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This article talks about how cross-cutting discrimination existed within the community, but also how they came to together not only to help each other but for progress.

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Gay Times, a monthly magazine-subscription based in London, was first established in 1975 and has, since then, used daily updates for the whole of the LGBTQ+ community, including content regarding pop culture (films, television programs, music, singers and artists) along with endorsing a variety of social media platforms.

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The article talks about how the U.S. has become anti-lgbtq, especially after the Covid-era. Such as Florida passing the "don't say gay" law.

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In 2019, the Atlantic ran an opinion piece titled "The struggle for gay rights is over". Written by the rightwing academic James Kirchick, the piece was obviously meant as a provocation, but its argument that "for those born into a form of adversity, sometimes the hardest thing to do is admitting that they've won" was at least considered cogent enough at the time to publish.

It came towards the end of a slew of political victories for the LGBTQ+ cause. At that time, it seemed as though the US supreme court would hand down a landmark ruling immediately before Pride Weekend every couple of years. The demise of the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 was followed by the end of the federal ban on marriage equality in 2015. Widespread acceptance of same-sex marriage rights, gay people serving in the military and the need for protections for LGBTQ+ people followed. As recently as 2020, the court, then with two Trump appointees, ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protected gay, lesbian and transgender workers. For all the terrible crises of our century, LGBTQ+ people's rights were solidly enshrined, and attitudes were shifting in line with legislation. In 1985, 89% of parents said they would be sad if they discovered their child was gay or a lesbian. By 2015, it was down to 39%.

Yet in the past few months, those victories have come under threat as the US has witnessed a pronounced acceleration of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation, fueled chiefly by misinformation about what it means to be trans and hysteria over so-called grooming. A rash of laws concerning the teaching of human sexuality in school curricula, banning trans student athletes and stripping parents of the right to help their gender-variant children obtain appropriate care have popped up in numerous red states this year.

As same-sex marriage is now part of the fabric of America, conservatives have chosen to exploit Americans' unfamiliarity with trans people and piggyback on parental anger over the perceived overreach of Covid-era school closures, conflating it with an insidious sense of "wokeness", in the hopes of finding an electorally viable sluiceway for anti-LGBTQ+ hysteria.

The most famous of these anti-LGBTQ+ laws is the piece of Florida legislation banning instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in schools between kindergarten and third grade, the so-called "don't say gay" law.

"A state hasn't passed a law like this in more than 20 years," said Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and a trans man. "Like many other people, I thought there was no way they would, because it's so draconian and obviously unconstitutional."

Laying groundwork for a potential 2024 presidential campaign, Florida's Trump-like governor, Ron DeSantis, has positioned the state as the last stronghold of liberty in America. The governor and his supporters have labeled as a "groomer" anyone who believes children can learn LGBTQ+ people exist, arguing that simply by talking about gay relationships to a child, you are sexualizing that child. DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Pushaw, for example tweeted: "If you're against the Anti-Grooming bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don't denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children."

To be gay, in their view, is to be inherently sexualized, a threat to innocence in a way that straight Americans are not.

Such vehemence has caught even veteran LGBTQ+ advocates by surprise. "At first, it was like 2015 again, with the bathroom bills, and I thought, 'There'll be a little pressure from national orgs and it'll stop,' but it didn't," says Ada-Rhodes Short, a roboticist and trans rights activist. "It started escalating and escalating."

For her, the catalyst was when Texas Republicans such as Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, the governor and attorney general, not only banned gender-affirming medical care for trans youth but reframed their parents as child abusers,Paxton signing a 13-page legal opinion that parents or doctors who helped children transition were abusers who should be investigated by law enforcement. He was followed by Arizona's governor, Doug Ducey, who, after barring minors from gender-affirmation treatment, wouldn't even state for the record that trans people were real.

Politicians are supported in the media by commentators like Tucker Carlson, who claimed "no one had heard of this trans thing four years ago", or Charlie Kirk, channeling 1980s fears in saying "gays want to corrupt your children".

Newly rejuvenated, the right wing is poised to make transphobia and homophobia cornerstones of the midterms and 2024 elections, with promises to deliver "don't say gay" legislation in states including Michigan and New York.

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobbying group, inveighed against the governors of Indiana and Utah for vetoing legislation banning trans women from participating in sports, calling the bills "timely, mainstream protections". The Republican US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene vowed to introduce a federal "don't say gay" bill if Republicans win the House this November, only to one-up herself days later by tweeting that for people to be pro-trans is to be pro-pedophilia. The dynamic is one of perpetual ratcheting-up.

What began in Florida could spread nearly everywhere.

Convinced that "there's a culture shift happening and we need to be focused on survival", Rhodes-Short and a dozen others co-founded Tear It Up. Modeled on Act Up, the organization that staged die-ins and other aggressive tactics to draw attention to the lack of funding for HIV/Aids, it is simultaneously confrontational and focused on mutual aid.

"While we are under a huge attack, we can see what's coming in November and the spring and we need to prepare for the next fight. People are running on insane nonsense, like trans people should face a firing squad," says Rhodes-Short, referring to to Robert Foster, a former Mississippi lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate who said that anyone "advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad".

Republican-dominated state legislatures have even begun bringing back North Carolina-style "bathroom bills" mandating that people use the facilities that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth.

"That started to supercharge this issue," says Alejandra Caraballo, an attorney and instructor at Harvard University's Cyberlaw Clinic. "That's what DeSantis ran with. It's the new tactic du jour. You saw Tucker Carlson saying that Disney supports the chemical castration and sexual grooming of children - stuff you would have heard two years ago and thought it was off the wall. Now it's going to an audience of 4 million."

The business-friendly wing of the GOP that would quietly team up with Democrats to scuttle rabidly homophobic bills is now outnumbered, and legislators in a dozen or more states that lean even farther to the right than DeSantis are taking note.

Minter, the National Center for Lesbian Rights legal director, believes Florida is the test case for a renewed push for an aggressive, Christian-nationalist program.

"That's why it's important that Disney has dramatically stepped up," Minter says, referring to its initially uneven but increasingly vocal opposition to Florida's new law. "The GOP is in an internal battle between the moderate, center-right legislators who have historically controlled the party and a very extreme Trumpian right wing that poses a threat not just to the Republican party but to our democracy," he says. "We're seeing that play out in real life. LGBTQ+ people and women and people of color are the primary targets."

The "don't say gay" bill, Minter notes, is very similar to what's been passed in Russia, tethering American conservatives to their authoritarian counterparts who have successfully rolled back democratic norms across eastern Europe.

"There is a worldwide authoritarian resurgence and our country is not immune from that," Minter says.

"I've seen this movie before over the last 30 years: The right wing decided to target the LGBTQ community, whether it's around marriage or adoption or trans kids playing sports or bathrooms," says the California state senator Scott Wiener, who is gay. "One state does something, and then they all start proposing it."

Wiener introduced legislation to explicitly make California a refuge for families who may no longer feel that they can raise a queer or trans child in states such as Texas.

"I thought it was really important to push back on the policy level, and to send a clear signal that California and other states really care about these kids," he says.

He believes that "don't say gay" is "patently unconstitutional" but also contends that relying on the judicial system to protect human rights may no longer be a sound option.

"Once the court lawlessly allowed that Texas abortion law to stay in place, that sent a powerful signal that we can't rely on the courts," Wiener said. "We have to rely on the political process."

But even that process has limits. Bella Blue, a burlesque dancer in New Orleans who is a pansexual, queer cis woman, homeschools a teenager whose stepfather is a trans man. Her child is "very aware" of the full spectrum of human sexuality, she says, but "he himself has not kind of landed" on a firm identity.

"I guarantee you when they're writing these bills, they're not asking how the kids feel," she says. "The only thing you can do is remember they're going to turn out to be whoever they are."

The urge to legislate the diversity of human experience so it conforms with the Christian-nationalist project Minter points to seems certain to intensify. Although the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't change the ideological balance of the supreme court, Republican senators' opposition to her consisted mainly of conjuring up a nonexistent sympathy for child abuse images, tying her to the QAnon-led tropes about satanic child trafficking that seem ever closer to Republican orthodoxy.

Indeed, conservatives' messaging heading into 2024 feels like a hypercharged version of the eternal paranoia that America's very existence is forever on the cusp of annihilation at the hands of liberals, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people. The far-right One America Network recently called Joe Biden the "groomer-in-chief", alleging that Democrats are now the party of perversion, gender "mutilation" and an end to human reproduction itself.

This renewed movement, channeling itself through overheated rhetoric about "parents' rights" that first gained traction during discussions of students masking up, now threatens to undo much of the progress America has made on LGBTQ+ rights over the last 15 years.

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After years of progress on gay rights, how did the US become so anti-LGBTQ+?

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A slew of bills are rolling back recently won freedoms for gay people. Is America ready to fight for LGBTQ+ rights all over again?

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Strangers who are apart of the LGBTQ+ community write their secrets and others read them. It gives an inside view of how others live with fear of not being accepted, to the point that they could be killed. Along how they have to hide their true self because of how the world might see them.

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Documentary talks about how the community found their safe place at the Stonewall Inn. Including how the riots made a turning point in the lgbtq+ rights movement.

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Stonewall Forever - A Documentary about the Past, Present and Future of Pride

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The history of lgbtq+ community and how through out the years more representation was shown. Along with the community creating safe places and starting to demand rights, creating movements.

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A Living History of the LGBT Movement Since The 1800s

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Adapted from the graphic novel of the same series by English author Alice Oseman (she/they), Heartstopper follows the story of Charlie Spring, a 15-year-old boy who had just recently been outed. The show focuses on not only the struggles of Charlie spring, but the struggles of his friends as well. Whether it be about their sexuality, gender identity, relationships, or all of the above. The show itself gives good insight of the lives of those who are apart of the lgbtq+ community.

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'It's A Sin' a British miniseries streaming on HBO Max, created by Russell T. Davies (who himself is a part of the LGBT community), follows the lives of four gay men, Ritchie Tozer (played by Years & Years lead vocalist, Olly Alexander, an openly gay man), Roscoe Babatunde (played by Omari Douglas), Colin "Gladys Pugh" Morris-Jones (played by Callum Scott Howells), and Ash Mukherjee (played by Nathaniel Curtis) as they move to London at the beginning of the 1980s' AIDS crisis.

The show follows their journey of what it means to love people, to have healthy tight-knit friendships, and explores what it is like to grieve, mourn, and deal with the death of those you are close to.

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Born as Dorthy Miranda Clark, Dodie is an English indie-artist who wrote their song "She" which talks about a girl having feelings for another girl, but knows that those same feelings wouldn't be returned.

She is an openly bisexual person, who also uses the pronouns she/her as well as they/them (combining together as she/they).

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A show about a boy’s life with autism and his struggles, but shows other forms of representation as well. Like his sister, Casey,  who is figuring out her sexuality. The character is played by Brigette Lundy-Paine, who is a part of the lgbtq+ community themselves.

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Born as Reginald Kenneth Dwight on March 25, 1947, Elton John is known for his impact on the music industry in the 1970s as well as for his flamboyant stage presence, with wild and colorful costumes.

Similarly to Freddie Mercury, whom he had met and became friends with, over the course of his lifetime, he too had been in relationships with both men and women, most of them ending abruptly. In 1976, John had publically came out as bisexual during an interview with the Rolling Stones though through the years following this when he had explored and became comfortable with his self-identity, in 1992 during another interview with the Rolling Stones, had admitted that he felt it more fitting for his sexuality to be gay; from 1993 to present-day, Elton John has been in a relationship with an advertising executive, David Furnish, who he had two young boys with in 2010 and 2013 through surrogacy, before becoming married on December 21, 2014.

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On June 26, 2015, a monumental piece of history took place. The U.S. Supreme Court took down state bans on same-sex marriage, making it legal in all fifty states.

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Born as Farrokh Bulsara on September 5, 1946, Freddie Mercury is known as the songwriter and frontman of the British rock band Queen, who created beloved songs such as "Killer Queen", Bohemian Rhapsody", "Somebody to love", "We Are The Champions", "I Want to Break Free", and more.

Despite Mercury having been in relationships with both men and women, his sexuality has always been something that has been speculated; with many people claiming that he was bisexual because of his attraction to both males and females while others considered that he might have been gay because of how he presented himself when in concert. However, Mercury himself had never confirmed what his sexual orientation was, which is his choice -- one that is completely valid.

He was what he was, simply because he didn't have a label didn't make him any less than, he was still a part of the LGBTQ+ community and continues to serve as one of the most popular icons for it.

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During the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic had made itself known, the minority that was heavily affected being gay and bisexual men, the ACT UP was created in late 1987 by a group of activists protesting against the ignorance of the president during that time, Ronald Reagan, who treated this crisis as a joke, labeling it as a "gay plague" and not taking responsibility in his own hands to help slow the contraction of HIV which can then become AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) or to even find a possible cure for the disease which was killing thousands of people.

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October 14, 1979, the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay rights, took place with an estimate of 200,000 people attending.

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1979 nation march for lesbian and gay rights

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With the history of 'homosexual acts' being illegal in all states during the 20th century, in the hot summer months of June and July, 1969, police officers had gone in and raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village, New York, well-known as a secret haven for the city's gay, lesbian, and transgender people. As these people of the LGBTQ+ community grew tiresome of the constant assaults, this evening, they had stood up for themselves and their rights, and resisted, fighting back police force.

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The movie talks about Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay man who had been voted into America's major public office. He is seen as someone who changed the meaning of what's a fighter for human rights. His victory was for gay rights and the forged coalitions across the political system.

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Members of Mattachine Society, who participated in the "sip-in" of 1966. They challenged bars who refuse to serve open members of the LGBTQ+ community.

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“Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece” by Paul Cadmus (1939-1940)

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“Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece” by Paul Cadmus (1939-1940)

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Important Events That Helped Shape The Movement

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Important Events That Helped Shape The Movement

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"Two Dancing Men" by Robert Mapplethorpe (1984)

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"Two Dancing Men" by Robert Mapplethorpe (1984)

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz 

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz 

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Published on February 21, 2012, this novel follows the story of Aristotle 'Ari' Mendoza, a cynical and bitter 15-year-old boy who meets and befriends Dante Quintana, a friendly, outgoing, and confident boy in the local pool one summer. The novel focuses in on the topics of Mexican-American identity, gender roles, homosexuality, friendship and family dynamics.

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We Are Everywhere by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown

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We Are Everywhere by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown

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Published in 2019, this novel covers the power, protests, and pride that led to the LGBTQ+ community's firm sense of unity and strength it has today.

This book records the distinct movements / events in U.S. History that shaped the LGBTQ+ community today, highlighting photographs that had been taken at the time of the event (i.e. people fighting for the Stonewall Inn parade, people, the front headlines of newspapers during the 1980s AIDS epidemic and photographs of the people protesting against the decisions of the president to avoid helping them, etc.)

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Published on June 4, 2019, this novel takes place during the peak of the AIDS crisis in New York City, 1989. Reza (the protagonist) is adjusting to his new life as an immigrant, but is afraid that others might find out he is gay and not accept him before he can even come to terms with accepting himself. This story combines both the history of the lgbtq+ with teenage romance.