gay

A son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly has publicly revealed that he is homosexual, while at the same time defending his mother’s political views and the Republican Party’s “family values” campaign theme.

“The family values movement is not anti-gay,” said John F. Schlafly, a 41-year-old attorney who lives with his parents in Alton, Ill., and counts among his clients the Eagle Forum, the conservative group founded by his mother.

“These people are not anti-gay. They’re not gay bashers,” John Schlafly said in a telephone interview Friday. “I hold my mother in very high esteem. She’s doing good work.”

He added that he “didn’t agree with everything” he heard at the GOP convention but insisted that “efforts to convey the (Republican) Convention and the platform and speakers as bigots and gay bashers is completely inaccurate. The concept of family values should not be threatening to gays and lesbians. Most gays and lesbians have good relations with their family, as I do.”

Schlafly was “outed,” or revealed to be gay, by QW, a magazine published in New York, two weeks ago. He confirmed his homosexuality in an interview published Friday by the San Francisco Examiner.

“I thought it best to set the record straight,” Schlafly explained. “The media was trying to push the angle that there was some sort of hypocrisy going on, which I felt was inaccurate.”

Phyllis Schlafly characterized the media’s interest in her son’s revelation as “obviously a political hit against me.” She declined to say when she learned her son is gay and added that homosexuality “is not a big subject around (the Schlafly family).”

As for her stand on gay rights, Phyllis Schlafly said: “There’s nothing about my position on gay rights that should be offensive to a gay unless he’s seeking some kind of preferential status.”

While John Schlafly said he did not think it was right for someone to be fired based on sexual orientation, he said he did “not support the so-called gay-rights agenda” and was not sure what he thought of the military’s ban on homosexuals.

In his remarks to the Examiner, he disagreed with one common contention of the religious right, that homosexuality is a choice. “You can say in some sense I choose to write with my right or left hand,” Schlafly said. “But the point is that it is such an automatic decision. That’s how I see homosexuality.”

He also objected “to anyone saying that being gay constitutes not having good moral character.”

The 25-year-old, who has 48 caps for the Netherlands, has found love in Manchester – settling down with her partner Ruth, who she met on a dating app.

Now an openly gay woman, Casparij says the community is “close to her heart”.

“It was hard at times growing up until I got into women’s football. It was normal and openly spoken about [at Heerenveen],” she said.

“I learned a lot about myself. I didn’t have that when I was young, I had so many doubts and questions.

“I was lying awake at night thinking ‘is this weird or am I weird?’ Being able to be that role model now with my partner, for so many young girls, is so important.”

The right-back has a platform to promote inclusivity in women’s football and has taken full advantage.

She wears rainbow laces on her football boots, rainbow armbands, regularly posts messages of LGBTQ+ support on social media and in April, dedicated her goal against Everton to the transgender community.

“Why I find it really important to spread the word and stand with people is because in modern society if it’s often not against you, you won’t say anything,” said Casparij.

“It’s important that we stand up for people that need it so they feel supported. For example, the trans community. They are good people and I care about them.

“I want to show that I stand with them. I’m hoping to inspire people to do the same. I think we need more togetherness generally and a sense of community.”

She has supported numerous campaigns – most recently becoming a patron for the LGBTQ Foundation, helping to fund helplines against domestic abuse and transphobia.

“I think queer women are having a tough time at the moment and I want to help them have safe spaces,” said Casparij.

“In domestic violence, for example, queer women are often overlooked. I want to make sure they have a place to heal and someone to talk to.

“I want to be a woman that helps women.”

She is also passionate about setting an example to young, gay women – the type of representation she wished she had as a child.

“It’s nice to be able to make other people take away doubt. It’s about helping them to understand why they are feeling how they are feeling,” she added.

“I always love being surrounded by queer people. Feeling included and supported is important. All I want to do is spread love.”

Netflix drama military drama Boots is based on the true story of gay Marine Greg Cope White

Boots, a military drama on Netflix, follows the journey of gay teenager Cameron Cope (portrayed by Miles Heizer) as he enlists in the Marines corps alongside his best mate, despite the inherent dangers.

The series is set in the harsh environment of the 1990s US Marine Corps, a time when homosexuality was still outlawed in the military. It traces the lives of Cameron and Ray McAffey (played by Liam Oh), the offspring of a decorated Marine, as they become part of a diverse group of recruits.

Together, they form unexpected friendships and discover their true identities while being pushed to their limits.

Netflix commented: “With sharp wit and plenty of heart, Boots is about friendship, resilience, and finding your place in the world – even when that world seems determined to keep you in line or leave you behind.”

Greg Cope White, a former sergeant in the US Marine Corps, served as a writer and executive producer for the series.

READ MORE: Netflix fans urged to watch chart-topping film hailed ‘a modern Cinderella’READ MORE: Who is in the cast of Boots on Netflix?

He is an ardent advocate for LGBTQ+ and veteran rights, and has appeared in the PBS docuseries American Veteran and published work in the military journal Zero Dark Thirty.

Reflecting on his journey from his days in the Marine Corps, he posted on Instagram: “At 18, I illegally enlisted in the Marine Corps to find my place as a gay man in the masculine world.

“The book honours my lifelong best friend Dale, who got me through a chaotic childhood, and the Marines who took a chance on me and changed my life.

“And to send a message to others who are bullied: Bullies don’t matter. You do. Hold on.”

Greg completed six years of service with the Marines, achieving the rank of Sergeant, before relocating to New York City to pursue studies in acting and writing.

He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he secured his breakthrough in writing through employment with Norman Lear.

The Pink Marine website details how joining the Marines represented Greg’s initial struggle, as he “has to cheat to pass the physical and then lie on the enlistment papers about his sexuality”.

The protagonists Cameron and Ray draw inspiration from Greg and his closest mate Dale, with the website outlining the dangers they both faced.

It states: “It’s insanely dangerous for both of them. But as fate would have it, the Few and the Proud turn out to be a bunch of oddballs and eccentrics – and a brotherhood is born.”

Boots is available on Netflix.

In “Boots,” a new miniseries set in 1990, Miles Heizer plays Cameron Cope, a scrawny, bullied gay teenager who is out only to his best (and only) friend, Ray (Liam Oh). Ray, who is joining the Marines to make his disciplinarian but not unkind father proud, convinces Cam to join alongside him. (The recruiters sell a buddy system, which is a bit of a come-on.) Cam told his messy but not unkind mother, Barbara (Vera Farmiga), where he was going, but she wasn’t listening.

Though the series, which premieres Thursday on Netflix and is based on Greg Cope White’s 2016 memoir, “The Pink Marine,” is novel as regards the sexuality of its main character, it’s also essentially conventional — not a pejorative — and largely predictable. It’s a classic Boot Camp Film, like “An Officer and a Gentleman,” or Abbott and Costello’s “Buck Privates,” in which imperfect human material is molded through exercise, ego death and yelling into a better person, and it replays many tropes of the genre. And like most every military drama, it gathers diverse types into a not necessarily close-knit group.

Cam’s confusion is represented by externalizing his inner voice into a double, “the angel on my shoulder and, honestly, sometimes the devil,” with whom he argues, like a difficult imaginary friend. (It’s the voice of his hidden gayness.) Where basic training stories like this usually involve a cocky or spoiled character learning a lesson about humbleness and teamwork, Cam is coming from a place of insecurity and fear. At first he wants to leave — he had expected nothing worse than “mud and some bug bites and wearing the same underwear two days in a row” — and plots to wash out; but he blows the chance when he helps a struggling comrade pass a test. He’s a good guy. (Heizer is very fine in the part.)

Cameron (Miles Heizer), left, is convinced by his best friend (and only friend), Ray (Liam Oh), to join the Marines with him.

(Alfonso “Pompo” Bresciani / Netflix)

Press materials describe “Boots,” created by Andy Parker, as a comedic drama, although, after the opening scenes, there’s not much comedy in it — even a food fight is more stressful than funny. Using “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as the soundtrack to a long-in-coming bowel movement — I just report the news — was already dated and exhausted in 1990, and is bizarrely out of joint with the rest of the production. “Boots” isn’t anywhere near as disturbing as, say, “Full Metal Jacket” — which Ray told Cam to watch to prepare, though he opted for a “Golden Girls” marathon instead. But it makes no bones about the fact that these kids are being trained to kill. “Kill, kill, blood makes the grass grow,” they chant, and “God, country, Corps, kill.” And sometimes just, “Kill, kill, kill.” And things do turn violent, sometimes for purposes of training and sometimes because someone just goes off his head.

Still, that Cam survives, and, after a period of adjustment, thrives (that’s not a spoiler, Cope White lived to write the book) makes this, strictly speaking, a comedy. (And, by implication, an endorsement of the program.) “We’re killing our old selves so we can be our best selves,” he’ll say to Ray. The Marines may make a man of him, but it won’t be a straight man.

Rhythmically, “Boots” follows scenes in which someone will break a little or big rule — I suppose in the Marines, all rules are big, even the little ones — with some sort of punishment, for an individual or the platoon. Laid across this ostinato are various storylines involving recruits working out the issues that have brought them to this Parris Island of Misfit Boys. Cody (Brandon Tyler Moore) was taught by his father to look down on his twin brother, John (Blake Burt), who is in the same outfit, because he’s fat. Slovacek (Kieron Moore), a bully, has been given a choice between prison and the military. Mason (Logan Gould) can barely read. Santos (Rico Paris) is slowed down by a bum knee. Ochoa (Johnathan Nieves) is a little too much in love with his wife. And Hicks (Angus O’Brien) is a chaos-relishing loon, having the time of his life. Obviously, not everyone who joins the Marines is compensating for something; Nash (Dominic Goodman), a more or less balanced character who seems to be sending Cameron signals, is there to pad his resume in case he runs for president one day; but he’ll have his moment of shame.

Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker), left, is one of the drill instructors who takes an interest in Cameron (Miles Heizer).

(Alfonso “Pompo” Bresciani / Netflix)

Though they all raise their voices and get in people’s faces, the drill instructors do come in various flavors. Staff Sgt. McKinnon (Cedrick Cooper), the senior instructor, is imposing but obviously sane and sometimes kind; Sgt. Howitt (Nicholas Logan) is an unsettling sort who will prove to have some depth, while Sgt. Knox (Zach Roerig) is a twitchy racist, soon to be replaced by Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker), tall, steely and tightly wound. He doesn’t yell as loud as the others, but even his posture is intimidating. He focuses immediately on Cameron; make of that what you will. He’s the series second lead, basically.

There are some respites from the training, the running and marching, the room full of tear gas, the dead man’s float test, the hand-to-hand combat, the flower planting. (That part was nice, actually.) The yelling.

Ray winds up in sick bay, where he flirts with a female Marine. We get a few perfunctory glimpses of what the brass is like when they’re out of uniform and quiet; it comes as a relief. McKinnon’s wife is having a baby; he makes Cookie Monster noises on the phone for his son. Capt. Fajardo (Ana Ayora), “the first woman to lead a male company on Parris Island,” is heard talking to her mother, presumably about her daughter’s wedding: “I would rather not spend the time or the money because she can’t live without love.” Of her position, she observes that it “only took 215 years and a congressional mandate.” McKinnon, who is Black, offers a brief history of Black people in the Marine Corps as lived by his forebears.

The social themes become more prominent in the second half, and we learn or are reminded just how toxic the military was to gay people, and how backward was its attitude. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” wasn’t in effect until 1994, and it wasn’t until 2011 that openly gay soldiers could serve. Now, as civil rights are being beaten back to … backwardness by small-minded politicians, there’s a timely element to this perfectly decent, good-hearted, unsurprisingly sentimental miniseries.

Christopher Soto, the founder of the Center for California Literature.

Los Angeles is, historically, a haven for writers and poets. In its city sprawl and California light, L.A. has fostered legendary writers from Joan Didion to Octavia E. Butler, created countercultural literary communities like the Watts Writers Workshop, and inspired Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”

Despite Los Angeles’ contributions to a rich literary history, the literary community struggles to stay rooted in place as writers’ spaces and financial support move elsewhere.

Take the National Endowment for the Humanities, which canceled over $10.2 million in humanities and arts funding to already-awarded projects in California. Or the devastating Pasadena and Altadena wildfires that decimated historic libraries and cultural archives.

For writers across the city, L.A. can feel like shaky literary ground. That’s where Christopher Soto has stepped in.

Soto is a poet and author of the debut collection “Diaries of a Terrorist,” a contributing writer at Image and now the founder of the Center for California Literature.

The Center for California Literature is Soto’s hopeful initiative for connecting writers across L.A. through readings, conversations and advocacy. In a period in which writers feel unsupported and concerned about the state of the arts, Soto says that the center is needed in L.A. more than ever.

The inspiration came about after Soto was commissioned by the L.A. Times to write a piece titled “Writers on Loving and Leaving Los Angeles,” about writers having to move out of L.A. due to a lack of opportunities. He says right as he was working on the article, it was decommissioned. The reason? The books editor who would have worked on it was laid off and subsequently had to leave L.A.

“It was so ironic. That article and the research I did for it really led me to see that there is a need for a structural solution. People shouldn’t have to choose between having a thriving arts life and having to leave their home,” Soto says.

Soto knew that waiting would only exacerbate the literary loss; if he wanted change, he said he needed to make it. He reached out to inspiring writers in his community for their support and found that people were searching for a place to gather and organize themselves. Roxane Gay, renowned author of the New York Times bestselling novels “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger,” is one of the center’s biggest supporters.

“There’s a lot of stories that literature is dead, or that literary communities are dying, but clearly they’re not. They’re alive and they’re well and we have to remember that,” Gay says. “Writing is a very solitary endeavor, but while we might write alone, we don’t exist as writers in the public sphere alone. We need community, whether it’s people to share our work with, people who understand our frustrations, or having people who will read our work.”

Soto and Gay imagine a future where the center is shaped by writers’ needs. With community as a centerpoint, the organization aims to serve poets and authors by giving them a platform to share their work, attend workshops and create connections among peers.

Gay joined a collective of notable speakers the night of the center’s official launch, which took place at Central L.A. start-up gallery Giovanni’s Room and was co-hosted with the Los Angeles Review of Books. Outside the launch, pupusas were sizzling and poets and book nerds stood in line for a bite or a read from a nearby Libros con Alma pop-up book cart.

The long line approaching the door was full of chatter and reunited friends, who stepped into the lobby and talked closely over the music mixed by DJ Izla. Although the gallery itself filled up quickly, growing warm and pupusa-scented, the energy was one of excitement and anticipation for people’s favorite authors and for a new beginning in the L.A. writers world.

In a corner of the gallery, in front of a paper backdrop and lush potted plants, Grammy-nominated contemporary poet aja monet stepped before the mic to open the night. She was assertive the moment she spoke, clarifying the pronunciation of her name (ah-ja) and simply introducing poems from her time as a political organizer in Florida.

As monet delved into her work, her voice was serious, contained and bursting with emotion. With every stanza, she settled into a musical rhythm that was satiric and bitingly honest. Her poems ranged from swampy oppressive memories of Florida to the nature of poetry to musings on hypocritical activists.

“A poem can rinse, reflect and reveal us / I give thanks for the intimacy of planting poems / the living that brings poems into being,” monet read.

The crowd hummed and swayed in agreement and cheered in recognition of the feelings that she captured. After her moving set, Viet Thanh Nguyen picked up right where she left off. Nguyen is best known for his debut Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” which discusses the Vietnam War’s impact on the U.S. through the lens of a Vietnamese American immigrant who navigates Hollywood social politics, integration and racial tension.

In the section Nguyen read that night, the main character challenges stereotypes of Vietnamese characters in a film, an attempt that is quickly shut down by a Hollywood executive. Nguyen chuckled as he finished — “The Sympathizer” was adapted into an HBO show, placing Nguyen into the very Hollywood spaces he criticized. He acknowledges this and affirmed that “after spending a lot of time in Hollywood, nobody has disputed this characterization.”

Author, actor and television writer Ryan O’Connell added to the conversation with a lengthy reading of “The Slut Diaries,” explorations of rediscovering sexuality in his 30s as a gay man with cerebral palsy. His reflections on sex and dating through the lens of gay and disabled identity, and the hilariously vulgar encounters that ensued, drew hoots and hollers from the crowd.

Camille Hernandez, a writer and poet laureate of Anaheim, was among O’Connell’s laughing audience.

“I love being from here, and I want to lift up the literature from here. It is really beautiful that you could be from some place with such a rich literary heritage, but it’s such a travesty that not many people know about it, so efforts like this are so important to uplifting writers like us, who can be funny and honest like Ryan O’Connell or inspiring like Roxane Gay once they have the community to support them,” Hernandez says. “We deserve this.”

As Gay closed the night, her brief statement encapsulated the promising energy of the center’s first gathering.

“We deserve the material and creative resources to practice our craft. We deserve an abundant community that is mindful of the past and active and engaging the present and able to imagine a radical and expansive future,” Gay said. “And so I hope that everyone here will join us in that work.”

As authors, poets and hopeful writers filtered out into the crisp night, conversations abounded about what was next. Some were excited for an afterparty rumored to feature Erykah Badu. Others projected a next reading presided by an even bigger crowd, feeding the hunger for the literary arts that the center aims to feed. Whatever comes next, the literary community of L.A. has a new home to gather in.

Slovak lawmakers have passed a constitutional amendment that further restricts LGBTQIA+ rights.⁠

⁠On 26 September, the amendment, proposed by Prime Minister Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government, moved forward after it narrowly secured a three-fifths majority vote (90) in the 150-seat National Council.

The recent development comes nearly five months after the lawmakers proposed the changes to parliament. 

Under the amended constitution, same sex couples have been effectively banned from adopting children, with only married heterosexual couples permitted to adopt.

It asserts that only two genders – male and female – will be recognised, excluding trans, intersex and non-binary identities.

Lastly, the draconian amendment bans surrogacy and gives national law precedence over European Union (EU) law, declaring that “the Slovak Republic maintains sovereignty above all in issues of national identity, culture and ethics.”

According to the BBC, Fico embraced the vote, exclaiming that he would have a shot of liquor to celebrate.

“This isn’t a little dam, or just a regular dam – this is a great dam against progressivism,” the conservative PM added.

Since the news was announced, a range of human rights groups have slammed the Slovak parliament for passing the archaic amendment, including Amnesty International Slovakia.

“This is devastating news. Instead of taking concrete steps to protect the rights of LGBTI people, children, and women, the Slovakian parliament voted to pass these amendments, which put the constitution in direct contradiction with international law,” the group said in a statement.

“Today is another dark day for Slovakia, which is already facing a series of cascading attacks on human rights and the rule of law. The situation of marginalised groups in Slovakia – including LGBTI people – is already dire. These amendments rub salt into the wound.

“Today, the Slovak government chose to follow the lead of countries, such as Hungary, whose policies have led to an erosion of human rights. The only way to stop this decline is to comply with international and European law and introduce proposals to protect human rights for all, while rejecting those that jeopardise these efforts.” 

The editor-in-chief of the Slovak daily SME, Beata Balagova, echoed similar sentiments in a statement to the BBC.

“The Slovak constitution has fallen victim to Robert Fico’s plan to dismantle the opposition and divert attention from the real problems of society, as well as the austerity measures he had to pass,” she said.

“Fico does not genuinely care about gender issues, the ban on surrogate motherhood or even adoptions by LGBTQ people.

The president of Slovakia, Peter Pellegrini, is expected to sign the anti-LGBTQIA+ amendment into law.

Sept. 24 (UPI) — Chinese pre-release viewers of an Australian movie saw a straight couple’s wedding when it should have been two men getting married.

The horror film, Together, starring Dave Franco and Allison Brie, was altered seemingly by using artificial intelligence before it was shown in China.

In a scene with a wedding between two men, one of the men’s faces was altered to be a woman’s, purportedly using AI, Out reported. The scene reveals plot points in the movie, which means the change created confusion for viewers.

Viewers in China only noticed the change when they saw side-by-side screenshots on social media, The Guardian reported. “What’s happening outside the film is even more terrifying than what’s shown in it,” wrote one Weibo user. Weibo is a Chinese social media site.

It’s not unusual for western movies to undergo Chinese censorship before being shown there. Often, the censorship is performed via cut scenes. But the use of AI or other technology to change the scenes is new, The Guardian said.

The film was scheduled to be released in China on Sept. 19, but after the outcry about the change, the film’s Chinese distributor has pulled the film, citing “changes in the film’s distribution plan.”

Homosexuality is no longer a crime in China, but it still faces strong stigma. The government had a longstanding stance to neither support or oppose LGBTQ+ relationships, but that has changed in recent years with a crackdown on gay groups.

In 2016, China’s censors banned “abnormal sexual behavior,” among other things the government disapproves of, in films and TV.

One RedNote user said that the use of AI to gender-swap gay characters was “humiliating minority groups.” Public opinion of homosexuality is on the rise in China.

CHICAGO — Saying he would do more if he were in Congress today to support LGBTQ rights — which he opposed when he served — former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) came out as gay Thursday in social media and web posts.

In the postings on Instagram and a web page, the 38-year-old also describes his anguish at being rejected by members of his deeply religious family, including his mother, after they learned last year he was gay.

The longtime Republican laments that he opposed same-sex marriage while representing his conservative congressional district in central Illinois, noting that Democrat and fellow Illinoisan Barack Obama once stopped short of outright opposition.

“That fact doesn’t make my then position any less wrong, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that it was leaders of both parties who for so long wrongly understood what it was to defend the right to marry,” he writes.

He adds: “The truth is that if I were in Congress today, I would support LGBTQ rights in every way I could.”

The onetime rising GOP star and prolific Republican fundraiser garnered national attention after appearing on the cover of Men’s Health showing off his six-pack abs. He successfully marketed himself during six years in Congress as an unwavering fiscal conservative.

Schock resigned from Congress in 2015 amid scrutiny of his spending. He was indicted a year later on charges that accused him of illegally dipping into campaign and government coffers to subsidize a lavish lifestyle. But all charges were dropped in 2019 amid criticism of how prosecutors handled the case.

Schock confirmed the posts’ authenticity in a text message to the Journal Star in Peoria, the heart of the congressional district he represented for six years.

As he composed the social media posts, Schock said he knew he could expect sharp criticism from the community to which he said he now wanted to belong.

“Where was I, they will ask, when I was in a position to help advance issues important to gay Americans?” his posting says.

Many longtime supporters of gay rights blasted him on social media Thursday, including Pennsylvania state Rep. Brian Sims.

“Anyone can be gay. Everyone who is should be out,” Sims, a Democrat, said in a Facebook posting. “But to be a part of a Community, especially one you’ve attacked, you better start with an apology, make amends …”

Schock now understands, he said, that he is indebted to those activists who supported rights he opposed for so long.

“I can live openly now as a gay man because of the extraordinary brave people who had the courage to fight for our rights when I did not,” he writes.

Schock starts the postings on both Instagram and the web page with the words: “I am gay.”

He said he began driving to his mother’s house from Los Angeles to tell her that last year. But she had learned of it before he arrived, and when he spoke with her on the phone en route, “she told me to turn around and go back to LA,” he writes.

He adds, “I’ve come to terms with the fact that it might take my loved ones more time than I would like. And I realize some might never come around.”

He said he still receives occasional emails from family members “trying to sell me on conversion therapy,” the widely debunked notion that someone who is gay can, with therapy, become heterosexual.

Schock described growing up in a conservative Apostolic Christian Church where members even considered “watching TV to be sinfully idle,” he writes. He said he doesn’t think he was aware there were other gays in his midst.

“I understood that the teachings of my upbringing were pretty clear on the matter,” he said.

The ambitious Schock began buying real estate in high school, became a member of the local school board at 19 and an Illinois legislator at 23, then entered Congress at just 27.

He said the fact he is gay wouldn’t be a revelation for many who know him, adding that coming out publicly as gay is “just one of those things in my life in need of explicit affirmation … to finally validate who I am as a person.”

“In many ways,” he writes, “I regret the time wasted in not having done so sooner.”

When a door slammed shut in the childhood home of Andry Hernández Romero, he wasn’t just startled. He winced, recoiling from the noise.

Nearly a month had passed since Hernández Romero, a 32-year-old makeup artist, and 251 other Venezuelans were released from a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison.

In a Zoom interview in August from Venezuela, Hernández Romero listed the ways in which the trauma of the ordeal still manifests itself.

“When doors are slammed — did you notice [my reaction] when the door made noise just now?” he said. “I can’t stand keys. Being touched when I’m asleep. If I see an officer with cuffs in their hand, I get scared and nervous.”

Trump administration officials accused the Venezuelan men of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua and a national security threat, though many, including Hernández Romero, had no criminal histories in the U.S. or Venezuela.

While he was confined, with no access to his attorneys or the news, Hernández Romero had no idea he had become a poster child for the movement to free the prisoners.

“Before I was Andry the makeup artist, Andry the stylist, Andry the designer,” he said. “I was somewhat recognized, but not as directly. Right now, if you type my name into Google, TikTok, YouTube — any platform — my entire life shows up.”

Days after he was sent to El Salvador on March 15, CBS News published a leaked deportation manifest with his name on it. His lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski, who co-founded the Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, denounced his removal on “The Rachel Maddow Show” and a “60 Minutes” expose.

In the “60 Minutes” episode, Time photojournalist Philip Holsinger recounted hearing a man at the prison cry for his mother, saying, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a stylist,” while prison guards slapped him and shaved his head.

Outrage grew. On social media, users declared him disappeared, asking, “Is Andry Hernández Romero alive?”

Activists made signs and banners demanding the federal government “FREE ANDRY.” During Pride Month, the Human Rights Campaign held a rally about him in Washington, D.C. The New Queens Pride Parade in New York named him honorary grand marshal.

Congressional Democrats traveled to El Salvador to push for information about the detainees and came back empty-handed.

“Let’s get real for a moment,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said in an April 9 video on X. The video cut to a glamour shot of Hernández Romero peering from behind three smoldering makeup brushes.

“When was the last time you saw a gay makeup artist in a transnational gang?” Torres said.

Hernández Romero walks through a market in his hometown of Capacho Nuevo.

Hernández Romero shows the crown tattoos that U.S. authorities claimed linked him to the Tren de Aragua gang.

Hernández Romero fled Venezuela after facing persecution for his sexuality and political views, according to his lawyers.

He entered the U.S. legally at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on Aug. 29, 2024, after obtaining an appointment through CBP One, the asylum application process used in the Biden administration. The elation of getting through lasted just a few minutes, he said.

Hernández Romero spent six months at the Otay Mesa Detention Center. He had passed a “credible fear” interview — the first step in the asylum process — but immigration officials had lasered in on two of his nine tattoos: a crown on each wrist with “Mom” and “Dad” in English.

Immigrant detainees are given blue, orange or red uniforms, depending on their classification level. A guard once explained that detainees wearing orange, like him, could be criminals. Hernández Romero said he replied, “Is being a gay a crime? Or is doing makeup a crime?”

When his deportation flight landed in El Salvador, he saw tanks and officials dressed in all black, carrying big guns.

A Salvadoran man got off first — Kilmar Abrego García, whose case became a focus of controversy after federal officials acknowledged he had been wrongly deported.

Eight Venezuelan women got off next, but Salvadoran officials rejected them and they were led back onto the plane. Hernández Romero said the remaining Venezuelans felt relieved, thinking they too would be rejected.

Instead, they ended up in prison.

Hernández Romero does the makeup for Gabriela Mora, the fiancee of his fellow prisoner Carlos Uzcátegui, hours before their civil wedding in the town of Lobatera.

“I saw myself hit, I saw myself carried by two officials with my head toward the ground, receiving blows and kicks,” Hernández Romero said. “After that reality kind of strikes me: I was in a cell in El Salvador, in a maximum-security prison with nine other people and asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’”

As a stylist, he said, having his hair shaved off was particularly devastating. Even worse were the accompanying blows and homophobic insults.

He remembers the photographer snapping shots of him and feeling the sting of his privacy being violated. Now, he understands their significance: “It’s thanks to those photos that we are now back in our homes.”

At the prison, guards taunted them, Hernández Romero said, telling them, “You all are going to die here.”

Hernández Romero befriended Carlos Uzcátegui, 32, who was held in the cell across the hall. Prisoners weren’t allowed to talk with people outside their cells, but the pair quietly got to know each other whenever the guards were distracted.

Uzcátegui said he was also detained for having a crown tattoo and for another depicting three stars, one for each of his younger sisters.

A prisoner is moved by a guard at the Terrorist Confinement Center, a high-security prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26. (Alex Brandon, Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

As prisoners looks on, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center on March 26. (Alex Brandon, Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Hernández Romero said he noticed that some of the guards would stare at him when he showered. He told reporters that guards took him to a small, windowless room known as “La Isla,” or “The Island,” after noticing him bathing with a bucket outside of designated hours. There, he said, he was beaten by three guards wearing masks and forced to perform oral sex on one of them, according to NPR and other outlets.

Hernández Romero no longer wishes to talk about the details of the alleged abuse. His lawyers are looking into available legal options.

“Perhaps those people will escape earthly justice, the justice of man, but when it comes to the justice of our Father God, no one escapes,” he said. “Life is a restaurant — no one leaves without paying.”

Uzcátegui said guards once pulled out his toenails and denied him medication despite a high fever. He had already showered, but as his fever worsened he took a second shower, which wasn’t allowed.

He said guards pushed him down, kicked him repeatedly in the stomach, then left him in “La Isla” for three days.

In July, rumors began circulating in the prison that the Venezuelans might be released, but the detainees didn’t believe the talk until the pastor who gave their daily sermon appeared uncharacteristically emotional. He told them: “The miracle is done. Tomorrow is a new day for you all.”

Uzcátegui remained unconvinced. That night, he couldn’t sleep because of the noise of people moving around the prison. He said usually that meant that guards would enter their cell block early in the morning to beat them.

Hernández Romero noticed his friend was restless. “We’re leaving today,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” Uzcátegui replied. “It’s always the same.”

Hernández Romero knew they had spent 125 days imprisoned because when any detainee went for a medical consult, they would unobtrusively note the calendar in the room and report back to the group. The detainees would then mark the day on their metal bed frames using soap.

On July 18, buses arrived at the prison at 3 a.m. to take the Venezuelans to the airport. Officials called out Hernández Romero and Arturo Suárez-Trejo, a singer whose case had also drawn public attention, for individual photos. Hernández Romero said they were puzzled but obliged.

Migrants deported by the United States to El Salvador under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown arrive at Simon Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetia, Venezuela, on July 18.

(Ariana Cubillos / Associated Press)

When their flight touched down, an official told them: “Welcome to Venezuela.” Walking down the plane steps, Hernández Romero felt the Caribbean breeze on his face and thanked God.

A few days later, he was back in his hometown, Capacho Nuevo, hugging his parents and brother in the center of a swarm of journalists and supporters chanting his name.

“I left home with a suitcase full of dreams, with dreams of helping my people, of helping my family, but unfortunately, that suitcase of dreams turned into a suitcase of nightmares,” he told reporters there.

Hernández Romero said he wants to see his name cleared. For him, justice would mean “that the people who kidnapped us and unfairly blamed us should pay.”

President Trump had invoked an 18th century wartime law to quickly remove many of the Venezuelans to El Salvador in March. In a 2-1 decision on Sept. 2, a panel of judges from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that the administration acted unlawfully, saying there has been “no invasion or predatory incursion.”

Trump administration officials have told a federal judge that they would facilitate the return of Venezuelans to the U.S. if they wish to continue the asylum proceedings that were dismissed after they were sent to El Salvador. If there’s another chance to fulfill his dreams, Hernández Romero said he’s “not closed off to anything.”

Uzcátegui sees it differently. After everything he went through, he said, he probably would not go back.

Now he suffers from nightmares that it’s happening again. “Despite everything, you end up feeling like it’s not true that we’re out of there,” he said. “You wake up thinking you’re still there.”

Carlos Uzcátegui exchanges vows with Gabriela Mora during their wedding in August as Hernández Romero, right, in cap, looks on.

As he restarts his career, Hernández Romero is redeveloping a client list as a makeup artist. Last month, he worked a particularly special wedding: Uzcátegui’s. He did makeup for his friend’s bride, Gabriela Mora.

“He lived the same things I did in there,” Uzcátegui said. “It was like knowing that we are finally free — that despite all the things we talked about that we never thought would happen, that friendship remains. We’re like family.”

Jonathan Hertwig-Ødegaard has opened up about his journey as an openly gay athlete.

On 1 August, the Norwegian decathlete sat for an interview with Norway’s public radio and TV broadcaster NRK, where he discussed coming out and why it shouldn’t get so much “attention.”

“I think it’s great that you can be a role model, but at the same time, I hope in the long run that it doesn’t have to be necessary, and that it gets so much publicity and attention,” he revealed.

Hertwig-Ødegaard went on to discuss the current state of coming out as a gay athlete and how there is a “bit of a wrong focus.”

“The problem is perhaps that among athletes, people talk about ‘it’s so brave and tough’ when people come forward,” the 20-year-old explained.

“I feel that there is a bit of a wrong focus, that the responsibility should not lie with individuals. I think it is the responsibility of society at large to facilitate that people are comfortable being open about their sexuality, also as athletes.”

While Hertwig-Ødegaard doesn’t want massive amounts of attention focused on his gay identity, he did reflect on how having more openly queer athletes could have positively impacted him during his formative years.

“I think it would have helped me as a young boy or young athlete. Not necessarily to have someone to look up to, but just to see that it is completely normal to be gay and be a top athlete. Because it is,” he told the news outlet.

Towards the end of his interview, the young decathlete exclaimed that he was “proud and happy” to be gay and if others have an issue with his sexuality, “it’s their problem.”

Two weeks before his recent sit-down, Hertwig-Ødegaard made massive waves at the European Athletics U23 Championships, dominating six out of ten events and scoring 8,002 points, a personal best.

Alongside his recent feat, he is ranked 81st in the world in the decathlon rankings, has won the Norwegian Under-20 title three times, and is preparing to attend the University of Texas, where he will compete for NCAA titles.

We can’t wait to see what the future holds for Hertwig-Ødegaard. 

Chip Gaines had a few select words after Samaritan’s Purse founder Franklin Graham publicly criticized his and wife Joanna’s new HBO Max show for casting a same-sex couple with twins among the three families who are featured.

Graham, who is the son of evangelist Billy Graham, wrote Saturday on X that he found it “very disappointing” to hear that Jason Hanna, Joe Riggs and their boys, Ethan and Lucas, were included on “Back to the Frontier,” produced by Magnolia Network. Chip and Joanna Gaines created Magnolia and are executive producers on the show.

“I hope this isn’t true, but I read today that Chip and Joanna Gaines are featuring a gay couple in their new series. If It is true, it is very disappointing,” Graham wrote. “While we are to love people, we should love them enough to tell them the truth of God’s Word. His Word is absolute truth. God loves us, and His design for marriage is between one man and one woman. Promoting something that God defines as sin is in itself sin.”

The American Family Assn. — which bills itself as a “pro-family organization” and was formerly known as the National Federation for Decency — chimed in first, posting a statement from Vice President Ed Vitagliano saying, “This is sad and disappointing, because Chip and Joanna Gaines have been very influential in the evangelical community. Moreover, in the past, they have stood firm on the sanctity of marriage regardless of the personal cost that has entailed. We aren’t sure why the Gaines have reversed course, but we are sure of this: Back to the Frontier promotes an unbiblical view of human sexuality, marriage, and family — a view no Christian should embrace.”

Chip Gaines, who with his wife belongs to the evangelical Antioch Community Church in Waco, Texas, fired off what seemed to be a reply on Sunday.

“Talk, ask qustns, listen.. maybe even learn. Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture. Judge 1st, understand later/never,” he wrote on X. “It’s a sad sunday when ‘non believers’ have never been confronted with hate or vitriol until they are introduced to a modern American Christian.”

Matt Walsh, a conservative filmmaker, political commentator and podcast host at the Daily Wire, fired back at Chip Gaines with a response that said, “Maybe you should endeavor to understand the basic moral teachings of your own alleged religion before you give lectures to other people about their lack of understanding.”

Two hours after his “sad sunday” post, Gaines wrote that his family was off to worship, reposting a 2016 tweet in which he said, “In times of trouble.. you’ll find the gaines family at church.”

Meanwhile, on her Instagram on Tuesday, Joanna Gaines was promoting all the Magnolia Network shows nominated for Daytime Emmys.

Separate from the online back-and-forth, Jason Hanna and Joe Riggs have been posting about their family on their @2_dallas_dads Instagram account since the arrival of the twins in May 2014.

“When our boys were born — our twin boys were born via surrogacy in 2014 — we faced some legal challenges, and so we’ve always felt it it to be important that we try to be an example for same-sex couples,” Hanna told Queerty in a story published last week. “And so we’re super honored that, when they were choosing three modern day families, they did choose the same[-sex] couple as a modern-day family — because we are; we’re your neighbors, and your coworkers. And so it was this amazing opportunity to [continue to] normalize same-sex couples and same-sex families.”

“Back to the Frontier” throws three families — from Alabama, Florida and Texas — into an eight-week scenario that recalls the 1880s. Living on the “frontier,” the families have to reinforce their own shelters, raise livestock, collect food and manage their supplies. The goal by the end of the show is to gather enough resources to make it through winter. But don’t worry — the families are all back in modern air-conditioning right now.

“Through this immersive experience, the families will have to reflect on their relationships and navigate the challenges that come with an 1880s lifestyle,” HBO Max said in a release. The show premiered Thursday.

HBO Max did not reply immediately to The Times’ request for additional comment Tuesday.

Chip and Joanna Gaines were caught up in a different conflict over LGBTQ+ issues in May 2023 after Target, which carries the couple’s Magnolia Home line among its household items, came under fire for carrying transgender-targeted items as part of its seasonal Pride Month selections. Some critics also hammered Target’s recognition of Pride Month at all. A boycott was urged among right-wing conservatives. They also called for a comment from the couple.

“No one doubts that Chip and Joanna are good people, kind, moral, and aligned with American values,” Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy said at the time when she was subbing as host of “Jesse Watters Primetime.” “But if I had a line at a company and my name was on it and that brand partnered with a trans Satanist that makes tuck ‘em bikinis for kids, I would feel compelled to speak up.

“Now, maybe they’re raising questions internally. Of course, that’s possible, but why aren’t they doing so publicly?”

The person whom Campos-Duffy — wife of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — called a “trans Satanist” is London designer Erik Carnell, who is trans and whose Abprallen line had partnered with Target until the retailer ended the relationship under pressure from the boycott. Carnell’s full line included a design that said “Satan respects pronouns.” That design was never available at Target, according to CNN.

Conservative activist Benny Johnson also posted a video of himself in a Target store at the time, touring the Pride Month section, then walking what he said was “10 steps” to the Magnolia Home display. He referred to Joanna Gaines and her family sarcastically as “the paragons of Christian entrepreneurs and family values.”

“I’ve been tweeting about how Christian influencers Chip & Joanna Gaines have not disavowed Target’s Satanic child grooming despite the backlash,” he said. “What I didn’t know is the Gaines Section of Target is directly ACROSS from the Groomer section. Not cool.”

Chip and Joanna Gaines did not speak out during that controversy.

A gay makeup artist and content creator has shut down right-wing trolls using his photos to promote right-wing talking points.

Over the last few years, social media has seen an increase in far-right accounts spewing hateful rhetoric towards the LGBTQIA+ community, people of colour and generally anything that represents diversity or community.

While some are front-facing with their bigotry, sharing videos and creating awful podcasts, many opt to hide behind anonymous profiles filled with inflammatory statements and cringeworthy memes.

However, one thing that has become evident with extremely conservative social media users is their less-than-stellar history of researching and vetting their sources properly.

This was certainly the case for an account on TikTok, which unknowingly used a photo of openly gay makeup artist Anthony Gordon as its rugged right-wing mascot.

“Remember boys, they keep calling us ‘far-right’ when in reality we have been ‘right-so-far,’ the meme says alongside a photo of Gordon pensively staring off camera in a flannel shirt and cowboy hat.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for the LA-based content creator to discover that his image was being used for right-wing purposes.

Taking to his Threads account, Gordon slammed the account that uploaded the meme, writing: “New here. Some of you will remember the idiotic far right stole an image of me to make a meme for them… What they don’t know is I’m far left gay liberal man lol. Bozos! Follow me, please.”

Since sharing his post, Gordon has received heaps of support from his followers.

“I lolled when I first saw this because I knew,” one person wrote.

Another Threads user commented: “They did the same thing to Kristofer Weston, the gay leatherman from @wattsthesafeword. Everytime they find an image of what they think they represent, it’s another gay progressive hot daddy. It’s starting to feel a little Freudian in here.”

As previously mentioned, social media has become a volatile place for LGBTQIA+ users due to the rise of far-right accounts and a lack of inclusive protections.

According to GLAAD’s 2025 Social Media Safety Index, platforms are largely “failing to mitigate harmful anti-LGBTQ hate and disinformation that violates their own policies.”

Another key finding from the report revealed that LGBTQ content is disproportionately suppressed on platforms “via removal, demonetization, and forms of shadowbanning.” At the same time, those same companies are withholding “meaningful transparency about content moderation algorithms, data protection and data privacy practices.”

In a statement, GLAAD President and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis said: “Recent years undeniably illustrate how online hate speech and misinformation negatively influence public opinion, legislation, and the real-world safety and health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people.

“The landscape of social media platform accountability work has shifted dramatically since GLAAD’s first SMSI report in 2021, with new and dangerous challenges in 2025.”

To read GLAAD’s complete 2025 Social Media Safety Index, click here.

Only seven pages in, John Birdsall offers a conclusion to the question that titles his book, “What Is Queer Food?”

It’s a subject that has consumed him for decades, as a restaurant cook in the Bay Area and then as a journalist and author. In the last dozen or so years — when food media began more honestly grappling with identity and diversity in its subjects, and also with who is given opportunities to tell those stories — Birdsall won national awards for feats like his groundbreaking piece, “America, Your Food Is So Gay.”

The queering of American food

“Still, saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me,” he writes in his new work, published this month. “Lots of us could say that queer food, like desire, exists, but nobody could definitely point through what is was.”

Drag-brunch eggs benedict? Rainbow cookies? Intentional diet choices? Suggestively shaped edible schtick?

“It shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did,” he accedes, “but at last I accepted the obvious truth that queer food is not a commodity. There is no essentialized cuisine of queerness, any more than there’s one simple answer for what it means to be queer.”

Acceptance is a doorway. He is freed to spend the rest of the book coupling meticulous research and gorgeous prose to illuminate lives that, in ways indirect and overt, shaped who we are as a culinary nation.

There’s Harry Baker, a man who flees from a sullied life in Ohio to Los Angeles and who, true to his name, develops a style of cake that becomes the de-facto dessert of young Hollywood; later it well be reworked and homogenized as a signature recipe for General Mills. There’s Esther Eng, an early 20th-century film auteur, her movies now mostly lost, whose fluency with the group dynamics of creating cinema translates to a second act as a New York restaurateur. In her masculine clothes and bluntly cropped hair, she is at once successful and invisible.

John Birdsall, author of “What Is Queer Food?”

(Courtesy of Rachel Marie Photography)

Birdsall notes that Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times and the father of modern American restaurant criticism, reviewed Eng’s self-named restaurant in the 1960s. Claiborne used his platform to push dining and cooking toward their current cultural status in the United States. Privately he was far more tragic — “haunted,” to use Birdsall’s word, by his difficult Southern childhood and misguided in a mess of a memoir published in 1983, 17 years before his death at 79.

Birdsall does not abide counterfeit joy. He narrates lives shaped by society’s denials, prejudices and punishments, and he lays their suffering bare. Some (among them Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin and Richard Olney, one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors) know to leave the country to love in greater peace.

Where delight comes easy is in Birdsall’s prose. He took the narrative lessons he learned from his 2020 biography of James Beard, “The Man Who Ate Too Much,” to tighten the intricate threads of this opus. Characters that appear early in the book return for lightbulb impact. No strand dangles. Even when the reader feels his own rage — as when he veers into a personal story about making quiche for a Sunday open house in the storm-center of the AIDS crisis — his eloquence carries us through the bitterest aftertastes.

The past and present of gay restaurants

Birdsall centers his elucidation of queer culinary culture on people, and by extension the worlds around them. In “Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries at America’s Gay Restaurants,” also published this month, Erik Piepenburg shifts the focus to place.

His catalyst for his book: the accelerated disappearance of spaces by and for LGBTQ populations across America.

He opens with a requiem for a 24-hour diner in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood where he was a regular in the 1990s. “The Melrose was a gay restaurant because gay people made it one,” he begins. He watched older men share their meals and drag queens scarf bacon-and-cheese potato skins post performance, and took solace in blueberry silver dollar pancakes when chemistry fizzled with the guy across the table. The Melrose closed in 2017 after 56 years in business.

“When gay restaurants close, gay reliquaries empty of memory and meaning,” he writes. “Gone are favorite waitresses and go-to-meals, safe spaces and party places in the night’s last hours. For me and other gay people who love to eat out, losing a gay restaurant is a kind of dispossession.”

Erik Peipenburg, author of “Dining Out”

(Peter Larson)

Piepenburg traveled across the country throughout 2023, interviewing owners and customers of establishments still present and long gone. Chapters graft careful reporting with his own running commentary, at turns cheeky and poignant and angered by the tenuous state of gay rights and acceptance.

Some salute institutions like Annie’s Paramount Steak House in Washington D.C.; lesbian-feminist restaurant Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Conn.; and trans safe havens like Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis. Others seek to debunk myths, including the supposed queer riot in 1959 at a downtown Los Angeles location of Cooper Do-nuts whose occurrence Piepenburg could find little hard evidence to support. To consider the future of gay dining, he considers two recently opened restaurants in Southern California: the Ruby Fruit in Silver Lake and Alice B. in Palm Springs.

Mara Herbkersman and Emily Bielagus, photographed in 2023, are owners of the Ruby Fruit, one of the restaurants mentioned in Erik Piepenburg’s book “Dining Out.”

(Brittany Brooks / For The Times)

Piepenburg has been writing for the New York Times for nearly 20 years, concentrating mostly on film (especially horror), television and theater. He is, in the most wonderful sense, not a food writer. He self-identifies as a “diner gay.” This is a work about history and, above all, community, not exalted poetry on the art of gastronomy.

What strikes me most about Piepenburg’s frame of reference is how explicitly and organically he twins the subjects of dining and sex. We rarely acknowledge the existence of sex in Food Writing. First, it’s the hardest subject to not be cringe about, and food and sex analogies usually land as ick. But also, most of us who cover restaurants are keenly aware of ugly power dynamics that went unspoken in male-dominated kitchens for decades, and the industry as a whole is in a slow but sustained corrective era.

The approach in “Dining Out” succeeds in its matter-of-factness. Lonely people congregate over holiday buffets in bathhouses. Men frequented — still frequent — certain gayborhood restaurants to cruise, to pose, to be themselves.

A bit of melancholy also winds through the book, as Piepenburg laments the “golden age” of gay restaurants that halted at the turn of the millennium, if not before, and also his own aging. Here is where I mention: I met the author 35 years ago, in my early college years before either of us was out, so I relate to his feelings on the passage of time. When in the book he references his ‘90s-era club kid days, sporting “shaggy wigs and carrying lunchboxes” at the Limelight in New York … I remember.

Of course, the release of Birdsall’s and Piepenburg’s books was planned for visibility during Pride month. Their merits, individual and collective, make for absorbing, enlightening reading far beyond 30 days of designated LBGTQ recognition.

Also …

Fred Karger failed.

There were 20 Republican presidential debates and not one featured the California political-strategist-turned-openly-gay-White-House-hopeful, although he came close — or at least should have — to qualifying for a session last summer, if only Fox News hadn’t changed the rules.

Or so he says. The Federal Election Commission, after reviewing Karger’s complaint, disagreed and found no evidence of wrongdoing. Karger returned this week from a campaign swing through Utah to find the FEC response in a pile of mail at his home in the Hollywood Hills.

Karger has devoted more than two years of his life to his quixotic White House bid, visiting 31 states and Puerto Rico, where, he exulted, “I beat Ron Paul.” He has spent close to $500,000 out of pocket and, for all his effort, collected precisely zero delegates.

Unlike some of the more delusional candidates who have run, Karger never thought he would become president. His overriding purpose, Karger said in a profile last year, was to appear in at least one debate, sharing a stage with the rest of the Republican field and sending, he hoped, a message to anyone growing up the way he did: confused, conflicted and shamed about his sexual orientation.

“I want to send the message to gay younger people and older people and everyone in between that you can do anything you want in life, and don’t feel bad about yourself and don’t feel you have to live your life the way I did,” Karger said at the time. Now 62, he did not come out publicly until he was 56.

Although he never made it to the debate stage, Karger said his effort was worth every minute and every penny.

“Absolutely!” he exclaimed in a telephone interview from his home overlooking Laurel Canyon. “Without a doubt!”

Karger, who spent 30 years as a political advisor to several top Republicans and major corporations, still talks as if a conversation is a pitch meeting with a potential new client.

“This is money I would have spent anyway,” he said. “Instead of going maybe to Australia for a vacation, I went to Des Moines 15 times. It was money well spent. The response, the emails I’ve gotten have been very, very moving and supportive.”

Regrets? He has a few.

The gay community never rallied behind his campaign, or took up his cause. The Victory Fund, which works to elect openly gay and lesbian candidates — mostly Democrats — gave him a months-long runaround before finally snubbing his campaign, Karger said. “And six or seven years ago,” he huffed, “I had a fund-raiser for them in my house.”

A spokesman for the organization said as a policy matter the group does not discuss candidates it declines to support.

For all the progress the country has made on gay rights, Karger went on, it still has a long way to go. Just before he left Utah on Monday, he had a friendly chat over custard with Willie Billings, the chairman of the Washington County Republican Party, and gave him a souvenir T-shirt and Frisbee. (Utah wraps up the presidential nominating season with its primary June 26.)

Soon after, riding home to California in a balky rental van, Karger received an email from Billings’ wife, Nanette, calling him a “radical idiot” and informing the candidate his campaign swag had been deposited in the trash.

“I would never support him,” Nanette Billings said in an interview — nor, for that matter, any openly gay or lesbian candidate. “The biggest issue is they can’t procreate,” she said, “so I think it’s totally wicked.”

Karger, who has crusaded against the Mormon Church for its efforts to outlaw same-sex marriage, will not back Mitt Romney because the likely GOP nominee shares that opposition. Karger is not sure, however, that he will vote for President Obama, though he was lavish in praising his support for allowing gays and lesbians to marry.

“I think back what to it was like for me as a teenager” in the 1960s, Karger said, and the effect it would have had for the president of the United States to voice that kind of support for gay rights.

As his campaign nears a close, Karger is left to ponder the might-have-beens. What if he’d been allowed to join the other candidates in front of the national TV cameras in just one of those 20 debates?

“Anything could have happened,” he said, laughing. “I could have been the gay Herman Cain!”
He paused.

“Without all the groping.”

[email protected]

Heartwarming tributes have poured in for the late Australian adult film star Koby Falks.

The tragic news was announced on 1 June via the 39-year-old’s Instagram account.

“Koby Falks passed away earlier this week. He was loved by many and will be missed. If this post has affected you, please reach out to Lifeline at 13 11 14,” the post read.

Known as Anthony Cox to his family and friends, the Australian native made his debut in the adult film world in 2022.

Although his time in the industry was brief, he starred in 76 projects and amassed over 400,000 followers across Instagram, X, Facebook and YouTube.

He also led a fruitful career as a content creator on the subscription-based websites OnlyFans and JustForFans.

Since his tragic passing was announced, a handful of Koby’s peers, friends and fans have taken to social media to share heartbreaking tributes. 

The late actor’s talent agent, Matthew Leigh, described him as “a light, a creative force, and a genuinely beautiful soul.”

“Though our time working together was brief, the impact Koby had was anything but small. From the moment we connected, I was struck by his warmth, his charisma and his incredible professionalism,” he wrote in a lengthy statement on Instagram.

“He was organised, kind-hearted, and deeply respectful. The kind of person you instantly felt grateful to work with. It was an honour to represent his remarkable body of work and to witness first-hand the power of his presence, both on and off-screen.

“His ability to connect with people, not just here in Australia but across the world, was something truly special. Never did I imagine I would be writing such a post, especially for someone I had the privilege of managing. And I sincerely hope I never have to again.”

OnlyFans star Keller Wolfe echoed similar sentiments, writing: “Rest in peace, mate. My thoughts are with your Partner, your family, your friends and loved ones during this impossible time.”

Lastly, Koby’s partner Sam Brownell celebrated the late talent’s life in a now-deleted Instagram story, writing, “I will love you always.”  

As of writing, the official cause of death has not been revealed.

Days before his tragic passing, Koby took to Instagram and shared a photo of his younger self alongside a caption reflecting on his journey.

“Took me years to drop the act. Turns out, the scariest thing wasn’t being rejected—it was being seen. No more masks. No more performance. Just me, as I am. Raw. Real. Free. Yeah, I fucked up along the way. Yeah, I wore the armour a bit too long. But I never stopped searching for the bloke underneath it all,” he wrote.

“This is for the younger me who just wanted to be loved without pretending. And for anyone else out there still hiding— You don’t have to be a symbol. Just be you. Rough edges and all. That’s where the beauty is.”

Our thoughts are with Koby’s family and friends during this unthinkable time.

NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room Is Empty,” has died. He was 85.

White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg.

Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in New York’s Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash.

A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, along with books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.

“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in the New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”

White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the 1991 essay “Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.”

As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.

“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”

Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”

“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”

White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”

His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”

“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told the Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

OKLAHOMA CITY — On the day that the U.S. Senate publicly spurned gay and lesbian activists, Helen and Tina Stiefmiller straggled home from their jobs, exchanged embraces and office news and began the usual litany of domestic chores and pastimes.

Over a dinner of takeout chicken, they discussed an unexpected plumbing problem and its impact on the household budget. They agreed to spend the weekend fishing with Tina’s mother and stepfather at a nearby lake. They watched a television documentary about one of Helen’s personal and professional passions: Native Americans. As Helen patiently sewed beading onto a Native American doll outfit, Tina mused happily about the prospect of the two raising children together.

Only hours before, the Senate had narrowly defeated a bill that would have made it illegal for most employers to discriminate against gay men and lesbians. And in an even more resounding message to homosexuals, the upper chamber overwhelmingly approved the Defense of Marriage Act. The legislation, which President Clinton signed into law early Saturday morning, would allow states to disregard gay and lesbian marriages performed in other states. It defines marriage, for federal purposes, as a union between a man and a woman.

*

On the floor of the Senate, lawmakers had brandished Bibles, invoked historians, cited legal scholars and thundered about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, the preconditions of the nation’s greatness and the responsibilities of lawmakers to preserve and protect the traditional family.

But for Tina and Helen, the Senate’s rhetoric, the subsequent votes and Clinton’s signature are strangely irrelevant. Three years ago this November, the Stiefmillers legally merged their names (from Tina Stief and Helen Miller), exchanged matching rings and recited vows of commitment in a ceremony attended by 300 guests. Today, the couple look forward to the possibility that Helen could be pregnant as a result of a donor-insemination procedure that she underwent only days before the Sept. 10 Senate vote on the marriage measure.

“In many ways it hasn’t changed anything,” Tina said of the measure. “I didn’t lose the right to legally marry because I didn’t have it before. We’ve known all along that if we waited for some type of societal or governmental recognition of our marriage, we might never be married. For us, regardless of what the Senate does, we’ve made those vows; we’re married.”

In places such as Oklahoma City, where homosexuals are a quiet presence rather than a political force, gay and lesbian couples took the news with a measure of both resignation and equanimity. For now, about the best they can hope for is that the Defense of Marriage Act is but a temporary setback in the gradual assimilation of same-sex couples into mainstream culture.

Judging from the experiences of same-sex partners here in America’s heartland, that process is proceeding with or without the nation’s political consent.

“History is very helpful to me in this: I don’t know of any social-change movement that hasn’t had some losses,” Tina said after the vote. “People keep trying–they get knocked back, and they get up and keep going. I can look at the struggles of lots of groups and know that nobody ever had immediate success.

“I want to be a happy person, have a fulfilling relationship, have children,” she continued. “So I’m going to go ahead and do those things regardless.”

Helen and Tina are products of the heartland, and they want all of the heartland stuff–the marriage, the kids, the white picket fence. Long after the years of car-pooling and soccer games and PTA are over, the Stiefmillers envision their lives together in retirement: an RV and a fishing boat, a garden and kids–lots of grandkids–to complete and carry on their family.

“In 30 years, when we’re still together, maybe we’ll be role models for straight and gay couples,” said Helen, 33, a museum curator and historian in Guthrie, Okla. By then, she added hopefully, “we’ll be obsolete as activists.”

Enactment of the Defense of Marriage Act ensures that, for the foreseeable future, Tina will get no health insurance through Helen’s state-funded job. It means that there will be no implicit understanding about inheritance and no legal certainty that each woman could make medical decisions for the other in an emergency. If the law stands, it mandates that neither will have a right to survivor benefits accrued by her mate during a lifetime of work.

As the nation’s tolerance of gays and lesbians has increased over time, activists had hoped, at least, for these things. More subtly, they have longed for the acceptance into mainstream American life that they believe legal recognition would bring.

That is something that even the defeat of the Defense of Marriage Act could not have given them. But its approval is a stark reminder of how far from that goal they are.

“Some people are very frightened by us, and I’ve yet to figure it out,” said Jack Wozniak, a 44-year-old Oklahoma City resident. He and partner Don Hanks, who have been together for 13 years, celebrated their relationship six years ago in a garden ceremony that brought family and friends together.

“I forget,” Wozniak said. “I’m so fortunate in my life, my work situation, my circle of friends.

“I forget that it’s an issue with people, that there are people who hate me or are frightened by me,” he said. “And when something like this happens, it’s like I’m looking at it all over again for the first time.”

Wozniak, managing editor of the Gayly Oklahoman, a weekly newspaper for gays and lesbians, sees the gay-marriage issue as a simple matter of civil rights.

“We should be able to use the same terms for our relationships that everybody else uses for theirs,” he said. “If we accept another term for the same thing, we’re separating ourselves. And we all know that separate-but-equal doesn’t work.”

*

Since the introduction of the Defense of Marriage Act four months ago, gay and lesbian activists have watched, disheartened, as it moved steadily toward becoming law. In July, the measure won approval in the House on a 342-67 vote, with almost two-thirds of Democrats voting in favor. It was approved by the Senate on an equally lopsided 85-14 vote. As he signed the bill at 12:50 a.m. EDT Saturday, Clinton noted that he has always opposed legal recognition of same-sex unions.

The legislative success of the Defense of Marriage Act owes much to the American public’s deep discomfort with same-sex marriage. In a poll conducted for Newsweek magazine in May, 58% of respondents said they opposed extending legal recognition to such unions, while just 33% approved of such state recognition. About 44% agreed with the argument made by the bill’s authors that legal recognition of gay marriage would undermine traditional marriage between heterosexuals.

Supporters of the legislation said it is needed because a Hawaii Supreme Court case threatens to redefine marriage throughout the nation. Still awaiting final resolution, the Hawaii ruling tentatively concluded that to deny gay and lesbian couples marital rights would be discriminatory and contrary to the state’s constitution. If the court ultimately holds that same-sex marriages are allowable, other states might have been obliged to honor such unions performed in Hawaii. The Defense of Marriage Act states that no state is required to recognize homosexual marriages performed outside their borders.

*

In places such as Oklahoma City, where gay men and lesbians live and work and form couples against a backdrop of conservative values, the Hawaii case has encouraged longings that many had never dared entertain before.

“I never considered marriage a possibility in my life–it was never going to happen,” Wozniak said. “All of the discussion about marriage now has made me excited about it, and I’ve really become adamant about it. I not only want it, I damn well want it. Because now there’s a glimmer of hope. Now we might be able to be accepted.”

Some gay and lesbian activists have argued that the Defense of Marriage Act is not an issue on which the homosexual community should make its stand, but others say it is a fight from which they cannot walk away.

The right to marry–and to have one’s commitment recognized by the state–is a right too fundamental, they say, to be subject to further compromise. And the respect they hope that right would bring is a hope too cherished now to give up.

“You have to do it,” said John Doneti, a 33-year-old Oklahoma City social worker who considers himself married to 36-year-old Terry Dennison. “You have to wake up and yell and scream and fight and fight. You may get set a of couple steps back in the process, but you have to do it.”

Doneti and Dennison send each other red roses on the anniversary of their first date. They have been together since that date 12 years ago. While the two have made no public commitments to each other, they are so much a couple that they have outlasted many straight friends’ unions. They often cannot agree on where to go out to dinner when neither wants to cook, but they have an agreed tiebreaker– a friendly neighborhood restaurant–when the bickering threatens to become too intense. They have an uneasy truce over who mows the lawn (John) and who does the laundry and cleans the kitchen and bathroom (Terry).

In their quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, straight neighbors lounge with them on the hood of their car on languid summer weekends, sharing neighborhood gossip. An elderly neighbor gratefully accepts Doneti’s offer to mow her lawn and clear the ravenous bagworms, sending over a pot-roast dinner in appreciation.

In the Stiefmillers’ neighborhood, 79-year-old retiree Dale Webster used to amble off his front porch every now and then and, in a grandfatherly way, ask Tina and Helen when they were going to go off and get married. He did not, of course, mean to each other.

*

As the women’s relationship became more evident, Webster halted the misguided inquiries. But he and his wife, Wanda, have remained friendly. Wanda, who is 69, declines to comment on the Stiefmillers’ lifestyle. But she volunteers that she and her husband “get a kick out of them” as the two “buddies” come and go on their camping trips, play with their dogs and tend the garden between their houses. Helen regularly mows the Websters’ lawn, Wanda noted. “They’re very good neighbors,” she said.

Doneti sees such acceptance as a measure of progress. But the overwhelming popularity of the Defense of Marriage Act bears witness to the difficulties still facing gays and lesbians in their battle for acceptance.

“You’ll know we have arrived,” Doneti said, “when gay people can live in suburbia and just be people–not the two fags, but the couple down the street.”