The historic Anne Arundel County Free School, for illustration. Photo: Pubdog, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Baltimore Banner and CBS Baltimore

Anne Arundel County Public Schools did what the Trump administration asked. In August, after threats of legal action and lost federal money, the Maryland district amended its gender identity policy so a student's gender identity is no longer treated as confidential medical information, and so staff can no longer use a trans student's chosen name if the parents object, the Banner reported. Superintendent Mark Bedell wrote that no policy or practice "may limit or otherwise interfere with parental rights under FERPA."

On Tuesday, the Justice Department sued the school board anyway. The complaint, under the federal student-records and pupil-privacy laws known as FERPA and the PPRA, says the district's policies "require staff to facilitate a student's social transition at school" and to withhold that from parents, per the Banner. It centers on one family whose daughter was allegedly called by a male name at school without their knowledge, CBS Baltimore reported. The government wants an injunction against the policy.

"Schools should not discuss preferred pronouns or 'gender identity' with a student without parental notification and consent," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said, per CBS. The district said it "disagrees with the allegations and stands by its compliance with FERPA and PPRA," and called it "regrettable that the Department chose to pursue litigation rather than continuing constructive dialogue."

The suit landed one week before Election Day, a timing the Banner tied to the president rallying his base. Giving in early, it turns out, buys a district about ten weeks. We have watched another school board learn that one the hard way.

Saurabh Kirpal at the 2025 Jaipur Literature Festival. Photo: Sriya Sarkar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via ANI, as published by Asianet Newsable and The News Mill, with background from Bar & Bench and NorthEast Now

Saurabh Kirpal has been about to become a judge for nine years. The Delhi High Court's collegium recommended him in October 2017. India's Supreme Court collegium approved him in November 2021. The government sent the file back in November 2022, and the collegium sent it right back in January 2023, per ANI. He is still not a judge.

Now a man who was in the room has said why. In an interview ANI published on Wednesday, former Supreme Court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul said that the "real reason," which he said "was informally told to me," was "their perception that the country is not ready to have a gay judge."

what the government said out loud

The on-paper objections were different. In an April 2021 communication, the Law Ministry told the collegium Kirpal was "openly gay and also passionate about the cause of gay rights," Bar & Bench reported in 2023. The other objection was that his partner is a Swiss national, which the collegium answered by saying there was no apprehension about the partner's conduct "having a bearing on national security," per NorthEast Now.

The collegium's January 2023 resolution, which Kaul sat on, took what ANI called the rare step of publishing the government's objections and rejecting them. "The fact that Mr. Saurabh Kirpal has been open about his orientation is a matter which goes to his credit," it said, per Bar & Bench.

why kirpal never became a judge

Because nobody blinked. "The government never cleared it, and the Collegium never dropped it," Kaul said, because "it would have been very embarrassing for the Collegium to drop it." Under established norms, ANI noted, the government was bound to accept a reiterated recommendation. Instead the file has sat in what The News Mill called "institutional limbo," neither approved nor rejected.

Kaul does not think the country needed protecting. "The country would have accepted (a gay judge) because he is a good lawyer," he said, adding: "I think it was a loss not to have had him." He also said he told Kirpal, many times, "you will keep this vacancy alive till you are 62," because Kirpal was willing to take the job at whatever age it was offered, as support to his community.

A whole country, and the government decided on its behalf that they could not handle one gay man in a robe. Kirpal kept his consent on file. The country never got asked.

The Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines, for illustration. Photo: Thesavagenorwegian, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Washington Post and Shellie Flockhart's own statement

The ad is the kind of thing you have seen a hundred times this fall. Several women. A warning about a Democrat and children. A bathroom vote. The super PAC behind it, the Congressional Leadership Fund, spent at least $1 million on it, according to The Washington Post, which cited AdImpact. One of the women is Shellie Flockhart, a city council member in Dallas Center, Iowa, who says of Democratic House candidate Sarah Trone Garriott that "when it comes to our kids," she is "just plain dangerous."

Then the Post pulled the court file.

what the court records say

In 2017, an officer found Flockhart parked in the grass on the side of a highway with two of her children, then 8 and 11, in the car, according to an affidavit in Dallas County court records the Post reviewed. A preliminary breath test read 0.254, about three times the legal limit. She later pleaded guilty to one count of child endangerment and one count of operating a vehicle while intoxicated, both misdemeanors, and got a fine and probation, the Post reported.

She does not dispute it. In a two-page statement she posted on X after the story ran, titled "My Past. God's Grace. My Testimony.", Flockhart wrote: "I drank and drove with my children in the car." She called it "inexcusable, a profound failure in judgment that endangered those I love most," and wrote that she has committed to sobriety since.

Recovery is real and nobody here is mocking it. The problem is the script, not the sobriety. The ad's whole argument is that one vote makes a person a danger to children, forever, no context, no grace. Flockhart's statement asks for exactly the grace her ad refuses to extend.

how she answered

She did not answer by stepping back. She told Trone Garriott that "a pastor's job is grace and healing," not "weaponizing a 10-year-old OWI against someone with a decade of sobriety," and called that "spiritual abuse." The next day she wrote that "Iowans aren't dumb," that she "appeared in that commercial unpaid and willingly," and that she only speaks "to what is documented and on the record." Which, yes. So did the Post.

On Tuesday she was back on X after a radio appearance: "Candidate Sarah Trone Garriott can't silence me."

Trone Garriott is challenging Rep. Zach Nunn, a Republican, in one of Iowa's most competitive House races, and the votes the ad attacks are on transgender issues, including her vote against a bill on which school bathrooms students can use, per the Post. A spokesperson for her campaign called the ad "desperate lies." It is not the only Iowa race this cycle where Republicans have run on trans panic. It is the one where the messenger came with her own court record.

Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron in November 2018. Photo: www.president.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Delaware Superior Court's opinion, Reuters and Forbes

Candace Owens spent Tuesday night in, by her own account, "the absolute best mood." On Tuesday a Delaware judge ruled that his court has no jurisdiction over her personally, since she lives in Tennessee, and dropped her as an individual from the defamation lawsuit Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron filed in July 2025. She called the case "one of the grossest, legal overreaches by a foreign government leader in human history," and then, in the same post, said the quiet part:

"I was NEVER being sued for stating that Brigitte Macron was born a male," she wrote. "I was instead being sued for discussing MK Ultra and for allegedly accusing the 'First Lady' of theft from her sister."

Hold that thought. It is about to matter more than she lets on.

what the ruling actually did

Judge Sheldon K. Rennie's 56-page memorandum opinion dismissed Owens individually and kept the case going against her two Delaware companies, Candace Owens LLC and GeorgeTom, Inc. He refused to toss the case to another forum and refused to strike the Macrons' amended complaint. Owens' personal assets are now likely shielded if the Macrons win, Forbes noted, but the business that makes the podcast is still a defendant.

The opinion also describes what the lawsuit is about, in plain words: "Throughout the Series, Ms. Owens contended that Mrs. Macron is a biological man, that the Macrons are blood relatives," and that they abused state power to hide it. So, a little bit about that.

the gender identity clock

Here is the part Owens' fans skipped. Rennie ruled that France's statute of limitations, not Delaware's two-year one, decides whether the Macrons sued in time. Under the French press law, the opinion says, an ordinary defamation claim must be brought within three months. That window "apparently" stretches to one year "when the defamation is directed at an individual or group on account of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity."

The Macrons' lawyers raised that longer window for the first time at oral argument, according to the opinion. Owens' side countered with a French law professor, Emmanuel Dreyer, who said the one-year rule covers attacks on someone for conduct framed as shameful because of a protected trait, "rather than for a bare assertion concerning a person's biological identity." The judge also noted that when the Macrons sued over the same statements in France, they used the standard three-month rule. He deferred the decision and ordered both sides to brief exactly one question: three months, or one year. If the short deadline applies, the whole case could be dismissed, Forbes reported.

Which brings us back to Owens' victory lap. In a longer post Tuesday night she explained the stakes herself, then insisted again that the couple "is NOT and has never sued anyone for matters pertaining to sex, sexual orientation, or gender." That is a talking point, and it is also, conveniently, the shape of her best legal argument. Imagine spending two years telling the world a woman is secretly a man, and then hiring an expert to explain that it was never about gender at all.

The ruling decides nothing about whether anything Owens said is true, and it does not touch the merits. The briefs come next.

The historic Travis County Courthouse in Austin, for illustration. Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Austin American-Statesman, CBS News Texas and CNN

The return address on the mailers was a Houston address nearly identical to the real Transgender Education Network of Texas, with one digit removed. On Tuesday, the lawyer for the company that sent them told a judge in Austin that this was a "typo," and that it was the printer's fault, CBS News Texas reported. Somewhere, a printer is having a very bad week.

The judge was not moved. District Judge Jan Soifer ruled that TENT, the real trans advocacy group whose logo, photos and branding were all over the pamphlets, can go ahead with its effort to find out who is behind them, the Statesman reported. She denied the sender's attempt to have the case dismissed, per CNN, and ordered two companies to sit for depositions: Texas Transgender Student Union LLC, the name on the envelopes, and Infobip, the company CBS says helped send the matching text messages. As of Tuesday, Infobip's deposition was set for Thursday and the LLC's for Friday, according to CBS.

who sent the trans mailers

Still unknown, which is the point of the hearing. The "student union" is a Wyoming LLC created in September, and its pamphlets, addressed to the student in each household, started landing around Oct. 17, two days before early voting began. We have been chasing that company since the week they arrived, and following the money since.

TENT's lawyer, Mimi Marziani, told the court the group estimates 3.6 million to 4.2 million mailers went out, a campaign she said would cost far more than TENT's own $1 million annual budget, CBS reported. She said TENT has had to take its website down, suspend programming and hire security. "Somebody has been impersonating our client and sending out millions of unauthorized text messages and mailers to voters across Texas," she told the Statesman after the hearing.

the lawyer with a lot of clients

The company's lawyer is Chris Hilton, a former assistant attorney general in Ken Paxton's office, according to CNN. His argument was the First Amendment. "Nothing here constitutes a violation of civil or criminal law," he told Soifer, and "the first Amendment and Texas law do not bend for speech that is unpopular," per the Statesman. He said the mailers were not political because they named no candidate or party, and accused TENT of wanting to expose his clients to "the social media mob," CBS reported.

Then, after the ruling, he mentioned that he also represents the other side of the text-message operation. "Separately from TTSU, I also represent the parties who are clients of InfoBip," Hilton said, per CBS. Marziani's reply, also per CBS: Hilton seemed to have several "mystery clients" who did not want to be named. Hilton said he will appeal.

A West Texas district attorney, Sarah Stogner, is separately investigating the mailers as possible fraud. The texts started this in mid-October. If Friday's deposition goes ahead, someone from the company will finally have to answer questions they did not write themselves.

A 1944 Rehoboth Beach postcard. Image: Steve Shook, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Delaware Public Archives and Metro Weekly

Delaware has erected more than 700 state historical markers since the 1930s, according to the Delaware Public Archives, and markers usually go "on the side of the road and on concrete," as the state archivist put it. The newest one goes on the sand at the gay end of the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk.

The state will unveil a marker recognizing Poodle Beach at 11 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29, at the corner of Prospect Street and the South Boardwalk. The Archives' announcement calls it "a landmark in Delaware's LGBTQ history," a place "where people could build community, celebrate identity, and enjoy a sense of belonging." The ceremony is free and open to the public.

It was supposed to happen in June. State archivist Maegan Peterman told Metro Weekly the delay came down to an "atypical installation." Sand, it turns out, is not concrete. Community members applied for the marker in 2020, she said.

The history, per Metro Weekly: from the mid-20th century, LGBTQ beachgoers gathered near the Carpenter family's "Shell House" in Dewey Beach, south of the boardwalk. With no gay bars in Rehoboth then, the beach was the daytime meeting spot before the house parties. By the late 1970s the crowd had moved to Poodle Beach, which for years hosted an annual Labor Day drag volleyball game. Nobody is quite sure where the name came from; one local story credits two gay cousins and their poodles.

A state plaque for a beach famous for drag volleyball. Some years it is the small things.

A Strictly Come Dancing costume on display at BBC Television Centre, for illustration. Photo: Andy Mabbett, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Digital Spy, PinkNews, PA and Sky News

Strictly Come Dancing will happily stick rhinestones on a bra top without blinking. Three words on a cotton T-shirt is where it draws the line.

The words were "Protect the Dolls." Bethany Antonia, the House of the Dragon actress dancing this series with professional Nancy Xu, wore the shirt in rehearsal. The BBC's own Strictly Instagram posted a clip on Oct. 9, apparently from the same rehearsal, with the slogan in plain view. When the rehearsal footage aired in the Oct. 10 live show, the slogan had been blurred, PA and Sky News both reported.

what the bbc says

The BBC's line, given to PA, Sky and Digital Spy alike: "As is standard practice on any entertainment show on the BBC and in line with our editorial guidelines, appropriate steps are taken to reduce the inclusion of any overt branding or slogans that may be present, regardless of the wording or statement in question." It is listed on the corporation's public complaints page as a response dated Oct. 12. The shirt does have a brand behind it: it was made by designer Conner Ives, has been worn by Pedro Pascal, Tilda Swinton and Troye Sivan, and all proceeds go to the UK trans charity Not A Phase, according to PA and Sky.

The complaints have not stopped. The Daily Mail reported that 206 people complained to Ofcom about the edit, PinkNews wrote on Tuesday. And we just wrote about the BBC editing pride pins out of University Challenge, so the "regardless of the wording" defense is getting a workout this month.

what bethany antonia says

The person least angry about it appears to be the person in the shirt. "The BBC had to do what they had to do when they edited it out, to keep it fair for everybody," Antonia told Digital Spy in an interview published Oct. 24. She said she had worn it "without considering the fact that it was linked to a charity, and that it was linked to what some people consider a brand."

She did not back away from the message. "I stand with my trans family in every way, and they knew what I was thinking when I wore that T-shirt. And that's all that matters," she said, adding she was "thrilled to see so much support for the trans community online." She also told Digital Spy she thinks "it's only a matter of years before we see a trans contestant" on Strictly.

Digital Spy notes this is not the BBC's first blurred T-shirt: Kaiser Chiefs singer Ricky Wilson's "Trans Rights Are Human Rights" shirt got the same treatment on Michael McIntyre's Big Show in 2024. Not A Phase's chief executive, Danielle St James, put it best back on Oct. 12, per Sky: "The slogan might not have made it to air, but the message reached us loud and clear." The blur, in other words, did more for the shirt than the shirt ever did on its own. The dolls, for the record, remain protected.

via the Texas attorney general's office, the Texas Tribune, Houston Public Media and Dallas Voice

At the bottom of Ken Paxton's Tuesday press release, after the victory lap, there is a line that reads: "To donate to the Detransition Clinic's efforts, click here." The link goes to Texas Children's Hospital's general donation form, the one tagged in its own web address as the hospital's navigation-bar donate button. So the attorney general is fundraising, with the hospital's form, for a clinic he made the hospital pay for. Bold.

The news itself, per Paxton's office: Texas Children's in Houston has opened what he calls "the nation's first-ever Detransition Clinic." It offers "detransition-related medical care to patients through age 21," plus obstetric and gynecologic care for patients older than 21, and the hospital must fund its services for the first five years so patients pay nothing. "I will continue to ensure that this clinic provides the care and support that victims of the radical left's gender ideology deserve," Paxton said.

what the settlement made them do

The clinic is one term of a settlement Paxton announced on May 15. Texas Children's agreed to pay the state $10 million over claims it billed Texas Medicaid for gender-transition care, and to revoke the privileges of five physicians, the Texas Tribune and the TNND wire reported. Paxton's release adds that the hospital had to change its bylaws so that providing such care triggers automatic loss of privileges. A 10-page term sheet the Tribune obtained, published by Houston Public Media, also required a clinic website, a donate page, and a "Potential GAC Patient List."

The hospital did not settle because it agreed. Texas Children's said it made the "difficult decision" to close a legal chapter "wrought with falsehoods and distractions," per the Tribune, after producing more than 5 million documents to the state and the U.S. Department of Justice.

who this clinic is for

Texas has barred puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans minors since Senate Bill 14 in 2023, the Tribune notes. And regret after hormones or surgery is rare, the Tribune's reporting adds; common reasons people stop transitioning include lack of family support, money and social pressure. A clinic fixes none of those.

Dallas Voice put it bluntly: Paxton is bragging. He is also on the ballot next week, which we have been covering for a while. The ribbon-cutting timing is surely a coincidence, in the way that a donate button is a medical device.

Adam Hamilton at Church of the Resurrection in 2011. Photo: Wikigear, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via LGBTQ Nation, PBS NewsHour and the clip itself

"Where do you come down on transgender rights?" is a question that, in a Kansas Senate race in 2026, usually produces a candidate sweating through a sentence about girls' sports. Adam Hamilton went somewhere else.

what adam hamilton said

Hamilton is the Democrat running against Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, and his day job is senior pastor of Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, according to PBS NewsHour. In an interview with Kansas City's KMBC, reported by LGBTQ Nation and the Advocate, that spread on X on Sunday, he started by admitting he does not understand everything there is to know about trans people. Then: "I don't think we should take a small group of people and bully them, pick on them, and hurt them."

"Jesus told me I was to love my neighbor," he went on, "so I'm gonna love the trans person as well as the straight person." And the line that made the clip travel: "We've turned a group of people into a campaign issue because it polls well. I just don't think that's okay."

why it landed in kansas

It is not a policy platform, and it is not trying to be. It is a minister quoting the second great commandment at a reporter, which in this election cycle somehow reads as a radical act. Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, PBS notes, and Marshall has called Hamilton "too woke for Kansas." Hamilton's answer to that, also via PBS: if Jesus were standing in front of them, "Roger Marshall would call him 'woke.'" Reader, we screamed.

Whether it wins him a single vote is a question for Election Day. As a sentence said out loud by a man who wants to be a senator from Kansas, it already did more than a lot of his party has managed all year.

via the Justice Department's own funding notice, Grants.gov and LGBTQ Nation

Most research starts with a question. This one starts with a title: "NIJ FY 2026 Research on Gender Dysphoria and Violent Crime."

The National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research arm, posted the notice on Oct. 9, according to Grants.gov. It puts $1,000,000 on the table for "foundational research on gender dysphoria, its treatment, and the perpetration of violence and violent behavior." First applications are due Nov. 23, the full ones Nov. 30, and awards are expected by Jan. 1, 2027.

Here is the part worth reading twice. The notice itself concedes that "available empirical evidence regarding this topic is limited." The fix it proposes is not to go collect any: "Research proposing the use of primary data collection efforts will not be considered responsive." Applicants must instead mine existing datasets, and the first examples the department lists include "prevalence rates of violent crime and behavior for this population" and "post-conviction analyses, to include analyses based on individuals who have been incarcerated." So the study begins with the people already in the criminal justice system and works backward. Somewhere a statistics professor just felt a chill.

Meghan Maury, policy director at the Transgender Law Center, told Science that the administration looks like it has already decided what it wants the research to say, LGBTQ Nation reported. The notice does ask applicants to discuss "limitations associated with this topic area." Generous of it.

It joins a stack of federal moves against trans health care this year, including the Justice Department settlements we covered with NYU Langone and UPMC. The grant is small. The headline it is built to produce is not.

Erika Hilton in the Chamber of Deputies, April 2024. Photo: Zeca Ribeiro / Câmara dos Deputados, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Erin in the Morning, The Advocate (from Them), PBS NewsHour and Al Jazeera

Brazil spent Sunday night deciding whether to give the presidency back to a Bolsonaro. It didn't. And by Monday the clip from the celebration that had traveled furthest was not a speech. It was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, freshly reelected, leaning in to kiss Erika Hilton on the cheek.

Hilton, a trans member of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, was standing next to him in the crowd filming a selfie video. In it she shouts, in Portuguese, what both Them and Erin in the Morning translate as "that's my president," followed by a line telling him she never doubted him. Erin in the Morning notes that a cheek kiss reads friendlier in Latin America than it might in the U.S. Fair. It still made the internet cry.

how the runoff went

Lula beat Flávio Bolsonaro, the senator son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, with 51.8% of the vote to 48.2%, according to the count reported by the AP via PBS NewsHour and by Al Jazeera. It is his fourth term. It is also, the AP reports, the first time since Brazil's military dictatorship ended in 1985 that the candidate who came second in the first round went on to win the presidency: Bolsonaro had led the Oct. 4 first round. Bolsonaro refused to concede and asked for the results to be annulled, the AP reported, pointing to a two-hour extension of voting.

who erika hilton is

Hilton was one of the first trans people elected to Brazil's National Congress, in 2022, and she was not a backbencher on this campaign; Them describes her as having played a prominent role in it. Her own race this month was not close. Brazil's electoral court shows her taking 1,596,472 votes for federal deputy in São Paulo, the second-highest total in the state, which we wrote about when it happened.

On Monday night she was in a lighter mood. In a post that passed 67,000 likes, she wrote that Flávio Bolsonaro had accepted his defeat, then asked, more or less, whether his party now planned to take orders from a jail cell. His father is serving a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup, the AP and Erin in the Morning both report. Reader, she had the votes to say it.

Sen. Tim Scott's official portrait. Photo: U.S. Senate Photographic Studio, Renee Bouchard, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

via the clip posted by Aaron Rupar and LGBTQ Nation

Some men go on television and say the ugly word. Tim Scott went on television, said the ugly word, and gave the president a byline.

"Annie Andrews, as President Trump calls her," Scott began on Monday, then said the slur Trump has been using for her, the anti-trans one we don't print. The clip, which Aaron Rupar posted on X on Monday afternoon, shows Scott on The Charlie Kirk Show on Real America's Voice, the network's chyron reading "SEN. TIM SCOTT (R-S.C.)" under his face. He carried on: "here's a person who believes as a pediatrician for a surgery, trans surgery, gender surgery for trans kid. That's wrong. Period."

how tim scott got here

Scott is South Carolina's senior senator. Andrews is the pediatrician running as a Democrat for the state's other Senate seat, against Republican Sen. Darline Graham. Trump coined the slur for Andrews in a Truth Social post on Oct. 5, using it three times; Andrews called it "not presidential." Trump then said it out loud at a rally in Clemson. Scott is the first sitting senator we have seen take it for a spin on air.

It lands the same week two former South Carolina governors, a Republican and a Democrat, cut an ad together endorsing Andrews. One side of the race is recruiting bipartisan elder statesmen. The other is workshopping playground names on a streaming network.

the one apology request so far

South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison told Scott the slur was "disgusting and beneath the dignity of the US Senate" and that he owed "Dr. Andrews and the transgender community an apology." As of Tuesday evening we could not find any response from Scott's office in the coverage of the clip.

For the record: Andrews is not trans, she is a pediatrician, and the word is a slur whoever you aim it at. Scott knows two of those three things. We are rooting for him on the third.

ICE headquarters, Washington, D.C. Photo: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Daily Beast, IBTimes UK and the posts themselves

Three words and an exclamation point, from an account with a government seal on it: "Fake & Gay!"

That was U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday afternoon, about a man it had already removed from the country. The post went on to say that Moussa Diawara, "the Malian national featured in this shockingly poorly researched @60Minutes report, now faces allegations of immigration FRAUD after his asylum application surfaced, revealing that he claimed to be a HOMOSEXUAL man who feared persecution in Mali." By Tuesday morning it had more than 36,000 likes, and IBTimes UK counted about 3 million views.

who moussa diawara is

On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment on deportations to Ghana, and Diawara was its face. Its own promo described a father who had lived in the U.S. for 25 years with no criminal record, deported in July, who "says he was deported without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge." He drove for Uber in Houston, and his two children are U.S. citizens, according to both the Daily Beast and IBTimes UK. Both report that an immigration judge ordered him removed in 2012 but barred the government from sending him to Mali, and that he was sent to Ghana instead. IBTimes UK reports he says Ghanaian officials then forced him onto a flight to Mali anyway.

how his file got online

The chain took less than a day. Late Sunday, DHS general counsel James Percival posted: "I pulled his file. His claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is 'gay,' just in case you're wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is." On Monday, Fox News correspondent Brooke Taylor posted pages of what Fox called his asylum application, writing that "we exclusively obtained" it. About 40 minutes later, ICE quote-posted her with the line above. Fox did not say who gave it the document, and the Daily Beast says it has asked DHS whether it came from inside the department.

We are not reprinting what the application says. It is a confidential document, and the man in it has not spoken publicly about it. Neither Diawara nor his lawyer had addressed the claims as of Tuesday, IBTimes UK reported. Neither ICE nor DHS has shown that he committed fraud; "fake" is their word. And, as the Daily Beast pointed out, a married man with children can still be gay or bisexual, which is a sentence that should not have needed writing in 2026.

what the rule actually says

Federal regulations are blunt here. Under 8 CFR 208.6, information in an asylum application "shall not be disclosed without the written consent of the applicant," with exceptions for things like adjudication, criminal investigations, litigation, "or at the discretion of the Secretary." Nobody has said whether DHS invoked that discretion. Immigration policy expert David Bier called the release "monstrous" and said it "blatantly violates the Privacy Act." Earlier, replying to Percival, he made the obvious point: "Whether true or not, he just endangered him."

That is the part worth sitting with. The whole system of asylum on grounds of sexuality works because the government promises to keep the claim quiet, since the people making it are, by definition, people who say being known as gay could get them hurt. The government just announced one of those claims to millions of strangers, about a man it has already shipped across an ocean, with a joke. We have written before about queer migrants being sent to third countries they have never lived in, and about a gay Phoenix man deported to Equatorial Guinea. This one came with a punchline.

IBTimes UK reports that Diawara's attorney has asked a federal judge in Washington to order his return. We'll follow it.

David Beasley, then head of the World Food Programme, on a courtesy call in Barbados. Photo: PMO Barbados, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

via WIS, the Post and Courier and the ad itself

"You might recognize this guy sitting beside me," says David Beasley, Republican, pointing a finger at the man sitting next to him. The guy is Jim Hodges, Democrat. In 1998 the two of them shared a ballot, against each other.

The minute-long ad went up on Annie Andrews' accounts on Monday, and it is exactly what it looks like: two former governors of South Carolina, one from each party, asking voters to send a Democrat to the U.S. Senate a week before Election Day.

what the ad actually says

Not much, which is the point. "This country is too divided and the political rhetoric has gotten way, way out of hand," Beasley says. "Annie understands that leadership isn't about making people angrier," he adds, and, as WIS transcribed it, "it's about making things better." Hodges says she is "willing to put people ahead of politics." Then Beasley again: "We may have served as your governor from different political parties, but we agree South Carolina deserves better than more of the same political fighting."

The ad never says the name of the woman Andrews is running against, Sen. Darline Graham, who was appointed to the seat after her brother Lindsey Graham died in July, as LGBTQ Nation noted. It does not mention Trump either. It does not have to. Earlier this month Trump endorsed Graham in a post that called Andrews an anti-trans slur, and LGBTQ Nation reports Graham's campaign has leaned on anti-trans attacks against Andrews. "The political rhetoric has gotten way, way out of hand" is about as pointed as a South Carolina Republican of a certain age gets on camera.

the 1998 of it all

Beasley was governor from 1995 to 1999, and Hodges, the state's last Democratic governor, followed him from 1999 to 2003, per WIS. The handover was not friendly. The South Carolina Encyclopedia describes Hodges in 1998 as "a political unknown, given little chance of unseating Republican David Beasley," and one of the things that sank Beasley was saying, halfway through his term, that his reading of the Bible had persuaded him the Confederate flag should come down from the State House. Flag supporters were enraged, and his attempt to walk it back only made it worse.

So Beasley has some experience paying for saying the decent thing out loud in a South Carolina election. Twenty-eight years later he is doing it again, sitting next to the man who beat him, for the candidate the president called a slur.

Andrews posted the ad saying she was "honored to have the support of two former governors," and that "we may not agree on everything." The Post and Courier reported the endorsement alongside millions in new outside spending flowing to both candidates. Graham's campaign had not responded to the ad in any coverage we found. We have been following this race since a documentary about Lindsey Graham landed in the middle of it, and two old governors on a couch agreeing that politics should be less mean is, somehow, the most radical thing anyone has said in it.

Atlanta has long been called the gay capital of the South, and it has the bars to back it up: 11 of them we could confirm open this month, from a Black gay bar that has been on Peachtree since 1978 to a drag club that opened last year with a disco ball named Lola. Most of them are in Midtown, the gayborhood with the rainbow crosswalk, or a short ride north in Ansley Square, and the rest are on the east side, where the crowd gets younger and the rooms get weirder. Here is all of it: the map, the addresses, what each place is actually like, four we could not confirm, and the ones the city lost.

Last updated: October 2026

midtown

The gayborhood: 10th Street, Piedmont Avenue and the edge of Piedmont Park, where the rainbow crosswalk is and where Atlanta Pride lands every October (this year the weather got a vote). Four bars, all walkable from each other, and the right place to start.

Blake's on the Park

227 10th Street NEMidtown

A Midtown institution since 1988, just off Piedmont Park, and as Matador put it, the neon red sign out front is the postcard picture of Midtown. Inside, the first floor has a neon-lit liquor shelf towering into the air, and its own bio promises cocktails, dancing, drag and the best bartenders in town, which is a bold thing to put in writing. It survived a fire in May 2024. Start the night here. Everyone else does.

Bulldogs

893 Peachtree Street NEMidtown

Opened on Peachtree in 1978, and by a 2023 history report the oldest LGBTQ+ bar in Atlanta still in its original location. One story tall, tucked between 7th and 8th, and in Atlanta magazine's words still the epicenter of the city's Black gay party scene. Stained glass bulldogs over the bar, a giant back patio, house music, hip-hop, $2 tequila shots and bartenders Georgia Voice calls heavy-handed. A tiny room with more history per square foot than anywhere else on this list.

X Midtown

990 Piedmont Avenue NE10th and Piedmont

Everybody still calls it Ten. A big red X on the brick wall marks the door, and inside it is a single, simple room with two bars and a dance floor at 10th and Piedmont. Weekly drag, go-go boys on the calendar, and a Tuesday dance party its own calendar describes as pop remix chaos all night with Chappell Roan, so if you have been waiting for permission to scream Pink Pony Club on a school night, this is it. Closed Mondays.

My Sister's Room

1104 Crescent Avenue NEMidtown

The lesbian bar, and it turned 30 this year, after moving from Midtown to Decatur, East Atlanta and back to Midtown again. Drag, burlesque, comedy and karaoke most nights, and its own line is the right one: a lesbian bar where everyone is welcome. It is one of the few left in the country, and it is on our list of every one of them.

ansley square and cheshire bridge

About a mile north. Ansley Square is a little cluster of LGBTQ+ bars and shops on Piedmont Avenue, and Georgia Voice will tell you that when it comes to gay nightlife, Ansley is the place to be. Cheshire Bridge Road and Woofs are a short ride further.

Atlanta Eagle

1492 Piedmont Avenue NEAnsley Square

The leather bar, which calls itself a leather and queer bar these days and says it caters to all of the community. It left its longtime home at 306 Ponce de Leon at the end of November 2020 and reopened in 2022 in the old Midtown Moon space, where 3,000 people showed up on opening night. It is also the bar police raided in 2009, and per WSB-TV the city paid out more than $1 million in settlements. It outlived all of it, and Georgia Voice says it is bigger and better than ever. Go upstairs for the dance floor.

Felix's

1510 Piedmont Avenue NEAnsley Square

Also in Ansley Square, and per Georgia Voice a friendly, small neighborhood bar. A wall of mirrors inside, a cute but small patio with its own bar outside, and a bio that calls it the best dive bar in the ATL, which, fine. Open from noon on weekends and 3pm on weekdays, until 2:30am most nights. The place to have the drink before the Eagle and the one after it.

Heretic

2069 Cheshire Bridge Road NECheshire Bridge

Open since 1991 and the dance club of the bunch, where Georgia Voice says you go to dance with a mix of shirtless and light leather crowds. Nights run from blackout parties to country line dancing, and touring parties like Bearracuda come through. It threw the official after-party for this year's Pride kickoff at the Georgia Aquarium. Bring a shirt you do not mind losing track of.

Woofs

494 Plasters Avenue NELindbergh

Atlanta's only gay sports bar, by its own count, open since November 2002 and on Plasters Avenue since 2019. A regular bear crowd, no elbow room on game days, an excellent Cuban sandwich, never a cover, and this summer it was the official Pride House for the World Cup. Closed Tuesdays. The rare gay bar where you can order lunch and nobody looks at you funny.

the east side

Across town, from the Old Fourth Ward out to East Atlanta Village and Grant Park. Younger, queerer, cheaper, and you will want a car or a rideshare between them.

Lore

466 Edgewood Avenue SE, Suite BOld Fourth Ward

The newest room on the list: a dance and drag club opened in March 2025 by the NonsenseATL party crew and Wussy Mag, built to celebrate queer culture. Dancing, day parties, drag, karaoke, a Sunday drag brunch at 12:30pm and a BYO crafting night, because the gays will make a craft night a rave. The disco ball has a name. It is Lola.

Mary's

1287 Glenwood Avenue SEEast Atlanta Village

East Atlanta's queer dive, run by Ben Cheaves and Bill Overall since 2005, and in Cheaves' own words a bit of a bar for misfits. Its bio says kinda sleazy, always easy, and that is a mission statement. Open Monday through Saturday from 4pm, a $5 cover that is free before 9pm, Mary-oke on Wednesdays, drag on Thursdays and DJs on Saturdays. The Infatuation counts fairly equal representation from every letter of the alphabet. Misfits, as promised.

The T

465 Boulevard SEGrant Park

A casual neighborhood gay bar in Grant Park with karaoke (Thursdays are the night), pool, video games, a jukebox and nightly specials. No website, a Facebook page, and the energy of a bar that has never once needed either.

where is the gay area of atlanta?

Midtown. The blocks around 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue, at the edge of Piedmont Park, are still regarded as the center of gay Atlanta, and that is where Blake's, Bulldogs, X Midtown and My Sister's Room are. Ansley Square, a mile or so north on Piedmont Avenue, is the second cluster, with the Atlanta Eagle and Felix's both on Piedmont Avenue. Everything else is a rideshare away.

four we could not confirm

Each of these was in Georgia Voice's LGBTQ nightlife guide last November and in The Infatuation's gay bar coverage, but we could not find anything from the bars themselves showing them open this year: no working website, no Instagram we could verify. That does not mean they are closed. It means call before you go, and if you know, tell us.

Friends on Ponce, 736 Ponce de Leon Avenue NE. A no-attitude bar with cheap drinks and pool tables, popular with the alt gay crowd, and around since at least 2004.

Oscar's, 1510 Piedmont Avenue NE, Suite C. Felix's neighbor in Ansley Square: a video bar with show tunes, karaoke and DJs.

BJ Roosters, 2043 Cheshire Bridge Road NE. Next door to Heretic: pool, darts, videos and go-go dancers on the bar.

Tripp's, 1931 Piedmont Circle NE. A gay dive with strong drinks across the street from Midtown Bowl.

gone too soon

Here because people still search these by name, and because a guide that only tells you where to go is half a guide.

Henry's Midtown Tavern, 132 10th Street NE. A popular gathering place for Atlanta's LGBTQ+ community on 10th Street, scheduled to close November 30, 2023. A Midtown social club organized a protest against the closing.

Swinging Richards, Northside Drive. Opened in 1996 and one of the few remaining strip clubs in the country that catered to gay men. It closed its doors on January 15, 2022.

Midtown Moon, 1492 Piedmont Avenue NE. Closed in 2022, and the room is not empty: the Atlanta Eagle moved in.

So: start on 10th Street, end wherever the night ends. If you are drinking at home instead, we keep a list of queer-owned brands worth pouring, and we have mapped New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Las Vegas too.

Hours and addresses change and bars close faster than anybody can publish. Every bar here was checked against two independent sources and its own website or Instagram the week this went up. Call ahead if you are traveling for it, and if we have something wrong or a bar we missed, tell us and we will fix it with a date on it.

The Washington State Capitol in Olympia, for illustration. Photo: Nils Huenerfuerst, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Associated Press, The 19th and KNKX/KUOW

Here is the number to hold onto. The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, which runs high school sports in the state, told The 19th that it knows of about 10 trans middle and high schoolers who play sports, out of more than 200,000 students who compete. Let's Go Washington, the group behind the ballot measure aimed at them, told the AP it has counted 16.

Ten, or sixteen. On Nov. 3, Washington votes on whether to build a verification system for every girl who wants to play on a girls' team, to find them.

what i-638 actually says

Initiative 638 would bar trans girls from girls' school teams and, per the text the AP quotes, require a healthcare provider to verify a student's "biological sex, relying only on one or more of the following: The student's reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels." KNKX and KUOW describe that as a genital exam, a chromosome test or a hormone test.

The campaign insists it is nothing of the sort. "We see that as being as simple as a checkbox," spokesperson Hallie Herzberg told the AP. On X last week, Let's Go Washington posted that "The initiative doesn't require or authorize exams" and that a doctor could rely on "existing medical history forms, or a history of treating the student." Dr. Libby Loft, who opposes it, told the AP the language calls for a genital inspection as part of a physical, or expensive testing, to "weed out an estimated five or 10 girls in the state of Washington, trans girls." One voter in Renton put it more simply to the AP: "medical exams of girls' genitalia is, like, Middle Ages."

If it really is a checkbox, it is a checkbox written in the vocabulary of reproductive anatomy. Voters can decide which part of the sentence to believe.

blue states, first time

Colorado votes on its own version the same day, one that also reaches college sports, which we covered when it qualified. The AP calls it the first time the question has gone straight to voters rather than lawmakers, and says 27 states already have such bans. Elected officials in both states had rejected bans, so the campaigns went around them.

The money is lopsided. The AP reports that Let's Go Washington, funded by hedge fund manager Brian Heywood, has raised more than $7.8 million for I-638 and two other measures on the same ballot, nearly twice what the ban's opponents have. The group's own unreleased poll, as KNKX/KUOW reported it, has the measure at 56%. Its spokesperson's theory of the race, to the same reporters: "They will support us, and they will stand up for girls, but they will do it in the safety of their own ballot."

Gay Twitter is barely in this fight. In our scan of X last week, the I-638 conversation belonged to the Yes campaign, the state GOP and conservative accounts, almost all of it about one cross-country runner in Camas. Which is the whole campaign in miniature: a few kids, a lot of adults, and a ballot due Nov. 3.

Bronzeville, Chicago, seen from the el, for illustration. Photo: Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Chicago Tribune and ABC7 Chicago

Dejanay Stanton was 24. She wanted to become a paralegal, her mother has said, and she was known for bringing home trans women who were no longer welcome in their own homes. "She was a beautiful soul," her mother, Valerie Griffin, told the Chicago Tribune. "She always tried to help people."

Stanton was shot in the head around 11 a.m. on Aug. 30, 2018, in an alley in the 4000 block of South King Drive in Bronzeville. On Friday, Oct. 23, a Cook County jury found Tremon Hill, now 25, not guilty of her murder, according to the Tribune and ABC7. Hill was 17 when she died. The jury deliberated for more than four hours and, shortly before reaching a verdict, asked what would happen if it deadlocked. Hill will be released on electronic monitoring because of a separate, pending case, the Tribune reports.

what the jury heard

Prosecutors built their case on cellphone evidence: texts between Hill and Stanton and phone pings that they said put the two together in the alley. They argued Hill had been involved with her and killed her to keep it secret. "It is too many coincidences to be a coincidence," Assistant State's Attorney Jennifer Cooper told jurors. Hill's public defenders said no witness, fingerprint or DNA tied him to the scene. "The phone is the entire case the state has," attorney Robyn Haynes said. "They have no other evidence whatsoever."

The family had no immediate comment on Friday. Earlier in the week, as the trial opened, "It's been a long eight years," Griffin told the Tribune, "a painful eight years." In 2018, she told ABC7 she was convinced being trans may have played a part in her daughter's death.

The Tribune notes the Human Rights Campaign has recorded almost 400 fatal attacks on transgender and gender-nonconforming people since 2013, nearly 60% of them Black trans women. Dejanay is one name in that count. She should be remembered as more than the case: a woman who opened her door.

The Belle Glade welcome sign. Photo: Jair, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Palm Beach Post and CBS12

Jayla McGee was 19. She was shot on Southwest Avenue B in Belle Glade, Florida, before dawn on July 5, and when the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office first announced the killing it described the victim as "an adult male," The Advocate reported in July, noting that her death had been "barely acknowledged by the media or authorities."

On Thursday, Oct. 22, deputies arrested two people. The sheriff's office says Elijah McClorin III was the shooter and Tomiah Duhart was the driver, according to CBS12 and the Palm Beach Post. McClorin is charged with first-degree murder with a firearm. Duhart is charged as an accessory. Both are charges, not convictions.

According to the Post, McClorin has denied any role in the shooting, both to investigators and in a jailhouse call. His lawyers at the public defender's office do not comment on open cases, the Post reports, and Duhart's attorney did not immediately respond to it. Both remain in the county jail.

CBS12 says her family is happy an arrest has been made. In a statement the station carried, they described her as "a loving and beautiful soul with a heart of gold" who "was truly the life of the party." The National Black Justice Collective held a candlelight vigil for her after she died.

It took three and a half months and a tactical unit. Her name should never have needed an editor's note.

University of Leicester, for illustration. Photo: NotFromUtrecht, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Leicester Gazette and Metro

Your starter for ten: what is so dangerous about a couple of Pride pins that the BBC would rather paint them out of a quiz show, frame by frame, than let them reach BBC Two?

The BBC's answer is a guideline. Here is what the students say happened. Two University of Leicester students, astrophysics student Samuel Carlier and history student Emmeline Hague-Wright, told the Leicester Gazette that their LGBTQ+ Pride pins were edited out of their University Challenge appearance. The pins showed the Progress Pride flag, the bisexual flag and a rainbow feather. The episode was due to air on Aug. 24, was pushed back twice, and finally ran on Sept. 7.

Carlier says he noticed his outfit "melting" into itself at odd moments, which is what happens when someone paints a badge out of moving footage. "Living in a liberal democracy and having the state broadcaster tell you 'we're editing how you look', seems very Orwellian," he told the Gazette. "If I had worn a rainbow shirt, would they have censored that? If the idea is to keep things impartial, where is that line in the sand?"

When he asked the BBC why, he says, a promised phone call never came, and he was eventually told to file a complaint on its website. He did. He says he has heard nothing since.

the call she expected

Hague-Wright's version is the one that stings. After an earlier episode drew transphobic abuse online, she got a call from the BBC and assumed it was about support. "I heard that they had received a lot of nastiness online from people and I thought they were going to call me to say 'we have support services if needed,' and that wasn't what I got at all," she told the Gazette. It was a call to say her feather was coming off.

"This entire delay has been because of a feather and two badges on a teammate that were basically impossible [for viewers] to see," she said.

what the bbc says

The BBC gave the same statement to the Gazette and to Metro: "In line with our editorial guidelines, we advise that no badges, flags, and emblems or symbols are worn or visible during filming, along with clothing with obvious branding or slogans." If they are not removed, it said, the producers and the BBC decide on edits together. It told both outlets the delays had nothing to do with the pins. ITV Studios, which makes the show, told the Gazette that University Challenge "is made in accordance with the BBC Editorial Guidelines requirements for impartiality." The university declined to comment to the Gazette.

So a rainbow is now an impartiality problem. That would be easier to believe as a neutral rule if it were not the second time this month. On Oct. 10, Strictly Come Dancing digitally removed "Protect the Dolls" from a T-shirt Bethany Antonia wore in rehearsal footage, a move the BBC also called "in line with our editorial guidelines," according to the Press Association and PinkNews. This is also the broadcaster that walked away from Drag Race UK mid-season. Once is a guideline. Twice in a month is a pattern.

Illustration: The Watering Hole

via FOX 2 St. Louis and KMOV First Alert 4

The man he had been talking to online went by "Adam." They agreed to meet at Bluebird Park in Ellisville, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb, around 2:20 a.m. on Oct. 21. According to the Ellisville Police Department's probable cause statement, as reported by FOX 2, the two began talking, and then "Adam" said, "I actually hate gay people."

That was when four men came out of the bushes, police say. The group punched and kicked him repeatedly, demanded his keys and belongings, and called him homophobic and racist slurs, according to both stations. He dropped his phone, made it to his car and drove straight to the police station. The phone was later found smashed at the park.

who is charged

Police say surveillance video caught the suspects' vehicle, and KMOV reported that Flock license-plate cameras captured the man leaving the park. Investigators traced the car to Abdulwareth A. Alahmad, 18, of Ellisville, whom the victim identified as "Adam." Officers stopped his car around 10 p.m. that night.

The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's Office has charged Alahmad with first-degree assault and first-degree property damage motivated by discrimination, a case FOX 2 describes as a hate crime. He was being held on a $200,000 cash-only bond, with a bond reduction hearing set for this week and a preliminary hearing on Nov. 17, FOX 2 reported. The charges are allegations, and he is presumed innocent. Neither station reported charges against the four other men.

The detail that should worry anyone on the apps in the St. Louis area: Ellisville police said they believe there are unreported incidents similar to this attack. Anyone with a similar experience is asked to call 636-227-7777. Meet in public, in daylight, and tell a friend where you're going. It's grim that it still needs saying.

The Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines, for illustration. Photo: Thesavagenorwegian, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Erin in the Morning and PolitiFact, and the ad itself, as posted by AdImpact

In June, Republican Ashley Hinson ran an ad saying Josh Turek, her Democratic opponent in Iowa's Senate race, supports "sex changes for kids." PolitiFact rated it False: the vote she cited was a 2023 school notification law about names and pronouns, which never mentions medical care, and Turek's campaign told PolitiFact he opposes gender-affirming surgery for minors.

Four months later, Turek has bought the phrase.

what the ad says

The 30-second spot went up on Saturday, Oct. 24. It opens on bullying, then turns: "As a kid in a wheelchair, I faced my share of bullying. It's why I believe that no Iowan should face discrimination. As a Paralympian, I also know it's important to have rules. It's why I oppose males competing in female sports, something that is already illegal in Iowa. I'm against taxpayers paying for sex changes too. Anyone tells you any different is lying."

It ends on "It's time to stop the nonsense from both extremes," over a montage of lawmakers at hearings. Erin Reed of Erin in the Morning identified one of them as Rep. Becca Balint, the first woman and first openly gay person to represent Vermont in Congress. So the "extreme" gets a lesbian's face.

the part that is new

A sports line from a red-state Democrat is, sadly, a genre now. We have covered Marcy Kaptur's and Annie Andrews'. The second sentence is the one that goes further. Reed reads "taxpayers paying for sex changes" as a federal funding ban on gender-affirming care, a trans version of the Hyde Amendment, which she says would reach Medicaid, Medicare, VA care and subsidized ACA plans, adults included. The ad does not say "kids." It does not say "minors." It says taxpayers.

That is the vocabulary of the ad PolitiFact debunked, now coming from the man it was aimed at. A day later, Nicki Minaj used the same two words at a Trump rally in Michigan. Same phrase, two parties, one weekend.

Turek faces Hinson on Nov. 3.

Illustration: The Watering Hole

via the Greenfield Recorder, Boston.com and the bar's own sale page

On Sept. 24, the Last Ditch fundraiser had about $9,000 in it. By Monday afternoon it had $21,600, 144% of a $15,000 goal, according to the Greenfield Recorder. Also on Monday, the bar announced it is closing.

"We need new owners AsAP, we close this winter," reads the bar's sale page, which went up alongside a social media post announcing a "soft close" effective immediately. Booked events continue through the winter; otherwise, the doors at 10 Fiske Ave. are shut. A Recorder reporter who stopped by Monday afternoon found the building dark and locked.

what is actually for sale

The bar puts the value at about $70,000 in equipment, furniture, repairs, inventory and its social media accounts, with an appraisal "available upon request." It is offering two routes: "Join, get trained, and take over the transition OR full sale (best offer)." A buyer would also take over the lease, the Recorder reported.

"It's time we pass it on," the bar wrote, per Boston.com, after saying its people had "put our lives on hold to foster networks of care, resources, and a home base for organizing."

why the money didn't save it

This is the part the "woke bar goes broke" crowd will skip. The fundraiser was earmarked for overdue rent, staff, maintenance and converting the place to a workers' co-op, the Recorder reported, and the co-op is what fell through. Two of the three founders had already left, and a few weeks ago the bar said it still did not "have a board/leadership" to run the transfer. Boston.com put it more simply: the bar says it has been "fighting since the beginning to fill out the team." The Recorder notes the fundraising page does not say what happens to leftover money if the bar is sold.

If you were online in September, you know how Last Ditch got famous: a strict, COVID-cautious bar made Saturdays mask-optional to stay afloat, a Boston Globe Magazine story about the ensuing fight went everywhere, and a small lesbian bar in a city of under 18,000 people became the main character for a week. The bar then tightened security and closed events to the public, and called out what it described as "infiltration and coercion by media," per Boston.com.

There aren't many lesbian bars left in America, and losing one is a loss whatever you thought of the masks. The Recorder says the calendar runs to a final karaoke night on Dec. 31. Someone with $70,000 and a high tolerance for discourse: it's your move.

Correction, Oct. 28, 2026: An earlier version of this story said the fundraiser had raised $216,000 of a $150,000 goal. It had raised $21,600, 144% of a $15,000 goal. The Greenfield Recorder, which we cited, corrected its own figure on Oct. 27.

Downtown Asheville, for illustration. Photo: Harrison Keely, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via WLOS and The News & Observer

"I'm going to be honest with you: I've never been to a barn dance in my life."

That is Nova, an Asheville drag queen, explaining to WLOS why she is surprised to be the star of a Republican attack ad in which she is doing exactly that. The 30-second spot, from the campaign of Jennifer Balkcom in North Carolina's 11th congressional district, shows Democrat Jamie Ager at a barn dance surrounded by drag performers while children look on. Its narrator delivers the line: "Jamie Ager talks like you and me on TV, but he's dancing with they/them."

"None of it was real," Nova said. "I've never met the man in my life."

how the fake was made

The News & Observer, which fact-checked the ad, reports it was paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee and appears to be built from footage of one of Ager's own campaign ads. Where his ad shows a plain wall of wooden slats, Balkcom's shows the same wall with a Pride flag on it. Where his ad shows a barn of ordinary people dancing, hers fills the same barn with drag queens. There is no disclaimer saying any of it was generated by AI, and the paper notes North Carolina is one of the minority of states with no rules on AI in campaign ads. Elections analyst Jacob Rubashkin described it on X as "an almost entirely AI-generated ad."

The ad's case rests on a 2019 "Fantasy Festival" at Hickory Nut Gap, Ager's family farm. The N&O found the event was advertised with puppeteers, fire dancers, stilt walkers and costume contests, not as a "drag queen barn dance," though an archived listing does name the Beer City Sisters, an Asheville drag and advocacy group, among many performers. The two performer names the ad drops came from a Breitbart article that pulled them off a Beer City Sisters Instagram post of new name tags, posted nearly three weeks after the festival. The NRCC did not give the paper proof either was there.

One claim does check out: FEC records show Ager's campaign gave $5,000 to Blue Ridge Pride in July. That is the scandal. A farmer donated to Pride.

what everyone said

Ager's campaign called it "100% fake, AI-generated ads" and said Balkcom "can't win on the truth, so she is using AI to lie." Balkcom's team declined an on-camera interview with WLOS and sent a statement accusing Ager of "hosting events exposing young children to inappropriate performances," and NRCC spokesman Reilly Richardson told the N&O that "Ager owes North Carolina voters answers for why he's trying to push sexualized performers onto kids."

Nova says she has sent the Balkcom campaign a cease-and-desist letter and, as of her interview, had heard nothing back. The N&O reports another Asheville drag performer named in the ad, Divine Holeburn, posted on Facebook that she has issued one too.

Nova wondered aloud "when are y'all going to start creating other preposterous storylines about gay people to fit into your narrative." Based on this ad, the answer is whenever the render finishes. Texas Democrat James Talarico got the deepfake treatment in September; western North Carolina is just the newest set.

Left: Chrishell Stause at a 2014 Daytime Emmy Awards event. Photo: Mingle Media TV, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Right: G Flip performing in Brighton, 2018. Photo: Drew de F Fawkes, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Them, QNews and Stause's own video, as reposted by E! News

Most celebrity breakups arrive as a Notes app screenshot with the warmth of a parking ticket. Chrishell Stause looked at that option on Monday and decided she couldn't do it.

"G and I are no longer together," she said in a video posted to Instagram on Oct. 26, her voice catching, explaining that the two had agreed to treat the public separation with love and respect. She said she felt her followers "deserved a little bit more than a cold written statement," and then said the part that made the clip travel: "I am in love with this person and I don't have all the information or the reasons."

what g flip said

G Flip, the Melbourne-born, nonbinary musician Stause first went public with on a 2022 Selling Sunset reunion, posted a few lines soon after. "After 4+ years Chrishell and I are no longer together," they wrote, adding: "I will always love her, we will always share a special connection and I cherish our memories together deeply." They said their "head & heart are feeling very heavy" and asked for privacy, according to the statement as printed by both Them and QNews.

Stause, for her part, said in the video that she "will always love G" and doesn't "ever really see that changing." She also said, plainly, "I feel like a little bit of a failure." Neither of them gave a reason.

why it hurts more than usual

They were, for a few years, one of the most visible queer couples on reality TV that wasn't on a show about queer people: a real estate agent on a very straight Netflix series and an Australian drummer-singer who turned up in each other's lives at, per QNews, a Halloween party. They married, and by Them's count kept renewing their vows at themed ceremonies, which is the most lesbian sentence available in the English language.

We'd like to stay mad at someone, but she made that impossible. Go hug your partner. Or, if you're single, enjoy the brief, smug feeling of having nothing to announce.

LeBron James, then with the Cavaliers, playing in Philadelphia. Photo: Ian D'Andrea, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Basketball Network and Whitlock's own upload of the episode

LeBron James is in his 24th NBA season, about to turn 42, and now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers, which is still a sentence that takes a second. Before Thursday's home game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, a game the Sixers won after coming back from 29 points down, he and Joel Embiid did their new pregame handshake: some slaps, then a coordinated little wiggle at the waist. The internet lost it. The league had been warming everyone up for weeks; the NBA's own account posted the two rehearsing it during the preseason under the caption "+100 team chemistry."

Jason Whitlock did not see team chemistry. At 9:39 p.m. Eastern, while the clip was spreading, he posted: "That looks Masonic?"

what whitlock actually said

By Friday morning he had worked out his thoughts. On the Oct. 23 episode of Fearless, his show, he opened with "Didn't take long. LeBron James has already worn me out." About ten minutes in, he played the handshake for his audience.

"This is some Masonic gay stuff," Whitlock said. He then explained, to a camera, that this is how you become "a 33 degree Mason or 69 degree Mason," and added, "that looks gay to me," describing "a 42 year old man out there pumping his hips in front of a seven foot man." Minutes later, after saying he tries to give people endless second chances, he concluded: "I'm done with LeBron James."

We have so many questions, but mostly one. Two grown men did a little dance and the person who brought up 69 was the guy watching it on a loop for his podcast.

this is a whole hobby

None of this is new territory for Whitlock. In January 2025 he named James and Embiid, now handshake partners, to his "Mount Rushmore of who has destroyed the NBA." In March 2025 he wrote that Stephen A. Smith and James "don't care if they promote a culture that sends your kids to jail and turns them gay." So the handshake is less a revelation than a sequel: the man has been worried for some time that LeBron is making things gay, and now he has footage.

Basketball Network, which wrote up the segment first, noted that the Sixers have looked good with James so far. He put up 17 points, 10 rebounds and three steals against Cleveland. Nobody has yet been initiated into anything.

Nicki Minaj at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, December 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Newsweek, Global News and PinkNews, with video from FOX 2 Detroit and WHAS11

The segue went like this. Trump, at McMorran Place arena in Port Huron, Michigan on Sunday, was revisiting the coverage of his comments about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted's body. "I looked at his ass," he said, per the video. "I've never done that with a man before." Then: "Off the record, women, yes. Men, no."

And then, by way of proving the point: "By the way, I looked at one hell of a beautiful ass before, Nicki Minaj." He pointed. "That's hard to miss." He told her to stand up. She did. "I hope Nicki wasn't insulted," he added afterward, according to Newsweek and Global News. "We love Nicki."

If you are keeping a file, this is not the first time this month he has told a crowd about Husted's behind. He did it in Youngstown, and Anderson Cooper made a supercut. The man has a type and the type is Ohio.

what nicki said with the mic

Minaj, who traveled to the rally with Trump on Air Force One, according to both outlets, then got the stage. Her speech, in FOX 2 Detroit's upload, runs about two minutes. Most of it is crowd work for Senate candidate Mike Rogers and governor candidate John James. One part is policy:

"We don't want our children to be bombarded with sex changes, right? We don't want that for our children. We want people to leave the children alone. Leave them out of it, right?"

She closed with a pledge: "If you run again, I will support you again." The 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being elected president more than twice, which PinkNews pointed out before we could.

barbie, read the room

This is not a new position for her, as PinkNews notes: she has spoken against gender-affirming surgery for minors before. Nor is the MAGA stage new. At Turning Point's AmericaFest last December she called JD Vance "the assassin," then covered her mouth, as Global News recounted. What is new is the setting: a rally where the president's material was about other people's bodies, and her contribution was about children's.

After the rally, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a video of the two of them on Air Force One with the line "I think we may have found the new White House Press Secretary," per Global News. We would watch that briefing. We would not enjoy it.

Iowa had its own version of the same two words the day before, from a Democrat, which we wrote up separately.

Byron Donalds at AmericaFest 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Advocate, and the video of the exchange

The question was about the Epstein files. That part keeps falling off the clip.

A transgender woman stopped Byron Donalds, the Republican running for governor of Florida, during his statewide bus tour, The Advocate reports. On the video, she tells him she had received his campaign mailer and was upset by it as a member of the LGBTQ community. "There is no trans agenda," she says. She is trans, she tells him, and "I don't have any agenda." Then she pivots to the agenda she says she does see, a cover-up, and asks how he plans to protect children while being endorsed by "somebody that's covering up the Epstein files."

what donalds actually said

He starts to answer, and the first word out of him is "sir." She cuts in: she is not a sir, she is a ma'am. Donalds tells her that as a member of Congress he voted to release the files. A few seconds later he explains himself, per the Advocate: "I'm listening to the voice, and I hear a sir. I'm sorry." Then he says "sir" again anyway.

The bystanders were not having it. On the tape, someone off camera unloads a string of profanity at him, and another voice tells him he has belittled her enough on camera. She walks off. Given the afternoon she was having, that is restraint.

the part nobody is clipping

By Friday night the video had become a genre. Accounts on the right posted it as Donalds "shutting down" a trans woman, TheBlaze among them, with captions built entirely around the word "sir." The most-shared versions we read were captioned around that one word and left out that the exchange began with a mailer from his own campaign and a question about the Epstein files. The Advocate reports Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign for Donalds on Friday at Florida Gulf Coast University's Alico Arena in Fort Myers.

So here is the scorecard. He was asked about a mailer and a cover-up. He answered the cover-up with his voting record, which is fine, and answered her existence with a pronoun, which was the bit he chose to repeat. The Advocate says it asked his campaign for comment. It is, after all, mailer season. We would love to read his.

The caption on the video, the Advocate notes, describes her as a veteran. She was a constituent asking a candidate a question. That used to be the whole point of a bus tour.

The Harford County Courthouse in Bel Air, Maryland. Photo: Farragutful, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Baltimore Banner and CBS News Baltimore

When the Harford County school board filed its appeal last November, its own lawyer, Gregory Szoka, said: "I think the chances of succeeding on the appeal are less than 20%," The Baltimore Banner reports. The board appealed anyway. On Thursday, it found out he was being generous.

Harford County Circuit Court Judge Yolanda L. Curtin ruled that the board's June 2025 decision to pull "Flamer," Mike Curato's graphic novel about being bullied as a kid for being gay, from school libraries violated Maryland's Freedom to Read Act and the First Amendment. "This court finds that the decision by the state board was not arbitrary, unreasonable or illegal," she said, per the Banner. CBS News Baltimore reports it is the first time the 2024 law has been tested in court.

what the judge ruled

The book went through exactly the process Harford set up for it. A parent asked in November 2024 to have it removed, arguing it didn't "meet the values of the community." A review committee of parents, students and staff read it and voted to keep it, and the superintendent agreed. Then the elected board voted 5-3, in a private meeting, to take it out anyway, the Banner reports. The state school board reversed that last fall, the first time it had ever stepped into a local book decision, and Harford went to court.

The board's argument, per the Banner, was that it could overrule the committee using its "collective understanding." Curtin's answer: "It's got to be following what the state law is." According to both outlets, she said the board had swapped in its own opinions for the process, which is the thing the law exists to stop.

how moms for liberty took it

The audience cheered when the judge left the room, the Banner reports. Moms for Liberty Harford County did not. In a statement CBS News Baltimore carried after the ruling, the group said: "When a county school board can't even decide what books should be in their libraries, we have reached totalitarianism."

For the record, the board could decide. It decided the wrong way, against its own committee and its own superintendent, in a room the public was not in, and a judge said so. That is not totalitarianism. That is a library with a returns policy.

Board president Lauren Paige did not immediately respond to either outlet, and CBS reports it is unclear whether the board will appeal again. We have been keeping score on library fights all fall, from a Tennessee librarian's lawsuit to a North Carolina library's vanishing rainbow logo. Put this one in the win column.

via Olympedia, NPR, Sports Illustrated, NBC News, the Washington Blade and the outlets linked in each entry

Twenty-six. That is how many women we could find who won Olympic gold for the United States and have said, in their own words, on the record, that they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer or pansexual, or who have talked publicly about the woman they love. We checked every medal against Olympedia's results database and threw out every name that only had a rumor, a fan wiki or somebody else's Instagram caption behind it.

When we did this for gay men with gold, the whole world came to fifteen. One country's women beat that by eleven, and most of them came from two dynasties. Each woman is described in her own words. Where she has never used a label, we do not hand her one. Here they are, sport by sport, oldest gold first.

lesbian, gay and queer olympians in usa basketball

This will not shock anyone who has been to a WNBA game, including Riley Gaines.

Jennifer Azzi, 1996

Photo: Shawncalhoun via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, taken in 2010.

Azzi won gold in Atlanta, per Olympedia. In 2016, as the University of San Francisco's coach, she came out while introducing Rick Welts, announcing that she was married to her top assistant, Blair Hardiek, per the AP and NBC Sports Bay Area. "I, too, lived a long time not being 100 percent honest," she said. Then, as the USF Foghorn tells it, she introduced Hardiek to the room: "This is my wife."

Sue Bird, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020

Photo: SusanLesch via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, taken in 2018.

Five golds, per Olympedia. She came out in 2017 in an espnW interview, per Sports Illustrated and The Advocate: "I'm gay. Megan's my girlfriend." SI reports she was close to coming out before the 2016 Rio Olympics and decided not to. The Megan is Megan Rapinoe, further down this list, and the two later got engaged, per NBC News. Ten golds between them. Imagine the trophy shelf.

Diana Taurasi, 2004 through 2024

Photo: John Mac via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, taken in 2024.

Six golds at six straight Games, per Olympedia. She married her former Phoenix Mercury teammate Penny Taylor in 2017, per ESPN and WNBA.com. She told ESPN: "And then for whatever reason, when Penny and I started dating, things just fell into place." Six golds. Things did fall into place.

Seimone Augustus, 2008, 2012 and 2016

Photo: Danny Karwoski via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, taken in 2013.

Three golds, per Olympedia. In 2012, engaged to LaTaya Varner, she urged Minnesotans to defeat an antigay amendment, per The Advocate. They married in Hawaii in 2015 after a five-year engagement, per MPR News. In her Players' Tribune essay about it she wrote: "I knew I was gay by the time I reached middle school." And, our favorite sentence in this whole article: "I met LaTaya in a Minneapolis club."

Candace Parker, 2008 and 2012

Photo: Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2018.

Two golds, per Olympedia. On Instagram, per TIME, she revealed that she had been married for two years to Anna Petrakova, a Russian player, per ESPN. She told TIME she was "always against ‘coming out’" because "you shouldn’t have to do that," and that she did it for her daughter: "I don’t want her to ever think that I’m ashamed or not proud of our family."

Angel McCoughtry, 2012 and 2016

Photo: Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2018.

Two golds, per Olympedia. She came out in 2015 through her Instagram account, per Georgia Voice. Before Rio she told Out: "My fiancee has made me more comfortable with who I am, with believing in myself, with fighting for the LGBT community and supporting them." Also: "I said never again in my life will I not be who I am for anyone." Noted.

Elena Delle Donne, 2016

Photo: Dannykuconn via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, taken in 2008.

Gold in Rio, per Olympedia. She announced her engagement to Amanda Clifton in 2016, per PhillyVoice, and told NBC News the next year why she kept it simple: "I don't want people to have to have these huge coming outs anymore. It should just be the norm. I love a woman."

Breanna Stewart, 2016, 2020 and 2024

Photo: Zafer via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2026.

Three golds, per Olympedia. She is married to former WNBA player Marta Xargay Casademont, per NBC News, which reported that the couple received homophobic threats during the 2024 WNBA Finals. In the round before, after the Liberty beat the Aces in Game 4, she said, per USA Today: "My mentality today was to go in and get this win for my wife and her dad."

Brittney Griner, 2016, 2020 and 2024

Photo: Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2019.

Three golds, per Olympedia. In 2013 she told Sports Illustrated, per the AP: "I've always been open about who I am and my sexuality." PinkNews reported it as coming out as gay. She then became the first openly gay athlete to sign with Nike and model its apparel, per the AP.

Chelsea Gray, Tokyo 2020 and 2024

Photo: SusanLesch via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2016.

Two golds, per Olympedia. When the Aces visited the White House in 2024 she told The Advocate: "There was a time when my wife and I couldn't come into this building." In a 2026 letter to her son in The Players' Tribune, she wrote that "it wasn’t always easy to be yourself for people like me and mama."

Stefanie Dolson, Tokyo 2020 (3x3)

Photo: Danny Karwosli via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, taken in 2015.

Dolson won 3x3 gold in Tokyo, per Olympedia, which made her the first out LGBT+ American to win gold at those Games, per PinkNews. She came out in ESPN The Magazine in 2016 without picking a word, per the Washington Blade: "I'm not attracted to someone's gender. I'm attracted to their energy as a being." So we will not pick one for her.

the uswnt's out gold medalists

Briana Scurry, 1996 and 2004

Photo: Bryan Berlin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2026.

Two golds in goal, per Olympedia. "I believe I’m the only Black lesbian to be on a Wheaties box," she told the Washington Blade in 2022. Looking back, she told ASU News that "the media had problems with the way I looked and the fact that I was gay." She married Chryssa Zizos in 2018, per the Blade. The Wheaties box was right on time. The media was not.

Abby Wambach, 2004 and 2012

Photo: the White House via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, taken in 2015.

Two golds, per Olympedia, and the 2012 FIFA World Player of the Year, per NPR. "I've been out in my private life for many, many years," she said in a 2013 Q&A reprinted by SoccerWire. She told NPR's Fresh Air that growing up in her small town, "I didn't want there to be any proof out there that I was gay," and that she was "not the person that's going to stand on top of a mountain and be like, I'm gay, hear me roar." She married Glennon Doyle in 2017, per Bleacher Report. No mountain needed.

Angela Hucles, 2004 and 2008

Photo: the U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, taken in 2012.

Two golds, per Olympedia. Now an owner of Angel City FC, she put it all in one sentence for Andscape: "I’m Black, I’m Cuban, I’m a woman, I’m a part of the LGBT family." She told RISMedia that growing up she felt different "being a female person of color, but also being LGBT, and not really knowing anyone who I could relate to." In 2019 she was grand marshal of Hampton Roads PrideFest, per RISMedia. Somebody to relate to, delivered.

Tobin Heath, 2008 and 2012

Photo: Pierre-Yves Beaudouin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, taken in 2013.

Two golds, per Olympedia, plus two Women's World Cups, per NBC News. Heath said it with paint. In June 2022 she unveiled an artwork she made, letters in colorful blocks spelling out "I Am Gay," and posted a photo of herself with it on Instagram, per The Advocate and NBC News. The most efficient coming out on this list, and the only one you can hang.

Megan Rapinoe, 2012

Photo: Daniel Nickson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, taken in 2022.

Rapinoe told Out in July 2012, weeks before the London Games, "For the record: I am gay," per Out and the Windy City Times. Then she won gold there, per Olympedia. She also won two World Cups and got engaged to Sue Bird, per NBC News. For the record, the record holds.

Kelley O'Hara, 2012

Photo: Hameltion via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2024.

Gold in London, per Olympedia. She kissed her girlfriend at the 2019 World Cup, in front of everyone. As she told Autostraddle: "kissing my girlfriend, now fiancée, at the World Cup in 2019 was such a shock to people." The girlfriend is Kameryn Stanhouse, and their engagement was announced in 2023, per The Advocate.

Tierna Davidson, 2024

Photo: Hameltion via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2024.

Gold in Paris, per Olympedia. Before the Games, asked about a teammate's past anti-LGBTQ posts, she told Sports Illustrated: "I feel like I want to be able to represent the queer community really well on this team." To The Athletic, per PinkNews, she said she wants people who "look up to queer athletes and see themselves in me."

Jane Campbell, 2024

Campbell went to Paris as an alternate and came home with a gold, per Olympedia. She did not play a minute, and the medal still counts. She told the Houston Chronicle why she stayed in Houston: "that was a big reason why me and my wife decided to stay." Her wife is former Dash player Christine Nairn, per the Chronicle.

queer olympians on ice and snow

Meghan Duggan, 2018

Photo: _becaro_ via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, taken in 2011.

Duggan captained the U.S. to gold in PyeongChang, per Olympedia and ABC7 New York, then married her former rival Gillian Apps, per NBC News. When the New Jersey Devils hired her, ABC7 reported she was believed to be the first openly gay person to work in NHL hockey operations. She told NHL.com: "I'm a woman, I'm a gay woman." The rivalry, resolved.

Hilary Knight, 2018 and 2026

Photo: U.S. Mission Korea via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, taken in 2018.

Two golds, per Olympedia. "I'm a part of the queer community and I think it's awesome that we have these great feats on ice," she told NBC Olympics, and she told The Athletic that the "overarching" term queer fits her best, per Metro Weekly. In Milan this February, the day before the final, she posted a video of herself proposing to speed skater Brittany Bowe. Then, as captain, she tied the final with just over two minutes left and the U.S. beat Canada 2-1 in overtime, per Reuters via NBC News. "I think I was more nervous for the proposal than I was for the gold medal game to be honest." Icon behavior.

Breezy Johnson, 2026

Photo: Stefan Brending (2eight) via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, taken in 2017.

Downhill gold at Milan-Cortina, per Olympedia. In 2022 she posted, per Hello! and Team USA: "So I'm bisexual. Before this season starts I wanted to be open about who I am." She told Team USA why: "growing up there weren’t people like me out there and the straight white ski racing world is large." It just got a little smaller.

Amber Glenn, 2026

Photo: SpiritedMichelle via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0, taken in 2026.

Gold in the team event at Milan-Cortina, per Olympedia. She came out as pansexual in 2019, which is still how she describes herself, per The Guardian, and explained it there: "Pansexuals are gender-blind." She became the first out LGBTQ woman to win the U.S. women's figure skating title, per NBC News. In a sport that hands out points for artistry, finally some honesty in the scoring.

on the court, the track and the fencing strip

Haleigh Washington, Tokyo 2020

Photo: Lega Pallavolo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, taken in 2022.

Washington helped win the U.S. women's first-ever volleyball gold and was named the tournament's best middle blocker, per Olympedia and Outsports. She had already tweeted the important part, per Outsports: "I am not cuffing my pants because I am tall, I am cuffing my pants because I am BISEXUAL!!!" Autostraddle counted her among the LGBTQ+ women medalists in Paris too, where she took silver. The cuff is the flag.

Sha'Carri Richardson, 2024

Photo: jenaragon94 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, taken in 2021.

Gold in the 4x100 relay in Paris, per Olympedia. In 2015 she tweeted "my family know I’m bi," and in 2021 she told the Orange County Register, both per Hola! USA: "My girlfriend picked this color because it’s loud and, honestly, dangerous." She meant the hair, for the Olympic trials. PinkNews quotes Vogue noting that her personal life is now off-limits, and we will leave it there.

Lauren Scruggs, 2024

Gold in team foil in Paris, per Olympedia, and a silver in the individual event, the first individual fencing medal by a Black American woman, per NBC News. Before the Games she told Outsports about her girlfriend: "She’s been very supportive of my fencing career." And to NBC: "Hopefully people like me who identify similar to me feel that this sport is the place for them." Sword in hand, girlfriend in the stands.

who we left off, and why

Other lists of LGBTQ Olympians name more American gold medalists than this one. Some of those women are married to women, or have been photographed with partners, but we could not find them saying anything about it in their own words on a page we could read, so they are not here yet. That is our rule, not a judgment on them. A few others said something once and have since described themselves differently, and we go by what a person says now. If you are one of those women and want to be on this page, or know an interview we missed, tell us. The men's list is here. For somewhere to raise a glass to all twenty-six, try one of the 33 lesbian bars left in America.

Hudson Williams at the Yaga premiere, TIFF 2026. Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Attitude and Out

Two episodes. That is how long Yaga waited.

The witchy mystery series starring Hudson Williams dropped its first two episodes on Friday, Oct. 23, and by the second one the Heated Rivalry star is wearing a pup mask with horns on it, trousers pulled down below his backside, behind someone dressed as an angel at a party. Attitude and Out both recapped it the same day, and both landed on the same detail: he begs his partner to say his name, and the name is "Henry."

who is henry, though

This is where it gets good. Williams plays two people. One is Henry Park, the heir to a powerful fishery, who has gone missing. The other is Logan Casey, Henry's best friend, roommate and lookalike, played by Williams in a pair of glasses and a prosthetic nose, per Out. Noah Reid plays Charlie Rapp, the private investigator who rolls into the coastal town to find Henry, and Clark Backo plays Carson, the local cop. In Out's telling, the two of them are eavesdropping on the scene, and Out points out, pointedly, that the man in the mask is not Henry.

So: a man who looks like a missing man, living the missing man's life, asking to be called the missing man's name, in a dog mask with devil horns. Attitude describes the show as a modern reimagining of the Baba Yaga legend, and it has clearly decided the scariest thing in the woods is a roommate.

how to watch yaga

Rotten Tomatoes calls it "the new AMC+ series" in the US. In the UK it lands on Sky Atlantic and NOW from Oct. 31, and the run is eight episodes with a finale on Nov. 27, according to Attitude. Carrie-Anne Moss is in it too, as a university professor Attitude describes as having "a taste for younger men," which we are choosing to treat as a promise.

Not everyone is sold. Variety's review went out under the headline "Despite Hudson Williams, Canadian Witch Mystery 'Yaga' Is No 'Heated Rivalry'." Fair. Heated Rivalry is a hockey romance and this is a missing-persons case. But nobody was asking Yaga to be Heated Rivalry. We were asking it to do exactly what it did in episode two. Earlier this month we wrote about his cardigan. We did not expect to be writing about the mask.

Photo: Camas, Washington and the Columbia River. Sarah McDevitt, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Seattle Times and The Columbian

Second place. After nine days of national outrage, a rally, a relocated venue and metal barricades between the athletes and the crowd, that is how the race actually went for the trans girl on the Camas High School cross-country team. She finished second at the 4A Greater St. Helens League district meet on Wednesday, and Camas won the girls team title, the Seattle Times reports. A Battle Ground senior won the race, per The Columbian.

We wrote last week about the roughly dozen Camas girls who walked off the start line on Oct. 13 rather than race with her. Wednesday was the sequel, and it looked like a security operation with a 5K attached.

what the meet looked like

The district meet was moved from Lewisville Regional Park to Camas, citing the "controversial climate surrounding the cross-country community." Athletes and coaches sat under tents behind metal barricades and security, and the district had warned families to expect "a police presence and some separation between athletes and spectators," the Seattle Times reports. Protesters lined the street outside, The Columbian reports.

About 80 people came to a "Camas Courage" rally beforehand, where speakers urged a yes vote on Initiative 638, which would limit girls' K-12 sports to students who can document their "biological sex." One high school student told the crowd: "More girls across our state need to do the same, and they need to stop competing." The Seattle Times reported it did not see any runner walk off the start line Wednesday.

how the race went

She came down the final stretch to cheers from teammates and some spectators, and some boos, the paper reports. When her name was read out as the second-place finisher, applause followed, and then one spectator at the barricade heckled her. Camas won the team title without some of its varsity runners, who chose to end their seasons early.

We are not naming her, for the same reason the Seattle Times is not: she is a minor, and she has not agreed to be. Her team races at regionals at the end of the month, and the state championship is Nov. 7. Washington votes on I-638 on Nov. 3, which means the adults will settle this four days before the kids finish running.

Photo: Crumbl cookies, for illustration. Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Out and Attitude

Two men who say they have never met are fighting about a Halloween party, and one of them is the reason the other came out.

The party is Grindr's Pleasure Ball, a costume contest in New York that the app hopes will become "the gay rival to the Met Gala," chief marketing officer Tristan Pineiro told Adweek. This is its third year, it was Thursday night, and Absolut is a sponsor. The men are Grant Gibbs, a TikTok creator, and Sawyer Hemsley, co-founder of Crumbl Cookies.

what grant gibbs says happened

In a video posted this week, Gibbs said he was dropped from the list, Out and Attitude both report. "I was specifically asked to be taken off the list, allegedly," he said, "because Sawyer Hemsley was invited. Sawyer Hemsley, who, in my opinion, does nothing for this community."

He made his case to the app directly. "Grindr, I have worked with this brand since 2022. I have mentioned y'all all the time. You have been in our music video. I have literally been to every single Pleasure Ball for two years." And then to Hemsley: "Look, I don't even know this man, nor do I give a fuck about this man. Sawyer Hemsley, let's talk."

Note the word "allegedly." He put it there himself, which is more legal caution than most TikTok call-outs manage.

why these two

Last August, Gibbs posted a video speculating that Hemsley was gay. Later that month Hemsley came out on Instagram, Out notes. So this is less a feud than a sequel, and the sequel's premise is that the man who got speculated about now has enough pull at a dating app to edit a party list. Hemsley stepped back from his day-to-day role as Crumbl's chief brand officer in April, both outlets report, and remains on the board.

what hemsley said back

He answered in Gibbs's comments, which is where all modern diplomacy happens. "Hey Grant, we've never met, but someone sent me your post and I wanted to reach out directly," he wrote, per Out and Attitude. "Neither I nor anyone on my team ever asked Grindr to remove you from any guest list, and I've never discussed you or this event with anyone there, so I'm honestly not sure where that came from."

Then the gracious bit: "I'll admit the TikTok situation was hard for me at the time, but I've moved forward and hold no ill will. I hope this gets sorted out, and I wish you all the best."

The only party that knows who is on the list is Grindr, and Grindr is not saying. Out asked and had no response by publication. So we have a claim with "allegedly" in it, a denial with a wish-you-well in it, and a guest list nobody will show us. Somewhere in Manhattan, a door person knows everything.

via A View From A Bridge, PinkNews and Queerty

"Some of my biggest fears is like a ball getting kicked over a fence when I'm the one walking past and have to pass it back to this group of men."

Troye Sivan said that into a red telephone on a bridge, for A View From A Bridge, a series where someone picks up the phone and tells a story. Every gay man reading this has just felt the ball land at his feet.

"I think I've like always had a very complicated relationship with men and like my own masculinity," he says. "Some of my like earliest memories in life were feeling very very um I guess sort of just like a bit of a failure as like a boy."

The story he tells is the school swimming carnival, compulsory, whole school watching, and "all of the boys that would like kind of already make fun of me for singing like a girl" in the stands. He made it about four strokes before he had to hang on to the lane divider. The next year he went to a teacher he describes as "so fab" who "always just looked immaculate and was so warm," and told her he did not want to swim. She said fine. But he had to sing the national anthem at the carnival instead. He did, the school clapped, and he went home dry.

"She saw something in me that I was really afraid of which was like a more real version of myself," he says. She is now the principal of a big school in Sydney, and he thinks "those are very, very lucky students."

It lands in the same month as She's the Best, the album he has framed around the women in his life, the same album rollout in which he answered a critic with "I am gay!!!! Gay gay gay gay." Turns out one of those women got there first, around the time he was learning to dread a football.

Photo: Kid Cudi performing in 2009. Jaime Rivera from San Francisco, CA, US, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Complex, Remezcla, Deadline and Kid Cudi's own post on X

"If you are a trans actor looking for work, holla at me." That is the whole post. Kid Cudi put it on X at about 1:20 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, with a prayer-hands emoji and a heart on fire, and by lunchtime it had nearly 7,000 likes and a few hundred replies that read like a waiting room.

The timing is why people noticed. On Wednesday he had announced on Instagram that he will write, direct and star as Jean-Michel Basquiat in a film called Jean, Complex and Remezcla report. "For years people have asked me about playing Jean Michel Basquiat in a film. But no project actually came to be," he wrote. "This year, I finally said f*ck it, ima write it myself." He called it "a love letter to Jean, the 80s and NY city," and posted wardrobe-test photos in a wig that Complex called an "uncanny resemblance." Deadline says the post flagged filming for 2027.

which movie is it for

He did not say, and we are not going to say it for him. Jean is not his only film. He is also making Doe, his directing debut, and the horror thriller Wrong Number with Barbie Ferreira, per Cover Media. The post names no project, no role and no casting process. It is an open door with no address on it, which is honestly the most Kid Cudi way to run a casting department.

The replies did not need an address. One woman wrote that she was a few months into her transition and would take a small part or a spot as a background extra. He quoted her an hour later: "Ima hit u Claire!" Another, @payphoneexhibit, told him it was her 21st birthday in 40 minutes and that she is "a trans playwright and actress," which is the most efficient pitch we have ever read.

Basquiat died in 1988 at 27. Jeffrey Wright played him in 1996, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. has the role in the separate film Samo Lives. Whether trans actors end up in Jean or in a phone thriller, a working rapper-director publicly asking for them, in a year like this one, is a sentence we are happy to print.

Photo: Annie Andrews at a campaign event in Greenville. Stimpus1, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Advocate, the full rally video (LiveNOW from FOX), the Post and Courier, Erin in the Morning and the DCCC

Annie Andrews tried the ad. Three days after Trump first called her an anti-trans slur, the pediatrician running for Senate in South Carolina looked into a camera and said she does not support "biological men" playing women's sports. On Wednesday night, at Clemson's T. Ed Garrison Arena in Pendleton, Trump called her the slur again anyway.

"Darline's running against a radical left lunatic named," he said, and then the word, and then "Annie Andrews." The Advocate reported it, and we listened to the clip to be sure. The automatic captions on the full video skip the word. We are skipping it too.

what else he said about her

A couple of minutes later, per the full speech: "She's a mutilizer. You know what a mutilizer is? That's a person that doesn't do good things." Then: "Annie Andrews should have her medical license revoked. Take it away. And she should not be allowed to run for office." That is the sitting president, at a campaign rally, saying a candidate for the United States Senate should not be allowed to run. For the record, he was there for Sen. Darline Graham, whose late brother is the subject of a documentary that dropped the next morning.

Andrews told SCETV that name-calling would not lower gas or grocery prices, the Advocate reports.

meanwhile, on the coast

The same week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started airing its first TV ad in South Carolina's 1st District, for retired Navy admiral Nancy Lacore. Mount Pleasant's Republican mayor, Will Haynie, says she will "lower costs, secure our border, and protect girls' sports." The ad does not explain that last part. Lacore's campaign manager, Kaylie Haberstroh, did: she told the Post and Courier that Lacore does not support trans girls playing in girls' leagues and would potentially support legislation in Congress against it. Erin in the Morning calls it the first known DCCC ad targeting trans people this election.

the note from clemson

Lacore is running against Republican Jenny Honeycutt in a district she is trying to flip, per the Post and Courier. Maybe the line wins her votes. But the party now has a live experiment one state race over, and the result came back Wednesday: Andrews said "biological men" on camera, and she still got the word, still got "mutilizer," and still got told she should not be allowed to run. They call you it either way. The only thing the ad changes is who else gets hurt on the way.

via the Los Angeles Times and WEHOonline

Ryley Niemi told the Los Angeles Times he asked the question because "they brought their baby out to the gay clubs at 9 p.m."

The question, from his own video of the April encounter on Santa Monica Boulevard, was: "Have you ever heard about the statistics coming out that gay men are much more likely to commit child molestation?" According to Vulin, he had introduced himself as a reporter with CNN. He is not one. The two men he asked were David and Anthony Vulin, out with their infant son, Ante.

why there are no charges

On Thursday, David Vulin's attorney, R.J. Dreiling, said Vulin had completed the terms of a "pre-filing diversion" agreement with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, and a spokeswoman for the DA confirmed to the Times that criminal charges will not be filed. WEHOonline reports the same. Dreiling said a Superior Court judge also agreed to seal the records of the arrest. He would not discuss the terms.

Vulin had been arrested by the Sheriff's Department on suspicion of battery and vandalism. Niemi's footage shows Vulin shove him, then, a few blocks later after a second confrontation, punch him in the head several times, the Times reports. Niemi says he got a concussion and a broken camera. The Times also notes the video never shows him hitting either father. WEHOonline, which interviewed the couple two days after it happened, reports they had gone to the West Hollywood sheriff's station for help, were told it sounded like a possible hate crime, and then watched David get handcuffed. He spent about 12 hours in custody.

what happens now

Niemi told the Times he "walked away 500 feet" and may still file a civil suit. The Vulins said in a statement that they were relieved, and disappointed that "the person who provoked this encounter with hate speech then filmed and monetized it, faces no consequences." Anthony, they said, is working with state legislators on a bill aimed at "rage-bait creators."

For the record, the baby was not at a gay club. WEHOonline says he was in Anthony's arms on the family's usual evening walk. Easy mistake, if you have never been on a sidewalk in West Hollywood.

Photo: Lindsey Graham in Des Moines, Iowa. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The CLOSETocracy (The Young Turks), Newsweek, Mediaite and The Advocate

"I'm not even going to entertain that question." That is Sen. Darline Graham, walking away from a reporter who has just asked whether her late brother used gay escorts. It is the only on-camera answer anyone in the Graham family gives in The CLOSETocracy, a documentary The Young Turks and Swamp Watch Studios put on YouTube Thursday morning, in which three men say Lindsey Graham paid them for sex.

Graham died on July 11, Mediaite and the Advocate report. His sister was appointed to his seat and is now running for a full term against Democrat Annie Andrews, which is why Donald Trump was in South Carolina the night before the film dropped, calling Andrews a slur.

what the documentary alleges

A man the film identifies as Cory, whom the Advocate names as the adult performer Cory Burns, says he was booked overnight for $1,500. In the film he says a driver picked him up at the Washington Plaza and took him to the Mayflower Hotel, where the client asked to be degraded, and that he recognized the man as Graham on television a month or two later.

A man identified as Jesse says he met Graham at the Beacon Hotel in Washington in 2012. He says Graham never gave his real name and paid him $260 against a $250 rate, and that he kept the change. It is the most mundane sentence in the whole film.

The third man, Kelvin, opens the film: "My name is Kelvin. I had sex with Lindsey Graham when I was 17." He says it happened in July 2001 at a house near Sedona, Arizona, and the film's narration places Graham, then a congressman, there as a guest of John McCain over the Fourth of July. Kelvin says Graham repeatedly accused him of being 17, that he insisted he was 18, that the encounter continued anyway, and that he was paid $120. Arizona's age of consent is 18, Newsweek notes.

Cenk Uygur, who founded The Young Turks, went further on X, writing that "some of these sex acts were taped" and adding: "And yes, there are others." The film does not show any tape, and Kelvin's account of a camera is that he saw "a blinking red light."

what nobody has proven

None of this is corroborated. Newsweek says so in plain words. The Advocate says it has not verified it. We have not either. There is no court record and no police report, and the man accused cannot answer. In life, Graham publicly denied being gay. A spokeswoman for the Grahams did not respond to Mediaite.

What is on the record is the part he did in daylight. On November 29, 2022, Graham voted no on the Respect for Marriage Act, which passed 61 to 36. The film plays that record against the men's accounts, and that contrast is the whole argument. The "LG" rumor itself is not new: Burns first posted about an unnamed senator with those initials in June 2020, the Advocate reports.

the "we all knew" crowd

Which is why a large share of X spent Thursday announcing it had known for six years. Fine. Nobody who knew in 2020 managed to make it cost him a single vote.

The film ends on Jesse, who has a closing argument ready: "Your gas prices are high because of policies that people like Senator Graham were supporting while they were paying people like me for sex. Does that make you mad?"

Photo: Franmarie Metzler; U.S. House Office of Photography, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

via Bangor Daily News, Dave Weigel and The Comeback

"I support the rights of trans women because I'm a girl's girl."

That is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, on stage at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, at a packed event billed as "Students vs. Billionaires" that the Bangor Daily News reports was hosted by the progressive nonprofit More Perfect University. She was there to campaign for Troy Jackson, the Democrat trying to unseat Sen. Susan Collins.

what aoc actually said

The full line, from video of the event: "I don't support the rights of trans people just to protect my own rights, but I support the rights of trans women because I'm a girl's girl. And I think that all of our bodily autonomy is tied together. The right to choose over our bodies is the right to choose over our bodies."

Dave Weigel posted the quote that afternoon, and it traveled. In a longer clip transcribed by The Comeback, she made the policy version of the same argument: that the administration's fixation on trans girls in sports is a way to weaken Title IX, the federal law that protects women and girls in school from sex discrimination.

Note the timing. This is a cycle in which plenty of Democrats in close races have decided the safest word is no word. We wrote this month about a South Carolina Senate candidate who answered a Trump slur with an ad opposing "biological men" in women's sports. Ocasio-Cortez picked the opposite strategy, in a state with a Senate seat in play, less than two weeks out.

the girls who replied

The internet's self-appointed girl's girls showed up on cue. Moms for Liberty posted that "a girl's girl doesn't leave high school girls walking in protest at the start line." Much of what followed on X was the same sentence with more capital letters.

Which rather proves her point. "Girl's girl" was never a biology test. It means you show up for the women next to you, including the ones the people yelling loudest have decided do not count. She said it in four words. The replies needed several hundred.

Photo: Reedy River Falls in Greenville, South Carolina. P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via WYFF, FOX Carolina and the chorus's GoFundMe

The grant was worth about $13,000 a year for three years. The chorus has now raised $42,075 from 470 donations, FOX Carolina reports, which is the whole grant and then some, from people who did not need a board vote to decide gay men singing in Greenville was worth paying for.

We wrote in October about the South Carolina Arts Commission voting 5-3 to deny the Greenville Gay Men's Chorus its grant. Board members did not publicly explain their votes, WYFF reported. The chorus's GoFundMe, which opened in August when the grant was first paused, raised its goal to $40,000 and passed it last week.

"We started getting donations from people that didn't even know we existed before," executive director Mary Adam told WYFF. "To me, this said that people really disagree with this decision." She also made the argument the commission was supposed to be making: "It is putting money into an arts group that generates tax revenue. It is a smart thing to do."

The money does not end the fight. The chorus says on its own site that it believes the decision "was discriminatory and unconstitutional" and that it is "evaluating our legal options." In the meantime it has a holiday show to put on, Merry & Bright, on Dec. 9 at Greenville Theatre. Tickets are now, in a very real sense, a political act. They were also always going to be fun.

Photo: ground-mounted solar panels in Connecticut, for illustration. Grendelkhan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the federal complaint and the Bangor Daily News

Paragraph 31 of the lawsuit is one sentence long: "On several occasions some of Wilmer and Jose's Centre Electric coworkers threw food at them as well."

The "as well" is doing a lot. Wilmer Muchacho and Jose Cordero, a married couple from New York City, were hired around May 2023 to install solar panels in Holden, Maine, for about $23 an hour each, according to the complaint they filed in federal court on Oct. 14. Starting that September, they say, coworkers called them "gonorrhea," "maricones" and a slur we are not going to print.

what the lawsuit says happened

They complained. The company moved them to a site in Mattawamkeag but, the suit says, never investigated or disciplined anyone, then assigned them to work alongside some of the same men. That is where the food came out. They also say they were denied meal breaks, bathroom breaks, warm-up breaks in their car and weekend shifts that other workers got.

Around February 2024, Centre Electric fired them both, citing "tardiness, leaving early and disrespectful behavior." The couple says they had never been warned or disciplined for any of it. In June 2026 the EEOC found reasonable cause to believe the company retaliated against them on account of sex by firing them, a finding the complaint lays out. They are suing under federal civil rights law and Maine's human rights and whistleblower laws, and want back pay, damages and civil rights training for the company's managers.

"In the United States, everyone deserves to be treated with dignity at work, no matter who we love," Muchacho told the Bangor Daily News. "We are putting our trust in a jury of Maine people to hear our story and to help us find justice."

Centre Electric, which is based in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, did not respond to the paper's request for comment, and has not yet filed a response in court. Everything above is an allegation until a jury says otherwise. They have asked for one.

Photo: a can of the beer he wanted you to stop drinking. Sarah Stierch (Missvain), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via WIRED and FOX 5 Atlanta

There is a Facebook group called "People Still Waiting for Ultra Right Fight Beer." It has about 400 members, WIRED reports. A recent post reads "I no longer want the beer," and then, after a beat: "just my money back!"

Ultra Right Beer was the 2023 answer to a question nobody gay was asking: what if you could drink a light lager and be mad at Dylan Mulvaney at the same time? Seth Weathers, a Georgia political consultant who, per WIRED, briefly served as Trump's Georgia state director in 2015, launched it that April, at the height of the Bud Light boycott. In his ad he hit a can of Bud Light with a baseball bat and said: "America's been drinking beer from a company that doesn't even know what restroom to use."

Within two weeks he claimed he was closing in on $1 million in sales, at $19.99 a six-pack, per WIRED.

where the beer went

Not to a lot of the people who paid for it, they say. In January 2024 the FOX 5 Atlanta I-Team found the company had an F rating with the Better Business Bureau over orders that never arrived. Weathers told the station his four-person company was overwhelmed. "If someone doesn't want the beer at this time, we'll offer them a refund," he said then.

Two years later the rating is still F, and the BBB says the company has failed to respond to nearly 200 complaints, WIRED reports. Customers who ordered the limited "Fight" six-pack, the one with Trump's raised fist on it, in 2024 say they got neither beer nor refund. One, a New Jersey police officer named Rich Alan, called Weathers a "fraud" and a "scammer." Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr's office has opened an investigation into the company, which has been unresponsive to compliance orders, according to court filings cited by WIRED. We could not see those filings ourselves.

what he says

Weathers did not respond to WIRED. But he did respond, at some point, to a Facebook commenter who called him a "thief": "We do not want you as a customer." He added that he had refunded that person, and then: "I cannot imagine how miserable someone must be to reach your age in life, to spend your time harassing small businesses who have made mistakes but is [sic] out here fighting for the causes you supposedly believe in."

Nothing he is accused of has been proven in court, and no charges have been reported. But for the record: Bud Light is still on the shelf, and it ships.

Photo: Ryan Murphy at Comic-Con in 2010. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Variety, TheWrap, TVLine and the Los Angeles Times

Heather Morris has an explanation for where Brittany S. Pierce has been for the last decade, and honestly it is better than most pilots: "Brittany S Pierce was in fact lost in the sewers for all these years. But I'm here to inform you that she is alive and well," she wrote, and then: "And back for more #Glee."

That was her Instagram caption on Wednesday, per TVLine, a few hours after Disney+ and Hulu gave a series order to a Glee reboot from 20th Television, the studio behind the original. The show's own account confirmed the return with the caption "Currently gleeking out!", the Los Angeles Times reports.

what disney actually announced

Almost nothing, which is very Glee of them. No plot, no production details and no cast, TheWrap reports. Deadline noted that no casting was announced as part of the order. There is no premiere date and no word on whether this is the old glee club grown up or a new batch of kids in Lima, Ohio.

What we do know is that the script exists. Ryan Murphy told Entertainment Tonight in September that he, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, "who wrote all the first two seasons, have written something." He said he had "been in touch with around 10 of the original cast members," who "all were very enthusiastic about the idea."

is lea michele coming back

Reportedly, yes, though the outlets disagree on how far along it is. Variety reported that Michele will return as Rachel Berry, citing multiple sources. TheWrap said she is "in talks." Representatives for Disney and Michele declined TheWrap's request for comment. Chord Overstreet, Sam on the original, posted "Reunited and it feels so good!" on X, which is a vibe and not a contract.

Not everyone is sold. Chris Colfer, who was singing Glee duets with Darren Criss this month, told Bustle on Oct. 6 that "it would be really hard to do it now that Naya [Rivera] is gone," while admitting fans "would probably come after me with pitchforks and jazz hands if I said no." Three members of the original cast have died, and how a reboot handles that is the question nobody at Disney has answered yet.

We will be watching every second of it, and we will be insufferable about it in the group chat. Rachel Berry would want it that way.

Photo: a rural mailbox, for illustration. Dave Bezaire, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, Chron and Covering Katy News

"Even if your family doesn't accept you as you are, groups like these are ready to become your found family." That line is in the brochure, per Covering Katy News and People Newspapers, which both quote it. Another one, according to Covering Katy: "You don't have to convince your parents."

It was mailed to Texas homes, as we reported Tuesday, by a "Texas Transgender Student Union" that turned out to be a Wyoming LLC with a UPS Store mailbox. Every group it named said it had nothing to do with it. This week the paper trail got a little longer.

who tracked the mailers

A mailer ID on two of the brochures was associated with SnailWorks, a Maryland company that tracks political mail, according to a Postal Service employee who looked up the IDs for the Texas Tribune. SnailWorks then confirmed to the Houston Chronicle on Wednesday that it was hired to track the mailers. It would not say who paid.

Here is where it gets interesting. The National Republican Congressional Committee has paid SnailWorks $57,300 for "list rental" over the past two years, the Tribune found in Federal Election Commission filings, and the FEC search turned up no other listed payments to the company. The Chronicle reports the NRCC is the only federal political group to report paying SnailWorks this cycle.

That is not proof of anything, and both sides say so. An NRCC spokesperson told the Tribune the committee had no involvement. A SnailWorks employee told the Chronicle the NRCC is not the client behind these mailers. What we have is a tracking number, a vendor that will not name names, and a list of one.

the republican who asked paxton

State Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican, had already asked Attorney General Ken Paxton to investigate, back when he thought the trans group TENT had sent texts that TENT says it never sent. Now he wants to know who actually did. "I expect a thorough investigation regardless of who is responsible, what their political affiliation may be, or which political interests they seek to advance," he wrote to Paxton, the Chronicle and Chron report. Paxton's office did not respond to the Chronicle.

We would also like to know. We suspect Leach would like to know slightly less than he did last week.

who is paying for it already

Not the sender. OutYouth, the Austin nonprofit the brochure lists, closed its in-person spaces through this week. "We didn't send it, but it has stirred up a lot of strong feelings," it told clients in a text that Chron viewed. "Your safety and wellbeing come first, always, which is why we've decided to close through this week."

"We do not purchase mailing lists or contact young people through unsolicited mail, and no information about the youth and families we serve was involved," executive director Jaryn Holbrook Janeway told Chron. "We are reviewing the matter with legal counsel."

So whoever sent a brochure promising trans kids a found family has, so far, managed to shut the doors of an actual one.

Photo: Enes Kanter Freedom. Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Associated Press, Front Office Sports and the New York Post

Here is a list of things the Atlanta Dream and State Farm Arena gave Enes Kanter Freedom for Game 3 of the WNBA Finals on Wednesday night: a private luxury suite, additional security in that suite, and a state police officer assigned to him personally, at his request.

Here is what he did with them: nothing. He left.

what actually happened in atlanta

Kanter Freedom, the former NBA player now running a one-man campaign against trans women in sports, had announced he would be at Game 3 between the Dream and the Golden State Valkyries. Minutes before tip-off, Front Office Sports reports, the arena and the team put out a statement. It said he "has contacted federal, state and local authorities, the WNBA, the Atlanta Dream and State Farm Arena officials to express concerns about his personal safety," and that after consulting the league, team ownership, arena leadership and security, "we have directed Mr. Freedom to watch tonight's game from a private luxury suite." The suite would have extra security, the statement said, and "State police have also assigned an officer to Mr. Freedom at his request."

He did not want the suite. He wanted the seats he bought. "Just talked to director of security of the @NBA and they are now banning us from our purchased seats," he posted at 7:20 p.m. "I guess they have to escort me out of the building. Stay tuned."

Nobody escorted him anywhere. In his own video, AP reports, he is told at the entry gate, "If you come in you have to agree to go to the suite." He answers: "I purchased tickets, right? Just because I purchased tickets, I would like to sit in my seat. That's all I want." A State Farm Arena spokesperson told AP he "was offered the suite for his safety and he rejected it."

the halftime post

At halftime he posted: "I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for the second time in a row for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA!" The first time was real. In August he was ejected from a Sky game in Chicago after an exchange with Natasha Cloud and banned from that arena. This time, by the accounts of the AP and the Post, he was turned away at the gate after declining the nicer seat.

It capped a week that started with WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert telling a congressman that "only women are eligible to play in the WNBA and the individuals you cite in your letter are both men." He says he wants to enter the WNBA draft. The league answered in one sentence. He answered by asking for a safer seat, getting one, and calling it persecution.

The women, for the record, played the whole game.

Photo: Anderson Cooper. Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Daily Beast, HuffPost and AlterNet

The segment opened on Kramer. Specifically the Seinfeld episode where the DMV hands him a license plate reading ASSMAN, which Anderson Cooper used on Wednesday night to announce that Kramer was "no longer New York's most famous" one, the Daily Beast reports. The title had passed, he said, to an "erstwhile Manhattanite and derriere aficionado."

He meant the president. Cooper closed Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360 by crowning Donald Trump the "assman-in-chief," per HuffPost, and then, like any gay man with a grievance and a producer, he brought receipts.

what trump said about jon husted

The occasion was a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Tuesday, where Trump got back onto his favorite campaign subject, the physique of Ohio Sen. Jon Husted. "I'm studying his body. I've never studied the body of a man before; it's not my thing," Trump said, according to the Daily Beast, which also printed what came next: he said he had looked at Husted's backside. Aaron Rupar posted the clip that night.

The Daily Beast counts Husted's body in four of Trump's rallies this month alone. We have written about the Youngstown one and about Jesse Watters noticing, which at this point is less a news beat than a weekly column.

the supercut

Trump has suggested his fixation on the "senatorial caboose" is a one-off, Cooper said, per the Daily Beast and AlterNet. So CNN rolled the tape: Trump on Georgia's Mike Collins, on Tim Sheehy, on Harrison Butker, on quarterback Jaxson Dart, and on Arnold Palmer in the showers, a 2024 classic. Cooper said Trump wanted MAGA voters to know Husted is "an unmitigated smoke show," and wondered if the senator might be "giving back his key to the locker room at Trump Doral."

Then the closer, which both outlets printed in full: "There's nothing at all unusual, and certainly nothing gay, about a president who dances daily to 'YMCA,' and who publicly pined for a reprise of Betty Buckley in 'Cats.'"

For the record, we agree. A man who brings up another man's glutes at four rallies in one month, dances to the Village People at the end of his rallies and has opinions about the Cats revival is simply a straight man with hobbies. CNN's own account posted the clip after the show, in case anyone at the network was hoping it would go away.

Photo: Iain Armitage in 2026. Adrian machiela, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Us Weekly, Just Jared and PinkNews

Imagine being 18, extremely famous for playing a child genius, and having strangers walk up to you in public to ask, "Yo, you gay?"

That is apparently Iain Armitage's life. In Jessica Radloff's new book about Young Sheldon, which came out Oct. 20, he told her people have assumed he is dating specific people, "like Mckenna [Grace], or people thinking I'm gay," and that "sometimes people will come up to me in public and be like, 'Yo, you gay?' or 'Man, you dating anyone?'"

He has, he said, "a whole myriad of stuff to respond with." Our favorites, as quoted by Us Weekly: "if it's a guy asking if I'm gay, I'll say, 'Not for you.' Or 'I haven't found the right guy yet.'" And for the girlfriend question: "That's private, dude, don't ask that."

Let us be extremely clear, since the headlines this week have not been: he did not tell anyone what his sexuality is. He told them how he deals with people who demand to know. "Not for you" is not a clue. It is the answer, and it is perfect. The guy has been on TV since he was a kid and has figured out, at 18, the thing it takes most of us until 30 and a therapist to learn, which is that a stranger asking is not the same as a stranger being owed.

"I haven't found the right guy yet" is the funniest of the three, and it will be screenshotted out of context by people who should know better. We are choosing to read it as a man who has been asked a rude question so many times he started doing bits.

Photo: Enes Kanter Freedom in 2021. Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via OutKick and the letter itself, as released by Rep. Marlin Stutzman

The answer the internet spent Tuesday screaming about is one sentence long, sitting near the bottom of page one of a letter about fouls and fan conduct.

"With respect to your questions regarding eligibility, only women are eligible to play in the WNBA and the individuals you cite in your letter are both men."

That is WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, writing on Oct. 16 to Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana and four other House Republicans, who had asked her in September to define "women." The individuals are Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, two former NBA players who announced earlier this year that they identify as women and want into the 2027 WNBA draft. We have covered this bit before, and the time Trump gave them a "full pardon" at a rally. It was always a stunt. Freedom has said so, more or less, the whole time.

what the wnba letter says

Not much, which is the point. The lawmakers wanted a definition of "women" under the league's collective bargaining agreement, which says only "players who are women are eligible" and leaves the word undefined, OutKick reports. Engelbert did not give one, and did not announce a new rule. Two paragraphs defend the referees and the fan code of conduct. The letter closes by promising to keep addressing "the significant amount of hate and vitriol directed at WNBA players online and on social media," which reads differently once you know who asked for it.

Freedom's legal team at the America First Policy Institute handed the letter to OutKick, and Stutzman posted it on Tuesday as a win: "The WNBA has just taken the first step in defining what a woman is for the sports community."

and then he got misgendered

Here is where it gets good. Freedom, who is a man, was given the official ruling that he is a man, and was furious about it.

"Cathy Engelbert cannot clearly define what a woman is, but she's absolutely certain that I'm a man," he told OutKick. Asked whether she had misgendered him, he answered, "Yes, 100%." Then: "I just want her to respect my identity because I am telling you that I identify as a woman." His post on X asked, in capitals, whether the WNBA is transphobic. It has 59,000 likes.

Buried in the same interview is the concession that gives the whole game away. OutKick reports that Freedom acknowledged deciding someone's identity and deciding who can play in the women's category "may be different decisions." Correct! That is the distinction a sports league gets to draw, and drawing it about two men doing a bit took Engelbert one sentence. Nobody who is actually trans has to be dragged into it to make that work. Which, to be fair, was never what this was about.

Freedom says it ends the moment the league adds the word "biological." "I will walk to the sunset," he said. "They will not hear from me ever again." We will believe it when we see the sunset.

Photo: Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Supreme Court docket, NBC News and Courthouse News

The whole thing fits in two sentences on the Supreme Court's docket. The administration's application "is denied." And: "Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the application for stay."

That is it. No opinion, no explanation, no dissent anybody bothered to write down. And with it, about 1,000 transgender people in federal prison, by NBC News' count, keep getting the hormone treatment the Bureau of Prisons has spent the last 18 months, across several announcements, trying to take away.

what the court actually did

On Wednesday, Oct. 21, the justices turned down an emergency request from Solicitor General D. John Sauer, filed Sept. 28, to let the Bureau of Prisons enforce its new policy while the lawsuit against it plays out. We wrote about that request when it landed, mostly because of the list attached to it: the policy ends transition surgery and hormone treatment and strips what it calls "social accommodations," which, per NBC, means things like wigs, padding and makeup. Had it gone into effect, mental health services and maybe an antidepressant would have been all that was left.

The order leaves in place an injunction from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, who found the policy's stated reasons were pretextual. "Despite providing gender-affirming care to inmates in its custody for years, the government cites in the Program Statement zero evidence from its own medical or mental health professionals to support its conclusions," he wrote, as NBC reports. Courthouse News puts his finding more bluntly: the 2026 policy was reverse-engineered to carry out Trump's January 2025 executive order. The D.C. Circuit refused to block him in September, 2-1.

the argument that lost

Sauer told the justices that Lamberth was "substituting its own policy judgment for that of the agency." The government also argued that hormone treatment and social accommodations were "not medically necessary" for gender dysphoria, Courthouse News reports. The ACLU's answer was history: the Bureau of Prisons has provided hormone therapy since 1992. Three decades of status quo, ended by a memo.

The lead plaintiffs, Alishea Kingdom, Jas Kapule and Solo Nichols, have each been on hormones for years. "This is a critical ruling for our clients and all transgender people in Bureau of Prisons custody," Li Nowlin-Sohl of the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project said in a statement.

a rare no from this court

Enjoy it, and keep it in proportion. This is the same court that, in June, upheld state bans on trans athletes, and a year before that upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for minors. It let Trump's trans military ban take effect. A brief order on an emergency application is not a ruling on the merits, and the case goes on.

But a majority of this court looked at a plan to confiscate wigs and makeup from roughly 1,000 people and would not let it start. Only two justices said, on the record, that they would have. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito remain, as ever, extremely available.

Photo: Coos Huijsen is sworn in to the Dutch parliament, 1976. Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

via NOS, NRC and NL Times

Coos Huijsen met Lank Bos in the summer of 1973, on tram 24 in Amsterdam, NRC reports. Within three months they were living together. In 1976, when Huijsen took his seat in the Dutch parliament, Bos was there. On Monday morning, when Huijsen died at home in Amsterdam after a short illness, Bos was there too. He was 87.

how coos huijsen came out

Huijsen first entered the Tweede Kamer in 1972 for the Christian Historical Union, a forerunner of today's CDA, and left the party within six months over its refusal to back the Den Uyl government, NOS reports. He had denied rumors that he was gay. In 1976 he came back as an independent to fill a vacant seat, and at that swearing-in, with Bos present, he came out.

The way NL Times tells it, Bos was challenged at the ceremony after explaining he was there as Huijsen's partner, and Huijsen's objection to how Bos was treated became the turning point in his decision to say it publicly. Imagine being the official who asked. Fifty years later you are a footnote in somebody's obituary, and he is the first line.

By his own account and his family's, that made him the first openly gay parliamentarian anywhere in the world. NRC says he did not learn this himself until 2013, when an American political scientist writing a book on LGBTQ politicians called to tell him.

after parliament

He left the Kamer in 1977, joined the PvdA, and went back to teaching history, eventually running the Gerrit van der Veen College in Amsterdam from 1986 to 1998. He became one of the country's best-known commentators on the House of Orange, earned a doctorate on it, and co-founded Het Blauwe Fonds, which funds LGBTQ emancipation projects, in 2007. His memoir, Homo Politicus, came out in 2016, and an updated edition, Roze Draad (Pink Thread), arrived this year, half a century after the swearing-in.

NRC writes that in recent years he worried about acceptance of gay people slipping. The pink thread, it turns out, ran a long way, and he held the end of it.

via Swarthmore College, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Swarthmore College Bulletin

"If English is not your native language, you can write in any language you want, because I know nine."

That is how T. Kaori Kitao opened her classes at Swarthmore College, according to the college. She taught there for 35 years, from 1966 to 2001, and in 1971 she became something the college had never had: an openly transgender professor. She died on Sept. 21 in New York City. She was 93.

who kaori kitao was

She was born in Tokyo in 1933, grew up there through World War II, and came to the United States in 1952, the Inquirer reports. After degrees in architecture and art history at Berkeley and a Harvard doctorate, she arrived at Swarthmore having just finished a dissertation on Bernini that became Circle and Oval in the Square of Saint Peter's (1974), which the college calls the definitive work on the landmark. She taught the Renaissance and the Baroque, Japanese architecture, the history of cinema, and a course she invented called Everyday Things. The student art gallery has carried her name since 2001.

"Most of all, she taught students how to see," said Brian Goldstein, who chairs the department. A colleague, Tomoko Sakomura, remembered "joy, whimsy, and her razor-sharp wit."

regaining her rightful womanhood

In a 2017 blog post quoted by the college's alumni magazine, she put it with an architect's love of symmetry: "I assumed a male identity until 1971, when I regained my rightful womanhood; I was 38 then." In the same post she noted that she and her wife, the fiber artist Tokiko Kitao, had been together 38 years, "19 twice," until Tokiko's death in 1995.

Alumni told the magazine that word got around campus the day the painter Robert Motherwell came to lecture, and thanked "Madame Chairman" after her introduction. "That sealed it publicly," one said. She never wanted the activist label. "I have never been a trans activist," she wrote to a former student. Her conviction, she said, was simply "being what I am."

She ran the numbers once more in that 2017 post. If she lived until 2033, she wrote, she would turn 100. "Cool." She got to 93, which is still a very good number. She is survived by her son, Giulio, and her interment was set for Oct. 17 at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.