At the annual Koovagam festival in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, more than 100,000 have gathered recently for a celebration of acceptance and community. The festival is rooted in a story from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, in which participants symbolically marry the deity Aravan and then publicly mourning his death the next […]
European Union Distances Itself from the U.S. Re: Conversion Therapy
The European Commission will urge its European Union member states to ban “conversion therapy,” which refers to attempts to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The announcement comes ahead of Brussels Pride and followed a petition signed by more than one million EU citizens calling for a legally binding ban across […]
Another Wicked Witch is Coming for Gay Marriage
Although the great majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, a national coalition of conservatives unveiled a new campaign to end same-sex marriage. One of the activists leading the charge is Katy Faust, president and founder of Them Before Us, a conservative nonprofit organization promoting the “traditional” family. In 2012 she started writing about her opposition to […]
Sex Isn’t Real?
In Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary, Beans Velocci argues that biological sex is not a natural fact or stabile category, but a socially and historically constructed classification system congealed via powerful cultural discourses. Velocci explains that scientific ideas about sex have always been entangled with racism, colonialism, eugenics, and efforts to […]
High-Heeled Activism
It is important to note that there has been some sassy pushback in response to the anti-LGBTQ+ antics of the current cruel and out-of-touch American administration. More than 1,000 people attended a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union at a gay bar in Brooklyn on April 16. The drag event raised $25,000, and the […]
June is Now “Nuclear Family Month” (insert eye-roll here!)
Leave it to Tennessee, whose Republican-run legislature has officially deemed June as “Nuclear Family Month”. The House joint resolution was signed by Governor Bill Lee on April 9. While the policy does not explicitly mention the Queer community, June is when many LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations take place across the country. This is undoubtedly a pointed […]
Library Board Fired Over Trans Children’s Book
In the fall of 2025, the Asheboro Public Library in North Carolina received a complaint about Call Me Max, a picture book by award-winning transgender author Kyle Lukoff. The library board followed established procedures for reviewing challenged materials and voted 5-2 to keep the book in place. Shortly after the decision the Randolph County Board of […]
Good News for African Gays
So much of what we hear from the African continent with regard to the rights of LGBTQ people is discouraging. Hard Copy has run stories about severe legal persecution in Uganda, Nigeria, and Senegal, among others. However, Africa is not a monolith: South Africa has long maintained very progressive policies in defense of its LGBTQ […]
Gay Symbols Banned and Restored
There seems to be no end to the targeting of the LGBTQ+ community in the U.S. these days. Thankfully, these efforts to diminish the visibility of the LGBTQ+ community are receiving push back. In Idaho, Boise’s official Pride flag was removed because a state law prohibits government entities displaying any flags other than approved flags […]
How to Own Your Narrative
Nillin Lore’s recently published Carry On: Unpacking Your Internalized Transphobic and Queerphobic Baggage (Thornapple Press, March 20, 2026) is a self-help book of sorts for Queer and Trans people. The chapters span topics from self-advocacy to finding community and dealing with queer/transphobia. Gender and sexuality are both front and centre in contemporary moral panics around […]