Intro text
www.facebook.com/notdeanquietfrankly/posts/pfbid0ZuQVU3KpQeS24qiK8oytsnSVzGp5sHKaWUzz1fCBW7ciUvUL…Something historic is happening in men’s professional tennis in 2026: João Lucas Reis da Silva and Mika Brunold are competing openly as gay athletes at the same time. Brazilian player Reis da Silva became the first active male professional tennis player to publicly come out in 2024, while Swiss player Brunold followed in 2025. Their presence comes as the U.S. Open celebrates Pride, bringing LGBTQ+ players, fans and supporters into the spotlight.
Both athletes are continuing to compete and build their careers on the professional circuit, showing that being openly gay does not have to stand in the way of reaching the highest levels of the sport. Reis da Silva has already made history by becoming the first openly gay man to compete in an ATP main-draw match, while Brunold has spoken openly about the importance of authenticity and greater LGBTQ+ visibility in sports.
For much of tennis history, openly gay men were extremely rare in professional competition, with many athletes feeling pressure to keep their identities private. Today, seeing Reis da Silva and Brunold compete openly gives younger players something that was largely missing before: the chance to see a gay man on the court and know that being yourself and pursuing your biggest dreams can exist together. 🎾🏳️🌈
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National Suicide Prevention Week is an annual week-long campaign to inform and engage health professionals and the general public about suicide prevention.
Follow our friends at @TheTrevorProject, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit organization for LGBTQ young people. The Trevor Project provides information and support to LGBTQ young people 24/7, all year round.
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www.facebook.com/LABRUCE3000/posts/pfbid0Cw8djhChKNnRqE4nfhyMqff96TfJaR1T7MJsHpGWPwH6xq7z2b5pYzKw…
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www.facebook.com/AbsoluteRadio/posts/pfbid0gFLHq87EZngqngPNLQ5xC2TPa1SsmERWRgoVSvnA65trQfY8Vf4P1r…Pet Shop Boys have announced a concept album called ‘A man from the future’ honouring English mathematician, computer scientist and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing.
Released on Friday 9th October, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe collaborated with acclaimed Alan Turing biographer Andrew Hodges on the record.
Produced by Pet Shop Boys and German composer Sven Helbig, each of the eight songs on ‘A man from the future’ explores a significant chapter in the life and death of Alan Turing.
Pet Shop Boys say: “Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality.
“Alan made a massive contribution to the defeat of Germany in World War II and was a pioneer of computing, imagining a world with intelligent computers. He also looked forward to a time when being gay would be accepted as normal. In both his professional and private lives, he was ahead of his time.”
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The late feminist icon spent her later years using her voice for transgender rights.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2LryW
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State Supreme Court says dad can stop mom from bringing child to “harmful” anti-LGBTQ+ church
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Ghana’s Anglican Primate Once Supported Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation. Now He Says Gay People Should Not Be Criminalised. 🏳️🌈
Archbishop Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith, Primate of the Church of the Province of West Africa, has spoken out against the criminalisation of Gay people as Ghana’s Parliament pushes a sweeping new anti-LGBTQ+ bill.
Speaking to the BBC, he said: “Our point in our province is very clear: we do not support the criminalisation of gay persons.”
He added that LGBTQ+ people are “all children of God” and that “God loves them.”
The Church still holds its traditional position on same-sex relationships, but Ben-Smith is drawing a clear line between religious teaching and criminalising people for being Gay.
Ghana’s Parliament passed the bill in May. It would impose prison sentences of up to five years for the “willful promotion, sponsorship or support” of LGBTQ+ activities. It has not yet become law.
After previously supporting criminalisation, one of West Africa’s most senior Anglican leaders is now saying clearly: being Gay should not be a crime. 💛
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On 1 September 1969, West Germany partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men.
Instead of repealing the harsh Paragraph 175 of its penal code, the country reformed it, making it legal for s*xual acts to occur between men so long as they were both over the age of 21.
However, penalties remained in place for s*xual acts performed by those under 21 and same-sex pr*stitution.
The move was a huge step for West Germany, which – between 1945 and 1969 – had convicted around 50,000 men for homosexuality.
📷 Getty
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Someone should tell Republicans that while the Roman Empire was pretty queer, according to historians, that wasn’t what caused its fall.
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Bishop Ramón Bejarano has made headlines for his embrace of the LGBTQ+ community.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2qdXm
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Poland begins recognizing foreign same-sex marriages after court rulings reshape legal treatment 🇵🇱⚖️💍🏳️🌈📄 👉 bit.ly/4iJAQ7E
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In 1778, two Irish women put on men’s clothing, walked out of their lives, and never looked back.
Eleanor Butler was 39. Sarah Ponsonby was 23. Both came from Anglo-Irish gentry families. Both faced the same future their class prescribed: an arranged marriage, a husband’s household, and whatever happiness they could manufacture inside those walls. Eleanor had already refused two marriage proposals. Sarah was living as a ward in a household where the man of the house had been making unwanted advances. They had been close friends for years. In February 1778, they decided they were done.
They dressed in men’s clothing, took a pistol, and tried to leave together. Sarah’s family caught them before they got far. They were brought back, separated, and lectured. Their families assumed the scheme would collapse without each other’s encouragement.
It didn’t.
Two months later, they tried again. This time they made it. They crossed to Wales, settled in a small cottage in the village of Llangollen in northern Wales, and spent the next 50 years there together.
They called their home Plas Newydd, meaning New Place, and they transformed it obsessively over the decades, adding Gothic woodwork, stained glass, and formal gardens until the cottage became something between a showpiece and a sanctuary. They read together every morning, walked the grounds every afternoon, and kept a detailed shared journal. They wore men’s riding clothes as their daily dress, kept their hair cropped short, and built a life entirely on their own terms.
Georgian society didn’t quite know what to make of them. They became famous for it. Visitors made the trip to Llangollen specifically to see them: William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington, Edmund Burke. The women they called “the Ladies of Llangollen” were celebrated as romantic idealists, two souls devoted to friendship and literature and rural simplicity. A 1790 newspaper item suggested the relationship was sexual. Butler and Ponsonby were furious. They sued for libel and won.
The question of what to call their relationship is one historians still argue about. They shared a bed for 50 years. Their letters describe each other in terms that go well past friendship. Whether they understood themselves as what we’d now call a lesbian couple is unanswerable, but the life they built together was unambiguous. They chose each other over everything their families and their class had mapped out for them, twice, and then spent half a century making good on that choice.
Eleanor Butler died in 1829. Sarah Ponsonby survived her by two years. They are buried together in the churchyard of St. Collen’s in Llangollen.
The cottage is still there.
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The documentary Hunky Jesus spotlights the surprising, subversive, and saintly history of the queer radical organization.
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Three intelligence veterans say the agency’s dismantling of LGBTQ+ programs threatens national security and reverses decades of hard-won progress.
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Before the British arrived, the Māori had a word for it. They had a word because they needed one. Same-sex relationships weren’t a scandal in pre-colonial Aotearoa. They were part of life.
The word was takatāpui. Missionary William Williams defined it in his 1844 Dictionary of the Maori Language as “an intimate companion of the same sex.” Williams was trying to document the language. He ended up documenting the culture, too.
Takatāpui appear in traditional waiata, in chants, in carvings. The evidence was everywhere. Scholar Elizabeth Kerekere, who spent five years researching her doctoral thesis on the subject, put it plainly: before colonization, takatāpui were simply “part of the whānau.”
You can see it in one of New Zealand’s oldest love stories. In chief Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke’s telling of the tale of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai, when Tūtānekai marries Hinemoa, he mourns the loss of his intimate relationship with a man named Tiki, his hoa takatāpui. The story wasn’t considered shocking. It was just the story.
Then the missionaries came.
The earliest European colonists in New Zealand were Christians, and they brought their theology with them. Same-sex relationships became sinful by decree. Pre-colonial Māori carvings depicting sexual diversity were destroyed or mutilated. Some were shipped to European museums as curiosities. The colonial project didn’t just take land. It took language, rewrote culture, and tried to erase the people who didn’t fit the new moral order.
The British didn’t stop at theology. When New Zealand became a British colony in 1840, British law came with it, making same-sex acts a capital offense. The Criminal Code Act of 1893 went further, outlawing all sexual activity between men, with penalties including imprisonment, hard labor, and flogging. Men convicted of sodomy faced a minimum of 10 years. That law stayed on the books, in various forms, until 1986.
The erasure went beyond the law. Translators in the late 1800s went back through traditional songs and quietly changed the words. A lament for a young man named Papaka Te Naeroa originally described him as “a youth who was sexual with that woman, with that man.” Someone replaced the word “aitia,” meaning sexual, with “awhitia,” meaning hugged or embraced. The edited version made it into the official published collection of traditional songs. The original meaning nearly disappeared with it.
Nearly. Scholars like Kerekere and Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku spent decades recovering what colonization tried to bury. The word takatāpui itself survived, and in the early 21st century, Māori LGBTQ communities reclaimed it. It now encompasses gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Māori identities, connecting contemporary queer Māori to a tradition that existed long before anyone told them it was wrong.
The British spent 150 years insisting that same-sex relationships were foreign to Māori culture. They had to destroy a lot of evidence to try to make that argument stick. It didn’t.
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www.facebook.com/LatterGayStories/posts/pfbid0YNHE6FkQYmESWWU8cEtrhiXZHxSxyr7t4dFvH6KysYDHvsL3xMv…Playboy has a new editor-in-chief, a gay man who went to Harvard Divinity School and wrote a thesis titled Is Jesus Kinda Hot?
Phillip Picardi took over Playboy this year, which is a pretty remarkable turn for a magazine that spent most of its 73-year history as perhaps the most recognizable monument to heterosexual male sexuality in America.
He came out at 14 while attending Catholic school. He eventually built a career in media, helping transform Teen Vogue before launching Them and later becoming editor-in-chief of Out. Then, at the height of a career, he walked away and went to Harvard to study religion.
Now he’s running Playboy.
It would be easy to treat that as nothing more than a funny bit of cultural irony, but Picardi seems genuinely interested in the contradiction he inherited. Playboy was created in 1953 for a world where pornography was difficult to obtain and a nude photograph in a magazine could be genuinely transgressive. In 2026, anyone with a phone has access to more explicit material than Hugh Hefner could have fit inside the Playboy Mansion.
Picardi has described our current culture as both “extremely prudish and extremely pornographic.” Sex is still there, but so are conversations about relationships, loneliness, gender, masculinity, pleasure and the increasingly weird ways people are learning to relate to each other.
The change is already showing up on the cover. This summer Playboy featured Cara Delevingne, reportedly making her the first openly lesbian woman to appear on a Playboy cover. Women photographed for the magazine are also being given substantially more control over their shoots.
Picardi is Playboy’s first openly gay editor-in-chief, but he isn’t the first gay man to lead its editorial operation. Shane Michael Singh served as executive editor several years earlier and pushed the magazine toward LGBTQ inclusion.
Hugh Hefner built an empire selling heterosexual men a fantasy about women. Seventy-three years later, Playboy has handed a gay man the job of figuring out whether the magazine has anything interesting left to say about sex.
Turns out the guy they picked has spent much of his career thinking about exactly that.
And Jesus, apparently.
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D.C. mourns Bishop Rainey Cheeks, whose ministry and HIV advocacy uplifted Black LGBTQ lives 🕊️🏳️🌈❤️🏥🙏 👉 bit.ly/3UASi4f
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www.facebook.com/TheBoldItalic/posts/pfbid02Y5g6ee6PmcfQSg7hf7VB2T6aVdFEhg6kY8JV1CDoZHbFhH9ZqJbJc…The windows at Twin Peaks Tavern are the entire point, and in 1972 uncovering them was a political act.
The bar sits at Castro and 17th, in a building with an intact 1923 Mediterranean Revival facade, right at the mouth of the Castro. It opened in 1935 as an Irish working-class pub, and like most bars of that era it kept the plate glass papered over. The joke at the time was that it kept wives from spotting their husbands drinking.
In 1972, two friends already working in the bar business, Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster, took over the lease, reopened it for a gay clientele, and stripped the coverings off the windows.
It is hard to overstate how radical that was. Gay bars in America had blacked-out windows for a reason. Same-sex relationships were criminalized, police raids were routine, and being seen walking out of the wrong doorway could cost you your job, your apartment, or your family. Every bar in the country was built to hide the people inside it. Twin Peaks became the first known gay bar in America with full-length open plate glass. Patrons could look out at the street. The street could look back in. Nobody was hiding.
That decision helped make the Castro the Castro. The bar became a meeting place for organizers as much as a place to drink, and it earned its nickname as the gateway to the neighborhood. It has also stayed, generation after generation, the room where the Castro’s older men are treated as regulars rather than relics.
Forster died in 2008. Cunha died in January 2015, a month shy of eighty. In February 2013 the Board of Supervisors made the tavern city Landmark No. 264, protecting the windows themselves as a character-defining feature.
Inside it is still a wooden bar, a mezzanine, and a mirrored backbar older than Prohibition. No thumping music, so you can actually talk.
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“Village Dreams – a (critical) view from the ’70s,” by Jay Quint, provides a historical and poetic overview of the rise of gay villages in West Hollywood, San Francisco and Montreal, the author’s home town, after the demise of the largely straight communal gatherings of the 1960s, says reviewer Paul Wilner.
“San Francisco’s Castro District began its flamingly colorful, unprecedented brand of gentrification when Haight-Ashbury – the hippie epicenter and place of pilgrimage for the ’67 Summer of Love…had grown dystopian, like a trashy sideshow swarming with lost souls and drug addicts,’’ the author writes.
“What followed in the late ’60s was the beginning of a migration out of the helter skelter of the Haight-Ashbury by those who still had their sanity. Rafts of homosexuals who’d been involved in the scene went over the hill to Eureka Valley where rent was cheap and the Castro Theater stood. The Revolution was over but the Gay Villages were in bud.
Read more: www.ebar.com/story/168869/
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Our Dyke Histories is BACK for season two!
@ourdykehistories is a podcast about how we built queer life one gathering at a time. Hosted by historian, geographer, and environmental psychologist Jack Gieseking, and produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, the oldest lesbian multicultural literary journal, the series brings together historians, elders, artists, and everyday dykes to remember how bars, parties, bookstores, and basements became our sanctuaries.
Catch up on season one now and check our the first two episodes of season two “The Bars Are Ours: Queer Nightlife, AIDS, and Community in the 1980s & 1990s, with Lucas Hilderbrand” and “1980s: Sex, Space, and Survival, with Sarah Schulman, Valarie Walker, & Katherine V. Forrest.” Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
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Scientists found “at most a modest and uncertain shortfall in catch-up rather than a demonstrated persistent deficit.”
Read more here: mrf.lu/2xgxc
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Today (10 August) marks the birthday of the accomplished Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, known best for roles in ‘The Mask of Zorro’, ‘Spy Kids’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Desperado’, ‘The Skin I Live In’, ‘The 13th War’, and ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!’—to name just a few.
Banderas is a staunch and outspoken long-time LGBTQ+ ally, taking on queer roles throughout his career in ‘Law of Desire’, ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Pain and Glory’. He discussed the career risks of taking these roles earlier in his career, but affirmed that he played those characters out of a deep respect for the LGBTQ+ community, saying in an August 2019 interview with The Independent that “I’m an actor. I just play the character and try to believe them completely when I’m doing them. I try not to perform them; I try to live them.”
In the same interview, Banderas also revealed that a drag queen saved his life after a motorbike accident in 1976 when he was just 16 years old.
Banderas, a practising Catholic, spoke about his hopes for Pope Francis’ papacy in 2014, LatinTimes reported him saying, “To those who believe that homosexuals are sick people, I would say that the real sufferers are the homophobes. Those who judge others from an irrational and intolerant point of view are those who really have a serious problem that must be solved. In this sense, I think that homosexuals lead a much healthier life.”
📷 Getty
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Qtopia stirs haunting memories of war, escape, and self-discovery as one teen leaves home chasing liberation 📚🧳😔🕊️🚨 👉 bit.ly/4wdXgRA
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Decades later, that handwritten story is giving readers a glimpse of the funny, playful, and unapologetically gay man behind one of history’s greatest minds. ow.ly/yKQq50ZwKJx
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www.facebook.com/gay.culture.geeks/posts/pfbid02pPS6sGpTmigvCAxULx8p4hxZzr1Yv1SU97uw5zMC5jns3vwTT…Antonio Banderas was in his early twenties when Pedro Almodovar first cast him as a gay man. The film was Labyrinth of Passion, the year was 1982, and Spain was only seven years out of Franco’s dictatorship.
By Law of Desire in 1986 the parts had got bigger, and Banderas has said he was very worried about the gayness of the whole script – how his mother would see it, how his father would be perceived. Almodovar’s answer was the one he was still repeating in interviews decades later. You have no problem killing somebody in a movie, but you have a problem kissing somebody. What is your problem?
He did the scene, and he kept taking the roles. Six years later he was playing Tom Hanks’s partner in Philadelphia, where the idea that the two of them should kiss on camera was his.
Forty-four years after Labyrinth of Passion, he turns 66 today. The murder was fine, he said, looking back at Spain in the eighties. Two men kissing was the scandal.
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1892 betritt eine junge Frau eine Arztpraxis. Sie hat Schmerzen. Der Arzt erklärt sie zum Mann. Sie geht zu einem anderen Arzt und verlässt ihn als Frau, geht zum dritten Arzt und verlässt ihn als ‚Hermaphrodit‘. Louise Julie Anna heißt die junge Frau und ihre Suche nach dem Grund für die Schmerzen findet statt, während ein wachsender Teil der europäischen Ärzteschaft sich darüber streitet, ob es inter*Personen gibt oder nicht. Über Louise‘s Körper werden detaillierte Berichte geschrieben, die diesen Streit befeuern und Louise‘s vermeintliche Trickserei beweisen sollen. Laut den Ärzten hat Louise – wie viel inter*Personen ihrer Zeit – das Entkleiden zur Profession gemacht. Sie zieht sich in Bars und Hinterzimmern aus, andere lassen sich bezahlen, um für sogenannte Lehrzwecke zu posieren, wieder andere sind Schausteller*innen.
Dieser Vortrag widmet sich der komplexen Geschichte derer, die ihre fetischisierten Körper zu Geld machen konnten. Anhand von Archivmaterialien der Jahre 1700-1900 erzählt Roux die Geschichte der öffentlichen Obsession mit inter*Körpern und der Kunst, diese zu nutzen, um etwas Unabhängigkeit von einer binären Welt zu erlangen. Basierend auf der Recherche für Roux‘s Performance JUICE fokussiert sie sich auf die Leben von inter*identen Sexarbeiter*innen und Performer*innen, die sich zwischen erotischer und medizinischer Performance bewegten.
River Roux (@river.in.motion) ist Performerin, Autorin und Tänzerin an der Pole. Ihre Arbeit zentriert die Überschneidungen von Arbeit, Gender, Care und Sex. Roux’s Performances beginnen in Archiven, wo sie die Leben von trans* und inter* Personen nachverfolgt. Seit der Spielzeit 26/27 ist Roux Teil des Ensembles der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
Dieses Event findet auf deutscher Lautsprache statt. Eintritt: Kostenlos!
Dieses Event ist Teil der Reihe „A History of Sneaking„, Vorträge zu inter* Geschichte von Juliana Gleeseon, Jako Wende und River Roux. Ein Projekt des Schwulen Museums Berlin. Gefördert von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt; Förderung zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte 2026. Bild: River Roux
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Sen. Erik Bottcher says HIV prevention has been transformed since the AIDS crisis, making it time to replace a 1980s ban with modern public health regulations.
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At 18 years old, an openly gay college professor forced a young Barack Obama to unlearn his own prejudice.
Dr. Lawrence Goldyn was a political science professor at Occidental College. For a freshman named Barack Obama, who later admitted to harboring the typical homophobic attitudes of the 1970s, he was also the first unapologetically gay person he had ever met.
In 1979, being openly gay in a position of authority could cost you your career or your safety. But Dr. Goldyn refused to shrink. He stood his ground, gave it right back to anyone who gave him trouble, and quietly counseled LGBTQ students at a time when they had nowhere else to turn.
Decades later, as the 44th President of the United States, Obama invited his former professor to a White House Pride reception. Standing at the podium, he publicly thanked the man who had fundamentally challenged his early ignorance, honoring him as an unsung hero who shaped his understanding of equality.
That is what true growth looks like. You meet people. You listen. You learn. And then, you carry those lessons all the way into power.
Happy 65th birthday, President Barack Obama.
If you appreciate my posts, it would mean the world if you followed my page. Thank you for being here.
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“Not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.” That is Alan Turing, in his own handwriting, describing a man he took home – and a Cambridge professor has just finished transcribing the whole thing.
The story is called “Pryce’s Buoy.” Six scruffy handwritten pages that sat in the King’s College Cambridge archive since Turing died in 1954, never properly studied until Sarah Dillon, a professor of English at Cambridge, published her analysis this month.
She dates the writing to late 1952 or early 1953, months after Turing was convicted of gross indecency and forced onto hormone injections meant to kill his desire.
He casts himself as a celebrated scientist who liked to parade his homosexuality in the right company, and who decides he has earned himself some fun.
Dillon’s verdict on the man who wrote it: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex. She told the New York Times he was never ashamed of being gay, and that he was a proud gay man.
That is not the flinching Turing of “The Imitation Game”. Britain took his career, his body and eventually his life, and never once got near his sense of himself.
The manuscript stops mid-sentence at the bottom of page six. Dillon has no idea where the rest went, or whether Turing’s mother destroyed it.
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From heavy-hitting documentaries, experimental cinema, dramas, and fluffier feel-good films and all of them are valuable watches for those of us looking to find resonance within the transmasculine film canon.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2ZxKJ
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www.facebook.com/notdeanquietfrankly/posts/pfbid0ZuQVU3KpQeS24qiK8oytsnSVzGp5sHKaWUzz1fCBW7ciUvUL...Something historic is happening in men’s professional tennis in 2026: João Lucas Reis da Silva and Mika Brunold are competing openly as gay athletes at the same time. Brazilian player Reis da Silva became the first active male professional tennis player to publicly come out in 2024, while Swiss player Brunold followed in 2025. Their presence comes as the U.S. Open celebrates Pride, bringing LGBTQ+ players, fans and supporters into the spotlight.
Both athletes are continuing to compete and build their careers on the professional circuit, showing that being openly gay does not have to stand in the way of reaching the highest levels of the sport. Reis da Silva has already made history by becoming the first openly gay man to compete in an ATP main-draw match, while Brunold has spoken openly about the importance of authenticity and greater LGBTQ+ visibility in sports.
For much of tennis history, openly gay men were extremely rare in professional competition, with many athletes feeling pressure to keep their identities private. Today, seeing Reis da Silva and Brunold compete openly gives younger players something that was largely missing before: the chance to see a gay man on the court and know that being yourself and pursuing your biggest dreams can exist together. 🎾🏳️🌈
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National Suicide Prevention Week is an annual week-long campaign to inform and engage health professionals and the general public about suicide prevention.
Follow our friends at @TheTrevorProject, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit organization for LGBTQ young people. The Trevor Project provides information and support to LGBTQ young people 24/7, all year round.
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www.facebook.com/LABRUCE3000/posts/pfbid0Cw8djhChKNnRqE4nfhyMqff96TfJaR1T7MJsHpGWPwH6xq7z2b5pYzKw...
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www.facebook.com/AbsoluteRadio/posts/pfbid0gFLHq87EZngqngPNLQ5xC2TPa1SsmERWRgoVSvnA65trQfY8Vf4P1r...Pet Shop Boys have announced a concept album called 'A man from the future' honouring English mathematician, computer scientist and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing.
Released on Friday 9th October, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe collaborated with acclaimed Alan Turing biographer Andrew Hodges on the record.
Produced by Pet Shop Boys and German composer Sven Helbig, each of the eight songs on 'A man from the future' explores a significant chapter in the life and death of Alan Turing.
Pet Shop Boys say: "Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality.
"Alan made a massive contribution to the defeat of Germany in World War II and was a pioneer of computing, imagining a world with intelligent computers. He also looked forward to a time when being gay would be accepted as normal. In both his professional and private lives, he was ahead of his time."
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The late feminist icon spent her later years using her voice for transgender rights.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2LryW
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State Supreme Court says dad can stop mom from bringing child to “harmful” anti-LGBTQ+ church
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Ghana’s Anglican Primate Once Supported Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation. Now He Says Gay People Should Not Be Criminalised. 🏳️🌈
Archbishop Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith, Primate of the Church of the Province of West Africa, has spoken out against the criminalisation of Gay people as Ghana’s Parliament pushes a sweeping new anti-LGBTQ+ bill.
Speaking to the BBC, he said: “Our point in our province is very clear: we do not support the criminalisation of gay persons.”
He added that LGBTQ+ people are “all children of God” and that “God loves them.”
The Church still holds its traditional position on same-sex relationships, but Ben-Smith is drawing a clear line between religious teaching and criminalising people for being Gay.
Ghana’s Parliament passed the bill in May. It would impose prison sentences of up to five years for the “willful promotion, sponsorship or support” of LGBTQ+ activities. It has not yet become law.
After previously supporting criminalisation, one of West Africa’s most senior Anglican leaders is now saying clearly: being Gay should not be a crime. 💛
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On 1 September 1969, West Germany partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men.
Instead of repealing the harsh Paragraph 175 of its penal code, the country reformed it, making it legal for s*xual acts to occur between men so long as they were both over the age of 21.
However, penalties remained in place for s*xual acts performed by those under 21 and same-sex pr*stitution.
The move was a huge step for West Germany, which - between 1945 and 1969 - had convicted around 50,000 men for homosexuality.
📷 Getty
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Someone should tell Republicans that while the Roman Empire was pretty queer, according to historians, that wasn't what caused its fall.
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Bishop Ramón Bejarano has made headlines for his embrace of the LGBTQ+ community.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2qdXm
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Poland begins recognizing foreign same-sex marriages after court rulings reshape legal treatment 🇵🇱⚖️💍🏳️🌈📄 👉 bit.ly/4iJAQ7E
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In 1778, two Irish women put on men's clothing, walked out of their lives, and never looked back.
Eleanor Butler was 39. Sarah Ponsonby was 23. Both came from Anglo-Irish gentry families. Both faced the same future their class prescribed: an arranged marriage, a husband's household, and whatever happiness they could manufacture inside those walls. Eleanor had already refused two marriage proposals. Sarah was living as a ward in a household where the man of the house had been making unwanted advances. They had been close friends for years. In February 1778, they decided they were done.
They dressed in men's clothing, took a pistol, and tried to leave together. Sarah's family caught them before they got far. They were brought back, separated, and lectured. Their families assumed the scheme would collapse without each other's encouragement.
It didn't.
Two months later, they tried again. This time they made it. They crossed to Wales, settled in a small cottage in the village of Llangollen in northern Wales, and spent the next 50 years there together.
They called their home Plas Newydd, meaning New Place, and they transformed it obsessively over the decades, adding Gothic woodwork, stained glass, and formal gardens until the cottage became something between a showpiece and a sanctuary. They read together every morning, walked the grounds every afternoon, and kept a detailed shared journal. They wore men's riding clothes as their daily dress, kept their hair cropped short, and built a life entirely on their own terms.
Georgian society didn't quite know what to make of them. They became famous for it. Visitors made the trip to Llangollen specifically to see them: William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington, Edmund Burke. The women they called "the Ladies of Llangollen" were celebrated as romantic idealists, two souls devoted to friendship and literature and rural simplicity. A 1790 newspaper item suggested the relationship was sexual. Butler and Ponsonby were furious. They sued for libel and won.
The question of what to call their relationship is one historians still argue about. They shared a bed for 50 years. Their letters describe each other in terms that go well past friendship. Whether they understood themselves as what we'd now call a lesbian couple is unanswerable, but the life they built together was unambiguous. They chose each other over everything their families and their class had mapped out for them, twice, and then spent half a century making good on that choice.
Eleanor Butler died in 1829. Sarah Ponsonby survived her by two years. They are buried together in the churchyard of St. Collen's in Llangollen.
The cottage is still there.
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The documentary Hunky Jesus spotlights the surprising, subversive, and saintly history of the queer radical organization.
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Three intelligence veterans say the agency’s dismantling of LGBTQ+ programs threatens national security and reverses decades of hard-won progress.
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Before the British arrived, the Māori had a word for it. They had a word because they needed one. Same-sex relationships weren't a scandal in pre-colonial Aotearoa. They were part of life.
The word was takatāpui. Missionary William Williams defined it in his 1844 Dictionary of the Maori Language as "an intimate companion of the same sex." Williams was trying to document the language. He ended up documenting the culture, too.
Takatāpui appear in traditional waiata, in chants, in carvings. The evidence was everywhere. Scholar Elizabeth Kerekere, who spent five years researching her doctoral thesis on the subject, put it plainly: before colonization, takatāpui were simply "part of the whānau."
You can see it in one of New Zealand's oldest love stories. In chief Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke's telling of the tale of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai, when Tūtānekai marries Hinemoa, he mourns the loss of his intimate relationship with a man named Tiki, his hoa takatāpui. The story wasn't considered shocking. It was just the story.
Then the missionaries came.
The earliest European colonists in New Zealand were Christians, and they brought their theology with them. Same-sex relationships became sinful by decree. Pre-colonial Māori carvings depicting sexual diversity were destroyed or mutilated. Some were shipped to European museums as curiosities. The colonial project didn't just take land. It took language, rewrote culture, and tried to erase the people who didn't fit the new moral order.
The British didn't stop at theology. When New Zealand became a British colony in 1840, British law came with it, making same-sex acts a capital offense. The Criminal Code Act of 1893 went further, outlawing all sexual activity between men, with penalties including imprisonment, hard labor, and flogging. Men convicted of sodomy faced a minimum of 10 years. That law stayed on the books, in various forms, until 1986.
The erasure went beyond the law. Translators in the late 1800s went back through traditional songs and quietly changed the words. A lament for a young man named Papaka Te Naeroa originally described him as "a youth who was sexual with that woman, with that man." Someone replaced the word "aitia," meaning sexual, with "awhitia," meaning hugged or embraced. The edited version made it into the official published collection of traditional songs. The original meaning nearly disappeared with it.
Nearly. Scholars like Kerekere and Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku spent decades recovering what colonization tried to bury. The word takatāpui itself survived, and in the early 21st century, Māori LGBTQ communities reclaimed it. It now encompasses gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Māori identities, connecting contemporary queer Māori to a tradition that existed long before anyone told them it was wrong.
The British spent 150 years insisting that same-sex relationships were foreign to Māori culture. They had to destroy a lot of evidence to try to make that argument stick. It didn't.
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www.facebook.com/LatterGayStories/posts/pfbid0YNHE6FkQYmESWWU8cEtrhiXZHxSxyr7t4dFvH6KysYDHvsL3xMv...Playboy has a new editor-in-chief, a gay man who went to Harvard Divinity School and wrote a thesis titled Is Jesus Kinda Hot?
Phillip Picardi took over Playboy this year, which is a pretty remarkable turn for a magazine that spent most of its 73-year history as perhaps the most recognizable monument to heterosexual male sexuality in America.
He came out at 14 while attending Catholic school. He eventually built a career in media, helping transform Teen Vogue before launching Them and later becoming editor-in-chief of Out. Then, at the height of a career, he walked away and went to Harvard to study religion.
Now he’s running Playboy.
It would be easy to treat that as nothing more than a funny bit of cultural irony, but Picardi seems genuinely interested in the contradiction he inherited. Playboy was created in 1953 for a world where pornography was difficult to obtain and a nude photograph in a magazine could be genuinely transgressive. In 2026, anyone with a phone has access to more explicit material than Hugh Hefner could have fit inside the Playboy Mansion.
Picardi has described our current culture as both “extremely prudish and extremely pornographic.” Sex is still there, but so are conversations about relationships, loneliness, gender, masculinity, pleasure and the increasingly weird ways people are learning to relate to each other.
The change is already showing up on the cover. This summer Playboy featured Cara Delevingne, reportedly making her the first openly lesbian woman to appear on a Playboy cover. Women photographed for the magazine are also being given substantially more control over their shoots.
Picardi is Playboy’s first openly gay editor-in-chief, but he isn’t the first gay man to lead its editorial operation. Shane Michael Singh served as executive editor several years earlier and pushed the magazine toward LGBTQ inclusion.
Hugh Hefner built an empire selling heterosexual men a fantasy about women. Seventy-three years later, Playboy has handed a gay man the job of figuring out whether the magazine has anything interesting left to say about sex.
Turns out the guy they picked has spent much of his career thinking about exactly that.
And Jesus, apparently.
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D.C. mourns Bishop Rainey Cheeks, whose ministry and HIV advocacy uplifted Black LGBTQ lives 🕊️🏳️🌈❤️🏥🙏 👉 bit.ly/3UASi4f
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www.facebook.com/TheBoldItalic/posts/pfbid02Y5g6ee6PmcfQSg7hf7VB2T6aVdFEhg6kY8JV1CDoZHbFhH9ZqJbJc...The windows at Twin Peaks Tavern are the entire point, and in 1972 uncovering them was a political act.
The bar sits at Castro and 17th, in a building with an intact 1923 Mediterranean Revival facade, right at the mouth of the Castro. It opened in 1935 as an Irish working-class pub, and like most bars of that era it kept the plate glass papered over. The joke at the time was that it kept wives from spotting their husbands drinking.
In 1972, two friends already working in the bar business, Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster, took over the lease, reopened it for a gay clientele, and stripped the coverings off the windows.
It is hard to overstate how radical that was. Gay bars in America had blacked-out windows for a reason. Same-sex relationships were criminalized, police raids were routine, and being seen walking out of the wrong doorway could cost you your job, your apartment, or your family. Every bar in the country was built to hide the people inside it. Twin Peaks became the first known gay bar in America with full-length open plate glass. Patrons could look out at the street. The street could look back in. Nobody was hiding.
That decision helped make the Castro the Castro. The bar became a meeting place for organizers as much as a place to drink, and it earned its nickname as the gateway to the neighborhood. It has also stayed, generation after generation, the room where the Castro's older men are treated as regulars rather than relics.
Forster died in 2008. Cunha died in January 2015, a month shy of eighty. In February 2013 the Board of Supervisors made the tavern city Landmark No. 264, protecting the windows themselves as a character-defining feature.
Inside it is still a wooden bar, a mezzanine, and a mirrored backbar older than Prohibition. No thumping music, so you can actually talk.
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“Village Dreams – a (critical) view from the ’70s,” by Jay Quint, provides a historical and poetic overview of the rise of gay villages in West Hollywood, San Francisco and Montreal, the author’s home town, after the demise of the largely straight communal gatherings of the 1960s, says reviewer Paul Wilner.
“San Francisco’s Castro District began its flamingly colorful, unprecedented brand of gentrification when Haight-Ashbury – the hippie epicenter and place of pilgrimage for the ’67 Summer of Love…had grown dystopian, like a trashy sideshow swarming with lost souls and drug addicts,’’ the author writes.
“What followed in the late ’60s was the beginning of a migration out of the helter skelter of the Haight-Ashbury by those who still had their sanity. Rafts of homosexuals who’d been involved in the scene went over the hill to Eureka Valley where rent was cheap and the Castro Theater stood. The Revolution was over but the Gay Villages were in bud.
Read more: www.ebar.com/story/168869/
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Our Dyke Histories is BACK for season two!
@ourdykehistories is a podcast about how we built queer life one gathering at a time. Hosted by historian, geographer, and environmental psychologist Jack Gieseking, and produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, the oldest lesbian multicultural literary journal, the series brings together historians, elders, artists, and everyday dykes to remember how bars, parties, bookstores, and basements became our sanctuaries.
Catch up on season one now and check our the first two episodes of season two "The Bars Are Ours: Queer Nightlife, AIDS, and Community in the 1980s & 1990s, with Lucas Hilderbrand" and "1980s: Sex, Space, and Survival, with Sarah Schulman, Valarie Walker, & Katherine V. Forrest." Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
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Scientists found “at most a modest and uncertain shortfall in catch-up rather than a demonstrated persistent deficit.”
Read more here: mrf.lu/2xgxc
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Today (10 August) marks the birthday of the accomplished Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, known best for roles in ‘The Mask of Zorro’, ‘Spy Kids’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Desperado’, ‘The Skin I Live In’, ‘The 13th War’, and ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!’—to name just a few.
Banderas is a staunch and outspoken long-time LGBTQ+ ally, taking on queer roles throughout his career in ‘Law of Desire’, ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Pain and Glory’. He discussed the career risks of taking these roles earlier in his career, but affirmed that he played those characters out of a deep respect for the LGBTQ+ community, saying in an August 2019 interview with The Independent that “I’m an actor. I just play the character and try to believe them completely when I'm doing them. I try not to perform them; I try to live them.”
In the same interview, Banderas also revealed that a drag queen saved his life after a motorbike accident in 1976 when he was just 16 years old.
Banderas, a practising Catholic, spoke about his hopes for Pope Francis’ papacy in 2014, LatinTimes reported him saying, “To those who believe that homosexuals are sick people, I would say that the real sufferers are the homophobes. Those who judge others from an irrational and intolerant point of view are those who really have a serious problem that must be solved. In this sense, I think that homosexuals lead a much healthier life.”
📷 Getty
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Qtopia stirs haunting memories of war, escape, and self-discovery as one teen leaves home chasing liberation 📚🧳😔🕊️🚨 👉 bit.ly/4wdXgRA
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Decades later, that handwritten story is giving readers a glimpse of the funny, playful, and unapologetically gay man behind one of history's greatest minds. ow.ly/yKQq50ZwKJx
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www.facebook.com/gay.culture.geeks/posts/pfbid02pPS6sGpTmigvCAxULx8p4hxZzr1Yv1SU97uw5zMC5jns3vwTT...Antonio Banderas was in his early twenties when Pedro Almodovar first cast him as a gay man. The film was Labyrinth of Passion, the year was 1982, and Spain was only seven years out of Franco's dictatorship.
By Law of Desire in 1986 the parts had got bigger, and Banderas has said he was very worried about the gayness of the whole script - how his mother would see it, how his father would be perceived. Almodovar's answer was the one he was still repeating in interviews decades later. You have no problem killing somebody in a movie, but you have a problem kissing somebody. What is your problem?
He did the scene, and he kept taking the roles. Six years later he was playing Tom Hanks's partner in Philadelphia, where the idea that the two of them should kiss on camera was his.
Forty-four years after Labyrinth of Passion, he turns 66 today. The murder was fine, he said, looking back at Spain in the eighties. Two men kissing was the scandal.
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1892 betritt eine junge Frau eine Arztpraxis. Sie hat Schmerzen. Der Arzt erklärt sie zum Mann. Sie geht zu einem anderen Arzt und verlässt ihn als Frau, geht zum dritten Arzt und verlässt ihn als ‚Hermaphrodit‘. Louise Julie Anna heißt die junge Frau und ihre Suche nach dem Grund für die Schmerzen findet statt, während ein wachsender Teil der europäischen Ärzteschaft sich darüber streitet, ob es inter*Personen gibt oder nicht. Über Louise‘s Körper werden detaillierte Berichte geschrieben, die diesen Streit befeuern und Louise‘s vermeintliche Trickserei beweisen sollen. Laut den Ärzten hat Louise – wie viel inter*Personen ihrer Zeit – das Entkleiden zur Profession gemacht. Sie zieht sich in Bars und Hinterzimmern aus, andere lassen sich bezahlen, um für sogenannte Lehrzwecke zu posieren, wieder andere sind Schausteller*innen.
Dieser Vortrag widmet sich der komplexen Geschichte derer, die ihre fetischisierten Körper zu Geld machen konnten. Anhand von Archivmaterialien der Jahre 1700-1900 erzählt Roux die Geschichte der öffentlichen Obsession mit inter*Körpern und der Kunst, diese zu nutzen, um etwas Unabhängigkeit von einer binären Welt zu erlangen. Basierend auf der Recherche für Roux‘s Performance JUICE fokussiert sie sich auf die Leben von inter*identen Sexarbeiter*innen und Performer*innen, die sich zwischen erotischer und medizinischer Performance bewegten.
River Roux (@river.in.motion) ist Performerin, Autorin und Tänzerin an der Pole. Ihre Arbeit zentriert die Überschneidungen von Arbeit, Gender, Care und Sex. Roux’s Performances beginnen in Archiven, wo sie die Leben von trans* und inter* Personen nachverfolgt. Seit der Spielzeit 26/27 ist Roux Teil des Ensembles der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
Dieses Event findet auf deutscher Lautsprache statt. Eintritt: Kostenlos!
Dieses Event ist Teil der Reihe „A History of Sneaking„, Vorträge zu inter* Geschichte von Juliana Gleeseon, Jako Wende und River Roux. Ein Projekt des Schwulen Museums Berlin. Gefördert von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt; Förderung zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte 2026. Bild: River Roux
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Sen. Erik Bottcher says HIV prevention has been transformed since the AIDS crisis, making it time to replace a 1980s ban with modern public health regulations.
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At 18 years old, an openly gay college professor forced a young Barack Obama to unlearn his own prejudice.
Dr. Lawrence Goldyn was a political science professor at Occidental College. For a freshman named Barack Obama, who later admitted to harboring the typical homophobic attitudes of the 1970s, he was also the first unapologetically gay person he had ever met.
In 1979, being openly gay in a position of authority could cost you your career or your safety. But Dr. Goldyn refused to shrink. He stood his ground, gave it right back to anyone who gave him trouble, and quietly counseled LGBTQ students at a time when they had nowhere else to turn.
Decades later, as the 44th President of the United States, Obama invited his former professor to a White House Pride reception. Standing at the podium, he publicly thanked the man who had fundamentally challenged his early ignorance, honoring him as an unsung hero who shaped his understanding of equality.
That is what true growth looks like. You meet people. You listen. You learn. And then, you carry those lessons all the way into power.
Happy 65th birthday, President Barack Obama.
If you appreciate my posts, it would mean the world if you followed my page. Thank you for being here.
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"Not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn't be choosers." That is Alan Turing, in his own handwriting, describing a man he took home - and a Cambridge professor has just finished transcribing the whole thing.
The story is called "Pryce's Buoy." Six scruffy handwritten pages that sat in the King's College Cambridge archive since Turing died in 1954, never properly studied until Sarah Dillon, a professor of English at Cambridge, published her analysis this month.
She dates the writing to late 1952 or early 1953, months after Turing was convicted of gross indecency and forced onto hormone injections meant to kill his desire.
He casts himself as a celebrated scientist who liked to parade his homosexuality in the right company, and who decides he has earned himself some fun.
Dillon's verdict on the man who wrote it: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex. She told the New York Times he was never ashamed of being gay, and that he was a proud gay man.
That is not the flinching Turing of "The Imitation Game". Britain took his career, his body and eventually his life, and never once got near his sense of himself.
The manuscript stops mid-sentence at the bottom of page six. Dillon has no idea where the rest went, or whether Turing's mother destroyed it.
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From heavy-hitting documentaries, experimental cinema, dramas, and fluffier feel-good films and all of them are valuable watches for those of us looking to find resonance within the transmasculine film canon.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2ZxKJ
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www.facebook.com/notdeanquietfrankly/posts/pfbid0ZuQVU3KpQeS24qiK8oytsnSVzGp5sHKaWUzz1fCBW7ciUvUL...Something historic is happening in men’s professional tennis in 2026: João Lucas Reis da Silva and Mika Brunold are competing openly as gay athletes at the same time. Brazilian player Reis da Silva became the first active male professional tennis player to publicly come out in 2024, while Swiss player Brunold followed in 2025. Their presence comes as the U.S. Open celebrates Pride, bringing LGBTQ+ players, fans and supporters into the spotlight.
Both athletes are continuing to compete and build their careers on the professional circuit, showing that being openly gay does not have to stand in the way of reaching the highest levels of the sport. Reis da Silva has already made history by becoming the first openly gay man to compete in an ATP main-draw match, while Brunold has spoken openly about the importance of authenticity and greater LGBTQ+ visibility in sports.
For much of tennis history, openly gay men were extremely rare in professional competition, with many athletes feeling pressure to keep their identities private. Today, seeing Reis da Silva and Brunold compete openly gives younger players something that was largely missing before: the chance to see a gay man on the court and know that being yourself and pursuing your biggest dreams can exist together. 🎾🏳️🌈
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National Suicide Prevention Week is an annual week-long campaign to inform and engage health professionals and the general public about suicide prevention.
Follow our friends at @TheTrevorProject, the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit organization for LGBTQ young people. The Trevor Project provides information and support to LGBTQ young people 24/7, all year round.
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www.facebook.com/AbsoluteRadio/posts/pfbid0gFLHq87EZngqngPNLQ5xC2TPa1SsmERWRgoVSvnA65trQfY8Vf4P1r...Pet Shop Boys have announced a concept album called 'A man from the future' honouring English mathematician, computer scientist and World War II codebreaker Alan Turing.
Released on Friday 9th October, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe collaborated with acclaimed Alan Turing biographer Andrew Hodges on the record.
Produced by Pet Shop Boys and German composer Sven Helbig, each of the eight songs on 'A man from the future' explores a significant chapter in the life and death of Alan Turing.
Pet Shop Boys say: "Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted for his sexuality.
"Alan made a massive contribution to the defeat of Germany in World War II and was a pioneer of computing, imagining a world with intelligent computers. He also looked forward to a time when being gay would be accepted as normal. In both his professional and private lives, he was ahead of his time."
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The late feminist icon spent her later years using her voice for transgender rights.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2LryW
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State Supreme Court says dad can stop mom from bringing child to “harmful” anti-LGBTQ+ church
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Ghana’s Anglican Primate Once Supported Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation. Now He Says Gay People Should Not Be Criminalised. 🏳️🌈
Archbishop Cyril Kobina Ben-Smith, Primate of the Church of the Province of West Africa, has spoken out against the criminalisation of Gay people as Ghana’s Parliament pushes a sweeping new anti-LGBTQ+ bill.
Speaking to the BBC, he said: “Our point in our province is very clear: we do not support the criminalisation of gay persons.”
He added that LGBTQ+ people are “all children of God” and that “God loves them.”
The Church still holds its traditional position on same-sex relationships, but Ben-Smith is drawing a clear line between religious teaching and criminalising people for being Gay.
Ghana’s Parliament passed the bill in May. It would impose prison sentences of up to five years for the “willful promotion, sponsorship or support” of LGBTQ+ activities. It has not yet become law.
After previously supporting criminalisation, one of West Africa’s most senior Anglican leaders is now saying clearly: being Gay should not be a crime. 💛
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On 1 September 1969, West Germany partially decriminalised homosexual acts between men.
Instead of repealing the harsh Paragraph 175 of its penal code, the country reformed it, making it legal for s*xual acts to occur between men so long as they were both over the age of 21.
However, penalties remained in place for s*xual acts performed by those under 21 and same-sex pr*stitution.
The move was a huge step for West Germany, which - between 1945 and 1969 - had convicted around 50,000 men for homosexuality.
📷 Getty
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Someone should tell Republicans that while the Roman Empire was pretty queer, according to historians, that wasn't what caused its fall.
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Bishop Ramón Bejarano has made headlines for his embrace of the LGBTQ+ community.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2qdXm
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Poland begins recognizing foreign same-sex marriages after court rulings reshape legal treatment 🇵🇱⚖️💍🏳️🌈📄 👉 bit.ly/4iJAQ7E
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In 1778, two Irish women put on men's clothing, walked out of their lives, and never looked back.
Eleanor Butler was 39. Sarah Ponsonby was 23. Both came from Anglo-Irish gentry families. Both faced the same future their class prescribed: an arranged marriage, a husband's household, and whatever happiness they could manufacture inside those walls. Eleanor had already refused two marriage proposals. Sarah was living as a ward in a household where the man of the house had been making unwanted advances. They had been close friends for years. In February 1778, they decided they were done.
They dressed in men's clothing, took a pistol, and tried to leave together. Sarah's family caught them before they got far. They were brought back, separated, and lectured. Their families assumed the scheme would collapse without each other's encouragement.
It didn't.
Two months later, they tried again. This time they made it. They crossed to Wales, settled in a small cottage in the village of Llangollen in northern Wales, and spent the next 50 years there together.
They called their home Plas Newydd, meaning New Place, and they transformed it obsessively over the decades, adding Gothic woodwork, stained glass, and formal gardens until the cottage became something between a showpiece and a sanctuary. They read together every morning, walked the grounds every afternoon, and kept a detailed shared journal. They wore men's riding clothes as their daily dress, kept their hair cropped short, and built a life entirely on their own terms.
Georgian society didn't quite know what to make of them. They became famous for it. Visitors made the trip to Llangollen specifically to see them: William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington, Edmund Burke. The women they called "the Ladies of Llangollen" were celebrated as romantic idealists, two souls devoted to friendship and literature and rural simplicity. A 1790 newspaper item suggested the relationship was sexual. Butler and Ponsonby were furious. They sued for libel and won.
The question of what to call their relationship is one historians still argue about. They shared a bed for 50 years. Their letters describe each other in terms that go well past friendship. Whether they understood themselves as what we'd now call a lesbian couple is unanswerable, but the life they built together was unambiguous. They chose each other over everything their families and their class had mapped out for them, twice, and then spent half a century making good on that choice.
Eleanor Butler died in 1829. Sarah Ponsonby survived her by two years. They are buried together in the churchyard of St. Collen's in Llangollen.
The cottage is still there.
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The documentary Hunky Jesus spotlights the surprising, subversive, and saintly history of the queer radical organization.
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Three intelligence veterans say the agency’s dismantling of LGBTQ+ programs threatens national security and reverses decades of hard-won progress.
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Before the British arrived, the Māori had a word for it. They had a word because they needed one. Same-sex relationships weren't a scandal in pre-colonial Aotearoa. They were part of life.
The word was takatāpui. Missionary William Williams defined it in his 1844 Dictionary of the Maori Language as "an intimate companion of the same sex." Williams was trying to document the language. He ended up documenting the culture, too.
Takatāpui appear in traditional waiata, in chants, in carvings. The evidence was everywhere. Scholar Elizabeth Kerekere, who spent five years researching her doctoral thesis on the subject, put it plainly: before colonization, takatāpui were simply "part of the whānau."
You can see it in one of New Zealand's oldest love stories. In chief Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke's telling of the tale of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai, when Tūtānekai marries Hinemoa, he mourns the loss of his intimate relationship with a man named Tiki, his hoa takatāpui. The story wasn't considered shocking. It was just the story.
Then the missionaries came.
The earliest European colonists in New Zealand were Christians, and they brought their theology with them. Same-sex relationships became sinful by decree. Pre-colonial Māori carvings depicting sexual diversity were destroyed or mutilated. Some were shipped to European museums as curiosities. The colonial project didn't just take land. It took language, rewrote culture, and tried to erase the people who didn't fit the new moral order.
The British didn't stop at theology. When New Zealand became a British colony in 1840, British law came with it, making same-sex acts a capital offense. The Criminal Code Act of 1893 went further, outlawing all sexual activity between men, with penalties including imprisonment, hard labor, and flogging. Men convicted of sodomy faced a minimum of 10 years. That law stayed on the books, in various forms, until 1986.
The erasure went beyond the law. Translators in the late 1800s went back through traditional songs and quietly changed the words. A lament for a young man named Papaka Te Naeroa originally described him as "a youth who was sexual with that woman, with that man." Someone replaced the word "aitia," meaning sexual, with "awhitia," meaning hugged or embraced. The edited version made it into the official published collection of traditional songs. The original meaning nearly disappeared with it.
Nearly. Scholars like Kerekere and Emeritus Professor Ngahuia Te Awekotuku spent decades recovering what colonization tried to bury. The word takatāpui itself survived, and in the early 21st century, Māori LGBTQ communities reclaimed it. It now encompasses gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex Māori identities, connecting contemporary queer Māori to a tradition that existed long before anyone told them it was wrong.
The British spent 150 years insisting that same-sex relationships were foreign to Māori culture. They had to destroy a lot of evidence to try to make that argument stick. It didn't.
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www.facebook.com/LatterGayStories/posts/pfbid0YNHE6FkQYmESWWU8cEtrhiXZHxSxyr7t4dFvH6KysYDHvsL3xMv...Playboy has a new editor-in-chief, a gay man who went to Harvard Divinity School and wrote a thesis titled Is Jesus Kinda Hot?
Phillip Picardi took over Playboy this year, which is a pretty remarkable turn for a magazine that spent most of its 73-year history as perhaps the most recognizable monument to heterosexual male sexuality in America.
He came out at 14 while attending Catholic school. He eventually built a career in media, helping transform Teen Vogue before launching Them and later becoming editor-in-chief of Out. Then, at the height of a career, he walked away and went to Harvard to study religion.
Now he’s running Playboy.
It would be easy to treat that as nothing more than a funny bit of cultural irony, but Picardi seems genuinely interested in the contradiction he inherited. Playboy was created in 1953 for a world where pornography was difficult to obtain and a nude photograph in a magazine could be genuinely transgressive. In 2026, anyone with a phone has access to more explicit material than Hugh Hefner could have fit inside the Playboy Mansion.
Picardi has described our current culture as both “extremely prudish and extremely pornographic.” Sex is still there, but so are conversations about relationships, loneliness, gender, masculinity, pleasure and the increasingly weird ways people are learning to relate to each other.
The change is already showing up on the cover. This summer Playboy featured Cara Delevingne, reportedly making her the first openly lesbian woman to appear on a Playboy cover. Women photographed for the magazine are also being given substantially more control over their shoots.
Picardi is Playboy’s first openly gay editor-in-chief, but he isn’t the first gay man to lead its editorial operation. Shane Michael Singh served as executive editor several years earlier and pushed the magazine toward LGBTQ inclusion.
Hugh Hefner built an empire selling heterosexual men a fantasy about women. Seventy-three years later, Playboy has handed a gay man the job of figuring out whether the magazine has anything interesting left to say about sex.
Turns out the guy they picked has spent much of his career thinking about exactly that.
And Jesus, apparently.
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D.C. mourns Bishop Rainey Cheeks, whose ministry and HIV advocacy uplifted Black LGBTQ lives 🕊️🏳️🌈❤️🏥🙏 👉 bit.ly/3UASi4f
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www.facebook.com/TheBoldItalic/posts/pfbid02Y5g6ee6PmcfQSg7hf7VB2T6aVdFEhg6kY8JV1CDoZHbFhH9ZqJbJc...The windows at Twin Peaks Tavern are the entire point, and in 1972 uncovering them was a political act.
The bar sits at Castro and 17th, in a building with an intact 1923 Mediterranean Revival facade, right at the mouth of the Castro. It opened in 1935 as an Irish working-class pub, and like most bars of that era it kept the plate glass papered over. The joke at the time was that it kept wives from spotting their husbands drinking.
In 1972, two friends already working in the bar business, Mary Ellen Cunha and Peggy Forster, took over the lease, reopened it for a gay clientele, and stripped the coverings off the windows.
It is hard to overstate how radical that was. Gay bars in America had blacked-out windows for a reason. Same-sex relationships were criminalized, police raids were routine, and being seen walking out of the wrong doorway could cost you your job, your apartment, or your family. Every bar in the country was built to hide the people inside it. Twin Peaks became the first known gay bar in America with full-length open plate glass. Patrons could look out at the street. The street could look back in. Nobody was hiding.
That decision helped make the Castro the Castro. The bar became a meeting place for organizers as much as a place to drink, and it earned its nickname as the gateway to the neighborhood. It has also stayed, generation after generation, the room where the Castro's older men are treated as regulars rather than relics.
Forster died in 2008. Cunha died in January 2015, a month shy of eighty. In February 2013 the Board of Supervisors made the tavern city Landmark No. 264, protecting the windows themselves as a character-defining feature.
Inside it is still a wooden bar, a mezzanine, and a mirrored backbar older than Prohibition. No thumping music, so you can actually talk.
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“Village Dreams – a (critical) view from the ’70s,” by Jay Quint, provides a historical and poetic overview of the rise of gay villages in West Hollywood, San Francisco and Montreal, the author’s home town, after the demise of the largely straight communal gatherings of the 1960s, says reviewer Paul Wilner.
“San Francisco’s Castro District began its flamingly colorful, unprecedented brand of gentrification when Haight-Ashbury – the hippie epicenter and place of pilgrimage for the ’67 Summer of Love…had grown dystopian, like a trashy sideshow swarming with lost souls and drug addicts,’’ the author writes.
“What followed in the late ’60s was the beginning of a migration out of the helter skelter of the Haight-Ashbury by those who still had their sanity. Rafts of homosexuals who’d been involved in the scene went over the hill to Eureka Valley where rent was cheap and the Castro Theater stood. The Revolution was over but the Gay Villages were in bud.
Read more: www.ebar.com/story/168869/
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Our Dyke Histories is BACK for season two!
@ourdykehistories is a podcast about how we built queer life one gathering at a time. Hosted by historian, geographer, and environmental psychologist Jack Gieseking, and produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, the oldest lesbian multicultural literary journal, the series brings together historians, elders, artists, and everyday dykes to remember how bars, parties, bookstores, and basements became our sanctuaries.
Catch up on season one now and check our the first two episodes of season two "The Bars Are Ours: Queer Nightlife, AIDS, and Community in the 1980s & 1990s, with Lucas Hilderbrand" and "1980s: Sex, Space, and Survival, with Sarah Schulman, Valarie Walker, & Katherine V. Forrest." Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
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Scientists found “at most a modest and uncertain shortfall in catch-up rather than a demonstrated persistent deficit.”
Read more here: mrf.lu/2xgxc
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Today (10 August) marks the birthday of the accomplished Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, known best for roles in ‘The Mask of Zorro’, ‘Spy Kids’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Desperado’, ‘The Skin I Live In’, ‘The 13th War’, and ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!’—to name just a few.
Banderas is a staunch and outspoken long-time LGBTQ+ ally, taking on queer roles throughout his career in ‘Law of Desire’, ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Pain and Glory’. He discussed the career risks of taking these roles earlier in his career, but affirmed that he played those characters out of a deep respect for the LGBTQ+ community, saying in an August 2019 interview with The Independent that “I’m an actor. I just play the character and try to believe them completely when I'm doing them. I try not to perform them; I try to live them.”
In the same interview, Banderas also revealed that a drag queen saved his life after a motorbike accident in 1976 when he was just 16 years old.
Banderas, a practising Catholic, spoke about his hopes for Pope Francis’ papacy in 2014, LatinTimes reported him saying, “To those who believe that homosexuals are sick people, I would say that the real sufferers are the homophobes. Those who judge others from an irrational and intolerant point of view are those who really have a serious problem that must be solved. In this sense, I think that homosexuals lead a much healthier life.”
📷 Getty
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Qtopia stirs haunting memories of war, escape, and self-discovery as one teen leaves home chasing liberation 📚🧳😔🕊️🚨 👉 bit.ly/4wdXgRA
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Decades later, that handwritten story is giving readers a glimpse of the funny, playful, and unapologetically gay man behind one of history's greatest minds. ow.ly/yKQq50ZwKJx
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www.facebook.com/gay.culture.geeks/posts/pfbid02pPS6sGpTmigvCAxULx8p4hxZzr1Yv1SU97uw5zMC5jns3vwTT...Antonio Banderas was in his early twenties when Pedro Almodovar first cast him as a gay man. The film was Labyrinth of Passion, the year was 1982, and Spain was only seven years out of Franco's dictatorship.
By Law of Desire in 1986 the parts had got bigger, and Banderas has said he was very worried about the gayness of the whole script - how his mother would see it, how his father would be perceived. Almodovar's answer was the one he was still repeating in interviews decades later. You have no problem killing somebody in a movie, but you have a problem kissing somebody. What is your problem?
He did the scene, and he kept taking the roles. Six years later he was playing Tom Hanks's partner in Philadelphia, where the idea that the two of them should kiss on camera was his.
Forty-four years after Labyrinth of Passion, he turns 66 today. The murder was fine, he said, looking back at Spain in the eighties. Two men kissing was the scandal.
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1892 betritt eine junge Frau eine Arztpraxis. Sie hat Schmerzen. Der Arzt erklärt sie zum Mann. Sie geht zu einem anderen Arzt und verlässt ihn als Frau, geht zum dritten Arzt und verlässt ihn als ‚Hermaphrodit‘. Louise Julie Anna heißt die junge Frau und ihre Suche nach dem Grund für die Schmerzen findet statt, während ein wachsender Teil der europäischen Ärzteschaft sich darüber streitet, ob es inter*Personen gibt oder nicht. Über Louise‘s Körper werden detaillierte Berichte geschrieben, die diesen Streit befeuern und Louise‘s vermeintliche Trickserei beweisen sollen. Laut den Ärzten hat Louise – wie viel inter*Personen ihrer Zeit – das Entkleiden zur Profession gemacht. Sie zieht sich in Bars und Hinterzimmern aus, andere lassen sich bezahlen, um für sogenannte Lehrzwecke zu posieren, wieder andere sind Schausteller*innen.
Dieser Vortrag widmet sich der komplexen Geschichte derer, die ihre fetischisierten Körper zu Geld machen konnten. Anhand von Archivmaterialien der Jahre 1700-1900 erzählt Roux die Geschichte der öffentlichen Obsession mit inter*Körpern und der Kunst, diese zu nutzen, um etwas Unabhängigkeit von einer binären Welt zu erlangen. Basierend auf der Recherche für Roux‘s Performance JUICE fokussiert sie sich auf die Leben von inter*identen Sexarbeiter*innen und Performer*innen, die sich zwischen erotischer und medizinischer Performance bewegten.
River Roux (@river.in.motion) ist Performerin, Autorin und Tänzerin an der Pole. Ihre Arbeit zentriert die Überschneidungen von Arbeit, Gender, Care und Sex. Roux’s Performances beginnen in Archiven, wo sie die Leben von trans* und inter* Personen nachverfolgt. Seit der Spielzeit 26/27 ist Roux Teil des Ensembles der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
Dieses Event findet auf deutscher Lautsprache statt. Eintritt: Kostenlos!
Dieses Event ist Teil der Reihe „A History of Sneaking„, Vorträge zu inter* Geschichte von Juliana Gleeseon, Jako Wende und River Roux. Ein Projekt des Schwulen Museums Berlin. Gefördert von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt; Förderung zeitgeschichtlicher und erinnerungskultureller Projekte 2026. Bild: River Roux
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Sen. Erik Bottcher says HIV prevention has been transformed since the AIDS crisis, making it time to replace a 1980s ban with modern public health regulations.
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At 18 years old, an openly gay college professor forced a young Barack Obama to unlearn his own prejudice.
Dr. Lawrence Goldyn was a political science professor at Occidental College. For a freshman named Barack Obama, who later admitted to harboring the typical homophobic attitudes of the 1970s, he was also the first unapologetically gay person he had ever met.
In 1979, being openly gay in a position of authority could cost you your career or your safety. But Dr. Goldyn refused to shrink. He stood his ground, gave it right back to anyone who gave him trouble, and quietly counseled LGBTQ students at a time when they had nowhere else to turn.
Decades later, as the 44th President of the United States, Obama invited his former professor to a White House Pride reception. Standing at the podium, he publicly thanked the man who had fundamentally challenged his early ignorance, honoring him as an unsung hero who shaped his understanding of equality.
That is what true growth looks like. You meet people. You listen. You learn. And then, you carry those lessons all the way into power.
Happy 65th birthday, President Barack Obama.
If you appreciate my posts, it would mean the world if you followed my page. Thank you for being here.
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"Not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn't be choosers." That is Alan Turing, in his own handwriting, describing a man he took home - and a Cambridge professor has just finished transcribing the whole thing.
The story is called "Pryce's Buoy." Six scruffy handwritten pages that sat in the King's College Cambridge archive since Turing died in 1954, never properly studied until Sarah Dillon, a professor of English at Cambridge, published her analysis this month.
She dates the writing to late 1952 or early 1953, months after Turing was convicted of gross indecency and forced onto hormone injections meant to kill his desire.
He casts himself as a celebrated scientist who liked to parade his homosexuality in the right company, and who decides he has earned himself some fun.
Dillon's verdict on the man who wrote it: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex. She told the New York Times he was never ashamed of being gay, and that he was a proud gay man.
That is not the flinching Turing of "The Imitation Game". Britain took his career, his body and eventually his life, and never once got near his sense of himself.
The manuscript stops mid-sentence at the bottom of page six. Dillon has no idea where the rest went, or whether Turing's mother destroyed it.
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From heavy-hitting documentaries, experimental cinema, dramas, and fluffier feel-good films and all of them are valuable watches for those of us looking to find resonance within the transmasculine film canon.
Read more here: mrf.lu/2ZxKJ
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