Blythe del Kuzio

These LGBTQ heroes stood up for our rights, helped their communities, and inspired us to be our best selves. These politicians, authors, activists, and everyday people made the world a better place for LGBTQ people and everyone else. Through visibility, policy, standing up to bigotry, and sheer pride in who they are, these nominees inspire us all and prove that, for LGBTQ people, the sky is the limit. This year’s LGBTQ Nation Hero of the Year nominees are Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider , who demonstrated she’s “just a normal person like we all are,” except really smart ;  White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre , the first out LGBTQ person to be the face of the White House; Jo Acker , a security guard who gave her life to defend others; teen activists who stood up against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill who we’re calling The Say Gay Teens ; and whose music and video art brought gay culture to mainstream audiences; and George M. Johnson , one of the most banned authors of t...

source https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/08/show-wont-stop-swing-vote-election-day/

Dozens attended a New Jersey school board meeting to denounce the reinstatement of Neptune Middle School’s former Vice Principal Michael Smurro. A viral video recorded by patrons shows Michael Smurro and his wife, Lisa, at the outside seating area of a local restaurant as Lisa Smurro ranted loudly about a transgender woman who used the bathroom. When the Smurros realize that someone at a different table was recording them, they get up to confront that person, while Lisa Smurro continued to rant about the trans woman. “Please take your hate elsewhere,” the patron who is recording them said.  Michael Smurro then threw his beer at the woman . The video of the confrontation quickly garnered national media attention. The recording raised questions about what happened that day, particularly, whether or not Mr. Smurro engaged in transphobic behavior himself. Smurro quoted the transphobic slur of the unidentified woman his wife used when explaining the incident to District Superintend...

Some New York grocery stores have begun requiring people to show ID to buy cans of whipped cream because lawmakers were worried about kids getting high. Stores near the state’s capitol began forbidding kids from buying the popular dessert topping after a law went into effect banning the sale of nitrous oxide canisters to people under the age of 21, The Times Union reported. Nitrous oxide, the gas used to pressurize whipped cream cans, can also be inhaled for a temporary (and possibly dangerous) disorientating effect. “Sadly, young people buy and inhale this gas to get ‘high’ because they mistakenly believe it is a ‘safe’ substance,” the law’s legislative author, state Sen. Joseph Addabbo (D) said when first introducing the measure. “This law will eliminate easy access to this dangerous substance for our youth.” Numerous area grocery stores began putting up signs alerting shoppers that they’d need to show ID to purchase whipped cream, the same way as is required for cigarettes an...

Brian Kilmeade, the Fox & Friends co-host, stumbled over an attack on White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday with — a touch of irony. Holding forth on what Kilmeade described as a garbled response the press sec gave to his Fox colleague Peter Doocy at a White House briefing Monday, Kilmeade tried to tie Jean-Pierre’s way with words to her boss’s occasional and well-known struggles with public speaking. Biden famously overcame a stutter in childhood. Droning on autopilot about her answer to Doocy, Kilmeade hit turbulence: “Just like her boss, KG Pay… KG P —  doesn’t have the best way with words.” Given the script, it was a delicious slip-up. And Twitter ate it up. It’s just the latest fumble from Kilmeade. In August, the host peddled a meme that showed magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who signed the Mar-a-Lago search warrant, as a guest on pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet; it showed Reinhart getting a foot massage from convicted sex-traffi...

The United Nations’ independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity says he is “ deeply alarmed ” by the state of LGBTQ equality in the U.S. At a Tuesday press briefing following a 10-day trip to the U.S., Victor Madrigal-Borloz warned that progress made over the course of previous decades is being undermined at both the state and federal level. “Despite five decades of progress, equality is not within reach, and often not even within sight,” Madrigal-Borloz said. During the trip, Madrigal-Borloz visited Washington DC, Miami, San Diego, and Birmingham, Alabama, and met with representatives from federal, state, and local governments, representatives from civil society organizations, LGBTQ people, and authorities at a detention center holding asylum seekers, according to a United Nations release . “I am deeply alarmed by a widespread, profoundly negative riptide created by deliberate actions to roll back the human rights of LGBT people at state level,” he said. “The ev...

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has revealed that he was the target of a death threat and the perpetrator claimed to be a gay conservative. “A staffer of mine — who’s 1 month into her job — received a call from a man saying he’s coming to our office w/ an assault rifle to kill me,” Swalwell tweeted Tuesday. “I hesitate to share this but how else do I tell you we are in violent times, & the architects are Trump & [House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.” The caller ranted about “gay issues” according to a memo filed after the incident and “said he is a gay man, but he doesn’t take it up the ass he gives it.” The man “used the F slur several times” to describe other gay men. The man “also made a statement saying he will come to the office, or to wherever he is to hurt him. He will bring guns (AR-15s) to kill him and f*ck him up” according to the memo Swalwell shared online. The report says that the man willingly gave his name and the staffer was able to record ...

Anti-LGBTQ users on 4chan targeted the Trevor Projects suicide prevention services on Tuesday in an effort to prevent LGBTQ youth from getting help. In a post on the notorious platform’s “Politically Incorrect” imageboard, an anonymous user posted a plan to bog down the nonprofit organization’s crisis hotline and online chats with fake requests for help. The goal was to “f**k up the queue so sodomites and f*gs commit suicide,” to “demoralize the therapists,” and “waste as much of their resources as possible.” According to The Daily Dot , the original thread appears to have been deleted, but it’s unclear whether it was removed by 4chan or the original poster. A second thread has been archived and was still visible on the site as of Tuesday evening. Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at progressive media watchdog org Media Matters for America, posted screenshots of the original post and responses from trolls sharing screenshots of their chats with Trevor Project councilors. Users o...

Far right pundit Ben Shapiro was mocked online for claiming that lesbians aren’t qualified to be astronauts and that NASA hiring lesbians is “like a bad pornography.” Earlier this week, NASA announced that the launch of Artemis I — a mission to put an uncrewed space capsule into the moon’s orbit — was going to be delayed until next week. It was originally scheduled to launch on August 29 but was delayed until September 5 due to some technical problems. It has been delayed again until September 6 due to bad weather forecasts for September 5. While for most people this is, at most, a sign of how cautious NASA is when it comes to major launches that take years of study, manufacturing, and planning, Shapiro of The Daily Wire thinks he understands the true problem: there are too many lesbians at NASA now that Joe Biden is president. “According to CNN, the launch of NASA’s historic Artemis I moon mission has been postponed after the team was unable to work through an issue with one of t...

Country music stars have clapped back to transphobic comments made by Brittany Kerr Aldean, a beauty lifestyle influencer married to Grammy-nominated country music artist Jason Aldean. In an August 24 video shared with her 2.2 million Instagram followers, Brittany Kerr Aldean wrote, “I’d really like to thank my parents for not changing my gender when I went through my tomboy phase. I love this girly life.” The accompanying video showed a before-and-after of her in makeup, hairdo, and sparkling blouse. Her husband commented on her post with a laughing emoji, writing, “Lmao!! I’m glad they didn’t too, cause you and I wouldn’t have worked out.” Moreover, trans kids aren’t just going through a “tomboy phase.” Trans kids often self-identify as another gender “persistently, insistently, and consistently” for years early in their youth . Brittany Kerr Aldean’s comment ignorantly parrots the right-wing claim that trans kids only exist because adults coercively “change” their gender identi...

In a major advance for LGBTQ rights in the Caribbean, a court for Saint Kitts and Nevis struck down a colonial-era law that banned the “abominable” crime of “buggery”. The Offenses Against the Person Act , imported from England with the colonization of the island nation, criminalized “unnatural offenses” and carried a maximum penalty of 10 years with hard labor. The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court struck down two offending sections of the act. One read: “Any person who is convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or with any animal, shall be liable to be imprisoned for a term not exceeding ten years, with or without hard labor.” Former British colonies Barbados, Dominica, Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines retain similar laws. Judge Trevor Ward wrote in the decision: “The absolute nature of the prohibition created by sections 56 and 57 are not reasonably justified in a democratic society in circumstances where...

A video posted this month by the far-right anti-LGBTQ Libs of TikTok Twitter account has since spread among anti-LGBTQ Russian and European disinformation networks, effectively furthering the anti-queer agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The account’s founder has pledged to do even more to threaten LGBTQ lives in the future. On August 10, Libs of TikTok’s founder Chaya Raichik posted a video of a therapist who works with jailed sex offenders. In the video, the therapist announces their pronouns and advises people to use the term “minor-attracted persons” (MAPs) rather than “pedophiles.” They said the latter term has “moved from being a diagnostic label to being a judgmental, hurtful insult that we hurl at people in order to harm them or slander them.” Indeed, the Libs of TikTok account itself has regularly accused pro-LGBTQ teachers of being “groomers” and has called the youth anti-suicide organization The Trevor Project a “ grooming organization. ” Grooming is a term for g...

In a major victory for religious freedom advocates and a defeat for LGBTQ rights, a three-judge panel in California reinstated a public school club in San Jose that denied membership to LGBTQ students based on a “Sexual Purity” pledge. On Monday, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes was ordered reinstated for the current school year while litigation continued in a lower court. Writing for the majority, Trump appointee Judge Kenneth Kiyul Lee of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the case represented “two competing values that we cherish as a nation: the principle of non-discrimination on the one hand, and the First Amendment’s protection of free exercise of religion and free speech on the other hand.” Non-discrimination lost. The case emerged from an all-school controversy in 2019, when a teacher at Pioneer High School in San Jose asked students what they thought about the Christian club’s “Sexual Purity” pledge, which according to court records states: “The Bible teaches ...

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has just released a new book about a female celebrity who is publicly called out for her transphobic views. No, it’s not an autobiography. It’s  The Ink Black Heart,  the sixth installment of the Cormoran Strike crime thriller series, written under Rowling’s male pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Though Rowling swears the book isn’t about her, online commenters seriously doubt it, and the book’s reviewers have been unimpressed at best. In the book, a woman named Edie Ledwell is the co-creator of a popular YouTube cartoon called The Ink Black Heart . Ledwell starts being harassed by her own fans, internet trolls, and an online figure known only as Anomie when her cartoon is criticized as “racist and ableist, as well as transphobic for a bit about a hermaphrodite worm,” according to Rolling Stone magazine . Ledwell’s home address is then leaked online (something that happened to Rowling ), she receives rape and death threats (which also hap...

Television has seen its fair share of reality dance shows – So You Think You Can Dance is in its 17th season while Dancing With the Stars is in its 30th. TV’s newest offering in the reality dance genre is Come Dance With Me , which is garnering buzz thanks to plus-size model and queer judge Dexter Mayfield. But just who is this loud, proud, and eccentric addition to the panel of Come Dance With Me judges? This article will tell you everything you need to know about Dexter Mayfield. Related: 5 Ways Gay Men Can Promote Body Positivity Besides Blocking Instagram “Thirst Traps”   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Dexter Mayfield (@dexrated) What Is Come Dance With Me? Come Dance With Me is a reality TV show that features young dancers-in-training who pair up with untrained family members to compete for a prize of $100,000. Pairs will learn new routines that adhere to a specific dance style each week, with the low...