A few years ago, I accidentally got a friend detained by the Secret Service for an hour while I was hanging out with Susan Sarandon. I didn’t realize Terrance had been picked up as a potential terrorist, of course. He doesn’t look like he’s capable of killing an ant, and since he’s a vegetarian Buddhist, I think my judgment holds water.

When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were slugging it out for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Obama campaign did outreach to LGBTQ blogs. Remember blogs? For you young ones, they came after a mystical place called “MySpace” and before social media; Substack is a direct descendant.

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Originally, there were four big LGBTQ blogs:

• Bilerico Project: This was the site I started. We were a group blog, with writers across the community spectrum, from activists to New York Times bestselling authors. We earned our bona fides from political reporting, opinion pieces, and celebrity guest posts. During the campaign, both Obama and Clinton published essays on the site about LGBTQ issues.

• Pam’s House Blend: Pam Spaulding and her group of bloggers were focused on politics and issues that actually mattered. Like us, she had a stable of writers representative of the actual community: people of color, transgender people, and working-class voices.

• Joe.My.God: Gruff bear Joe Jervis excerpted clips from news stories and added a few acerbic and funny sentences to add context. I prayed for the days when he published one of his personal essays about the dance of the sugar plum lesbians or how much Ricky loved Madonna. Joe, a one-man show, still publishes daily.

• Towleroad: Andy Towle was a pioneer of the aggregation scheme of rewriting a news story and calling it your own. The site catered to well-heeled white men who vacationed on Fire Island and in Palm Springs. He had the most traffic and, with his lack of diversity, the least of my respect.

Terrance wrote for both Pam and me.

A few months before our story starts, the four of us won awards from the New York City Anti-Violence Project. Andy roamed the room, ignoring the rest of us, networking and reveling in the adulation. I only despised him more, thinking my shallow jealousy somehow made me superior.

Before the national convention in Denver, the Obama campaign announced it would sponsor some blogs to attend and cover the events from the inside. Two LGBTQ blogs would be awarded the prestigious right to be in the room. They chose Pam’s House Blend, an obvious choice, and… Towleroad.

I took to the internet to voice my disapproval, pointing out that Andy’s coverage of political issues was almost nonexistent and asserting that his site had been chosen only because of its wealthy readers, who were most likely to donate to the campaign. While truthful, it definitely wasn’t gracious. It led to a completely immature feud between the two of us that lasted for years.

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The campaign reached out after my hissy fit and assured me that we’d be getting credentials to the convention too. They even helped arrange for an LGBTQ organization to pay for my flight since Jerame was already going as a Clinton delegate.

When we arrived, a staffer met me on the street and pulled out high-level passes from his coat like he was a spy handing off top-secret info. We got backstage passes and access to areas normally forbidden to the media, he told me, while Andy had tickets to parties and workshop passes. Feeling incredibly smug, I bragged about it to Terrance and promised him that I’d pass along any passes I couldn’t use.

The Human Rights Campaign hosted a big party one night featuring a performance by Cyndi Lauper. I was invited as a VIP guest. It was the same night that Hillary Clinton was dropping out of the contest and Jerame, as a delegate, had to be on the floor. That gave him plenty of access to take photos and describe his experience in a blog post, so I skipped out in favor of the party.

But before I did, I gave Terrance my all-access pass for the night so he could take extra photos for me and report on it for Pam. Incredibly excited, he set off to commit journalism.

As I strutted into the VIP area feeling like a minor celebrity, I spotted Susan Sarandon sitting at a table with two other people. Starstruck, I walked over and gasped, “You’re Susan Sarandon!” as if this was news to her. She chuckled as the woman sitting next to her quipped, “And I’m Melissa Etheridge.”

“I know,” I shot back. “But she’s Susan Sarandon!” Laughing, Sarandon reached over the table, took my hand, and gave me a peck on the cheek. Sitting on the other side of the table, Rufus Wainwright said hello and, while I realized he was a singer, the most I knew at the time was that he had really bad breath.

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Jerame, a major Cyndi Lauper fan, ran through the streets of Denver after Clinton conceded, gasping for air in the high altitude, to get to the party moments before she took the stage. I breathlessly told him about meeting Susan Sarandon and Rufus Wainwright’s unfortunate halitosis. We watched the performances, listened to the speeches, and drank the free cocktails before stumbling back to our hotel room giddy with delight.

Terrance, however, did not have such a great time. The next morning, he told us that he’d gone through security with the pass and headed backstage to set up his camera, hoping to grab a quote from Clinton. Suddenly, Secret Service agents were looming over him and took him into custody for questioning. He’d unknowingly wandered into a forbidden area and was too close for their comfort.

Separated from his phone, poor Terrance spent hours being searched and questioned about where he managed to get the pass and what his plans were. He missed Clinton’s concession speech, never got a single photo, and didn’t make it in time to see Cyndi Lauper perform.

Years later, when we both lived in the DC area, I ran into Terrance on the street, and we both had a big laugh about his night getting interrogated as a potential domestic terrorist. It was frightening at the time, he admitted, but it makes for a great story at cocktail parties.

Personally, I just tell everyone that once, Susan Sarandon kissed me.

Dolly Parton’s death has done something almost impossible: it’s brought America together. She was a major celebrity who stayed humble and a business-savvy capitalist who gave generously to charity. Her philanthropy earned as much space in obituaries as her musical and acting career did. While her voice and image will live on, her charity will breathe new life into others.

Other celebrities quickly took to social media to honor Dolly’s legacy, and as they piled on top of each other to praise her, I kept thinking: if they’re so impressed with Dolly’s character, why aren’t they putting their money where their mouth is?

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There are celebs who give without publicly announcing their donations. Actress Bea Arthur quietly supported a shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth for years. But right now, the world needs more people like Bill Gates or Elton John who publicly state what they are doing as ongoing efforts, instead of tossing a few bucks in a bucket and calling it generosity.

Some set up their own foundations like Dolly did. Madonna has Raising Malawi, a group that helps vulnerable children in Africa. Gaga’s Born This Way foundation and the Selena Gomez Fund for Lupus Research do great work. But unlike Dolly, they are giving a mere pittance of what they’re worth.

After the original donation, they quickly pivot to fundraising for their foundation, begging the middle class to shell out dollars for a cause they could fully fund. Dolly partnered with government agencies and corporations, but she didn’t expect those with less means to provide the most support.

Taylor Swift honored “the tightropes she walked so that young girls like me could grow up dreaming of joining the circus” in a social media statement.

Swift and her new husband, Travis Kelce, are worth approximately $2.5 billion combined; they donated $26 million dollars to charity, including two million to Dolly’s Imagination Library program, before their nuptials. The wedding alone cost about $50 million.

The total global cost for Imagination Library ranges from $70 million to $100 million per year, with the program delivering roughly 30 to 40 million books annually across five countries. The program doesn’t specify how much of the funding comes directly from Dolly’s own pocket, but its primary source is the Dolly Parton Foundation.

That’s not following in Dolly’s footsteps; Taylor’s got bigger shoes to fill.

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Madonna reposted an Instagram image honoring Dolly, and she’s tried to claim the mantle of being an AIDS activist and supporter. She raised $400,000 for AmfAR in 1987, but as far as direct donations, she gave $10,000 to AIDS Project Los Angeles and $15,000 to the T.J. Martell Foundation in 2005. She’s worth about $850 million; she could do a lot more than $25,000 if she chose. Her level of support for AIDS charities is about as large as her effort to honor the recently departed.

Dolly donated $1 million in April 2020 to fund research into a COVID-19 vaccine. Her net worth was estimated at $450 million, about half of Madonna's.

Selena Gomez had a kidney transplant in 2017. Lady Gaga knows what chronic pain can do to a person’s life. They both have enough money that medical bills are an inconvenience rather than a potential bankruptcy. Financial analysts place Gomez’s wealth between $700 million and $1.3 billion, whereas Gaga’s net worth sits at approximately $300 million.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that outstanding medical bills in collections plague roughly one in five Americans. Groups purchase massive debt portfolios for a mere fraction of their original cost, only to wipe the slate clean for the debtors. $1 in funding erases roughly $100 in debt. A combined $40 million donation from the two pop superstars would wipe out $4 billion in crushing debt.

That’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the amount currently in collections, but what if they spent as much time soliciting other celebs to join them as they do promoting their latest money-making albums?

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Dolly’s philanthropy attacked problems ordinary people actually experience. The Imagination Library gives children books. Her disaster relief gave families cash. Medical-debt abolition would give people something equally concrete: a letter saying you don’t owe this money anymore. It would give peace of mind instead of the liberal equivalent of Republicans’ hopes and prayers.

As the people who keep shoving cash in their pockets, we repeat the progressive talking point to “tax the rich,” flirt with socialist concepts, and champion various causes. But we conveniently overlook that our favorite singers, stars, and heroes have more money than they’d ever be able to spend on themselves, and we’re the ones who are eagerly forking over more to finance their mansions and bodyguards.

It’s time we held them to the Dolly Standard.

If you need any further proof that gay Republicans are some of the worst people in America, they’ve willingly chosen to offer it up for you.

The Board of Directors has decided that the organization will no longer advocate on behalf of transgender people. In an announcement in the conservative rag Townhall, the group’s president, Ross Hemminger, writes that now “we are an LGB advocacy organization, as our founders envisioned and as our moral center calls us to be.”

How many years have passed since gay Republicans had morals?

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Still, the group did fight for same-sex marriage rights and the end of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on gay and lesbian service members. They played a large role in that effort. Kudos where deserved and whatnot.

Years ago, I scorned the group as enablers and do-nothings, but even their most die-hard advocate from Indiana now denies that he ever suggested any LGBTQ person should actually vote for a Republican. He claims he was just trying to make “inroads” and “facilitate conversations” in a red state where conservative Democrats weren’t that great either. Sure, Jan. He regularly rails against Trump on social media now, so good for him; he saw the light.

Trump changed the equation for him and many others. Most of the group’s leadership resigned as Trump acolytes slowly took over the organization. The more fealty was required, the more the old guard backed away until the takeover by Trump worshippers was complete.

Former president Charles Moran practically licked the taint of Ric Grenell, the former Twitter troll elevated to ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term.

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Despite being a diversity hire, Grenell mimicked the president so fiercely that the German government and citizens wanted to toss him out on his ass. When the pressure became too much, Trump recalled him and appointed him Acting Director of National Intelligence. For years, he griped that Pete Buttigieg, former Transportation Secretary under President Biden, wasn’t actually the first gay cabinet member since he’d sat in on meetings too, despite never actually being confirmed to the position.

For his unwavering loyalty, he was named the “special presidential envoy for special missions,” another role that doesn’t require congressional approval, and acting director of the Kennedy Center. His leadership was marked mostly by resignations and firings of qualified members of the board of trustees, and artists dropping out of planned performances.

His office reserved seats for a group of Log Cabin members who disrupted guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams’ performance after she dared to criticize him for rolling back diversity at the institution. Once a troll, always a troll.

That’s the type of ne’er-do-wells the Log Cabin Republicans have become as they marinate in Trump’s greasy fever swamp. They’ve gone from Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to disrupting guitarists who were too “woke.”

In 2015, the board of directors made it clear that trans rights were part of their mission “out of a belief that all adults should be allowed to pursue their own happiness, free of government interference.” Hemminger now acknowledges that the group is no longer interested in those lofty ideals because “the new era of gender identity politics is not the movement we supported and fought for.”

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Instead, he regurgitates the administration’s absurd talking points, blaming trans people for the backslide in Republican support for LGBTQ issues as if their Great Orange Savior had no hand in the backlash.

Religious right opportunists and zealots have never accepted LGBTQ people, and they never will. We will always be under attack from them. But now, instead of standing up to them, the Log Cabin Republicans have opted to put on their best Mar-a-Lago face, praise Jeebus Trump, and slice off the segment of the community currently being targeted the most heavily.

“We were founded on principle,” Hemminger insists at the end of his sniveling suck-up piece. What he doesn’t admit is that as soon as Trump descended his golden elevator, the group lost its backbone and all sense of morals. Now they can’t even let a woman play guitar in peace.

George Michael played softly on a cassette tape that never got flipped. I still can’t hear “Faith” or “Father Figure” without thinking about Steve. It was the summer of 1988. We were teenagers. He was my boyfriend; I just couldn’t admit it, even to myself.

Steve had sandy-colored hair and an easy smile, always happy to see me. His family had recently moved to town, and they were poor. He lived in a ramshackle house with his parents and several siblings. We would hang out in his bedroom sometimes, smoking cigarettes we’d stolen from his dad, and talking about nothing.

Most of the time, we lounged around my place, playing games on the Commodore 64, reading books, and planning our getaway from suffocating small-town life. Technically, it was a cheap one-bedroom apartment, but Mom had improvised when she fled a bad marriage with little money. I slept on the top landing of the stairway, which passed for a bedroom. I didn’t have much room for anything more than a bed, a desk, and a small shelf, but the lack of privacy was the biggest drawback. My bed sat right outside her bedroom door, and she never closed it unless she was getting dressed.

When I got my first car, we took road trips and explored other towns. Sometimes we’d pull off on a country road near a cornfield, sit on the hood, and make ourselves laugh so hard we’d collapse into each other’s arms. That was my favorite part, and I’d stretch the moment out as long as I could, his arm around my shoulder or his head in my lap. We were inseparable.

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Steve slept over at my house one night and insisted we sleep downstairs in the living room because it was “too hot” upstairs since we didn’t have air conditioning. We stayed up late talking, and at one point he just asked me, “Do you like me?”

I shyly acknowledged that I did. He shocked me by telling me that he liked me too. It didn’t take long after that for us to end up wrapped in each other’s arms.

The next couple of months sped by, and we spent them hanging out, smoking cigarettes, sneaking kisses, and whatever else we could get away with. We’d built our own little world, just the two of us, despite how often my mom would look at us suspiciously and question why two teenage boys wanted to have sleepovers so often.

“Y’all act like faggots sometimes,” she’d mutter, just loud enough for me to hear.

Suddenly, it was time to go back to school. Panic seized me. What would happen when we went back to class? Would someone find out? It didn’t seem to bother him nearly as much as it did me.

Steve and I had a mutual friend, Steph. She was in his grade, and they got to talk in class, while I only hung out with her between classes or after school. One afternoon, Steve followed me home in a really good mood.

“It’s a beautiful day, and I feel so free!” he chirped.

“Why?” I asked.

“I told Steph about us.”

My knees buckled. I sat down on the front steps to my house in shock and shook with fear that my mom would find out. I was always the class fag, how could I prove them right? I wasn’t the horrible name classmates had called me. I’d carried that accusation as long as I could remember, long before any of those kids even knew what the slur meant.

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No one liked a faggot. The punches and sneers I’d endured had made that abundantly clear.

Terror and anger hit me at the same time. It didn’t matter that Steph would be supportive. He’d made the decision for both of us. What if she told someone? What if it got back to my mom? Gossip spreads quickly in a small town.

We went up to my room. Mom was at work, so we didn’t have to worry about being overheard. I screamed at him that he was going to shame me into taking my own life and blamed him for the imagined beatings I would get from classmates.

He reached out to me and told me he loved me. And I spit in his face.

I called him names like “faggot” and “queer,” all the names that had been thrown at me over the years and muttered by my own mom. I told him I wasn’t like him and never wanted to be. I screamed every dreadful thing at him that I feared about myself.

And then I punched him. Again and again and again, I hit him, trying to release all of the hurt and sickness I felt inside for his casual honesty about being what I’d always been despised for. I cried for his love that I couldn’t accept and screamed at the pain I’d felt myself when each punch from a classmate had landed. I beat him for what seemed like hours, days, years.

While I raged, he never raised so much as an arm to defend himself.

I told him to leave and never come back. I spat on him again as he walked down the stairs from my room, shell-shocked and wounded.

When the secret eventually got around school, I spun a story about how he’d hit on me, I’d rejected him, and that’s why we weren’t friends anymore. I lied. Over and over again, I lied. No one believed me anyway. It was a performance for an audience of one.

When he would try to talk to me in the school hallways, I’d ignore him or give him a look of disdain. I denied him in public; at home, I cried because I missed him.

His family moved away before the semester finished. I was ashamed of what I did, but I never apologized. My spit running down his face was my last goodbye.

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Shortly after his family moved out of town, my mom sat me down on the couch. She told me that she’d heard the rumors about Steve and me from a classmate’s parent. Steph had told someone. She warned that she’d better not hear anything about any other friends.

“Homosexuality is disgusting, and God will punish you for it. No one likes a faggot,” she lectured me. I’d already learned that lesson too well.

I thought about him more times than I could count over the years, but I never had a way to find him. Then, social media happened. I found Steve on Facebook, reached out, and apologized.

He’d followed my work as an activist and journalist from a distance, but never reached out, he said after graciously accepting the apology. As we caught up, he admitted that his family hadn’t moved far away, only one small town over; he used to drive back and sit outside my house in his car, hoping I’d notice and come out to talk to him. It took me 35 years, but I finally did.

While the UCPOS award normally goes to a right-winger, this month’s winner is the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Amy Acton is an Utter and Complete Piece of Shit.

After the Supreme Court ruling that states could ban transgender kids from school sports, Acton was asked for a response. Instead of just saying something benign, let alone supportive, she chose a different approach. She chose to misgender and demonize transgender youth.

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“I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor, I will enforce and uphold the law,” Acton told the Toledo Blade. “As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids’ health and safety… While my opponent tries to divide us, I’m laser-focused on issues that matter most to Ohioans: lowering costs, cracking down on corruption, and cutting taxes for working families.”

The Ohio High School Athletic Association reported that 17 transgender female students had participated in high school sports over the past eight years. 350,000 students participate in school sports every year. Thank god, Acton is there to protect the fucking football team.

Of course, despite her chest-beating that she’s not out to divide people like the Republicans, her statement promptly divided the Democrats and has led to complete chaos as her team tries to force everyone back into the fold.

The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus released a statement that said its members were less enthused about the candidate “not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests” and warned that “those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton.”

They pointed out that the campaign had refused to embrace the LGBTQ community and kept them out of the decision-making process. “Any one of us could have warned her of that natural consequence if any one of us had been in the room with her,” they said.

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In response, the Ohio Democratic Party told them to STFU and remove the statement posted on social media. As an official caucus of the party, the group couldn’t publicly say anything negative about the candidate and should have handled it internally, they asserted. They promised that Acton would meet with members of the caucus and community to make nice.

Instead, she compounded the catastrophe by not actually showing up to the meeting, and her staff barred the Vice Chair of the party’s Pride Caucus from even attending via Zoom. When one attendee asked why Arienne Childrey, a transgender candidate for the Ohio House and Ohio’s first openly trans city council member, had been forbidden access, she got the boot too.

The chair of the Progressive Caucus, Kim McCarthy, was left in the waiting room for the entire “listening session,” where they didn’t have to hear her.

Leaving her incompetent campaign manager to face the blowback and continue making shitty decisions, Acton proved her disdain for the community she needs to win the election.

“I was shocked. I could not have prepared myself for the sheer contempt the campaign staff demonstrated toward Pride and Progressive Caucus leaders and the hundreds of grassroots constituents we represent,” a Vice Chairman of the Progressive Caucus said after the meeting. “When they retaliated against our trans rights advocate for the crime of demanding an explanation, I was forced to abandon hope of rationalizing the original act and recognized it for what it was: intentional targeted suppression of minorities; a preview into a future Acton administration.”

Can anyone see this in a different light? Acton is willing to implode her campaign by shitting on transgender people.

In the end, Equality Ohio downgraded its level of support for Acton. The Progressive and Pride caucuses won’t be promoting and helping her candidacy. And, as word of the clusterfuck has leaked out into the community, LGBTQ people aren’t willing to vote for her.

But what about the alternative? Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate, is even more opposed to transgender rights than Acton. Ohio voters get a choice between a Democrat who throws away civil rights or a Republican who wants to erase trans people entirely.

In essence, Acton is simply following the traditional Democrat playbook from decades ago when it comes to LGBTQ Americans. “Sure, we suck,” they say, “but Republicans suck worse.” It’s the same mindset that led to the rise of Trump and has kept Democrats firmly locked out of power in state after state.

The people she just alienated are the same ones who would have knocked on voters’ doors, made phone calls, paid for advertising, and turned out voters. Instead, she declared war on them to appeal to voters who would never pull the lever for a Democrat, no matter how much she panders to them.

She traded the support of the most active and engaged wing of the party for a quote in the fucking Toledo Blade. If her campaign had an ounce of political smarts, they’d know that Toledo is a liberal bright spot in the area with a substantial LGBTQ community that helps power Democrats to victory.

Acton didn’t just make a strategic error. She looked the trans community in the eye, told them to fuck off, and then sent her campaign staff to slam the door in the face of the LGBTQ community. She isn’t showing incompetence; she’s showing contempt.

That’s why she’s this month’s winner of the Utter and Complete Piece of Shit Award.

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I dated a con artist for several months when I was 19. It wasn’t until the cops showed up to haul him away to jail that the illusion broke.

But let’s back up to how it began.

In 1992, I went with a group of ACT UP members to Houston, Texas, to protest at the Republican National Convention. There was a sea of AIDS activists in the city to protest George H.W. Bush and demand that he do something about the epidemic his boss had ignored.

Jason spotted me at ACT UP headquarters, quickly zeroed in on me, and started flirting. He was in his mid-20s, with a dashing, confident air, and when he asked me out, I agreed immediately. It was magical. Too good to be true, as it turned out.

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He took me to AstroWorld, where he told me he had connections and got us free admission. We played games, ate junk food, and rode the Ferris wheel, where he gently held my hand before giving me a blowjob when we got stuck at the top, slowly swinging back and forth. As riders unloaded and others climbed on board, I unloaded too, about a quarter of the way down. I was smitten.

A small group of out-of-state activists was camping out at a rich woman’s house for that week. One was a cute twink, and when he and I found ourselves alone in the hot tub the next night, things heated up until Jason showed up unexpectedly and jealously intervened before it went too far. The twink urged me to stay, but I felt guilty and left to soothe Jason’s hurt feelings.

After he left, the twink stole into my room and warned me about investing too deeply in a man I hadn’t known very long. Looking back, I should have listened and chosen the twink instead of capitulating and believing Jason’s vehement declarations of adoration and dismay.

To atone for his jealous fit, Jason took me out drinking the next night, sneaking us past doormen and into bar after bar. Completely drunk, I casually said I wanted to get a tattoo someday. He knew the best place to go, he said, and it would be his treat if I wanted to go right then; it was where he had all his tattoos done. He drove us to a seedy parlor and talked the owner, who didn’t seem to know him, into a discount.

Since I hadn’t actually considered what I wanted and was drunker than I’d ever been, I randomly chose Pink Panther flash art from the wall, sat down in the chair, and when I woke up hungover next to Jason the next morning, I had a giant, badly done tattoo on my right arm. I had no clear memory of anything that happened after I got inked, but we were both naked; apparently, we’d had actual sex for the first time. As I took stock of the situation and looked at his sleeping body, I didn’t see a single tattoo.

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When it was time to leave Houston, Jason offered to drive me back home to Indiana in his new Toyota Corolla. He wanted to take it on a road trip, he said. He could spend a couple of days with me in the Midwest before going back. After two days on the road and two days in my bed, he decided he had nothing in Texas worth going back for, and he was going to stay. Somehow, that seemed like devotion instead of a major red flag.

To be fair, I’d had to scramble to find a new place to live since I’d been gone for almost three weeks and hadn’t told my roommate I was leaving before I just disappeared. I didn’t have a job either, since employers like to know if you’re not going to show up for almost a month. Jason talked a random couple into renting us the carriage house behind their home despite our lack of jobs and paid the deposit. He told them and me that his parents would be paying the rent so we could focus on activism. They never did.

Together, we formed the local ACT UP chapter in Evansville, a small city with about 120,000 people. Over the next two months, we issued press releases and did TV news interviews. That’s where it all started to unravel.

The local media told viewers we were “declaring war on small-town America.” That got the police chief’s attention, and he decided to look into our backgrounds. About a week after the media ran their breathless account of deranged militaristic gays ready to destroy civilization, the cops showed up at my door.

The truth came out faster than a gay man obsessed with showtunes.

Jason was wanted for multiple counts of fraud. He’d left numerous victims in his wake back in Texas, including his grandmother who had taken him in after his parents died years before. The car he’d driven us to Indiana in was actually a rental. He’d never returned it; as far as Texas was concerned, it was stolen.

After the police left, the landlady walked over to ask what had happened and whether his parents would still pay the back-due rent. While he’d paid the deposit, he never paid a dime in rent. Instead, he’d convinced her somehow that it was always coming soon. Since I was on the lease too and he was sitting in a jail cell, I was now the one who owed her hundreds of dollars I couldn’t pay.

I was forced to move out quickly, and since we’d both been conned, the landlady forgave the rent. I’m not sure if it was because she felt sorry for me or because she felt stupid she’d fallen for it too.

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A local drag queen rented me an apartment at the back of her home, and I got a job at Olive Garden; it was one of the worst jobs I’ve ever had, but it paid the rent until I got a job at an LGBTQ newspaper, where skepticism for airy promises and feel-good activism turned out to be an asset. I never stopped looking for the red flags I’d missed with Jason.

Thirty-four years later, I finally decided I’d rather not see his face every time I looked at my arm. I booked an appointment to get that tattoo covered up the second day I was in Mexico City, paid for it myself, and sat in the chair completely sober. As the artist started, I couldn’t help but laugh. Out of all the wreckage Jason left behind, that hideous ink was actually the lowest price I paid.

As an American living in Mexico City, I see it constantly. If you’re a good liberal on social media, you’ve seen it too. Suddenly, “expat” has become a dirty word.

The true term, according to the morally pure set who smugly pontificate online, is “immigrant” because only Americans who move to a poorer country refer to themselves as expats. What they don’t realize is that they’re parroting right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric dressed up for liberals.

Insisting Americans abroad call themselves immigrants doesn't defend the poor. It frames immigration as something shameful. That's not progressive.

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An expat doesn’t intend to stay in the country; they plan on returning home. An immigrant plans on staying. They’re building a new home.

And it’s not a term Americans invented to make themselves feel better about moving somewhere cheaper. The word “expatriate” goes back to the 18th century.

The real turning point was the post-World War II era. American and British workers flooded into Europe, the Middle East, and Asia as corporations expanded globally and colonial administrations wound down. Literary giants like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein were famous expats in Paris. The idea that it only applies to a third-world country is ridiculously inaccurate.

Semantics, however, aren’t what fuels this new debate. Racism, classism, and demagoguery are.

While American right-wingers are obvious about their racism, in Mexico, the resistance is wrapped in classism. The whiter your skin, the more opportunities you have and the more money you’ll make. Skin tone is secondary to economic power, although part of the same issue.

That’s why gentrification is a commonly cited concern, and white immigrants get called colonizers. Landlords raise prices, purchasing power declines, and people who have just arrived become easy targets. Not every local loses; some make more money. But blaming the newcomer is simpler than tracing rent hikes back to the people setting them.

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Gentrification is a problem in Mexico City. My neighborhood, San Rafael, is a great example. When I moved here three years ago, I was the only white guy for blocks. Now, I can’t step out onto the sidewalk without seeing a glut of gringos.

Marriott bought the hotel on the corner and now has tons of white tourists renting rooms instead of the Mexicans and Colombians who used to stay there. On my block alone, two coworking spaces have opened, and a new apartment building, Nomad Gardens, has short-term rentals. The lower level includes a makeup store, a Chinese noodles and dumplings restaurant, a CrossFit, and a dual pilates/tea shop.

Two trendy cafes have opened nearby, drawing a much wealthier clientele than the one across the street that’s been there for decades. Their menus are in both English and Spanish; the older one is in Spanish only. Several restaurants also now have English-language menus.

While my neighborhood was decidedly middle-class when I rented my apartment, it’s now in the top five most expensive neighborhoods in the city.

Am I to blame? Did I single-handedly raise rents and open a dozen shops, or did developers and business owners see an opportunity to make money? The logic that blames me for San Rafael is the same logic that blames a Mexican farmworker for taking an American’s job. A corporation saw a way to exploit a worker by paying low wages and making more money for shareholders.

The problem isn’t the newcomer. It’s the folks who are making money off of them. But that’s a much harder dynamic to grasp, and humanity loves to find an easy target.

That’s why right-wing governments are on the rise in many countries struggling with mass immigration. Politicians provide a boogeyman, and patriots form a mob.

As liberals, we deride the narrow-minded crowd who buy into it. But the expat kerfuffle feeds right into anti-immigration sentiment in a way most don’t seem to understand. While they’re wrapping themselves in the mantle of defending the poor, they’re sending a much different message.

You’re not a respectable expat, you’re a dirty immigrant, according to the logic. It’s the same right-wing playbook with a progressive coat of paint. They’re giving a negative spin to immigration.

Is the “gringo go home” graffiti I saw recently in my neighborhood any different from the “I stand with ICE” signs I saw back in Indiana on a recent trip home?

I still have an American mailing address, but a temporary residency status in Mexico. If we’re going by strict definitions, I’m an expat, though it’s a grey area since I don’t plan to move back to the USA. But next year, I’ll be eligible to get my permanent residency.

And I’ll be proud to call myself an immigrant.

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I didn’t train to be a journalist. And, honestly, I don’t see myself that way still, despite years in the industry. Other people have called me that, and I’ve won journalism awards, but I just consider myself a writer.

Sure, sometimes I chase stories, and they are more reported. I’ve won awards for those stories, toppled the CEO of an LGBTQ organization, and helped get a Florida immigrant with AIDS freed from prison after highlighting her plight. She was imprisoned for spitting on a police officer, denied proper medical care, and died within days of being released.

I was the yearbook and school newspaper editor in high school. My second job as a teenager was as a stringer for a small Indiana newspaper. I did theater and restaurant reviews for another paper. I wrote for an LGBTQ newspaper in my 20s.

So it sounds like I always wanted to be a journalist, doesn’t it?

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More often, my stories are opinion pieces or personal essays, though. That’s what I enjoy writing more than hard news. I enjoy getting people talking. And I love telling my own stories.

Back in the 90s, the GayIndy mailing list was my sounding board. I’d write 800-word emails that were op-eds in disguise and pontificate from my supposed expertise as a young activist in a red state; I had a lot of self-confidence even if my actual resume was slim. Still, it was more than most, so people listened, and it kicked off discussions and changed opinions.

When blogs became a thing online, Jerame immediately told me I should start one and stop haranguing the local email list. I dubbed it the Bilerico Project and wrote a mix of op-eds and reported political and LGBTQ pieces. It eventually gave me a national stage, experience as a TV and radio pundit, and, even more important, the opportunity to network with other bloggers, movement leaders, and politicians. When social media joined the internet, thousands of followers followed.

When I eventually sold it, I took a job with the new owner to run LGBTQ Nation. That rarely involved any actual reporting. Instead, the new thing was “aggregation,” which is a fancy way of saying “rewrite someone else’s actual reported story.” I privately referred to it as Cliff Notes Journalism. It required a certain level of professionalism, but it was hardly award-winning journalism. Maybe that’s when I started actually struggling with the label.

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Since my job was to drive traffic to the site rather than build a personal brand, I mostly stopped posting on my Facebook page, dropped off Twitter, and took a break from being the public face of the website, letting the site be the star. It was actually a relief; I found creating social media content stressful, and aggregation felt more like producing content than writing.

When the company transferred me to their travel site, I started my own travel Instagram account with Uriel, since he could accompany me on several press trips so I could experiment with video content. I’m honestly still not great at it; I simply cannot do a voiceover in that hyped-up, excited content-creator voice. My tone is great for NPR but not necessarily the best for hyping a tropical resort.

After getting laid off after a decade there, I realized I hadn’t had an “office” job in over 20 years, and all I really knew how to do was to write and create content. Now I post Facebook content daily, produce two newsletters every week, create videos for the travel account, and still find time to write freelance articles. It’s a grind, but at least it’s varied.

But it’s definitely not “journalism.”

I get to choose topics that actually interest me. I make some money (not much) from the reels, posts, and newsletter, but I find the constant grind grueling. I spent a decade building up someone else’s brand while letting my own falter. Sometimes it feels like I have to catch up immediately to where it was ten years ago, but when I get overwhelmed, I fall back on an old hobby.

When I lived in Maryland, my husband, Jerame, and I regularly had a puzzle spread out across the dining room table that we worked on in spurts. After moving to Mexico City, I continued the tradition, and now Uriel and I do the puzzles together. I enjoy it a lot, searching for the correct piece by using context clues, memorizing the locations of pieces, and conducting a detailed examination. I even made a couple of videos about it.

That’s what I’m enjoying about life as a “content creator.” I don’t have to stress about website traffic numbers, though I do track how well my page and newsletter perform. Some habits don’t change. I have fun with the writing, still influence the conversation, and use the same search-for-the-right-piece approach I use at the dining room table. As an extra bonus, when I get bogged down, I can pause and go work on an actual puzzle.

Still, my page describes me as an “LGBTQ journalist” and free newsletter subscribers get a prompt at the bottom of the email to “support independent journalism” by upgrading to a paid subscription. I’ve considered changing that to “help me spout off online,” but that doesn’t seem professional.

So maybe I am a journalist after all.

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Why are gay white men so threatened by lifting up transgender women?

Don’t get me wrong, older lesbians get worked up over trans men. But the dudes are especially vicious in their seeming insecurity, and, for some reason, they’re almost always white.

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I recently posted on my Facebook page about Sylvia Rivera’s speech at New York’s Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in 1973. If you don’t know the tale, the gist is that Rivera, a trans Latina woman, took the mic and berated the crowd for abandoning the people still paying the highest price. While middle-class gays focused on winning acceptance, trans people were still being arrested simply for wearing the wrong clothes. Queer kids were still sleeping on the streets.

“Today, Rivera’s speech is remembered as one of the defining moments in LGBTQ history because it exposed a tension that never really disappeared,” I wrote. “Every generation has arguments about who gets centered, who gets left behind, and whether the fastest path to equality requires making some people less visible.”

And good God, do the white gay men want to be centered. Queer history isn’t zero-sum, but they treat it like it is because their identity depends on being the star of the show. They want to be seen as respectable, good boys, and they regularly take to the comments section to let that be known on any post about a trans woman. The same people who are offended by the word “queer” feel as if their self-worth is diminished.

“Leftists always rewrite history to whatever narrative suits them,” Russell Howard replied. “The fact remains that the gay rights movement was largely a middle-class white male movement. There was drag, but that had nothing to do with the trans insanity going on today.”

Actually, most pre-Stonewall protests were organized by gender-nonconforming people, youth, people of color, and drag queens. Yes, there were also protests led by white men and women in suits and dresses, but, as in every movement, those with the most to lose are the first to protest.

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“She was an interesting, noteworthy historical figure. But stop with the ignorant, absurd, desperate claims that her history somehow overshadows the single most powerful force for equality: millions of ordinary, everyday people coming out as gay or lesbian,” boasted Steve Sanders.

Somehow, lifting Sylvia up diminished “ordinary” people. What an interesting way of phrasing that. His identity is challenged by honoring a Latina trans woman who did sex work to survive. For some reason, he sees it as a competition despite no one losing.

“What got sodomy laws overturned?” Dan Avery asked in a full-throated defense of respectability politics. “There’s a time and a place for in-your-face activism, but even as ACT UP was staging die-ins, the ‘respectable’ crowd was there to talk to the pharmaceutical companies and HHS.”

Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that got sodomy laws overturned, was brought by two Black men. Neither were “respectable” plaintiffs; they were just everyday Americans, part of our diverse community. And the people who went to talk to the pharmaceutical companies and HHS were the very activists who had protested outside government buildings and corporate offices; they weren’t some outside mediators in business suits.

I built my reputation on fiery, populist writing that centered fly-over country queers over the richer, more respectable crowd. What a gay man needs in Topeka is different from what he needs in San Francisco. Not entirely, of course, but big-city queers have more protections, generally a more liberal public perception, and more resources. When I advocated for employment and housing protections, coastal queers downplayed the need because they already had it; marriage equality needed undivided attention, they said.

When I led the effort to pass an inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance in Indianapolis, we had to fight tooth and nail to ensure that transgender people were included. But the fight wasn’t with politicians; it was with our own community. The white gay men were willing to sell out trans people, blaming them for the lack of support when it was actually religious beliefs and partisan politics that had to be overcome. In the end, the ordinance passed with full support from all Democrats, including a Black Muslim who had struggled with his religious beliefs, and two Republicans.

It took a Supreme Court case, Bostock v. Clayton County, to ultimately give LGBTQ people nationwide protections. Gay men from New York and Georgia, plus a transgender woman from Michigan, brought those cases before the court. An East Coaster and two folks from fly-over country won us those protections together. Yes, white gay men were part of the struggle, but so was a trans person.

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Marsha P. Johnson was not at Stonewall on the first night of the riots, as she said herself, and, therefore, didn’t throw “the first brick,” no matter how many times people repeat the inaccuracy. Transgender people did not singlehandedly build the LGBTQ movement, as some misguided activists have claimed. Sometimes people blow things out of proportion - especially when they feel under attack and that they have to prove their worth.

The real issue isn’t historical accuracy. It’s that some gay men, most frequently white men, have decided their identity requires being the center of the story. LGBTQ rights aren’t an either/or proposition.

It’s a “yes, and…” movement. It was built on equality, not respectability. In the beginning, none of us were seen as respectable.

Pete Hegseth was a strong contender for the UCPOS Award this month. The Secretary of Defense is obsessed with male virility. He opposes transgender women serving in the military, because why would any man want to be a woman, but wants to pump male soldiers full of testosterone shots. That’s gender-affirming care, by the way.

He’s also been personally blocking high-level promotions for women across every branch of the military. He’d ban gay and lesbian service members too if he could get away with it.

But Hegseth has a spiritual advisor who makes him look like a goddamn moderate. Meet Doug Wilson. He’s our July winner of the not-so-prestigious Ultimate and Complete Piece of Shit Award.

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Wilson sat down recently with Uncloseted Media for what the outlet says is his first interview with a queer publication. It did not go well. For him, I mean. For us, it was a gold mine.

He opened by bragging.

“I don’t regard myself as homophobic by the standards of scripture at all. According to the standards of the sexual revolution, yeah, I’m homophobic and transphobic. You’ve never met anybody worse,” Wilson told interviewer Spencer Macnaughton.

He was not wrong about that last part.

Wilson wants to recriminalize sodomy. His definition covers anal and oral sex, plus handjobs between men. Married straight couples get a pass, naturally. Lesbians he’s not particularly worried about, because the Law of Moses never criminalized it, and he’s a Bible guy. It’s just sinful.

“There are things that are manifestly sinful for every Bible-believing Christian, which I believe ought not to be criminal,” Wilson said. “You don’t have any penalty in the Old Testament attached to lesbian behavior.”

Good news for the lesbians, I suppose.

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For gay men, the news is considerably fucking worse. Wilson thinks execution is on the table, although he’s magnanimous enough to say it shouldn’t be the mandatory minimum. He spent a surprisingly long time working through the mechanics of whether stoning is required or if a firing squad counts, since “they’re throwing very tiny stones at a high rate of speed.” He settled on exile as the floor, pointing to two Old Testament kings who ran the sodomites out of town. He doesn’t tell us where he’d send all the gays, but probably someplace decidedly pansy like… Europe.

That’s the kind of deep theological reasoning advising a sitting cabinet member.

Then Wilson took a sharp turn into something darker. When Macnaughton pressed him, Wilson wasn’t just talking about consensual sex between adults.

“I do want to create a society where the maximum penalty for a Roman Catholic priest molesting or raping an altar boy is solved and addressed with a tall tree and a short rope,” Wilson said.

The man who wants to criminalize gay sex equates it, without hesitation, with child rape.

“When Macnaughton asked Wilson directly whether two men having consensual sex was equally sinful as a man raping a girl, Wilson didn’t flinch. “Yeah, they’re both violations of God’s law.”

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Wilson also thinks the “P” should be added to the “alphabet people” LGBTQ+ acronym, because in his view the whole coalition is just a “sexual alliance of people defying traditional biblical norms.” He wants conversion therapy. He thinks marital rape laws are an overreach. He believes women in the military are “catnip into a pack of cats,” which tells you everything about how Wilson thinks men should be held accountable for their behavior.

That last view, incidentally, lines up neatly with Pete Hegseth’s record on female servicemembers. This is the man whispering in the ear of the Pentagon.

If you can stomach the full interview, watch it below or read the transcript. But you’ve been warned.

Doug Wilson is an utter and complete piece of shit.

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Last Sunday began like almost every other Sunday.

I woke up, poured my first cup of coffee, and did what I’ve done nearly every morning for the past 50 years in the news business. I started reading the news. I moved from source to source to see how the world woke up. That morning, I turned on BBC World News.

The lead story stopped me cold.

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Reports described a vehicle attack near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate during the city’s Pride celebrations. As the details unfolded, my mind immediately traveled back to another horrific day - the massacre at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. It also brought to mind the recent Pride celebration in Medford, New Jersey, where nearly a thousand people gathered, knowing that religious extremists had announced they would be there.

Those moments remind us of a reality that every LGBTQ person understands. When we gather publicly, whether at a Pride march, a community center, or a celebration, there are still people in this world who believe we should disappear. They want us to be silent. They want us to go back into hiding.

Yet every year, millions of us do exactly the opposite.

That is why I am so proud of everyone who attends Pride.

People often think the bravest thing you’ll do in life is serve in combat, rush into a burning building, or stand up to injustice. For many LGBTQ people, the bravest thing they will ever do is simply show up at Pride and say, “This is who I am.”

Every person who marches honors those who came before them.

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I think back to that first Pride March in 1970. We were only about 15,000 people walking up Sixth Avenue in New York City, but we carried something far greater than signs. We carried a simple message: We are out. We are proud. We are not going back into the closet. We refused to remain invisible.

That spirit has never changed.

As I watched those reports from Berlin, Jason and I were packing our bags for WorldPride in Amsterdam, where I would soon stand on a stage and speak publicly, as I have done for decades, with pride. The thought never crossed my mind to stay home. Nothing and no one was going to silence me.

Because if terrorists, extremists, or those fueled by hatred can frighten us into staying away from Pride, community centers, or any public LGBTQ event, then they have accomplished exactly what they set out to do.

We cannot allow that to happen.

One of the greatest lessons I learned walking up Sixth Avenue in 1970 is that visibility changes history. Every person who is seen makes it easier for someone else to be seen. Every march, every rally, every Pride celebration chips away at fear and replaces it with acceptance.

We have grown from 15,000 marchers on that first Pride Day to millions celebrating in cities around the globe. That didn’t happen by accident. Generations of us have refused to disappear.

There is extraordinary power in visibility. There is safety in community. And there is hope in our numbers.

So, to everyone who has ever marched, waved a rainbow flag, volunteered at Pride, or simply had the courage to show up, thank you.

Your visibility is changing the world. Your courage honors our history.

And because of you, the next generation will inherit a world that is freer than the one we were given.

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If there’s one thing Donald Trump’s addled mind can’t resist, it’s his fixation on demonizing Biden and the trans community in a desperate attempt to get Americans to forget what a fuck-up he is. His latest whopper is mind-boggling in its sheer stupidity, but it combines his two favorite bugaboos.

The CHIPS Act, which passed with bipartisan support during Biden’s presidency, supports domestic semiconductor production. It has been praised as a rare example of Congress actually working productively on an issue that will genuinely help American workers. No wonder Trump is critical of it now.

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“We had this ridiculous CHIPS Act where you give billions of dollars to a company, and they didn’t even know what the hell to do with it. You give them billions of dollars, they say they’re going to build, nobody knew what to do with it,” Trump said during a speech at the U.S. Army War College.

“And of course, the standards were so high if you weren’t transgender, as an example, uh, you didn’t qualify. So they get the money, they hired— they look all over for transgender people to run the company, large portions. They couldn’t find them. They weren’t into the chip business, I guess.”

Sweet Jesus. Ya got trouble!

The legislation obviously does not contain any requirements about trans people, whether line workers or CEOs. But what if it did? Personally, I’d rather have a transgender person leading a major tech company than, say, Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

Trans women built significant pieces of the modern internet and the devices you use to access it. That’s not an exaggeration.

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In 1968, IBM fired Lynn Conway when she expressed her intention to transition. She restarted her career under a new name and spent decades hiding that she was trans. She couldn’t afford to let another employer do what IBM had done. She was brilliant, warm, and funny. I knew her.

IBM eventually apologized, but only 52 years later, when Conway was 82 years old. She died in 2024 at age 86. IBM puts a rainbow flag on its logo every June now. It took them five decades to apologize to her. Lynn deserved better than that.

Despite spending years living in fear of being outed, she still managed to revolutionize microchip design. Conway developed algorithms that enabled software to efficiently arrange millions of transistors on a microchip. Her textbook on VLSI chip design, co-written with Carver Mead, became the standard for a generation of semiconductor engineers. The chips in your phone exist because of that work.

Before Mary Ann Horton’s work, you couldn’t send a file by email. She led Usenet from a 10-site network to over 5,000 sites worldwide and was a driving force behind standardizing the user@domain.com email format. She also pushed Lucent Technologies to become the first Fortune 500 company to add transgender-inclusive language to its nondiscrimination policy and to provide coverage for transition care and surgery.

Then there’s Sophie Wilson. Regardless of the technology you’re using to read this post, its processor was designed by a trans woman. Wilson designed the ARM instruction set architecture at Acorn Computers in 1983, a processor so power-efficient that it became the dominant chip architecture for smartphones, tablets, and embedded systems, now found in over 230 billion devices worldwide.

Those three women never led the major companies sucking down government dollars like Slurpees. They didn’t rake in billions of dollars in personal wealth. They used their brains and changed the world for all of us.

Trump has spewed his bullshit for years, railing against diversity initiatives while demonizing immigrants, LGBTQ people, racial minorities, and women. His whole pitch is that real men build things. He’s spent his life cosplaying as one. He’s never built a thing that didn’t eventually go bankrupt or require a lawsuit to untangle. Meanwhile, three trans women quietly built the architecture of the modern world.

Trump built casinos that went bankrupt. Trans women built the internet. Decide for yourself who you’d rather have running a chip factory.

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Maggie, our little Maltipoo, is a former street dog and she just can’t shake the habit of snatching up any crumb of food from the sidewalk and gulping it down. A couple of weeks ago, after an unfortunate snack, she got sick and needed to go to the vet. That’s when it happened.

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Veterinarians work differently in Mexico City. They tend to share space with groomers or wedge themselves into little storefront nooks. They keep odd hours too. We set out to find one nearby and struck out three times. At one place, the vet was only available two hours a day and already gone for the day. At another, he wouldn’t be back until the weekend. The third place was closed entirely, with the shutters all rolled down. Since it wasn’t a serious illness, we started trudging home, trying to beat the afternoon rain.

That’s when I tripped. Sidewalks here are notoriously uneven thanks to earthquakes and underfunded infrastructure, so I’m usually careful where I step. Instead, I was looking at Maggie while trying to dodge an oncoming pedestrian. My left foot caught on something and I fell forward, just barely keeping myself upright before my right leg slammed down, taking my entire weight in a delicate fight with gravity.

Uriel rushed over to ask if I was alright. I waved it off as nothing major. My left leg hurt a little. Within a few blocks though, my right knee and lower leg were shouting that it was, actually, something significant. My knee throbbed and the muscle next to my tibia was screaming. As we limped home, we passed another vet’s office, open and empty as the owner got ready to go watch the World Cup.

It was only two blocks from home and we’d traipsed around the neighborhood for 45 minutes trying to find what was practically next door.

We stopped, Maggie got a shot and some antibiotics to take later that night, and off we went to go home. By the time we got inside, I was limping.

My knees have ached and crackled for years, all part of getting older. When I first started working out, leg exercises put me out of commission for a week after my right knee vetoed the stress. But now, I was hobbling home like I’d gone to war and needed the Red Cross.

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About a week later, after spending days in bed with my leg propped out in front of me, I acknowledged that ibuprofen and ice weren’t going to cut it. I was able to move around and go for short walks, but it still ached. I thought I might have a meniscus tear, so I made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon who sent me for x-rays. When I returned, he gave me the worst possible news.

I’m getting old.

I have arthritis in both knees, more severely in my right knee, and the clumsy trip inflamed it. He gave me a steroid shot in my knee, some mild anti-inflammatory medication, told me to make an appointment to see a physical therapist, and prescribed three days of bed rest with ice packs. The shot should help immediately, he told me, and I’d feel better within a couple hours.

He lied like a rug.

Instead, for the next three days I could barely walk. Doc GPT helpfully informed me that some people have a reaction to steroids that makes the pain worse for a couple of days and congratulated me on being in the special 20% of lucky recipients who had a reaction.

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By the time Uriel and I left that weekend for a press trip to the Thompson Zihuatanejo resort on the Mexican Pacific coast, my knee was still a little stiff, but nothing major.

I was careful, avoiding long walks and taking stairs carefully. I spent half my time in a lounge chair at one of the country’s best beaches, Playa la Ropa, and the other half floating on my back in the bay. The resort’s publicist had even scheduled a couple’s massage for us and the woman who worked on me spent extra time working out the tight leg muscles. I felt fine until it was time to go home and I had to climb up the stairs to the airplane that was parked on the runway.

By the time we walked in the apartment, I was limping again. More bed rest and ibuprofen followed. I met with the physical therapist for the first time and slowly started feeling myself again. I’m hoping to go back to doing elliptical by the end of the week, although Uriel has strictly forbidden it.

I’m not sure why this has hit me so hard, but over the past couple of weeks, I’ve just felt old. Arthritis is different from grey hair. Still, I’m on the mend.

But yesterday Maggie snatched a couple of unknown street snacks from the ground at the open air market. She’s thrown up a few times, so it’s back to the vet again. This time, we’re going straight to the one two blocks away. I hope he’s open.

I recently found out that I’m an Israeli intelligence agent. Which, quite frankly, you’d think would pay better.

I’m also a Zionist who simultaneously promotes “trans ideology” and actively harms transgender people. I want to incite a race war against white people, but don’t respect people of color. I should stay out of “women’s issues,” while I don’t lift up women’s roles in history sufficiently.

That’s a contradictory clusterfuck of labels and accusations. Apparently, I’m a multifaceted guy, at least on Facebook.

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Back when I ran Bilerico Project in the 2000s, the comments section on the blog posts were frequently overrun with community infighting and denunciations. For years, some transgender people considered me second only to the devil while others lifted me up as a stalwart ally. Going to a conference was always interesting when a trans woman would walk up to berate me, talk to me for a few minutes, realize what they’d seen online wasn’t true, and end up apologizing for believing it. Several of them ended up becoming close confidants.

All it took was one person to launch a “blog swarm” as it was called then, inciting a horde of angry voices to keep ratcheting up the volume until it could become dangerous. It was the opening salvo of what has become an internet standard now.

After one vicious week full of comments, emails, death threats, and having my name smeared all over the internet, Mara Keisling, the former head of the National Center for Transgender Equality, called me to discuss the blog post someone else had written that kicked off that week’s furor. We became friends after the incident and she performed the wedding ceremony years later for my husband and me. On my recent trip back to DC, I saw her at Pride and it was probably my happiest moment of the day.

In the 2010s when I was the editor of LGBTQ Nation, we’d see a similar situation, especially after Trump was elected. The site allowed comments and they were frequently overrun by right-wingers after the article would get shared on social media. I refused to moderate them as did the other editors. The owner hired three moderators who all quit, slightly traumatized by the sheer number of hateful and disgusting things people posted. The owner had been adamant that our community needed a place to discuss the articles until it just wasn’t feasible any longer.

The mob won the battle. The queer space was overrun with hatred and shut down.

I see the same dynamic on social media. While the comment section of LGBTQ Nation was a cesspool, on the site’s Facebook page, it was even worse. With over a million followers plus the folks who just stumbled across a post, it was a bloodbath between our side and Trump supporters.

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Now, on my Facebook page, I post short queer history pieces along with links to the newsletter. Sometimes, I’ll toss in a political meme, but, for the most part, it’s benign informational content. And yet, I spend at least a half an hour every morning, more if a post went viral, banning accounts and deleting some of the most vile comments.

Two recent posts, one about Two-Spirit Native Americans and the other about trans doctor Alan L. Hart, brought out some of the worst in humanity.

The Two-Spirit post drew tons of racist comments about Native Americans like it was 1850. Naturally, it also garnered a large amount of anti-trans replies. They were shocking in their venom and outright hostility. I reported at least 50 comments advocating violence; two were removed. The rest, Facebook said, “did not violate our terms of service.” On social media, saying people should shoot and kill Native Americans “like buffalos” is apparently fine now. “Scalping” transgender people is also acceptable under the AI algorithm.

The post about Hart, a man who saved millions of Americans from tuberculosis, spawned thousands of replies insisting that he was a woman. Some even accused me of trying to “steal” women’s accomplishments away from them.

Posts about transgender people also get a heaping helping of anti-semitism. Either Jews are trying to forcibly turn everyone transgender by funding transition surgeries worldwide or, in a super bizarre stretch of logic, they want to turn all gay teens into women as part of a secret conversion therapy mission. It’s lunacy.

Some of the comments come from real people. Older lesbians, MAGA supporters, and British men make up the bulk of the anti-trans crowd. But other profiles only have three friends and a handful of hateful posts; they’re obviously either bots or troll accounts set up by someone too afraid to put their real name behind their words. The majority of the comments come from these types of accounts.

While Facebook formerly claimed to be providing safeguards to shut out the vitriol and shut down the fake accounts, since Trump took office and Zuckerberg unilaterally lifted the restrictions on hate speech, the sheer number of bots and trolls has increased dramatically and the disgusting comments have proliferated without any intervention - even when they advocate murder.

It was bad enough when people swarmed into welcoming areas for the queer community to showcase the worst of human nature. Now we’ve got bots leaving anti-LGBTQ slurs and denying our humanity?

Like the people I highlight on the page, we will persevere.

Every morning I spend at least a half hour banning accounts while I have my first cup of coffee. Then I schedule the next piece to publish later that evening. That’s apparently what being a Mossad agent looks like.

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I’m not a sportsball fan, so I haven’t been infected with World Cup Fever like many folks in Mexico and America. But one small bit of the Mundial, as it’s called here, has lodged in my brain. It’s a simple slogan that Mexico embraced and I’ve been mulling it over for weeks.

Yo sé que no, pero… ¿y si sí?

Roughly translated, the hopeful phrase means, “I know that it’s no, but… what if it’s yes?”

“We know the answer is probably no. We know the odds. We know the disappointments. History has not exactly been on our side. But our hearts cannot be stopped from hoping, from latching onto a delusional optimism,” one of my favorite newsletters, CDMX IYKYK, explained. “It’s not optimism born from ignorance. It’s optimism despite reality. It’s the collective decision to keep believing anyway.”

It should become the LGBTQ community’s mantra.

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I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and picked up the activism bug in the ‘90s. The road to equality looked incredibly dim, but I believed it could be done. The chances were as slim as Mexico winning the World Cup, but even at the height of the AIDS crisis, I was optimistic.

When I lived in Indianapolis, I fought tooth and nail to get enough votes to pass an LGBTQ human rights ordinance through the city council. I spent months chasing one vote. It was going to come from either a Republican woman or a Muslim Democrat. Both cited religion as their reason for holding back. The night of the final vote, I still didn’t know which way it would go.

Right before the council voted, the Democrat pulled me aside. He was voting yes, he told me quietly. It was going to pass.

I knew the answer was probably no. Until it wasn’t. LGBTQ people have housing and employment protections in Indianapolis now.

The community struggled for years to stop the state legislature from passing a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage, and I was there, using Bilerico as a bully pulpit and showing up for the rallies, protests, and lobbying days with friends and family. The amendment failed repeatedly through multiple legislative sessions. Same-sex marriage is legal in Indiana.

Yo sé que no, pero… ¿y si sí?

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Inclusive protections were already in place in Washington, DC and Mexico City and had been for years before I moved to either. Marriage was legal here before it was in the United States.

In DC, I was thrilled to see so many gay and lesbian couples holding hands. Relocating to Mexico City and living close to the gayborhood changed what normal looks like. Same-sex couples hold hands as they walk down the street and kiss on park benches. Even far from Zona Rosa, you’ll still find couples strolling along showing public affection.

I saw gay couples comfortably holding hands at the Pride parade last month, but nowhere else in Indianapolis. But what if it’s a yes?

DC has many more bars, groups, stores, and restaurants that cater to a queer clientele than Indianapolis, but they exist in Indiana. You can still walk into some restaurants in Indy and find almost every table occupied by LGBTQ people.

When Uriel and I came home after our trip to the States, he was telling a straight friend about the differences between the two cities and how they compared to Mexico City. DC was the most accepting of LGBTQ people, he decided. CDMX has its own version of yes. It just doesn’t look the same.

He told her about Annie’s Paramount Steakhouse, a restaurant that sits in the heart of a gay neighborhood and has been a staple of the community for decades. Back in the 1970s, Annie, the owner’s sister, noticed two men holding hands under their table. She approached and told them, “you don’t have to hide that here,” and motioned for them to hold hands on top of their dinner table.

Our friend shrugged off his amazement at a full restaurant with tables packed with queer people. “C’mon, güey, you can find that here,” she told him.

It wasn’t the same, he insisted. This wasn’t a place built by LGBTQ people to be a safe space. It was a restaurant adopted into the community and supported by our people so completely we’d practically taken it over. This was kindness repaid over decades with loyalty. It was gay and trans people working and breaking bread together in a space they didn’t need to build themselves.

That’s what a yes looks like when it finally arrives.

Mexican soccer fans have used a homophobic slur as a chant for years, and FIFA has warned them about it repeatedly. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Mexico hasn’t won the World Cup. When the chant ends, they’ll win.

Yo sé que no, pero… ¿y si sí?

Mexico got eliminated. They believed anyway. So do we.

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Do me a favor and either leave a comment on this article or shoot me an email back with your answer.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for a little more than six months now and I’ve bounced between political coverage/opinion, LGBTQ current events, and personal essays. I post most of my essays (either completely or a teaser) on my Facebook page too and got a comment on a personal story that has stuck with me: “Much more interested in this than the grumpy hot takes!”

But what have you enjoyed the most? What keeps you coming back?

The common wisdom is to write about what you love most, but all of these topics interest me. Experts also say to choose a topic and stick with it so readers know what to expect when they open your newsletter. Fair enough. My goal is obviously to increase the subscriber count - both paid and free. You give the people what they want.

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There are some clear trends that I can see.

1. Personal essays tend to do well for the most part. (This is my dirty secret or The leftovers)

2. Political opinion pieces do reasonably well and even better if they mix in personal anecdotes (Let’s get honest about the No Kings thing or 4 lessons from ACT UP we can use against Trump)

3. Pieces about LGBTQ issues are popular. (They lost on marriage equality, so they invented this or “Queer” is not a slur. Sit down.)

4. Current events about LGBTQ topics do really well. (These nuns want to make dying of cancer even worse or Target investors are rebelling as company’s reputation becomes toxic)

5. Explainers bomb. (The political magic trick most Americans never notice)

6. Emailed newsletters tend to be opened more often on Tuesdays than Thursdays, but the articles are read more on the Substack app on Thursdays.

I’ve been in online media long enough to know that headlines can make or break an article. Some great pieces have been sunk by a poorly written subject line for email subscribers. Articles being shared on Reddit or Facebook also increase views. Some of this is just luck, timing, and social media magic.

Doing straight-up political news reporting bores me and since I live in Mexico now, sometimes it feels uncomfortable pontificating from afar despite having plenty of opinions that I’m not shy about sharing over a glass of wine. I like writing the personal pieces, but they can also seem a little self-serving and I wonder how many stories I’ve got that people would find entertaining. Am I really that interesting?

I can see positives and negatives by focusing on one style, no matter which one comes out on top. I’m a Libra. It is what it is.

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So help me out. Leave a comment or shoot me back a private email if you’d rather. I’m interested to hear what you think.

What are your thoughts? Do you have a preference? What keeps you coming back for more or would get you to share the newsletter with a friend?

-Bil

Today’s essay is written by a reader who asked to stay anonymous. Names have been changed, not because she’s ashamed of her family, but to respect their privacy.

When Bil published an essay last week describing how his family structure has changed, it spoke to me. My own is unusual as well, even if it feels completely normal and stable after living within it for over a decade. Non-traditional family structures might be unusual, but they can work out beautifully.

Back in the late 2000s, I came out as transgender to my wife, Janet. We had children, and we needed to figure out what to do that was best for everyone. We got along well, but she rapidly figured out that she wasn’t a lesbian.

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Normally, people in this situation get a divorce, but my spouse and I both wanted to be close to the kids. Moreover, it didn’t make any financial sense for us to split up. Plenty of sexually incompatible straight people have stayed together over the years for the sake of the children, while remaining close friends; why couldn’t we?

So we stayed together. We both tried dating. My wife rapidly discovered why she’d ended up with someone who turned out to be a trans woman: straight guys were just such a pain in the ass that it didn’t work. As for me, I met a cisgender lesbian woman, Sarah, who had left a straight marriage after figuring out who she was.

This developed into a long-term relationship, and Sarah rapidly became part of our routine. Janet got along very well with her, and she quickly came to think of the kids as “hers”. There was no way Janet would have agreed to this if Sarah hadn’t been fantastic with them from day one: unremittingly kind, patient, soft-spoken, emotionally intelligent, and supportive.

Several months after we met, Sarah moved in with Janet and me, and we started sharing finances. Sarah worked from home as a technical professional with a very good income. The dynamic would best be described as two very amicable exes living together with the new step-mother.

One of the big criticisms of LGBTQ families is that kids need a role model to show how a person of a specific sex and/or gender should behave (i.e., display a particular gender stereotype). This was put to the test with our youngest son, Alex. He grew up parented by three women of various flavors, none of whom gave a hoot about gender stereotypes.

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Each of us has different roles in the household, with different strengths and experiences we can offer. One is a stay-at-home mom, one is a work-from-home mom, and the third is a parent who works outside the home. Between the three of us, there is always someone to do whatever is needed: tie a double-Windsor knot, repair a washing machine, throw a football, teach shooting and fishing, bake a cake, balance the budget, wrangle doctor’s appointments and extracurricular school activities, read bedtime stories, you name it.

I would be hard-pressed to find any experience that is unavailable to him because he is growing up with a cis straight woman, a lesbian cis woman, and a trans lesbian. For what it’s worth, it’s the straight one in the bunch who repairs home appliances.

So, how did Alex turn out after growing up in this non-traditional family structure? He’s thoughtful, empathetic, and has a particularly low tolerance for the explosive stupidity of teenage masculinity. When other boys are being destructive for no reason, he has the sense to walk away.

Alex isn’t particularly wed to gender stereotypes. To him, pink is just the color of one of his favorite video game characters, Kirby. We had to explain the concept of misogyny and the glass ceiling to him, because it never entered his mind that women were somehow “less” than men. They’ve always been fully capable people with thoughts, feelings, dreams, and ambitions. He genuinely likes girls in a way that not enough boys do.

I’ve heard children of gay fathers describe growing up with an enhanced sense of aesthetics and culture. For Alex, living in a house where makeup is worn once a month at most and comfortable shoes are a given, aesthetics are secondary to developing an emotional IQ. From the beginning, he has had open, honest, and nonjudgmental relationships modeled for him: say what you mean, but don’t be mean about it.

We have joked that he’s basically Steven Universe: a boy co-parented by gender-nonconforming women who are all very different. (For those who might get the reference, I most resemble the hot-tempered Ruby, Sarah is the cool and composed Sapphire, and Janet is Pearl).

Alex has a honed sense of right and wrong. He stands up for kids being bullied. When he inadvertently stumbles across something wrong, whether it’s peer pressure to filch candy from the Dollar Store or online content in his feed trying to pull him into right-wing subcultures, he has the ability to recognize that something isn’t right and turn away. For all the right-wing hand-wringing about “how can someone know the difference between right and wrong without a religious upbringing,” Alex seems to do more than fine.

He still loves his video games, animated shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and “guy” humor. He’s a nerd raised by nerds. He’s just a guy, the only one who’s escaped the worst of the toxic masculinity that all too often comes with that. Alex works hard, does his best, and lets us sleep at night without worrying he’s going down any of the particularly dark rabbit holes available to young men.

In the end, we have certainly gone down a road less traveled as a family, but it was always emotionally and financially stable, the kids always knew they were loved and would be taken care of, and there was always an adult there to drop everything if needed. They have seen healthy adult relationships modeled for them since an early age, which has led them to navigate their own emotional states and those of others in a way that is mature beyond their years.

Love is love. Family is family, whether it’s chosen or by blood. If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.

We are the weirdest herd I’ve ever seen. But it’s functional, supportive, and healthy, and at the end of the day, that’s the important part.

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Here we go again.

Another gay white conservative man felt compelled to open his yap and bemoan that some LGBTQ people call themselves “queer.” On the last day of Pride month, the New York Times handed him a megaphone.

The very distressed writer is Matthew Vines, author of a thrilling tome currently ranked #2 in Amazon’s extremely prestigious Religious Intolerance & Persecution category. He believes the Bible is completely factual and the ultimate authority in all things. He also seems to think conversion therapy and lifelong celibacy are perfectly reasonable options for gays who just can’t bring themselves to show their no-no spots to another man.

Sex monsters, take note: Jesus will shun you if you don’t put a ring on it before you put your mouth on it. Make sure you’re married before you frot. No shit, it’s in the book.

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His whole argument, stripped of the theological window dressing, is this: queer people need to make themselves smaller so Republicans stay comfortable. He spent an entire New York Times op-ed asking the community to shrink itself to fit inside a box that evangelical conservatives can tolerate. Straight people in red states are nervous, so knock it off with the queerness. Just be gay, but not too gay.

He bemoans that progressive activists and major media now use “queer” as an umbrella term, then insists the word is so “adversarial” that it’s basically causing right-wing Christians to attack the LGBTQ community. The word means “anti-normative,” he explains gravely, which means it could theoretically encompass “open marriages, prostitution and public sex, even when heterosexual.” Every time a trans woman uses that dirty word, a Baptist preacher pictures Vines in a wanton sexed-up relationship with a hooker. Presumably.

Not only that, but now anyone can use the word, even people “vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations.” Those people are most definitely not good normie gays like Mr. Vines. Being gay means being born only slightly different because “sexual orientation isn’t chosen.” He was forced into this lifestyle, dammit, or he’d be living in Oklahoma with a wife who homeschools their three kids. Just think about what he had to give up!

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Same-sex marriage is his main concern, and only the lifelong monogamous kind with no crazy hanky panky going on in the bedroom. No, seriously, half of the piece references the topic and his book doubles down on the idea that upstanding gays get married like good Christian men.

Vines shoves everyone else off the stage to make his argument work. In his telling, the LGBTQ movement is a story about gay men like him, which is convenient because men like him are the only ones he’s trying to protect.

Lesbians built half this movement. He doesn’t mention them. Bisexual people exist too, which is a problem for his “born this way, can’t help it, please don’t be mad at us” framework, since their existence tends to complicate the tidy narrative that sexual orientation is fixed and binary. He doesn’t mention them either. Trans people barely register and only condescendingly when he admits that some people might like the word.

Then comes the saddest paragraph in the piece.

“As a 19-year-old, I found freedom by coming to understand that there is nothing inherently radical or subversive about being gay. Watching committed same-sex couples be welcomed into the institution of marriage transformed my sense of self-worth, allowing me to envision for the first time a dignified future as an openly gay person.”

Out of everything possible in life, his biggest dream was to be a trad-wife. The people trying to snatch that wedding ring are the exact Republicans he’s bending over backward to appease.

He knows this. He says so himself. And his solution is to ask queer people to be less queer about it.

Here’s the thing about that strategy: it didn’t work in 1950, it didn’t work in 1970, and it’s not going to work now. Every time a segment of the LGBTQ community has tried to purchase safety by throwing someone else under the bus, the bus just got bigger.

Republicans aren’t coming for marriage equality because of the word “queer.” They’re coming for it because they were always going to come for it. Dressing up in a bow tie and quoting scripture won’t change that.

Then again, I’m old enough to remember when gay men had a hissy fit when the acronym changed from GLBT to LGBT. Then they did it again when it became LGBTQ and the argument was “that’s too many letters now!” Now that it’s becoming consolidated into one actual word, the perpetually perturbed white men who scoff are up in arms again.

And no matter what we called ourselves, the religious right still hasn’t welcomed us into humanity with open arms. Isn’t that queer?

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I told you a couple of weeks ago that my partner, Uriel, and I were off to the United States for a road trip, at exactly the right time to attend the Indianapolis and DC Pride parades. We got back home here in Mexico City on Tuesday, and on Saturday, we went to CDMX Pride.

The three parades were strikingly different and not just in size. But if you looked beyond the surface, you found massive groups of people who loved each other. Drop any one of them into either of the other parades, and they’d be family there, too.

As queer people, the concept of a “chosen family” isn’t new to any of us, especially those who weren’t accepted by their flesh and blood.

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When I split up with my husband, Jerame, a few years ago and moved to Mexico, I assumed we’d drift apart, but we didn’t. Together for almost 25 years, Jerame and I continued texting every day and found that we aren’t bitter exes, we’re best friends. We never have actually filed for divorce.

One of my biggest worries about our breakup was that I’d lose Jerame’s family too, since I’ve always been closer to them than my own flesh and blood. Thankfully, that didn’t happen either.

It was always an open relationship, but emotions were forbidden. I came dangerously close to having a boyfriend once, but at Jerame’s demand, I ended it. Towards the end of the relationship, we drifted toward polyamory, but neither of us handled it well. When Jerame got a girlfriend, I was jealous and hurt.

I had been bonking anyone who said yes, and that was enough for me, but he wanted something else. Jerame and I had discussed being a poly couple, but I never thought it would actually happen. He suggested I start up again with Shawn, the almost-boyfriend, since we still chatted and there was still a flame, but the timing wasn’t right. I packed up my wounded pride and moved to Mexico City.

I met Uriel on one of the apps during a solo trip to the city, and we started hanging out after I moved. Still, he’s younger than I am, so I only expected it to last a few weeks at most. Three years later, we have an apartment and a dog. Around the same time that Uriel moved in with me, Chrissy, Jerame’s girlfriend, moved in with him.

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Jerame and Chrissy came down here to visit us, and Jerame came down by himself once. When I went back to America, I went duckpin bowling with the two of them and Jerame’s mom. There’s a group chat. We’ve established a relationship that’s more than just friendly. It’s a chosen family.

When Jerame found out we were planning a trip to America after Uriel got his tourist visa, he suggested that the three of us take a road trip from Indianapolis to DC. So that’s exactly what we did, and it was probably the most fun vacation any of us has ever had.

After we landed in Indy, Uriel met all of Jerame’s extended family, including our daughter and two of our grandchildren. He also met one of our oldest friends, who baked cookies to welcome Uriel to the family. In Ohio, the three of us stopped to see my 90-year-old mother.

The two of them chatted the whole trip about everything under the sun, from the history of A&W Root Beer stands to Star Wars trivia. Jerame introduced him to FunYuns and root beer floats. Uriel told him about the differences between Mexican and American culture he noticed. And I listened and smiled as the two of them became better friends.

Jerame, Uriel, and I stayed with my best friend in DC. We had a group dinner with the close friends Jerame and I had collected together over the years, Shawn included. Uriel met them all, connected with them on social media, and has been chatting with at least two people since we came back home to Mexico City. Our merry group of friends went to bars, museums, restaurants, and parades together.

I’ve got a family that’s awkward to explain, but everyone is happy and doing their best to make everyone else feel loved. That’s how I found myself having dinner with Jerame, Chrissy, Uriel, our daughter, and her boyfriend in Indianapolis this month. I left years ago with a bruised ego, but by keeping everyone in my heart and being given the same gift in return, I was welcomed home.

The LGBTQ community works the same way. It doesn’t matter what side of the border you’re on. You don’t have to understand every shade of sexuality or gender identity. You just open your heart and make people feel welcome. That’s what family does.

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If you want to know why Americans are turning away from religion in droves, look no further than this shocking lawsuit. A group of Catholic nuns is suing for the right to disrespect dying transgender cancer patients.

What could possibly be so upsetting to the cadre of decidedly un-Christian sisters that forced them to file a lawsuit against the state of New York? They don’t want to refer to trans women as “she,” and they don’t want them dying in beds with other women nearby.

Now, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has picked a side in the case, and, as you probably guessed, it’s siding with the nuns.

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“For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “New York’s law would force these religious women to choose between their faith and their license if they wish to continue serving the dying.”

Which is complete horseshit, of course. No one is asking the nuns to evangelize gender affirmation surgery. They’re simply required to treat dying people with respect. Apparently, that’s a step too far.

“It is unconstitutional for [the state] to dictate how the Sisters speak and how they care for those on their final journey,” one member of the nuns’ legal team declared without a hint of self-awareness of exactly how shitty that makes the sadistic sisters sound.

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When someone is on their “final journey,” would Christ expect his followers to demean, antagonize, and insult them? Is that what the Catholic church is teaching its followers? I reached out to the Vatican to ask them, but didn’t get a response.

The federal government is spending taxpayer money to help nuns misgender cancer patients on their deathbeds. What does that say about this DOJ’s priorities? The civil rights division, which was created to protect minorities, not harass them, has made a determined effort to undermine absolutely everything the department has championed for decades under Dhillon’s leadership.

It’s not shocking that Trump is eagerly watching his toadies and henchmen work against minority groups, but Leo has supposedly made the protection and visibility of minorities and marginalized communities a cornerstone of his papacy.

For all of the positive PR the Church obviously seeks as it pits Pope Leo against Trump in a war of words, the sheer fact that he hasn’t picked up the phone and asked the naughty nuns, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” speaks volumes.

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Is it any wonder that only 65% of American Catholics think that religion has a positive view of religion? Only a quarter of them think that ignoring the law in favor of “but my religion tells me…” excuses is a net positive for the country.

In other words, 75% of American Catholics think petty bitches like the Dominican Sisters are doing the right thing, and almost half of them think that people like the nuns are making life worse for everyone.

And seriously, if using the word “she” to describe a woman who is dying is enough to get their knickers in a twist, these nuns have to be the worst possible choice to be caring for anyone about to shuffle off this mortal coil. They need compassion and respect, not abuse or callousness.

If disrespect and mean-spirited judgmental condemnation are all you have to offer, you’re in the wrong fucking business.

Christ fed the hungry, healed the sick, and sat with the dying. The Dominican Sisters sued the state of New York for the right not to. Somebody’s religion got lost on the way to the courthouse.