Day of Remembrance on Nov. 20, a vigil for Rita Hester, a trans woman murdered the year before. Monica Helms, a trans veteran, created the Transgender Pride Flag, using pink and blue for the colors traditionally associated with girls and boys, and white for people who are intersex, transitioning, or don’t fit the binary. And the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition formed to lobby lawmakers directly on transgender Americans’ behalf.

The DSM finally dropped “gender identity disorder” in 2013, replacing it with “gender dysphoria,” a change the APA said refocused the diagnosis on distress some trans people experience rather than treating trans identity itself as the disorder.

Gwen Araujo’s Murder and Laverne Cox’s TIME Cover Marked Two Different Kinds of Visibility

Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old trans girl, was murdered in 2002. Her killers’ defense attorneys argued she deceived them by not disclosing she was trans, a version of the “trans panic” defense. The first trial ended in a hung jury; a second trial convicted two men of second-degree murder. California responded in 2006 with the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act, barring juries from basing verdicts on a victim’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Representation kept expanding through the next decade. Dylan Orr became the first openly transgender person appointed to a presidential administration role in 2009, at the U.S. Department of Labor. The first International Transgender Day of Visibility took place on March 31, 2010, founded by Rachel Crandall of Transgender Michigan; that same year, Victoria Kolakowski became the first openly transgender trial court judge of general jurisdiction, elected in Alameda County, California.

By 2014, Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of TIME for “The Transgender Tipping Point.” “We are in a place now where more and more trans people want to come forward and say, ‘This is who I am,’” Cox told the magazine.

North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill Opened a Decade of Escalating Backlash

2016 cut in two directions at once. North Carolina passed the first U.S. transgender bathroom ban, requiring people to use the restroom matching the sex on their birth certificate; boycotts followed, projected to cost the state $3.76 billion. The same year, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that “otherwise qualified service members can no longer be involuntarily separated, discharged or denied reenlistment or continuation of service just for being transgender.” That policy lasted about a year. In 2017, President Trump announced by tweet that “the United States Government will not accept or allow ... transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.”

The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked outrage that spilled into trans rights organizing too. The Brooklyn Liberation March that June drew an estimated 15,000 people, becoming the largest trans rights demonstration in U.S. history, with a specific focus on police violence against Black transgender people.

Sarah McBride’s Historic Win in 2024 Triggered a Bathroom Fight in Congress Within Weeks

Sarah McBride won Delaware’s at-large U.S. House seat on Nov. 5, 2024, with 57.9% of the vote, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to Congress. She’d previously become the first openly trans state senator in the country, elected in Delaware in 2020.

Her win came during a campaign season defined partly by how much money Republicans spent attacking transgender people. Broadcast television ad-tracking from AdImpact, analyzed by Uncloseted Media, put spending on anti-trans ads during the 2024 cycle at roughly $215 million, more than twice what Trump’s campaign spent on immigration ads and more than five times what it spent on ads about the economy. That figure covers broadcast and network TV only; it doesn’t include cable or streaming spending, meaning the real total was almost certainly higher.

The backlash to McBride’s win reached Congress almost immediately. Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a resolution on Nov. 18, 2024, two weeks before McBride was sworn in, seeking to bar her from Capitol restrooms matching her gender. Rather than force a floor vote, Speaker Mike Johnson preempted it with his own directive, then quietly inserted a bathroom restriction into the Congressional Record on Jan. 3, 2025, using his authority as speaker instead of putting it to a House vote.

Trump’s 2025 Executive Orders Targeted Trans Passports, Health Care and Military Service

Since retaking office in January 2025, the Trump administration has moved on trans Americans faster than any previous administration, on multiple fronts simultaneously.

On his first day back, Trump signed Executive Order 14168, defining sex under federal law as fixed at conception and recognizing only male and female. Agencies including the Office of Personnel Management and Department of Health and Human Services have implemented it since. That same order became the basis for a new State Department passport policy rejecting gender markers that don’t match a person’s sex “at conception.” A federal judge blocked that passport policy with a preliminary injunction in the case Orr v. Trump in June 2025; the Supreme Court granted the government a stay on Nov. 6, 2025, meaning the restrictive policy remains in effect while the underlying lawsuit continues.

A separate executive order, EO 14187, conditions federal funding on institutions ending gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. A federal judge blocked that order nationwide in February 2025 in Washington v. Trump, and it remains blocked as of this writing while an appeal sits before the 9th Circuit. That federal block doesn’t mean gender-affirming care for trans minors is protected everywhere, though. In June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti that states can ban that same care outright under their own laws, upholding a Tennessee ban and clearing the way for similar state bans to stand. Whether a trans teenager can access care today depends heavily on which state they live in.

The administration’s ban on transgender military service has followed a similar, contradictory path through the courts. After Trump signed EO 14183, the Pentagon moved to separate transgender troops from service. In May 2025, the Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s injunction in Shilling v. Trump, letting the ban take effect nationwide while litigation continues. More than a year later, on June 1, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in Talbott v. United States that the ban likely violates the constitutional rights of transgender troops already serving. That ruling protects only the named plaintiffs in that specific case; the broader ban remains in effect for transgender service members nationwide.

Subscribe now

New Jersey’s Shield Law and 800-Plus State Bills Show Where Things Stand in 2026

More than 800 anti-trans bills are active or pending across 43 states this year, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, which has followed the issue since 2015. Other trackers, including the ACLU’s, count differently and report lower totals because they define “anti-trans” and “anti-LGBTQ” bills differently; there’s no single agreed-upon number, but every tracker shows the same trend. Bill counts stayed relatively low and flat through the late 2010s, then climbed sharply starting in 2020, from roughly 91 bills that year to more than 1,000 in 2025, the steepest sustained increase the tracker has recorded.

“What is relatively new is, over the past five to six years, we’ve seen a really dramatic escalation,” Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, said in February 2026.

Not every recent development has gone against trans Americans. New Jersey’s legislature passed a bill in late June 2026 protecting both patients and providers of gender-affirming and reproductive care from out-of-state legal interference, including extradition attempts and civil suits tied to care that’s legal in New Jersey. It also bars protesters from obstructing clinic entrances. The bill passed the Assembly 55-23 on June 30 and awaits Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s signature; once signed, New Jersey becomes the last Democratic-controlled state to adopt this kind of shield law, following a wave of similar laws in other blue states.

That’s the country trans Americans are navigating heading into the second half of 2026: a federal government that named their existence in a counterterrorism strategy, courts delivering mixed and often narrow rulings, and state legislatures pulling in opposite directions depending on who controls them. None of it is new in kind. The scale of it is.

Track the Bills in Your State, and Subscribe for What Comes Next

Trans rights in America didn’t start with this administration, and the fight over them won’t end with it either. If you want the reporting that keeps tracking the bills, the court rulings, and the people organizing against both, subscribe to The Queer Agenda. If you’re in a state without a shield law like New Jersey’s, the Trans Legislation Tracker shows exactly what’s moving where you live, and most statehouses make it easy to find and contact your own representatives about specific bills.

Sources

• The White House, “2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” May 6, 2026.

• Washington Blade, “White House counterterrorism strategy targets ‘anti-American, radically pro-transgender’ groups,” May 11, 2026.

• New York Public Library and New York Historical Society, records on Jemima Wilkinson and Lucy Ann Lobdell.

• Smithsonian Institution, records on Mary Jones and H.R. Robinson’s “The Man-Monster” lithograph, 1836.

• The Revised Ordinances of the City of St. Louis, 1843.

• National Women’s History Museum, biography of We’Wha.

• Library of Congress, Stonewall-era research guide and Reconstruction-era coverage referencing Frances Thompson’s 1866 testimony.

• The New York Times, coverage of Murray Hall’s death, January 1901.

• Dr. Joshua Allen Gilbert, “Homosexuality and Its Treatment,” on Dr. Alan Hart’s 1917 surgery.

• New York Daily News, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” Dec. 1, 1952; Wikipedia retrospective on Christine Jorgensen.

• University of Victoria Transgender Archives, Transvestia and FTM International newsletter collections.

• American Psychiatric Association, DSM classification history, 1980 and 2013.

• Smithsonian Institution, “Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and the History of Pride Month”.

• Wikipedia and Village Preservation, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and STAR House.

• Wikipedia, Compton’s Cafeteria riot and the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (formerly Conversion Our Goal).

• GLAAD, Transgender Day of Remembrance history.

• Wikipedia, timeline of the murder of Gwen Araujo, 2002-2006.

• TIME, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” June 2014.

• U.S. Department of Defense, Secretary Ashton Carter announcement on transgender service, June 2016.

• The Associated Press, analysis of HB2’s projected economic impact on North Carolina, March 2017.

• ABC News, Sarah McBride election results, November 2024.

• Uncloseted Media, analysis of 2024 anti-trans campaign ad spending.

• The Washington Post, coverage of Rep. Nancy Mace’s Capitol bathroom resolution, November 2024.

• The White House, Executive Order 14168, Jan. 20, 2025.

• ACLU, case page for Orr v. Trump and coverage of the Supreme Court’s Nov. 6, 2025 stay.

• KFF, litigation tracker for Washington v. Trump on the youth gender-affirming care executive order, 2025-2026.

• Supreme Court of the United States, United States v. Skrmetti opinion, June 18, 2025.

• Lambda Legal, coverage of Shilling v. Trump and the Supreme Court’s May 2025 stay.

• U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Talbott v. United States opinion, June 1, 2026.

• Trans Legislation Tracker, 2026 bill count and historical year-by-year data.

• Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, “Anti-Trans Legislation” report, January 2026.

• Movement Advancement Project, Logan Casey statement via Truthout, Feb. 14, 2026.

• New Jersey Monitor, coverage of New Jersey’s health care shield bill, June-July 2026.

On July 16, the Fox News host joked on The Five that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new testosterone screening plan would turn troops into “wild animals” around women. Fox has said nothing about it since.

One week later, in a Washington, D.C. courtroom, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes asked the question Fox skipped. Why does the Pentagon treat testosterone therapy as a readiness tool for some troops, and a disqualifying condition for others?

What Hegseth’s Testosterone Screening Order Actually Requires

Hegseth announced the policy on July 15, in a video posted to social media rather than a written memo. The Pentagon declined to elaborate when reporters asked for details.

Under the plan, active-duty service members 30 and older get an annual testosterone screening added to their regular health assessment. That part is mandatory. Any resulting testosterone replacement therapy, or TRT, is voluntary. Troops younger than 30 can request the screening too.

Hegseth framed it as a readiness measure, saying the goal is “ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best” and tying it to “psychological and mental readiness” and “the leading edge of lethality.”

He hasn’t said when screening starts, how results will be recorded, or whether a low-testosterone diagnosis could affect a service member’s assignment or career. The policy is separate from body-composition standards Hegseth issued in December, which set a 26 percent body-fat cap and a 0.55 maximum waist-to-height ratio.

Jesse Watters Told Women on Military Bases to ‘Watch Out’

Discussing Hegseth’s plan on The Five, Watters predicted troops would abuse it.

“The guys that don’t need it are going to take it to triple boost, right?” Watters said. “And then they’re gonna get out there, and women on base, you guys better be careful. Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful, because these guys are gonna be wild animals, and you better watch out.”

His co-hosts responded with silence. Nobody on the panel challenged him.

Journalists called it out. “A Fox host joking about US soldiers raping women. Well done Rupert Murdoch, well done,” wrote Zeteo journalist Mehdi Hasan, naming the network’s founder. Retired intelligence officer Travis Akers asked why “joking about rape” was airing on Fox at all. Fox News has not issued a statement, and Watters has not addressed the criticism on air.

Watters has a track record of inflammatory, LGBTQ+-hostile, and sexist remarks. He’s said men who vote for Kamala Harris have “mommy issues” and that men who vote for women candidates will eventually “transition” into women themselves. When a gay asylum seeker, Andrys José Hernández Romero, was wrongfully deported to a Salvadoran prison, Watters dismissed the case on air, telling a co-host she’d “been talking about this gay barber from El Salvador with some stupid tattoo for weeks.”

Judge Ana Reyes Orders Pentagon to Explain Its Testosterone Double Standard

The sharper story is playing out in federal court, in a case Fox never mentioned.

Talbott v. United States is the lawsuit brought by more than 20 active-duty transgender service members and enlistees challenging President Trump’s ban on transgender military service. On July 23, Judge Reyes ordered the Justice Department to explain, in writing, “the similarities and differences in administering TRT, both medically and logistically, for trans men compared to other service members,” and the Pentagon’s “basis for treating trans men and other service members differently” under the ban and the new testosterone policy.

“The Court must assess the impact of this newly announced policy on the parties’ positions,” Reyes wrote.

The contradiction is direct. The administration’s ban policy requires troops to meet standards “without the benefit of routine medical treatment or special provisions,” and the government has argued transgender service members should be excluded in part because they need ongoing hormone therapy. Nine days later, Hegseth started offering that same category of treatment to troops 30 and older as a readiness benefit.

Why the Military Still Bans Transgender Troops Who Need the Same Hormone Therapy

The ban has had a tangled legal history. Reyes issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against it in March 2025, writing that “thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed, some risking their lives, to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them.” The Supreme Court let the ban take effect anyway in May 2025 while litigation continued.

A federal appeals court blocked the discharge of currently serving transgender troops named in the case on June 1, 2026. On June 30, the court certified the case as a class action, extending that protection to transgender service members currently serving across the military. New transgender recruits remain barred from enlisting.

The GLAD Law case page confirms the ban stays blocked for currently serving class members while litigation continues, with the government still pushing to enforce it fully.

Sexual Assault Reports in the Military Fell 4% in 2024. The Real Number Is Likely Higher

Watters’ joke wasn’t made in a vacuum. The Pentagon’s own data shows sexual assault remains a persistent problem it has struggled to fix.

The Defense Department’s FY2024 sexual assault report counted 8,195 sexual assault reports involving service members, a 4 percent drop from 2023. An anonymous survey conducted separately estimated more than 29,000 active-duty troops experienced unwanted sexual contact in the prior 12 months, a figure far higher than what gets formally reported. Hegseth is also cutting tens of thousands of civilian Defense Department positions, which officials have acknowledged could affect the department’s capacity for assault prevention and prosecution.

The pattern isn’t new. In February 2008, a U.S. Marine was accused of raping a Japanese teenager near a base in Okinawa, prompting then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to publicly express “deep regret.” That case occurred during Dana Perino’s tenure as White House press secretary, and it was one of several incidents involving American service members near Okinawa bases that have recurred over the decades and repeatedly strained U.S.-Japan relations.

What Happens Next in Talbott v. United States

Discovery in the case closes August 7. The Justice Department has said it plans to ask the Supreme Court to undo the appeals court’s block on discharges by August 30. Trial is scheduled to begin January 4, 2027.

Whatever the Pentagon files to answer Judge Reyes’ order will be the first official, on-the-record attempt to explain why hormone therapy disqualifies transgender troops but not the ones Hegseth is now screening for it. That filing, not another Fox panel, is where this story actually gets decided.

Follow the Talbott case. It will decide whether the Pentagon can keep banning transgender troops while handing out the exact treatment it says disqualifies them.

Subscribe to The Queer Agenda for updates as the Pentagon’s filing and the discovery deadline land next month.

In September 2025, Vice President JD Vance sat down for a Fox News interview. Host Jesse Watters asked if he saw the “militant transgender movement” as a domestic terrorist threat. Vance answered: “If you are encouraging people to commit acts of violence against the US government or against your fellow Americans, absolutely, you’re involved in a terrorist movement.”

That line, first reported by journalist Ken Klippenstein, set off policy moves trans advocates are still tracking.

JD Vance and a Heritage Foundation Push to Call Trans Advocacy “Terrorism”

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project is now pushing the FBI to create a formal “Trans Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” designation. Internal debate reportedly centers on whether an existing “Nihilistic Violent Extremist” label already covers trans suspects, or whether the government needs something more specific. A leaked Customs and Border Protection brief has already warned of a “Radical Leftist Trans Militant Cult.”

The push follows two shootings the administration has cited as justification. An August 2025 shooting in Minneapolis involved a transgender perpetrator. The September 2025 assassination of activist Charlie Kirk did not, despite early right-wing claims that the shooter’s ammunition carried pro-trans messages. Researchers who study mass violence say the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men, and fact-checkers including PolitiFact and Snopes have repeatedly debunked claims that transgender people are disproportionately violent. None of that has slowed the designation push. It isn’t official policy yet, but dozens of other Project 2025 proposals already are.

Trans-Specific Philanthropy Is Shrinking as Anti-Trans Bills Keep Climbing

The terrorism rhetoric is landing while trans-specific philanthropy keeps shrinking. Tracking reports from Funders for LGBTQ+ Issues, the sector’s main research group on this data, show foundation grants earmarked specifically for transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming communities fell from about $48 million in 2022 to roughly $36 million in 2023. Nonprofit Quarterly, citing that research, put trans-specific funding at just a few cents of every $100 U.S. foundations give away in total, a share that keeps shrinking rather than growing.

The money is disappearing as the legal landscape gets worse. The Trans Legislation Tracker counted 645 anti-trans bills nationwide by early February 2026. The ACLU, using a broader anti-LGBTQIA+ category, was tracking closer to 400 bills around the same time. Only three had passed by February and 17 had failed, meaning most were still active. By July, four states (Florida, Idaho, Kansas and Texas) carried the tracker’s highest “do not travel” risk rating, with 15 more states in its second-highest tier.

A Transgender Strategy Center Trainer Says Cis Gay Men Keep Stepping Back

Jordan Blaza Olsen watches both trends collide up close. She’s the training and technical assistance manager at the Transgender Strategy Center, a nonprofit she says has run capacity-building calls with trans leaders and allies nationwide since 2019.

She recently described one of those calls: a young trans woman of color asked for help launching her own organization, then said, “The gays hate us. They steal our words, our culture, but don’t want to help us when we’re literally fighting for our lives.”

Olsen says that comment names a pattern trans elders have flagged for decades. Cis LGB communities lean on trans people during a crisis, she argues, then step back once the spotlight moves. She points to a national health conference where a panel of mostly cis gay men described recovering executive-order funding. When she asked how trans people were involved, she says the room went quiet, then someone called trans people “hard to work with” and “hard to find.”

She traces the pattern back further. Three decades into the HIV/AIDS response, she says, major organizations took funding earmarked for trans programming but rarely put a trans person in charge. That’s her read on the sector’s history, not an independently audited count, but it echoes years of criticism from trans leaders in HIV and public health circles about being funded without being empowered.

Olsen also says philanthropic advisors have told the Transgender Strategy Center to consider dropping the word “trans” from grant applications, or renaming the organization outright. That pressure isn’t only coming from funders. Executive orders issued this year have already forced other nonprofits to scrub “transgender” from government-facing materials, part of a broader rollback that has also stripped transgender history from federal websites, according to a July 2026 policy review by trans journalist Erin Reed.

What “Protect the Dolls” Raised, and What It Didn’t Fix

“Protect the dolls” became shorthand for this exact tension. Designer Conner Ives coined the phrase for a T-shirt he wore during his London Fashion Week show in February 2025, with proceeds going to Trans Lifeline. Pedro Pascal wore it publicly weeks later. So did Troye Sivan and Haider Ackermann. Ives said pre-orders alone raised $70,000, and the campaign eventually topped $100,000.

That’s real money, and Olsen isn’t wrong that some posts stop there. Writer Marie-Adélina de la Ferrière made a related point in her own essay this year published in The Advocate. She described attending a memorial for a 15-year-old trans girl who died by suicide, her third vigil for a queer community member in four months. “Protecting the dolls is more than just a phrase or a trendy shirt,” she wrote. The shirt raised six figures. It didn’t save the teenager she was mourning.

Ariana Grande, Pedro Pascal and Where Trans Solidarity Money Is Really Going

Some of it is going further than a shirt. Ariana Grande launched the Brighter Days Ahead Foundation in June 2026, funding 22 organizations across four categories, including Trans Lifeline, Lambda Legal, Transgender Law Center and SAGE USA. Pedro Pascal has kept using red carpets and Instagram comment sections to call anti-trans rhetoric “vile and pathetic.”

Funders for LGBTQ Issues runs two programs built for exactly this gap: Grantmakers United for Trans Communities and the Trans Futures Funding Campaign, both designed to move philanthropic dollars directly to trans-led groups instead of routing them through larger, cis-led intermediaries. Olsen says allies inside that network have opened professional doors to trans organizers who had been locked out of others.

What Cis Gay Men Can Actually Do Instead of Posting

Olsen’s ask isn’t complicated. Give directly to trans-led organizations, not just general LGBTQ funds. Show up to city council meetings and legislative hearings on anti-trans bills. Walk trans friends home. Say something when a trans person isn’t in the room to defend themselves.

“Keep the ‘protect the dolls’ posts,” she says. “But back them up with something real.”

The FBI terrorism designation hasn’t been finalized. Most 2026 legislative sessions run through the fall. Both fights are still open, and how much support trans-led organizations get in the next few months may decide how they come out.

If today’s the day you put money where the hashtag is: give directly to Trans Lifeline, the Transgender Law Center, Gender Liberation Movement, or a trans-led mutual aid fund in your own city. Then check whether your state legislature has an anti-trans bill moving right now, and call whoever’s sponsoring it.

Subscribe to Queer Agenda for the stories, culture, and conversations shaping LGBTQ+ life right now.

Hunter Biden has a new word for what he thinks is wrong with Washington. Not corruption. Not partisanship. “Closetocracy.”

Biden introduced the term this week on I’ve Had It, the podcast hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan, in an episode posted July 18. His argument: some of the country’s most anti-LGBTQ+ politicians are closeted men, and their shame turns into policy.

“Everybody knows there is this closeted gay mafia, largely Republican, that exists in Washington, D.C.,” Biden said. “The only reason that is relevant is because I believe that internal conflict creates so much vitriol inside a person that they take it out on the rest of the world, and they do.”

He kept going: “Their whole lives they’ve been closeted, and so you have this... blackened heart about the fact that you can’t be who you want to be, so you take it out on everyone else. And these men, largely men, have done exactly that, and everybody knows who they are.”

Biden named a mafia. He didn’t name its members, not with anything that holds up. What he did next is why this clip spread past LGBTQ+ media into mainstream political and entertainment coverage within a day.

Why Ted Cruz, Not Mike Johnson, Was the Real Flashpoint

Welch had asked Biden a pointed question: given how obsessed the GOP got with his own leaked laptop during his father’s 2020 campaign, whose laptop would he want to see? Biden’s first pick was Sen. Ted Cruz.

What followed wasn’t reporting. It was speculation, and Biden said so himself. “You know what I get? I get a really, really kinky weird shit-type thing,” he said of Cruz, adding, “It may be gay, it may not be gay... It may be a little bit of this, it may be a little bit of that.” Then the walk-back: “I don’t know these to be true at all.”

That line matters more than the joke. Biden spent the segment arguing that closeted shame curdles into cruelty, then, in the same breath, aimed sexual speculation at a sitting senator with nothing behind it. Cruz’s office hasn’t responded publicly.

His second pick was Sen. Josh Hawley. His third was House Speaker Mike Johnson, which is where Welch’s nickname for him, “Little Moses Mike ‘Grindr’ Johnson,” came from.

Subscribe now

The Mike Johnson Grindr Rumor Is Still Unproven, and It Already Cost Someone Their Job

The Grindr nickname isn’t new, and it isn’t Biden’s invention. It traces back to a TikToker who goes by @razzledazzlemo, who claimed in fall 2025 to have screenshots proving Johnson used the gay dating app, and threatened to release them unless Johnson swore in Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva by October 1, 2025.

No screenshots ever surfaced. The TikToker said he handed the material to a journalist who never published anything. Fact-checkers at Snopes and Yahoo News have both examined the claim and found no evidence to support it. Johnson’s office has not addressed it directly.

The rumor had a real cost for the person who started it, regardless. The TikToker says he lost entertainment work and received threats after the claim went viral, and he launched a GoFundMe legal defense fund that has raised more than $27,000.

Johnson’s own record on the subject is better documented, and it isn’t about a dating app. In a 2023 clip that resurfaced widely, Johnson said he and his then-teenage son used Covenant Eyes, an app that shares a porn-viewing report with an “accountability partner,” which was his son. That much is on the record, in Johnson’s own words.

Biden isn’t wrong that internalized homophobia has shaped American politics. It’s a real, well-documented pattern: men who spend careers voting against LGBTQ+ rights while privately living something else. But naming a real pattern doesn’t excuse skipping the evidence. The same logic that lets Biden speculate about a senator’s sex life for laughs is the logic that cost a random TikToker his job over an unproven claim. Closeted or not, guilt by vibes isn’t accountability. It’s the same rumor mill queer people have spent decades trying to escape, just pointed in a different direction.

The Queer Agenda will follow up if Cruz, Hawley, or Johnson responds on the record, or if any of this moves past speculation. Subscribe to get that update when it happens, not just the version that goes viral first.

Subscribe to Queer Agenda for the stories, culture, and conversations shaping LGBTQ+ life right now.

Sources

PinkNews · LGBTQ Nation · Primetimer · Snopes · Yahoo News · Rolling Stone

That’s what a counselor told a circle of campers on a June night in rural North Carolina, according to Uncloseted Media, which spent time on the ground at Transcending Adolescence, a weeklong summer camp for trans and gender-diverse kids ages 8 to 17. One camper pictured sitting in a circle with other trans people, deep in the trees, mosquitoes buzzing in the dark.

“That place is here, and this is the place where I feel safe,” the camper said, according to co-founder Jacob Hofheimer, who recalled the moment to Uncloseted Media. “It got all of us.”

That’s the whole point of the camp. For one week, nobody has to guess.

What happened

Transcending Adolescence was founded in 2019 by Jacob and Chrissy Hofheimer, a trans married couple who met as lifeguards at a queer summer camp in New Hampshire. About 30 campers come together each week during the summer to swim, tie-dye, run the ropes course, and put on shows, the same as any other camp. They also hold nightly fireside talks about gender-affirming care, coming out, bathroom anxiety, misgendering, and mental health, guided by outside experts, according to Uncloseted Media’s reporting.

They chose North Carolina on purpose. The queer camp where the Hofheimers met mostly drew kids from wealthy New England families. Jacob told Uncloseted Media that far fewer campers came from Florida, Georgia, or Texas, the places where affirming resources are hardest to find. So they built their camp in the South instead.

A week costs $1,975. Chrissy told Uncloseted Media the camp also offers a “no questions asked” subsidized rate of $1,500 for families who can’t afford full price. “Access is really, really important,” she said.

Why it matters

Camp isn’t just fun for these kids. It’s data. A 2021 pilot study in the International Journal for Equity in Health, based on a six-day LGBTQ summer camp, found that participants reported measurable gains in resilience, self-esteem, and quality of life, with transgender and nonbinary campers in particular describing social connection they couldn’t find at home.

That tracks with what The Trevor Project’s 2025 national survey found: 40% of transgender and nonbinary young people seriously considered suicide in the past year, and 90% of LGBTQ+ youth overall said recent anti-LGBTQ laws, policies, and political debates caused them stress or anxiety. Among trans and nonbinary respondents specifically, that number climbs to 94%.

“Finding places where you literally see yourself and can be seen by others for who you are is important during adolescence. It’s a human need,” Stephen Russell, a professor at Arizona State University’s Sanford School who studies youth development, told Uncloseted Media. “For trans youth, especially those who may not feel fully accepted at school, at home, or in their faith communities, a camp where their identity isn’t something they have to navigate or defend, but is simply centered as part of who they are, can be transformative.”

Who’s affected

The story Uncloseted Media tells in depth is a 12-year-old camper the outlet calls Ruby, whose name was changed to protect her privacy. Before camp, bullying at school got bad enough that her family pulled her out and homeschooled her for the rest of fifth grade. Her mother, called Kate in the piece, told Uncloseted Media her daughter manages a constant, exhausting mental checklist most cis kids never have to think about: What if someone finds out? Are they looking at me? Do I look the part?

At camp, Ruby told Uncloseted Media, that checklist went quiet. “I couldn’t really go anywhere without picking [at] myself because I was anxious,” she said. “It really made me smile knowing that there’s a lot of people out there like me. I’m putting myself out there, I’m being myself, and no one judges me.”

Rory Sowers, a 19-year-old junior counselor from Florida who first came to camp in 2021, put it more bluntly to Uncloseted Media: “There’s so much that trans folks have to worry about just going about their day-to-day lives, especially living in the South. I was able to come into myself a lot more when I didn’t have all of those anxieties on my back.”

Legal and political context

North Carolina’s law hasn’t stood still since the Hofheimers picked it as their home base. Three laws enacted in 2023, after the legislature overrode then-Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes, now shape daily life for trans kids in the state: the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act bars transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s teams, the Parents’ Bill of Rights (Senate Bill 49) restricts classroom instruction on gender identity in early grades and requires schools to notify parents of a student’s name or pronoun change, and a separate law bans gender-affirming medical care for minors.

That legal picture got more restrictive this year. House Bill 805, vetoed by current Governor Josh Stein and passed over his veto by the legislature, took effect January 1, 2026. It defines only two legally recognized sexes, male and female, cuts off state funding for gender transition care for minors, and extends the malpractice statute of limitations to ten years for doctors who provided transition-related care to minors, a provision advocates warn will chill providers who treated trans youth even before the practice was banned. It also bars students from sharing sleeping quarters with peers of a different “biological sex” during school-authorized activities, which directly touches overnight programs like camp cabins, and lets parents block their kids from specific library books.

The Campaign for Southern Equality has flagged North Carolina’s Parents’ Bill of Rights as a possible Title IX conflict, though that hasn’t yet produced a court ruling reversing the law. As of this writing, all four laws remain in force.

What happens next

For now, Transcending Adolescence keeps its exact location undisclosed, a common safety practice among programs serving trans youth in states hostile to them. Chrissy told Uncloseted Media she hopes the camp’s model eventually gets replicated in other states. It isn’t the only option in the meantime: programs like Camp Indigo Point, Harbor Camps, and Brave Trails run similar affirming spaces for LGBTQ+ youth elsewhere in the country, part of a small but growing network of camps built specifically for kids who don’t have one at home.

Every camper eventually goes home, back to the same schools and laws they left behind. Sowers told Uncloseted Media that campers who arrive reluctant are often the ones crying on the last day because they don’t want to leave.

“After the camp, I really haven’t been talking about how I feel insecure that I’m trans,” Ruby told Uncloseted Media. “I can’t wait to go back and see the people I met and meet new friends.”

If a camp like this didn't exist where you grew up, or still doesn't, share this with someone who needs to know it does now. If you're in a position to help fund a $1,500 subsidized camp spot for a kid who needs one, Transcending Adolescence takes donations directly through their site. And if you're a parent of a trans or gender-diverse kid in the South looking for a place like this, PFLAG keeps a running list of affirming camps by state.

Subscribe to Queer Agenda for the stories, culture, and conversations shaping LGBTQ+ life right now.

Editor’s Note: The photos in this article were not taken at Transcending Adolescence and do not depict its campers. They are included for illustrative purposes only.

Sources

• In the Middle of the Bible Belt, a Summer Camp Lets Trans Kids Exhale — Uncloseted Media, original on-the-ground reporting, quotes, and camper interviews (Sam Donndelinger, July 18, 2026)

• Transcending Adolescence — organization site

• The Trevor Project 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People

• Pride Camp: Pilot study of an intervention to develop resilience and self-esteem among LGBTQ youth — International Journal for Equity in Health, 2021

• North Carolina House Bill 574, Fairness in Women’s Sports Act

• North Carolina Senate Bill 49, Parents’ Bill of Rights (Session Law 2023-106)

• Veto overridden: Ban on gender-affirming care for minors takes effect in North Carolina — NBC News, 2023

• North Carolina House Bill 805 (Ratified)

• NC gender identity law: HB 805 in effect Jan. 1, 2026 — ABC11

• ASU Sanford School director named fellow of international developmental science society — ASU News (confirms Stephen Russell’s affiliation)

This year’s observance of Transgender Day of Visibility takes place during a historically hostile political environment for the transgender community. Already in the first three months of the year, more than 700 anti-transgender bills have been considered in states across the United States on topics ranging from restricting transgender people’s healthcare to penalizing those who updated the gender marker on their identification documents to match their gender identity.

As the U.S. transgender community faces a historically hostile environment, there are many actions that allies can take — both large and small — to show support and solidarity.

Here are five actions to take in honor of Transgender Day of Visibility

1. Take a moment to learn about what it means to be transgender.

With fewer than one in three adults in the United States reporting that they personally know someone who is transgender, it’s understandable to have questions. Transgender people have always been part of every community, both in the U.S. and around the world, throughout history. To learn more about what it means to be transgender, read Advocate for Trans Equality’s resource, Frequently Asked Questions about Transgender People.

2. Watch, read, or follow transgender folks’ stories to get to know the people behind the political headlines.

While stories about transgender people continue to make headlines and gain traction on social media, many fail to include the voices of transgender people themselves. To address this imbalance, incorporate first-hand perspectives from transgender people into your preferred media format.

Each year, GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, honors media for fair, accurate, and inclusive representation of the LGBTQ+ community through the annual GLAAD Media Awards. See the outstanding stories about transgender people honored this year for a diverse list of movies, documentaries, television series, books, podcasts, and more that highlight transgender voices.

3. Familiarize yourself with the transgender-led organizations and initiatives working to support trans people.

There are many organizations dedicated to supporting and protecting transgender people in the United States. Consider learning more about some of the country’s leading organizations below by visiting their website, subscribing to their email lists, following their social media accounts, or donating to support their cause:

• Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE) is an organization that fights for the legal and political rights of transgender people in the United States. A4TE is one of the largest trans-led advocacy organizations in the U.S., bringing together experts, advocates, and communities to shift government and society toward an equitable future in which trans people live joyful lives without barriers.

• Transgender Law Center (TLC) is one of the largest national, trans-led organizations in the U.S. that advocates for self-determination for all people. TLC is dedicated to advancing the rights of transgender and gender-nonconforming people through litigation, policy advocacy, and legal services.

• The Transgender Youth Emergency Project, a program of the Campaign for Southern Equality, offers logistical and financial support to families of transgender young people seeking essential health care amid an increasingly challenging environment.

4. Look into your state’s current policies impacting transgender people — and those working to protect trans folks in your community.

Amid a continued wave of anti-transgender headlines, policies, and news stories, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest information or figure out what to do in response. Zeroing in on what policies and political activity are taking place in your own state or region can help.

Consider learning about the current policies impacting transgender people living in your own state by utilizing The Movement Advancement Project’s LGBTQ Equality Map. This resource regularly tracks and updates more than 50 LGBTQ-related laws and policies in each state, the District of Columbia, and the five populated U.S. territories — including those that specifically impact transgender individuals.

Once you’ve explored the laws and policies impacting your state, look into the organizations and individuals working to push back against anti-transgender activity in your community. Most states have regional, state-wide, or local LGBTQ+ organizations that are actively working to protect and support transgender individuals every day. Check out the Equality Federation’s network of more than 40 state-based LGBTQ+ organizations across the U.S. to connect with an on-the-ground group nearest you.

5. Make it personal: Assess how you might show up as an ally in everyday interactions and conversations with family and friends

While advocating for legal and legislative protections for transgender people is critical, it’s also important to take action to support this community on an individual level. You do not need to be an expert in transgender topics or identities to provide meaningful allyship. Supporting the transgender community can start with simply taking stock of your everyday conversations and if/how transgender people and topics come up. Consider asking yourself questions, such as:

• How am I currently using gendered language in my day-to-day conversations?

• What can I do to shift my language to be more gender-inclusive?

• What are the people around me saying about trans folks, or related political headlines?

• How might I respond to someone who makes an anti-transgender comment or joke?

Many leading LGBTQ+ organizations have created resources to support anyone, anywhere, in their efforts to support the transgender community. Deepen your allyship by reading free guides and resources from groups such as Gender Spectrum, The Trevor Project, and The Human Rights Campaign.

Transgender Day of Visibility is a great moment to reflect on how you are showing up for the transgender people in your life and in your community – not just today, but every day of the year.

“This has been going on for a very long time,” Yesenia Mendoza, director of development and communications at Latino Equality Alliance, which operates the Southern California nonprofit in partnership with the Los Angeles LGBT Center, tells Queer Agenda. “We were so innocent-minded that we didn’t think it was a hate crime. That happens to a lot of people, where you rationalize negative things that occur in your life. We didn’t think it could happen to us.”

Since late May, an as-yet-unidentified assailant has been throwing dog feces at Mi SELA, which provides leadership development and support groups for LGBTQ+ youth in Bell, a city of 33,000 in greater Los Angeles. In just one evening alone, dozens of bright green bags filled with fecal matter were hurled onto its front awning and deposited on the sidewalk near the building’s entrance.

Staffers didn’t realize that the vandalism was a biased attack until Latino Equality Alliance posted a TikTok video raising awareness about the situation. The post rapidly went viral as people flooded the video with thousands of anti-LGBTQ+ comments. Trolls cheered the vandal on, asking for Mi SELA’s address so they could toss feces at the building, too. Scrolling through the hate directed at them, Mendoza says she came to a long-delayed realization: “Wait a minute, this is not normal.”

What made the attacks especially violating for Mi SELA is that it’s the only place many of the youth who rely on its services can be themselves. The majority of LGBTQ+ young people who visit its drop-in center each day are closeted in their daily lives, largely hailing from culturally conservative Latino households. They come to do homework, to watch Netflix, and — as Mendoza puts it — to “just vibe.”

“It made me afraid, not for myself but for the people that come in,” she says of the vandalism. “I never want them to feel unsafe or targeted in our community center.”

Mi SELA is one of numerous queer and allied spaces that have been vandalized during the second Trump administration. Since the president was sworn in this January, more than a dozen properties have been targeted seemingly for their support of LGBTQ+ people, including community centers, churches, businesses, and even public spaces. Those incidents, as sources tell Queer Agenda, highlight not merely the increasing scrutiny facing LGBTQ+ Americans under Trump but also the community’s continued resilience in the face of adversity.

Among the countless locales reportedly targeted in 2025, Sinners and Saints, a Washington, D.C. gay bar, had its glass front door shattered and a homophobic slur painted on the inside wall. The headquarters of Long Beach Pride in the California city of the same name were tagged with Nazi symbols and pro-Trump graffiti. A Pride display at BookWoman, a longtime feminist bookstore in Austin, Texas, was defaced when a vandal pitched a piece of concrete through its front window. In cities ranging from Appleton, Wisc. and Atlanta, to St. Paul, Minn., LGBTQ+ Pride flags have been torn down from city light poles and private homes.

Many of these altercations appear to be connected. In Stockton, Calif., three LGBTQ+ nonprofits were hit in one day, including the Central Valley Gender Health and Wellness Center, which provides harm reduction, HIV prevention, and peer support to queer people of color. A rock was thrown through the building’s front window during Pride month June, seemingly targeting a Trans Pride flag that was on display. This October, at least four different LGBTQ+ owned businesses in Denver all had their windows smashed during the same week, including a local gym, a salon, and a boutique that chose to remain anonymous in press coverage. Also hit was the Center on Colfax, Colorado’s largest LGBTQ+ community center.

Although the wave of attacks against Denver LGBTQ+ spaces drew national coverage, they were not a new phenomenon. John Taylor, the Center on Colfax’s vice president of development, says that a local gay bar reported being vandalized frequently in recent months. The vandalism is “especially violating,” Taylor adds, because Denver “feels like such a safe space for the queer community.” After Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed a 2023 law declaring Colorado a trans sanctuary, many families have fled to Denver from hostile states targeting gender-affirming health care for youth.

“It makes me really frustrated that we’re trying to make sure we have this safe space, and then feeling like, no matter what we do, something like this is still going to happen,” he tells Queer Agenda.

Numerous allied spaces have likewise found themselves in the crosshairs, including LGBTQ+ affirming churches. In September, a vandal slashed a rainbow banner reading “All Are Welcome” at Indian Heights United Methodist Church in Overland Park, Kan. Rev. Fred Daley, a pastor at All Saints Catholic Church in Syracuse, N.Y., tells Queer Agenda that he has received at least three death threats since its Pride flag was torn down and burned in June. The vandalism was followed by an “explosion of hate mail to our parish, to our bishop, to our Catholic Diocese, many of them very violent, just based certainly on ignorance, but very, very hateful,” he says.

These faith centers, though, have chosen to defy the hate by continuing to signal their support for the LGBTQ+ community. When the entryway of Life in the City in Austin, Texas, was vandalized with the words “Pride is the First Sin” in July, the parish immediately went into action. Within hours, a community member designed a new mural to cover the vandalism: a pair of Progress Pride flags that now buttress the front entryway. And the very next weekend after its rainbow banner was defaced, All Saints held a public flag-raising ceremony to replace it.

“We just have to go forward,” Daley says. “All this negative and even violent reaction across the country, which is being fed by our present administration, is never going to win the day. You can step on a flower, but you can’t hold back the spring.”

For the team at Mi SELA, the vandalism they have faced is yet another reminder of how important the work they do is. Although many of the youth clients who seek out their services don’t have a great deal of support in their lives, having access to Mi SELA’s resources and programming helps them to be bolder in their identities. A young person who would come to the drop-in center to try on heels and experiment with makeup, Mendoza says, now performs drag at college. Even then, Mendoza saw how experiencing even a taste of freedom “lit up something in them, knowing that their identity is affirmed, and it’s not only affirmed, it’s celebrated.”

To ensure the space remains safe for years to come, Mi SELA recently installed high-quality security cameras to catch the vandal in the act, with the help of generous donations from the community. Security footage finally caught a glimpse of the perpetrator in October, although he has yet to be identified by local authorities.

While Mendoza is grateful that justice is closer to being served, she hopes this chapter is soon behind them so Mi SELA can focus solely on its mission: serving the vulnerable communities that rely on them to thrive. “I know that our community is resilient, but honestly, I have a weird relationship with the word resilient,” she says. “We have to go through hardship when we really shouldn’t, but this is not going to stop us. People can do whatever they want, but that doesn’t change who you are.”

“It’s like we are in this game: Whenever something in the world goes sideways, trans people are always one of — if not the first — targets for Republicans to blame,” Cadence Pierce, 40, tells Queer Agenda. “My friends and I often joke about the Iago meme: ‘I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die from not surprise.’ I’m used to it, but every time, I get frustrated and irritated. How does anyone buy the nonsense?”

Pierce is one of the estimated two million LGBTQ+ Americans who presently rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known colloquially as food stamps. Those benefits, which provide an estimated 40 million Americans with up to $100 billion in food assistance each year, will be dramatically reduced and significantly delayed amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The closure has resulted from a congressional standoff over a federal budget bill: Democrats oppose proposed GOP cuts to Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies that would dramatically increase health care costs for millions of Americans.

As the impasse over the ACA continues, the official website of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) engaged in a particularly Trumpian obfuscation. In a message posted on October 27, the federal agency claimed that SNAP benefits are being blocked by Democrats who “continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures.” Over a week later, the statement remains pinned to the USDA’s homepage, despite the claim being patently false.

Even as trans people are unjustly censured for the SNAP quagmire, the reality is that they are disproportionately likely to rely on monthly assistance to meet their food needs. LGBTQ+ adults are 36% more likely to be enrolled in the SNAP program than their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts, according to an analysis from the Williams Institute, a pro-LGBTQ+ think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles. Of LGBTQ+ people who reported receiving regular nutritional assistance, 66% were disabled, and 69% had a household income under $35,000 annually.

It makes sense that the trans community would be uniquely reliant on these resources, which are designed to aid low-income populations: Trans people are disproportionately likely to be unemployed, unhoused, living under the poverty line, or a combination of all three. During the pandemic, trans respondents were three times as likely as cisgender people to report not having enough to eat, per the Williams Institute’s research.

Some trans Americans tell Queer Agenda that they aren’t sure how they are going to get by without the necessary benefits that SNAP provides. Iris Marrah, 29, receives the maximum allowable individual benefits every month, which are currently set at $292, and still struggles to pay her household bills. Marrah is unable to work due to a severe strain of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome — a connective tissue disorder that, in her case, has resulted in skin tears, bruising, and cyclical vomiting — and 80% of the monthly Supplemental Security Income she receives goes to rent. Marrah already overdrafts her bank account every single month, even if she doesn’t spend a dollar on food outside of her allotted SNAP budget.

With the future of SNAP now in limbo, not knowing how she is going to pay for electricity or where her next meal may be coming from has been a disquieting experience. Marrah has a history of disordered eating and worries that any changes to her usual food intake might retrigger old behaviors. “I have been in a very dark place, but what has kept me holding on is not wanting to give them what they want,” Marrah says, noting that she has experienced increased suicidal ideation in recent weeks. “It’s miserable. Existence is not great. Basically, I live out of spite.”

Others voiced the same anxieties: unsure of what the coming days hold without the certainty of being able to fill their pantries. Samuel James, 35, says that he has enough to get by for the next two weeks, but after that, he isn’t sure how he is going to feed himself. Howie Rhodes, 34, fears being forced to choose between paying for his groceries and his monthly medications. Without the generosity of her landlords, Tela Rose, 55, says that she would likely end up on the street: “All I know how to do is get through today. That’s where I have to keep my focus: on making sure I have something to eat and getting through each day.”

While conservatives have long painted SNAP recipients as “lazy” and “welfare queens,” many of those who spoke with Queer Agenda say that the program has helped them rebuild their lives. Marrah was forced to leave a previous job after her employer refused to give her accommodations for her disability, causing her to pass out during a shift. After a series of stays in mental health facilities over the past three years, Liz Phillips, 41, was hoping that being on SNAP would help her find some stability; instead, she now anticipates being forced to beg for money from friends on social media.

“This administration and the ruling party are pitting my existence and my ability to be myself against my ability to eat,” Phillips, who requested the use of a pseudonym in this story, tells Queer Agenda. “I’ve spent so much of my life trying to be someone I’m not, and when I actually am finally starting to become myself, it’s under threat. I’m going to do my damnedest to survive this.”

Government leaders are hopeful that a shutdown deal may be in sight after a 36-day standstill. In order to end the shutdown, at least eight Senate Democrats must cross the aisle to join Republicans in voting for the funding bill — thereby crossing the 60-vote threshold to avoid a filibuster. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) expressed optimism that a compromise was in sight, telling reporters this week that he believes congressional lawmakers are “getting close to an off ramp here.” Although some centrist Democrats reportedly are open to concessions, others oppose giving in to the drastic ACA cuts that the GOP is seeking.

Befitting his tactic of laying the blame elsewhere, Trump has been sending mixed signals on his willingness to end the crisis, saying he will only negotiate after the government is reopened. Claiming that Democrats “have lost their way,” he predicted in a 60 Minutes interview that the party would cave: “I think they have to. And if they don’t vote, it’s their problem.” (It’s also unclear how Trump will respond to a federal ruling ordering the government to fully fund the SNAP program, given how often he has ignored court mandates before.)

Despite the fact that trans people have very little to do with the intraparty strife in Congress, it has played out a now-familiar pattern amid Trump’s second term in office. Since January, the White House has directly targeted trans access to accurate passports, affirming sports participation, and necessary health care. More than 21 hospitals have discontinued gender-affirming treatments for minors as a result of the federal administration’s threats, and the Department of Health and Human Services is currently pursuing a new rule that would effectively amount to a national ban on trans youth health care. Trans people have become such a cursory target that Trump even railed against transgender mice during a March speech to Congress.

If being scapegoated for the SNAP crisis is perhaps further insult to injury, trans people are doing what they always do: figuring out how to survive, often under unenviable circumstances. Many sources for this story credited food banks for stepping up to support vulnerable populations, and in Rose’s home state of Washington, Gov. Bob Ferguson (D) has issued an additional $2.2 million to local pantries during the government shutdown. “I feel really lucky that we have a community that really steps up when things are hard,” she says.

Some worried, though, that a breaking point may be coming soon: of being forced to bear too much of society’s burdens. Pierce insists that trans people simply want what everyone else wants — to live authentically and without scrutiny — but that can be difficult when certain government leaders don’t even want you to eat. “Every time another attack gets lobbed at trans people, it wears you down little by little,” she says. “When is too much going to be too much?”

On November 7, America’s highest judicial body will hear a long-shot bid from former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis seeking to reverse the Supreme Court’s own 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. In a petition to SCOTUS, Davis’s attorney, Mat Staver, said the 5-4 decision — which allowed queer couples to marry in all 50 U.S. states — is “egregiously wrong” and based upon a “legal fiction.” “The mistake must be corrected,” said Staver, who also serves as chairperson of the far-right extremist group Liberty Counsel. Deemed a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Liberty Counsel has claimed the legalization of marriage equality is “destructive to our very social fabric” and a slippery slope to pedophilia.

If Davis’ name seems familiar, she made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to LGBTQ+ couples in Rowan County, Ky., leading her to be jailed for five days on contempt of court charges. David Moore and David Ermold, one of the couples who refused a license, eventually sued and were awarded damages of $50,000 each in a 2023 jury verdict (along with an additional $260,000 in legal fees). Although Davis pleaded with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to intervene in her case, her entreaty was rejected.

While Davis and her legal team might believe that the most conservative Supreme Court in 90 years would be sympathetic to her plight, the votes may not be on her side. Although the arch-conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have openly called to revisit Obergefell, other right-wing members of the bench may not be so inclined. Although Chief Justice John Roberts joined the minority in opposing the nationwide legalization of marriage equality, he was in the majority on Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark 2020 decision finding that federal civil rights laws barring sex-based discrimination also ban anti-LGBTQ+ bias. Fellow conservative Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, personally authored the Bostock opinion.

Fears that the Supreme Court would nullify Obergefell outright were somewhat assuaged by a recent interview with Justice Amy Coney Barrett in The New York Times, during which she said the decision rests on “very concrete reliance interests” that would make it difficult to overturn. Defining “reliance interests” as referring to “things that would be upset or undone if a decision is undone,” Barrett claimed that deciding whether to undo precedent is not merely a question of: “Is this decision right or wrong?” “Because if a decision is wrong, then you have to decide whether you should keep it for many of the reasons you say: stability, reliance, interests, et cetera,” she said.

But even if the fickle tides of the Supreme Court turn against Davis, she can sleep soundly knowing that America doesn’t need her help in kneecapping the freedom to marry. Judicial and political authorities across the U.S. have repeatedly indicated their brazen willingness to methodically whittle down the rights of queer couples until their marriages are relegated to second-class status. When it comes to rolling back LGBTQ+ equality, this country much prefers the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach.

The first blow to Obergefell was dealt in April 2016, when Mississippi passed what was, at the time, the single most extreme anti-LGBTQ+ law ever enacted by a U.S. state. Known as House Bill 1523, the statute allows people of faith to refuse goods or services based upon their “deeply held religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Although critics warned that the bill was so vaguely worded that it could potentially be used to ban women from wearing pants in the workplace, HB 1523 was an explicit response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the freedom to marry one year prior. The first protected belief outlined in its bill text is that “marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman.”

Although HB 1523 affected the entire LGBTQ+ community in Mississippi, the law particularly placed queer couples in the crosshairs. Under the discriminatory statute, landlords have the right to refuse housing to married LGBTQ+ partners on the basis of religion. Adoption and foster care agencies would have the ability to turn away queer couples seeking to give a child a loving home. The ACLU of Mississippi even predicted it would grant exactly what Davis is asking for: allowing county clerks to recuse themselves from being forced to certify LGBTQ+ unions.

HB 1523 has quietly stayed on the books for close to 10 years because the courts have declined to halt its enforcement. Although U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves initially paused HB 1523 due to his belief that it would ultimately be found unconstitutional, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed his injunction in June 2017. The court found that because plaintiffs had not yet been targeted under the law, LGBTQ+ Mississippians did not have a legal right to sue. In January 2018, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal challenging HB 1523, thereby allowing Mississippi to continue willfully discriminating against queer couples.

In the near-decade since HB 1523’s passage, numerous laws have been enacted seeking to prevent LGBTQ+ married couples from having the same rights and protections as other wedded partners. Getting to the punch early, Tennessee passed a law in 2017 mandating that words like “husband” and “wife” be legally interpreted as to their “natural and ordinary meaning.” While Gov. Bill Haslam (R) denied that HB 1111 was a swipe at marriage equality, conservative groups that lobbied for the bill, such as the Family Action Council, admitted that it was intended to prevent queer and opposite-sex families from receiving equal treatment under the law. A lawsuit seeking to void HB 1111 was thrown out of court later that same year, and it has since remained in place.

The attacks on marriage equality over the past decade have been extremely wide-ranging, and in truth, they are just getting started. At the time that Mississippi’s law was enacted, just two states restricted foster care and adoption for queer couples: Nebraska and North Dakota. At the time of publication, at least 14 states currently allow faith-based agencies to turn away prospective parents because they are LGBTQ+. At least two states permit judges or other officiants to refuse to perform queer ceremonies: Tennessee (yet again) and Texas. The latter move came courtesy of the Texas Supreme Court this very month.

The nation’s most powerful legal authorities have not only done little to stop the escalating war on marriage equality, but they have also, in many cases, encouraged it. When Christian baker Jack Phillips pleaded with the Supreme Court to let him ignore Colorado laws that would compel him to treat queer couples equally, the justices ruled narrowly in his favor. SCOTUS gave a similar pass to Arizona designer Lorie Smith, who was granted permission to refuse to create LGBTQ+ wedding websites (even though she had never been asked to do so).

Civil rights advocates have declared many of these decisions to be split: neither an outright defeat for LGBTQ+ equality nor an unbridled victory for conservatives. When the Supreme Court ruled that Philadelphia discriminated against a Catholic foster care agency by requiring that it work with queer couples, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) noted that the verdict actually upheld the validity of laws protecting the LGBTQ+ community. “The Court ruled that governments can enforce nondiscrimination laws as long as they do so neutrally, but that the city of Philadelphia was not neutral in its application of its nondiscrimination laws,” HRC said in a press release at the time.

The Supreme Court has left many of the biggest questions unanswered, though, as it effectively kicks the can down the road on equality.. Because many of its rulings are idiosyncratic and not intended to be sweeping, it’s not always clear how broadly they can be applied: Is it OK now for bakers not to bake cakes for gay weddings? Can website designers just say no to queer ceremonies? Illustrating the mass confusion over where LGBTQ+ couples stand, a “No Gays Allowed” sign at a Tennessee gas station went viral on social media following the SCOTUS ruling on wedding websites. The display actually dated back to the days of Obergefell — posted just hours after the decision came down — but people shared the message as if it just happened.

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will entertain Davis’s wish to negate the marriages of more than 820,000 queer couples. (The smart money is they don’t, especially given that they already snubbed her once before.) But no matter the outcome, the truth is that LGBTQ+ Americans do not have true marriage equality. Despite our community’s hard-won progress, the U.S. is just as it was in the days before Obergefell: a country that operates under a patchwork of protections for marginalized people, where an individual’s rights are dependent upon their zip code.

A system in which queer couples can get married on Sunday but are refused a table at a restaurant for it on Monday isn’t full equality. It’s lip service.

A new report touted by The Welcome Party, a centrist political action committee turned nonprofit, finds that 70% of voters believe that the Democratic Party overemphasizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans” and “fighting climate change” in its messaging. Deeming Democrats to be “out of touch” with the average voter, its polling research stresses that the party should instead focus on issues like “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” According to Semafor, The Welcome Party intends to present its findings directly to elected Democrats in the coming weeks.

As Democrats continue to wring their hands over U.S. President Donald Trump’s second victory this past November, the too-online have predictably seized upon the report to heap misdirected blame on LGBTQ+ Americans. Frequent poster Joe Walsh, a former Republican Congressman who recently converted to the Democratic Party, posted on BlueSky that anyone who was on the ground last year “speaking with middle class/working class voters… heard from these voters every single day the same.” Stephen Richer, a fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, concurred that the report is simply common sense: “Anyone outside of a college cafeteria could have told.”

The trouble with common sense, however, is that sense is increasingly uncommon. If anything, the above research indicates that the U.S. public has short memories: Democrats did perilously little to engage LGBTQ+ equality in the 2024 presidential election, thereby ceding the issue to the right. The last time that Democrats made full rights and protections for the LGBTQ+ community a centerpiece of their messaging, they won the White House resoundingly.

If 2020 now seems a lifetime away, so do its politics. More than two dozen Democrats ran for president at the time, making it the largest Democratic field in at least four decades and the most diverse in history. After four years of Trump decimating LGBTQ+ rights under his first term, nearly every mainstream candidate spoke to their stance on equality. Democratic hopefuls like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, and former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg (himself an out gay man) released detailed platforms outlining how they would fight for the LGBTQ+ community as president.

Let’s take a closer look at some of those platforms. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand promised to cover gender-affirming treatments under a universal health care plan. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke pledged to appoint more LGBTQ+ allies in the federal government and ensure that data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity is included in the U.S. Census. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a comprehensive 12-page plan vowing to ban discrimination against queer couples seeking to foster or adopt, institute a nationwide conversion therapy ban, decriminalize HIV transmission, and ease the asylum process for LGBTQ+ immigrants fleeing to the U.S. for safety.

As the deputy editor for Out magazine during the Democratic primaries, I worked directly with several of the 2020 presidential campaigns to ensure that LGBTQ+ prospective voters knew where they stood. To name just a few, our staff coordinated op-eds with the teams for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and former Vice President Joe Biden (who would eventually win the nomination) that highlighted the candidates’ records on LGBTQ+ issues and what they hoped to achieve in office.

“Bernie is committed to guaranteeing comprehensive, free at point-of-service health care to everyone,” wrote Victoria Rodriguez-Roldan, then a national surrogate for Sanders’ campaign. “His Medicare for All plan would not only confront the massive health disparities faced by the LGBTQ+ community, it would cover gender affirming surgeries, increase access to PrEP, remove barriers to mental health care, and bolster suicide prevention efforts.”

Candidates had the opportunity to speak to queer voters in their own words at not one but two dedicated LGBTQ+ forums. At an October 2019 town hall organized by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Klobuchar called to recognize a third gender on federal documents, and Booker declared violence against the LGBTQ+ community to be a “national emergency.” Warren apologized for a 2012 remark in which she claimed that providing gender-affirming care to trans people in prison isn’t a “good use of taxpayer dollars.” Prior to a frankly surreal non-sequitur on “round-the-clock gay sex” in San Francisco, Biden waxed about how far society has progressed on LGBTQ+ acceptance in recent decades: “It’s normalized. It’s not anything strange.”

Supporting LGBTQ+ people wasn’t what won Democrats the 2020 election all on its own, but being vocal allies to the community certainly didn’t hurt. In defeating Trump in the November general election by 4.5%, Biden earned not merely the largest number of votes from any presidential candidate in history but also record support from the queer community. In an HRC poll, 83% of LGBTQ+ respondents said they backed Biden in 2020, a significant 5% increase from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s numbers four years earlier.

That picture is the near mirror image of 2024, when Democrats were notably silent on the major issues affecting queer Americans. After Biden withdrew from the race, former Vice President Kamala Harris declined to release a detailed policy outlining her vision for LGBTQ+ equality. Her presidential campaign platform devoted just three sentences to the LGBTQ+ community and did not mention trans people. Her only explicit action item was supporting passage of the Equality Act, a landmark civil rights bill that would enshrine LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination in all areas of public life, including housing, health care, education, and credit.

When contacted by this writer in September 2024 to expand on her platform, a representative for Harris’s team offered no additional clarification on how she would fight for equality as president. While reaffirming her support for the LGBTQ+ community, the email notably did not reference a single piece of proposed policy.

“Vice President Harris knows that freedom is the very foundation that our country was built on,” a Harris spokesperson wrote. “She’s spent her entire career fighting to make sure every single one of us has the freedom to love who we love and be who we are. From attacking LGBTQ+ rights to spewing hatred about the LGBTQ+ community, Donald Trump has made clear that he stands firmly against the fundamental freedoms that unite us. Americans deserve a President who will fight for their freedoms — not against them — and that leader is Kamala Harris.”

The contrast with 2020 is stark: Four years earlier, Harris had released one of the most expansive and wide-ranging pro-LGBTQ+ platforms of any candidate in the Democratic primaries. Among other policies, it included pledges to require insurance providers to cover HIV-prevention medications like PrEP, reverse Trump’s ban on open trans military service, appoint a White House Chief Advocate for LGBTQ+ Affairs, and prohibit “religious freedom” laws from being used to deny goods and services to LGBTQ+ people on the basis of faith. Her platform also promised to create a first-of-its-kind “transgender fellowship” in the White House that would “help lift up promising young leaders within the transgender community.”

Rather than continuing to sell the ideal of an America that uplifts and protects its LGBTQ+ citizens, Harris allowed Trump to dominate the conversation, likely in fear of alienating the same moderates that some insist Democrats don’t pander to enough. That strategy did not work. One of the most consequential moments of the 2024 presidential race was a multi-million-dollar ad campaign painting her, in now familiar fashion, as an out-of-touch liberal: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” The commercial reportedly ran more than 55,000 times in a two-week span, often during NFL games.

While Harris dismissed the ads as a distraction, her milquetoast response ignores that the blitz was actually fundamental to Trump’s plan, which was to fill the vacuum she had created on LGBTQ+ issues with fear, disinformation, and total lies. Without a clear message to combat the commercials or a proactive agenda for equality, taking the low road was what stuck in voters’ minds. Ultimately, it won the day.

Showing Democrats have learned nothing, Harris has suggested her real mistake was not that she did very little to speak to a sizable base of the Democratic Party — one totalling 9.1% of Americans — but that she should have thrown trans people under the bus more forcefully. After losing the November election by 86 electoral college points, Harris expressed regret in her new book, 107 Days, that she wasn’t more critical of policies allowing trans athletes to compete in alignment with their gender. “I agree with the concerns expressed by parents and players that we have to take into account biological factors such as muscle mass and unfair student athletic advantage when we determine who plays on which teams, especially in contact sports,” Harris wrote.

Imagine the difference if, rather than running scared from LGBTQ+ equality, Democrats actually held firm to their principles. Imagine if they fought as fiercely for queer people as Trump is fighting to eradicate the community. There’s a long-held idea in psychology that it takes three positive messages to outweigh one negative message, and so if Democrat leaders hope to counterbalance the hate, they need to not only be louder; they need to be much, much louder. Many have instead chosen silence, allowing the far-right to portray them as obsessed with LGBTQ+ rights even when they have abandoned the topic.

As party leaders grapple with their own enthusiasm problem, it’s telling to consider the grassroots support behind 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who looks likely to sail to victory in New York’s closely watched mayoral race. While it’s difficult to name a single policy that Harris put forward in 2024, three that Mamdani has backed come to mind immediately: universal rent freezes for tenants, no-cost childcare, and a $65 million investment in trans health care. Even after the latter proposal generated bizarre, unfounded fears that Mamdani would institute “trans sharia” as mayor, the New York assemblyman stuck to his guns. During LGBTQ+ History Month, he released an ad celebrating trans civil rights leaders Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

If Democrats want to address the mistakes of the past, the time is not to heed centrists who tell them that the only way forward is to further water down and dilute their values. It’s time to stand for something, or else they stand for nothing at all. When a sweeping anti-trans medical care ban crossed the desk of Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in 2023, he swiftly vetoed it. Despite presiding over one of America’s reddest states, the Democratic leader did not hide from his vote, instead responding via public statement: “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God.” Less than a year later, Beshear won reelection by five points.

On October 21, Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas announced that the congregation was in the process of painting its steps in rainbow colors after Gov. Greg Abbott (R) threatened Texas municipalities if they did not follow federal directives limiting LGBTQ+ public displays. After Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a July directive to sitting U.S. governors ordering them to remove “political messages of any nature, artwork, or anything else that detracts from the core mission of driver and pedestrian safety,” Abbott promised to withhold critical funding if cities and counties across the state do not comply.

While Dallas’ crosswalk has remained intact as city leaders reportedly explore their legal options, the removal of several rainbow walkways from Houston last week signals that further targeting of the LGBTQ+ community could be imminent. Oak Lawn UMC’s front entrance faces out into a busy intersection adorned with a colorful crosswalk, in tribute to the church’s own namesake: the city’s historic gayborhood. Located in central Dallas, Oak Lawn is the state’s first officially recognized LGBTQ+ enclave, home to just over 50,000 residents.

Rev. Ryan Weger, who has lived in Dallas for 15 years, says the possibility that the neighborhood’s iconic crosswalk could soon be erased has been disappointing. He says it was important for the church to let both the community and the public know that they fiercely oppose the federal and state government’s efforts.

“To the wider world, we are saying we resist,” Weger tells Queer Agenda. “Our United Methodist baptismal vows say that we’re committed to opposing evil and injustice in whatever forms they present themselves, and we clearly see evil and injustice happening in the world and as a part of the federal and state government. It’s our job to stand up for justice and those who need it, and that’s what we’re here for.”

As Florida likewise bends to the White House’s will, LGBTQ+ business owners in the state have also signaled their resistance to erasure. Hours after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) forced the removal of a rainbow crosswalk outside Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, the local gay apparel company MojoMan Swimwear painted a large rainbow flag in front of its business. After the store’s owner, Lane Blackwell, first heard that the Pulse crosswalk had been painted over on August 20, he says that his first thought was, “Somebody needs to do something,” and then, before he knew it, he was at the store buying paint. MojoMan’s new rainbow walkway was unveiled the very next day.

“There were a lot of people that were [at Pulse], that made it out, and that are still traumatized by it,” he tells Queer Agenda. “You can’t let a political administration just wipe you off the map and not do something about it.”

A former patron of Pulse nightclub, Blackwell lost numerous friends during the shooting on June 12, 2016, when a gunman opened fire during the Orlando gay bar’s monthly Latin night. Just over a month after that horrific attack, a rainbow crosswalk was installed outside Pulse as a tribute to the 49 people killed and 53 injured. The display was, at the time, approved by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), the exact same agency that would be tasked with its eradication eight years later. In July, the head of FDOT, Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue, issued a memo claiming that “non-standard surface markings… can lead to distractions or misunderstandings, jeopardizing both driver and pedestrian safety.”

What was most upsetting to Blackwell about Florida’s about-face on rainbow crosswalks, he says, is the way the decision was finalized: overnight, without any prior notice reportedly given to Orlando municipal leaders. Blackwell can’t help but recognize the unfortunate parallels to the tragedy itself.

“Pulse happened at 2:00 am, and then they came in the middle of the night and removed the rainbow crosswalk without telling the city officials or anybody else,” he says. “We painted our rainbow flag in the parking lot in the middle of the day because we were showing that we’re out here in the daylight. We’re not going to hide in the darkness, and we have to do what we can to let everybody know that we’re not going anywhere.”

Other Orlando companies have also stepped up as DeSantis sets his sights on eliminating rainbow crosswalks throughout the state. Displays that have already been removed include colorful walkways in Gainesville, Jacksonville, Key West, Miami Beach, St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee, while Fort Lauderdale has instead chosen to contest the mandate. As justification for the crackdown, the governor has alleged that — in addition to the federal edict — a new law passed in June effectively forces his hand on the issue, even though that law never mentions rainbow crosswalks. (The legislation also did not alter any of Florida’s preexisting guidelines on approved road displays.)

One Orlando business to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community was Se7en Bites, a local comfort food restaurant owned by Chef Trina Gregory. After the Pulse crosswalks were painted over, Gregory converted the eatery’s parking lot into an art installation by allowing artists to paint rainbow murals on 49 different parking spaces. Gregory says that thousands of artists have reached out in hopes of participating, and she has received phone calls and messages from all over the world to thank her.

“A man in Kentucky said that he feels like he hasn’t been seen or felt safe in his city, but knowing that there’s a place where we’ve created this safe space for people [meant a lot],” she tells Queer Agenda. “It reminds me to be grateful for the fact that we all have each other, and we have each other’s backs. One person can make a big impact, even when you don’t think you’re going to.”

Many say it is that very solidarity that is giving them hope as the fight to preserve America’s rainbow crosswalks proceeds. The removal of colorful walkways in Houston and Orlando was met with vociferous protest, including demonstrators chalking new makeshift murals in the streets to replace those that were removed, leading to several arrests. After activists reportedly returned to the site of the former Pulse nightclub with paint, police officers were stationed outside the bar to enforce FDOT’s orders. When the Miami Beach crosswalk was erased on October 5, community members reportedly chanted in protest, “Miami Beach, forever proud.”

For its part, Oak Lawn UMC is doubling down on its newly unveiled rainbow steps by adding an inscription: “Let justice roll down like waters,” referencing a passage from the Book of Amos in the Old Testament. According to Rev. Weger, those words are a powerful illustration of both his church’s values and what he believes God’s wishes to be. Oak Lawn UMC typically sees around 600 each month as part of its LGBTQ+ focused 12-recovery program and does extensive work feeding local unhoused populations, he says, because it is what they are called to do: to care for others.

“We want more people to know that in this world, where Christian nationalism and authoritarianism is becoming the celebrated style of being a Christian, there are churches that are open to those that need them,” he says. “It’s an act of not only resistance, but also of hospitality.”