LGBTQ

'Tiger King' star Joe Exotic was jailed for trying to have an animal rights activist murdered. (Facebook) Joe Exotic has hastily withdrawn his lawsuit against the US Department of Justice after learning that his request for a pardon has actually been seen by the president. As he faces a 22-year stint in federal prison, the “gun-toting gay redneck” of Netflix’s Tiger King is growing ever more desperate for a get-out-of-jail free card from Trump. With his many grovelling appeals going nowhere, he decided to change his tactics last week by...

Zachary Quinto is to produce and star in a new audio drama podcast shedding light on Harvard University’s attempts to purge gay students. The Boys in the Band star is set to delve back into queer culture with upcoming scripted podcast series Secret Court, which tells the true story of a purge of gay students from the Harvard class of 1920. After gay Harvard sophomore Cyril Wilcox took his own life, the university had instigated a secret court led by the university’s president and deans, which dedicated itself to eradicating...

South Oxfordshire District Council has voted for a new policy ensuring all its buildings have gender-neutral toilets in a new inclusive move. The local authority will also ensure all services, communications and policies are gender-neutral and accessible to all “regardless of their sexuality or gender identity”. The motion was put forward by Alexandrine Kantor, a Liberal Democrat councillor. Discussing the motion, Kantor spoke about statistics that said trans people had avoided eating and drinking so they didn’t have to use public toilets. Some had even developed kidney and urinary tract...

Samy Nemir-Olivares, District Leader in Brooklyns AD523, Williamsburg and Bushwick (Instagram/SamyNemir) The Brooklyn Democratic Party has voted unanimously to remove gender requirements from its county committee seats after it was sued by six trans and non-binary candidates. A lawsuit was brought by six candidates who were allegedly forced to run as either male or female without their consent due to rules requiring an even split of male and female candidates for county committee seats – the lowest run of elected office – with no provision for non-binary people. The case...

JK Rowling attends the Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them premiere in 2016 (Getty/Jim Spellman) A mother has wrestled with whether to let her youngest read Harry Potter after her trans son asked her to boycott author JK Rowling. Writing to Slate‘s Dear Prudence column, a mum-of-three explained that her oldest son came out as trans in the first grade. Now 15, he has asked his mum not to read Rowling’s books to his youngest siblings. Reading Harry Potter has long been a tradition in their household, she said,...

2020 wasn't all that bad, if you think about it. (PinkNews) If you can bring yourself to look back at 2020, it’s hard not to write it all off as a screaming trashfire ejected straight from the bowels of hell. It’s incredible to think that a year that began with an entire burning continent and an impending World War Three could possibly have got worse, but hey, here we are. But even more incredibly, this annus horribilis wasn’t actually all bad, and some of the best silver linings came in...

Jacob Candelaria wants to see an end to the gay panic defence (YouTube/New Mexico in Focus) The first gay man ever to serve on New Mexico’s state legislature is working to abolish the “gay panic” defence as a justification for murdering LGBT+ people. State senator Jacob Candelaria is backing a bill to end the controversial legal strategy, which claims that discovering a victim’s sexuality or gender identity can cause a state of temporary insanity, leading to violence and murder. Shockingly it is still a valid defence in all US states except...

The change led to a wave of protest and concern from the LGBT+ community and civil rights groups. (George Gascón for District Attorney) The newly-elected district attorney for Los Angeles County has backed away from a plan to scrap sentence enhancements for hate crimes as part of criminal justice reforms. George Gascón had caused alarm within his first weeks on the job this month when he issued a sweeping criminal justice directive banning enhancements that can increase sentences for certain types of offence, such as crimes against elders and hate...

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which runs the London-based Gender Identity Development Service, has begun an appeals process (Getty) The NHS trust that runs the UK’s only gender identity clinic for transgender children has begun the process of appealing the High Court’s ruling on puberty blockers. The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, which runs the London-based Gender Identity Development Service, has been forced to pause endocrinology referrals in the wake of the High Court’s ruling earlier this month. The court ruled that most teens would be incapable of giving...

T'Nia Miller at the Victoria and Albert Museum Summer Party in 2019 (Keith Mayhew/SOPA/Getty) T’Nia Miller kept her sexuality hidden until her early 20s, but now that she’s out she’s determined to be seen. The east-London born actor played the ethereal housekeeper Hannah Grose in Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor, a show whose central lesbian love story instantly won a strong queer fandom. Miller saw nothing like it when she was growing up. As a child she had “no exposure, no knowledge, nada” when it came to LGBT+ issues,...

Tel Aviv Pride 2019 in Israel. (Amir Levy/Getty) Trans people in Israel should be given legal recognition regardless of whether they have pursued gender-affirming surgery, a government task force packed with top officials has recommended. A joint committee between the Justice and Social Welfare Ministries suggested a raft of new policies as part of its ongoing efforts to tackle the “exhausting, frustrating and bureaucratic” hurdles the trans community faces. Deputy attorney general Dina Zilber and deputy director general of the Social Affairs Ministry Avi Motola wrote in an interim report...

Conservative radio host and minister E.W. Jackson An evangelical radio host has warned Georgians that it would be spitting in the face of Jesus to vote for pro-LGBT+ candidates. American Family Radio host and minister E.W. Jackson made the claim ahead of January’s Senate run-off elections in Georgia, which are set to decide the balance of power in the US Senate and shape the first years of Joe Biden’s first term in office. In the first run-off, incumbent Republican senator David Purdue is facing a challenge from Democrat Jon Ossoff,...

Beyoncé and Alexandra Burke's iconic performance on the X Factor (YouTube/Dingledoodie) Alexandra Burke and Beyoncé “blagged” their iconic “Listen” duet, the X Factor winner has revealed in a new interview. Appearing on Angela Scanlon’s BBC series, The Noughties, Burke recalled how the earth-shattering duet came about, revealing that Simon Cowell called her the day before the final to tell her: “Prepare yourself but we’ve got someone for you tomorrow… It’s Beyoncé.” “I hope you can sleep tonight,” Burke recalled Cowell signing off, adding: “I don’t even know how I had a voice the...