LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims is a lifesaver. When he learned he was a perfect donor match for a gay man was dying of renal failure last year, he agreed to donate one of his kidneys. This week, over a year later, Sims tweeted he ran into the now-healthy recipient and his husband while the two men were having lunch. He also revealed that when his parents came to town, the group all shared a meal together.

“My recipient Alan and his husband John were sitting having lunch,” Sims tweeted of the chance encounter that occured while he was walking to his office last month. “A perfectly normal, healthy, happy couple sitting in the sun enjoying each other’s company. It was perfection!”

Sims had initially kept the news secret. However, he initially revealed it last year after some Republican members of the Pennsylvania legislature tested positive for the virus but hid their status and came to work anyway without telling anyone. Sims blasted them, revealing why their actions hit home personally as well.

“In late January I secretly donated a kidney to a person who lives about 10 blocks from me in the City,” Sims tweeted at the time. “He was dying of renal failure and I turned out to be a near perfect match.”

The surgery went well and the “recipient began to improve almost immediately and his long term prognosis is strong.”

Sims noted that “none of this was ever supposed to be public” but instead was meant to be a private act of compassion. He only revealed his donation because fellow lawmakers had put him and others at risk by not revealing their positive test results.

Sims was the first out gay elected state legislator in Pennsylvania when he was first elected in 2012. He made an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2015. In February, he announced he was running for the state’s lieutenant governor.

“We need adults in the room and I want to bring bold innovative leadership based on lived experiences and shared values to the Commonwealth,” he said in the video announcing his candidacy.

Sims is a busy man these days, but he always seems to find time for family. He revealed he and his parents sat down for dinner with found time to sit down for dinner with donor recipient Alan and his husband, John, the night before.

“Families come in all shapes and sizes,” he tweeted. “Ours is pretty special.”

Silver Spoons actor Ricky Schroder went viral after berating a Costco employee over the store’s mask policy. Gay actor Ricky Schroeder, however, felt the blowback on social media. Schroeder, who includes “(Not THAT Ricky Schroder)” in his username, was forced to make a video explaining the differences between the two despite some unfortunate similarities.

Because it wasn’t the first time he’s had that problem, but this time the Twitter algorithm helped push the mistake.

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“Due to recent events I would just like to clarify that I am a gay liberal 29 year old redheaded actor who does NOT beat his wife nor vote for trump nor give bail money to white supremacist terrorists,” Shroeder posted in 2020 after the other actor had made the news for contributing to Kyle Rittenhouse’s bail funds. Rittenhouse shot and killed two Black protestors in Wisconsin. “Oh and I spell my last name with an ‘e’ after the ‘o’!”

“I hate that I have to retweet this again today, 5 months later,” posted yesterday along with the old tweet, “and add that even tho I’m fully vaxxed, I still have a years worth of anxiety pent up to make me want to keep my mask on for a while, and I would never harass a costco employee and I don’t have a Costco membership”

Schroeder posted video of himself accosting a Costco employee when he was refused entrance to the store because he wasn’t wearing a mask. While the CDC has changed the mask guidelines for fully vaccinated people, retailers still have the option to ask all customers to wear a mask before entering.

But when Twitter included his account as part of the “trending” list of tweets and accounts related to the far-right actor’s latest stunt, things got a little hairy. The mask-wearing liberal tried to get the service’s attention, but hours later he was still included in the mix.

“The next time that other asshole Ricky Schroder does some stupid shit,” he tweeted to the Twitter account, “can you not link my liberal gay self, with a pic of me in drag with Kelly Clarkson as my banner pic, and my display name as ‘Not THAT Ricky Schroder’ to the trend? Thnx.”

He even made a humorous video that highlighted the stark differences between the two. The gay actor has worked more lately, for example.

Still, it got him some more followers as folks confessed that’s how they’d discovered his account and, he said, the blowback wasn’t as fierce this time.

In the summer of 1953, Audrey Hartmann was 23 years old and on vacation with friends. She was staying in Ocean Bay Park, a small beach town on Fire Island, 60 miles from New York City.

She’d heard whispers about a place down the beach called Cherry Grove. A few miles away, it was said to be a welcoming community of gay people. She’d heard there were lesbians there. 

Hartmann walked down, and what she saw is on display at a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, as well as chronicled in the 1993 book “Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town” by Esther Newton. Hartmann encountered “charming little houses” lit by gas lamps, and wherever she walked were canopies of trees. She caught a glimpse into some of the homes and said, “I remember seeing women by candlelight sitting there,” and wished she was one of them.

Her wish came true. She would go on to live in Cherry Grove and became a beloved member of the community. She and her longtime partner were some of the first women to buy a home on the island. Hartmann, now 90, was interviewed for the exhibit, “Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove,” which opens Friday at the New-York Historical Society, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In a recording, Hartmann says of Cherry Grove, “It was an escape for everyone to be able to come out here on the weekend and be yourself. It was a safe haven. I could say to someone, ‘I’m Audrey Hartmann … and I’m gay.’” 

That, at the time, was unheard of.

The exhibit includes 70 photographs and additional ephemera contributed by the Cherry Grove Archives Collection. Included in the exhibit are recorded accounts from notable residents, including Hartmann. 

Cherry Grove was one of the first gay beach towns in the United States, joining a handful of LGBTQ vacation spots and resorts that became popular in the pre-Stonewall era, along with places like Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Saugatuck-Douglas, Michigan. 

The striking images in the collection are special because of their rarity, as well as the joy and intimacy displayed in them. There is a relaxed nature to the photos, of couples with their arms around each other, friends out at parties or spending time together on the beach. 

“Most people didn’t share themselves in that way because they couldn’t be documented. It could be held against them legally,” said Parker Sargent, 46, one of the curators of the exhibit and a representative of the Cherry Grove Archives Collection. In Cherry Grove, gay residents were able to form a community, have a voice in how things were run and be out. “And that’s revolutionary in a really quiet way,” Sergeant said.

Part of what makes Cherry Grove special is its remote location on a barrier island between Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the island is only accessible by boat and inaccessible to cars. Cherry Grove provided a sanctuary while also offering queer people the distance and safety required to be themselves, away from the New York laws prohibiting their queer identities and the constant police enforcement of anti-LGBTQ policies.

“Because it’s isolated, people are not judging you, like you’d be afraid of in the real world,” said Susan Kravitz, 77, who curated the exhibit with Sargent and is a committee member of the Cherry Grove archive. “The women in the ‘50s had to wear skirts and dresses … but when they came to Cherry Grove, they could wear trousers — and that was a big deal. Not just pants, but trousers … It’s always about freeing oneself to be who you want to be, and where else can you do that?” 

Cherry Grove did have its share of raids and arrests, but the last boat left the island at midnight, meaning there was no police presence once the boat left the dock. That contributed to a vibrant nightlife, one so integral to the community a section of the exhibit is devoted to theater, performance and the social scene. Theater is a lasting legacy of Cherry Grove, as it was theater people who began to vacation there as early as the 1930s, laying a foundation of creativity and openness that has had a lasting draw for the LGBTQ community. 

Cherry Grove was different from the city, where the gay bars were run by the mob, according to Sargent, who described these urban watering holes as “dark and seedy clubs” where “you always had to be careful that the lights would come on,” signaling a police raid. 

“In Cherry Grove, you were suddenly out in nature and sitting on people’s front porches and going to house parties,” Sargent said. “There was a levity and a freedom of not being caught.” 

Cherry Grove continued to evolve after the 1950s, moving from a sanctuary for mostly white and affluent gay men and women to a more inclusive place with the advent of the 1960s, as the civil rights movement gained traction and more commercial real estate in the area led to affordable housing options for greater swaths of the community. As the decades move forward, photographs begin to show queer people of color and working-class LGBTQ people.

“You will see such joy in these photographs, you will see happiness, you will see laughter, and you would never think that would be the case given the times in which these people lived,” Kravitz said. 

Part of the mission behind “Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove” is to create an archive where there has been none. 

“It’s more than just the photos or the old videos,” Sargent said. “It’s getting that material out there for people to see and to rewrite our history in a way that has been very blank because we tend to think that gay life started at Stonewall. … People have a look at gay history before Stonewall. We’ve always been here.” 

Today, Cherry Grove remains a beloved summer destination for LGBTQ beachgoers, particularly lesbians, as has the adjoining community of the Fire Island Pines, which has traditionally catered to gay men. Though the world has become more accepting over the decades, these two Fire Island enclaves remain important to the community, and just as vibrant as ever, welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors to its boardwalks every season.

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During a family friendly drag show at The Palace on Miami’s South Beach in April, Angela Stanton-King went on an obscenity laden act of hate speech against the LGBTQ+ performers.

Included in the offensive rant was a comment about the horrific mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016. The tragedy led to 49 people killed and another 53 injured, the majority of which were Latin Americans.

In the video—that can be viewed below (*discretion advised*—Stanton-King commented on two children that were innocently dancing with the drag queen on stage during a Madonna performance.

People were upset by the rant by the Qanon believing GOPer’s rant.

Stanton-King said:

“Why in the h*ll have these people got these little bitty-a*s kids at this f**king drag show?”

“Look at this f**king bulls**t… They’re picking f**king money up off the floor like they’re f**king strippers and s**t.”

After Stanton-King posted the video to her 300,000+ Instagram followers , The Palace began receiving violent threats on their accounts.

To Palace owner, Thomas Donall, told local10 one particular comment stood out:

“I hope y’all end up like Pulse.”

Of the comment Donell said:

“It’s really difficult for us and heart-wrenching… I mean it just makes me… really sick to my stomach.”

He added:

“It was all innocent fun for the girls. I mean they were posing with a Madonna show.”

This is not the first time that Stanton-King went on an anti-trans tirade. She spent two years in prison on federal conspiracy charges for her part in a car theft ring until Donald Trump pardoned her in 2020.

Stanton-King used her freedom to go on another hateful tirade—targeting her own transgender child. She appeared on an episode of Dr.Phil after being invited on the show to be more educated about transgenderism and to find a resolution with her daughter.

Instead, Stanton-King went on another explosive, expletive filled tangent—read more about her response here. Of the experience she took to social media and said:

“F*ck Dr Phil. F**k his motherf*cking wife. F*ck goddamn Paramount studios. F*ck all you other crazy dumba*s sons of b**ches that think a d*ck is somehow magically turned into a p**sy.”

Twitter users have had enough from Stanton-King and were pleased to hear her account had been removed.

Transgender youth suffer extremely high rates of suicide, in part due to the intense hatred they endure daily. Combat that hate by showing your support to the transgender people in your life, by advocating, and calling out legislators who will not support ALL of their constituents.

Organizers of New York City’s Pride events said Saturday they are banning police and other law enforcement from marching in their huge annual parade until at least 2025 and will also seek to keep on-duty officers a block away from the celebration of LGBTQ people and history.

In their statement, NYC Pride urged members of law enforcement to “acknowledge their harm and to correct course moving forward.”

“The sense of safety that law enforcement is meant to provide can instead be threatening, and at times dangerous, to those in our community who are most often targeted with excessive force and/or without reason,” the group said.

It will also increase the event’s security budget to boost the presence of community-based security and first responders while reducing the police department’s presence.

Police will provide first response and security “only when absolutely necessary as mandated by city officials,” the group said, adding it hoped to keep police officers at least one city block away from event perimeter areas where possible.

Word of the ban came out Friday when the Gay Officers Action League said in a release it was disheartened by the decision.

The group called the ban an “abrupt about-face” and said the decision “to placate some of the activists in our community is shameful.”

The parade is scheduled for June after the coronavirus prevented many Pride events worldwide last year, including in New York which instead hosted virtual performances in front of masked participants and honored front-line workers in the pandemic crisis.

The disruptions frustrated activists who had hoped to collectively mark the 50th anniversary of the first Gay Pride parades and marches in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco in 1970.

Those marches came a year after the 1969 uprising outside Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, in response to a police raid. The uprising is largely credited with fueling the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

Pride season occurs this year amid activism inspired by the response to racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death last year at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

Pride NYC’s announcement Saturday follows a division among organizers in recent years in planning for celebrations of LGBTQ pride in New York City.

In 2019, there were two marches in Manhattan after some in the community concluded that the annual parade had become too commercialized. The Queer Liberation March aimed for a protest vibe, saying the main Pride march was too heavily policed by the same department that raided Stonewall a half century earlier.

The New York Police Department commissioner apologized for the raid during a briefing in 2019, calling it “wrong, plain and simple.”

Detective Sophia Mason, a spokesperson for the New York Police Department, said on Saturday the department’s “annual work to ensure a safe, enjoyable Pride season has been increasingly embraced by its participants.”

She added: “The idea of officers being excluded is disheartening and runs counter to our shared values of inclusion and tolerance. That said, we’ll still be there to ensure traffic safety and good order during this huge, complex event.”

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Government has called on citizens to play their part to ensure the safety of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI+) community.

“We call on all sectors of society to oppose any form of violence committed against LGBTQI+ persons,” Acting Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said.

The call comes as South Africa joins the rest of the world in commemorating the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia under the theme, ‘Together: Resisting, Supporting and Healing’.

In 1990, on this day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) took a firm stand to remove homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases, opening a gateway to equal rights and inclusion.

The South African Constitution, which celebrates its 25-year anniversary this year, provides for equal rights to all who live in South Africa.

Ntshavheni said the Bill of Rights reaffirms that the State may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone, irrespective of race, gender, marital status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion or cultural background.

“Government reaffirms its commitment to protecting the rights of all who live in South Africa. Members of the LGBTI+ community are equally protected by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa,” the Minister said.

She said the commemoration builds on existing measures to educate and raise awareness amongst the public.

“It is also used to reflect on the progress that has been made by the National Task Team on Gender and Sexual Orientation Based Violence Perpetrated Against LGBTQI+ Persons, which was established to protect and address concerns of the LGBTQI+ community.”

As the day is commemorated, Ntshavheni said the government will stop at nothing until the realisation of an equal society that protects the lives and livelihoods of all, especially the most vulnerable members of society.

“The National Strategic Plan On Gender-Based Violence and Femicide remains relevant as a multi-sectoral, coherent strategic policy and programming framework that coordinates a national response to the crisis of gender-based violence and femicide, which also affects the LGBQTI+ community,” Ntshavheni said.

The Minister said the government will continue to do all it can to provide a safe environment, particularly for the marginalised members of society, and create a conducive space to ensure their full economic participation in the development of the country.

“As a society, we all have a responsibility to exercise tolerance and respect for each other,” Ntshavheni said.

(With Inputs from South African Government Press Release)