A huge crowd of New Yorkers and local elected officials gathered in the city’s Christopher Park on Thursday to see the LGBTQ+ Pride flag raised at the Stonewall National Monument days after the Trump administration had it removed. But local LGBTQ+ people have been left wondering how long it’ll stay up, as the Trump administration issued a statement denouncing the re-raising.
The New York Daily News estimated that over 2,000 people spilled onto the streets around the Greenwich Village park across from the historic Stonewall Inn, where the modern fight for LGBTQ+ rights kick-started in June 1969. Many held Pride flags of their own and signs reading “You can’t erase our history.” At one point, the crowd chanted “raise the flag.”
As the Associated Press notes, the Pride flag has flown for years over the National Park Service-run monument, the first in the nation to honor the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
But on Monday, the National Park Service removed the rainbow flag in accordance with new guidance issued by the Trump administration in January. A spokesperson for the agency told Gay City News that a government-wide guidance now mandates that “only the U.S. flag and other congressionally or departmentally authorized flags are flown on NPS-managed flagpoles, with limited exceptions.”
“Any changes to flag displays are made to ensure consistency with that guidance,” the spokesperson added.
The removal sparked immediate outrage in the LGBTQ+ community as well as local officials, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York state Sen. Erik Bottcher (D), and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.
On Tuesday, Holyman-Sigal vowed that he and other elected officials would re-raise the Pride flag in Christopher Park this week. New York City Council speaker Julie Menin told the New York Times that she and other lawmakers had sent a letter to the National Park Service demanding the flag’s restoration. And on Thursday, the city council passed a resolution urging Congress to respect the history of the Stonewall monument, according to The Guardian. The flag was restored the same day.
“We have brought the flag back to a sacred site,” Holyman-Sigal told the Times Thursday.
“Stonewall is a sacred site in this city,” Menin said. “It is sacred ground for civil rights and sacred ground for the LGBTQ community.”
According to the Times, officials initially raised the original rainbow flag designed by artist Gilbert Baker, which includes eight stripes, below the American flag flying in Christopher Park. But several activists briefly removed the flag before hoisting it alongside the stars and stripes.
“We won’t let Trump erase LGBTQ+ history. Stonewall was a rebellion. Stonewall was a beginning. Today, Stonewall is a call to action once again,” U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who was among those at Thursday’s flag raising, said in a statement. “I’m proud to be at Stonewall today as we re-raise the Pride flag. It’s flying once again.”
The Pride flag removal represents the Trump administration’s latest attempt to rewrite the history of the Stonewall monument. Last February, the National Park Service (NPS) removed all mentions of transgender people from its website for the monument in compliance with the president’s executive orders prohibiting any federal recognition of trans people in any aspect of civic life. In June, the agency reportedly banned both the trans and the Progress Pride flags from being displayed at the monument. Both moves were seen as a blatant effort to erase the trans community’s pivotal role in the 1969 uprising.
The Times noted Thursday that it remains unclear how long the Pride flag will be allowed to fly in Christopher Park. In a statement, the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, called the flag restoration a “political stunt” and a “distraction” from what it described as the city’s failures in response to this year’s winter storms.
“Today’s political pageantry shows how utterly incompetent and misaligned the New York City officials are with the problems their city is facing,” the statement read, according to local ABC affiliate WABC.
“They’re probably gonna take it down again, maybe,” New Yorker Joyce Burstein told the Timeson Thursday, “but it’ll just go back up.”
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The first reported cases of what would be known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) included five white men and two Black men, one from Haiti and the other from Los Angeles.
Though HIV was a mystery and researchers had little information on what caused it, let alone which communities it impacted most, that lack of knowledge didn’t prevent the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from erroneously inferring that Black Haitians were at greater risk for contracting HIV. By the time the CDC began collecting racial statistics on the disease, Black people already made up 26% of all AIDS cases within the United States, even though they only made up 13% of the national population.
Misinformation prevented the world from realizing that HIV didn’t discriminate based on gender, race, nor sexual orientation. Yet, 1980s conservatism and society’s lack of knowledge around HIV created a lethal stigma towards the LGBTQ+ and Black communities.
As of 2023, Black men and women experienced the highest rate of new HIV diagnoses among all races and ethnicities. With growing disparities in healthcare, socioeconomic standing, and housing, the Black community continues to be disproportionately impacted today, no thanks in part to the Trump administration.
Even worse, these communities are left even more vulnerable due to the administration’s removal of data revealing the pandemic’s impact.
When Dr. Aishah Scott, assistant professor of health sciences and Black studies at Providence College, told LGBTQ Nation that when she wrote a microsyllabus last year on HIV/AIDS and Black activism, “A lot of the data points that I reference[d] from the CDC, if you click them now on that website, it goes to ‘page not found.’ The CDC’s had so much data wiped from its website that it’s making it difficult for people to even know what’s going on.”
Dr. Aishah Scott, assistant professor of health sciences and Black studies at Providence College | image provided by Dr. Aishah Scott
Dr. Scott’s scholarship examining the intersections of race, medicine, and public health will culminate in her upcoming first book, Respectability Can’t Save You: The AIDS Epidemic in Urban Black America. Her work is a reminder that even in the midst of our medical, political, and social advancements, HIV still haunts “Black America” — and that Black HIV activists and community leaders must continue to learn from the past in order to secure a better future.
Black Americans already have a torrid history with the U.S. healthcare system, marred by racism in medical research, as seen in the U.S. Public Health Service’s untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee, implicit bias in regard to patient care, and socioeconomic hindrances preventing access to healthcare and insurance. Other social determinants of health, such as housing, are closely linked to HIV prevention since people living with HIV who are experiencing housing instability are more likely to delay treatment, less likely to access care, and are left navigating increased medical costs and limited incomes — an estimated 31.6% of houseless people are Black.
“Within the Black community, the issues that leave folks at risk for contracting HIV come down to these social determinants of health in a very fundamental way,” Dr. Scott stated. “Something that really shocked me when I was doing dissertation research: Every HIV advocate that I spoke with brought up housing as HIV prevention, every single one. I think that when we think about social determinants of health within ‘Black America’ and HIV housing, affordable housing is really a key factor.”
These same socioeconomic disparities have lain heavily on Black America like a weighted blanket since HIV’s emergence. During the height of the AIDS epidemic, these glaring disparities gave rise to Black community-centered HIV groups, Black-centered conferences to advocate for change, and the return to the “Black Church,” the epicenter of Civil Right movements.
These three historic developments still center Black HIV advocacy today and provide a possible blueprint as Black communities continue to advocate for prevention, care, and survival.
Rise of Black-centered HIV support groups
A protest march demanding free access to proper drug therapy drugs for people with HIV. The HIV-positive t-shirts were worn to challenge the stigma so often associated with the disease. | Getty Images
While the HIV epidemic raged on in the background of the 1980s, Black HIV activists called upon white-led HIV activist groups to establish minority outreach programs. Organizations, like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), followed suit. However, division in supporting Black-centered efforts arose in HIV activist leadership, with some favoring HIV activism’s focus on sexuality rather than race.
White-led organizations honed in on gaining access to HIV treatment, Black activists fought for intersectional care, racial equity, and socioeconomic support. And when Black activists called out these inequities within the leadership of white-led organizations, the response was either apathy or criticism about the Black community’s presumed lack of support for the white community’s welfare, according to HIV historian Dan Royles.
“Avoidance of these root causes was intentional because addressing socioeconomic disparities meant dismantling the structures that maintain the economic sustenance of white supremacy,” Dr. Scott told LGBTQ Nation, who added that the AIDS epidemic also raised the issues of “respectability politics” — the adherence of dominant cultural norms within marginalized communities in an attempt to combat stereotypes and mitigate discrimination — something Dr. Scott calls “a problematic tool of resistance within Black American fellowship.”
To combat this, Black activists and advocates — such as Dr. Rashidah Hassan, Sandra MacDonald, Wesley Anderson, Bishop Rainey Cheeks, Dazon Dixon Diallo, Prem Deben, Reggie Williams, Aundrea Scott, Archbishop Carl Bean, and Howard Morris — mobilized to address the lack of medical research around HIV treatment, prevention, and proper care left on the Black community by the Reagan Administration.
While the government, media, and mainstream HIV advocacy groups ignored the harsh realities of HIV’s impact on the Black community, these organizations offered HIV education, outreach, direct services, and intersectional care to Black Americans, while advocating for research, housing, and employment programs as well.
The National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community in Washington D.C.
A group of gay protesters make a statement during the “Million Man March” in Washington DC, on October 16, 1995. The march, called by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, is intended as a day for black men to unite and pledge self-reliance and commitment to their families and communities. | TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images
By 1987, HIV was the third-leading cause of death for Black men, fifth for Black women ages 25 to 34, and ninth for Black children between up to age 14. Simultaneously, the crack cocaine epidemic ransacked communities of color, with researchers discovering connections between crack cocaine use and HIV infections in women of color.
What rose from this growing epidemic came the first National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community in Washington, D.C. (now the U.S. Conference on HIV/AIDS) in 1987. The conference brought over 400 activists, educators, and healthcare providers to the nation’s capital to address the needs of Black Americans navigating HIV/AIDS.
Conference sessions became platforms for the Black community to stress the need for intersectional and culturally competent HIV education and care, discuss the role of intravenous drug use as a catalyst in heterosexual HIV transmissions, call out the lack of media representation in Black and LGBTQ+ outlets covering the HIV epidemic, and push for Black churches to respond to the growing infection rates.
“Existing AIDS organizations, which have grown out of the predominantly white gay movement of the ’60s and ’70s, have been very effective in serving their communities,” activist Craig Harris stated, in regard to the conference. “Similarly, it is time for both traditional and newly established Black political, social, and health organizations to do the necessary outreach to our own communities which are at risk.”
If they’re not going to do it [prevention for gay men of color], then goddamn it, we can do it ourselves. We’re not crippled! We have power.
Black HIV/AIDS activist Reggie Williams
What started as a 15-minute lunch meeting at the conference between Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and activists of color, including Gil Gerard, Suki Ports and Archbishop Carl Bean, transformed into a 2.5-hour conversation on how to address HIV/AIDS’ impact on communities of color. That same discussion covered Koop’s upcoming “Understanding AIDS” report, which acknowledged that HIV didn’t just impact Black and queer people and was the only report to be mailed en masse to Americans in 1988, aside from tax and census forms.
The same year as the National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community, not a single person of color was invited to partake in the American Public Health Association’s first session on AIDS.
Instead, Craig Harris, a Black, gay activist living with HIV, stormed the session stage, famously shouting “I will be heard!” Harris took the microphone from then San Francisco health commissioner Dr. Merv Silverman and used the moment to advocate for the plight of communities of color in their fight against HIV/AIDS.
Harris, along with several other activists, including Gerard and Ports, formed the National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC), an organization dedicated to responding to the HIV epidemic’s impact on people of color through advocacy, education, and care.
Harris’s sentiment echoed that of Reggie Williams, who said, “If they’re not going to do it [prevention for gay men of color], then goddamn it, we can do it ourselves. We’re not crippled! We have power.”
In 1988, Williams and other board members of the queer anti-racist group the National Association of Black and White Men Together submitted a proposal to the CDC’s National AIDS Information and Education Program for a $200,000 grant to launch the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, a national organization dedicated to developing HIV education and service programs by and for gay and bisexual men of color in local chapters nationwide.
Reggie Williams, a trailblazing HIV/AIDS activist who co-founded the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, creating culturally specific outreach to Black and brown communities that centered dignity and real experiences. | Getty images
The NMAC recruited R&B/Soul singer Patti LaBelle, one of the few recording artists to publicly discuss HIV/AIDS in the media during the 1980s, as a spokesperson. NMAC placed her front and center of their 1989 “Live Long, Sugar” campaign, along with four HIV-positive men and women of color, capitalizing on her popularity with Black gay men and Black women to steer traction towards seeking HIV/AIDS education and care.
LaBelle wouldn’t be the only Black celebrity to take a stand against HIV and as infection rates continued to rise within the Black community, and media coverage started to reflect this.
NBA legend Magic Johnson, gay tennis trailblazer Arthur Ashe, and NWA rapper Eazy-E became tabloid fodder after publicly sharing their HIV status. Whereas music groups, like Salt-N-Pepa and TLC, used their popularity and artistry to create songs, like “Let’s Talk About Sex” and “Waterfalls,” to address safer sex practices and HIV. Even Essence, a lifestyle magazine that catered to Black women, featured activist Rae Lewis-Thornton, a Black woman living with HIV, on the cover. But her magazine feature carried a terrifying truth.
“A lot of the folks who were living with HIV, in this moment, that were Black women [were] not middle-class Black women,” Dr. Scott told LGBTQ Nation. “These are low-income, working-class, Black women who are not necessarily having access to the same resources as a Rae Lewis-Thornton. [She] finds out she has HIV because she’s working in politics in DC. She’s hosting a blood drive as an event and she’s immediately connected to resources.”
However, this is in stark contrast to what happened to Russelle “Rusti” Miller-Hill, an HIV advocate Dr. Scott interviewed for her research article, Erased by Respectability: The Intersections of AIDS, Race, and Gender in Black America. While Lewis-Thornton received resources upon her HIV diagnosis, Miller-Hill’s experience reflects that of countless Black women who lacked access to proper HIV care and were subjected to systemic inequities that left them overlooked during the height of the HIV epidemic.
“[Miller-Hill] was a woman who found out that she was living with HIV when she was getting ready to enter a drug treatment program in New York,” Dr. Scott said. “She went to [the] New York City Department of Health. They basically ran a finger down the list and was just like, ‘Positive,’ turned around and left her to her own devices.”
“She ends up not going into the drug treatment program, spiraling back into her addiction, and ends up incarcerated within the next three years, and then has to navigate living with HIV incarcerated as a woman,” Scott added, pointing to the fact that women, drug users, and incarcerated people continued (and continue) to be marginalized even as public attention increasingly focused on the epidemic’s impact upon Black people.
Black churches turn faith into progress
African-American churchgoers at Baltimore Koinonia Baptist Church, 1995. | Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images
While HIV infection rates continued to rise, Christian adherents, who historically have been urged by their religious leaders to care for those impacted by epidemics, drew a line in the sand between faith and compassion. This allowed for religious leaders, like Rev. Jerry Falwell, to use the lack of education around HIV and the growing stigma connected to gay men to instill fear in the congregation.
Falwell also used his political organization, the so-called Moral Majority, to oppose HIV research and reduce the epidemic to a “gay problem.” Falwell and the religious right fervently denounced the queer community, while the Black church, or rather the collective of Black Christian congregations that constituted it, took a more apathetic approach.
During the 1950s and ’60s, the Black church became synonymous with combating racial injustice, serving as the headquarters for the Civil Rights movement. However, HIV’s association with homosexuality and its stigmatization within the Black church community garnered disapproval from the pulpit, hindering the Black church’s involvement in the fight against HIV, even with queer members in its congregations.
“The Black church was not as active, and they did not take the helm the way they were supposed to when it came to HIV and AIDS in black America,” Dr. Scott stated. “I’ll put that out there first. But also, their response was reflective of the respectability politics that were happening from the federal government down.”
In the 1980s, we’re seeing the rise of mass incarceration, crack epidemics. And when you look at Black church leaders in this moment, that’s what they’re talking about… HIV was not being framed as an issue of Black America in the 1980s.
Dr. Aishah Scott, assistant professor of health sciences and Black studies & author of an upcoming book on Black HIV activism
This particular stigma was reinforced by respectability politics, which most notably impacted Black Americans with middle-class aspirations in discussing HIV, which was associated with homosexuals, drug users, and poor people — community members that were not considered as part of “the American Dream.”
“This was being marketed as a disease that was impacting gay, predominantly white men. It was still being called GRID [gay-related immune deficiency] in the media for a significant period of time, which is why this was a disease that people just immediately associated with gay men,” Dr. Scott said.
“In the 1980s, we’re seeing the rise of mass incarceration, crack epidemics. And when you look at Black church leaders in this moment, that’s what they’re talking about,” she continued. “They are responding to what is being framed as the issues of Black America of the day — but HIV was not being framed as an issue of Black America in the 1980s.”
With Black religious leaders turning a blind eye and white queer-led HIV activist groups decentering communities of color, the Black queer community sat at the center of an unjust and extremely vulnerable intersection. However, religious figures, such as Bishop Rainey Cheeks, founder of Washington, D.C.’s Us Helping Us, People Into Living Inc.; and Archbishop Carl Bean, founder of the Minority AIDS Project (MAP) in Los Angeles, developed HIV care programs in response to rising infections.
Cheeks’ organization leaned into offering holistic care, support groups, and HIV-prevention programs for individuals living with HIV in the nation’s capital. MAP partnered with celebrities and politicians to raise funds for the organization to provide HIV education, testing, and social services for the Black community in the City of Angels.
Community residents participate in a rally for National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day at Leimert Park in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles. | Steve Grayson/WireImage
But the same could not be said about all Christian churches. While Black HIV activists and community leaders established organizations in response to the growing threat, Pernessa Seele led the charge to mobilize the Black church.
A South Carolinian immunologist, Seele helped congregations navigate theological challenges with responding to HIV and developing Black community-focused outreach programs, including her own organization Balm of Gilead. Seele’s nonprofit sought to serve as a bridge between congregations and public health by leveraging community planning and faith-based services to address health disparities, such as HIV.
“When you think about grassroots [HIV] organizations, those folks were very active members of their church, and a lot of their faith is honestly what led them to do this work,” Dr. Scott stated. “Those organizations largely became the bridges, in most cases, for the Black church to be able to be taught the language they needed to engage with people living with HIV in a meaningful way.”
In response, Seele mobilized religious leaders to implement the Harlem Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, including congregations in creating public health HIV awareness strategies to support the Black community.
The initiative expanded into what is now the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, which incorporates over 10,000 churches worldwide. Along with organizations, like the NAACP, creating faith-based public health initiatives, the Black church has maintained an active fight in the battle against HIV.
The Black church has since evolved in its approach, using different tactics to alleviate the socioeconomic disparities that play a role in exacerbating the HIV epidemic. Now, more Black congregations offer support in areas of education, housing, and healthcare equity, all of which can be found at the root of the HIV epidemic in Black America.
As history proves, Black Americans have had to continuously fight to be seen and heard since the rise of the HIV epidemic. These intergenerational efforts sowed seeds that, when harvested, will lead the Black community towards a future with HIV no longer in it.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of rebuilding that is going to have to happen in terms of HIV and AIDS outreach, activism, awareness campaigns, funding structures, and surveillance efforts, after we transition to the next administration,” Dr. Scott said.
February 7 marked the 27th annual National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Created in 1999, the observance day highlights the continued disproportionate impact of HIV on the Black community as well as the community’s united engagement, education, and empowerment efforts to finally end the epidemic.
If anything is apparent from the history, it’s that Black activists, medical professionals, politicians, and community leaders will need to continue to advocate for better HIV prevention, treatment, and education for Black Americans, especially in the midst of all the setbacks from Trump’s second presidency.
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James Grech, the CEO of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the country, gave Donald Trump an award this week, a bronze trophy that looked like a coal miner with a pick and a headlamp, at a ceremony attended by several Republican members of Congress, Cabinet members, and coal industry executives.
The award, which was created for Trump this year, had a name: “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.” Trump – who has no dignity and no capacity to even pretend like he has dignity anymore – accepted it with glee.
For the coal company that gave it to him, it was a good trade. Make up an award, pay a trophy shop a couple hundred dollars to make a shiny trinket, and, in exchange, receive $175 million in government money to upgrade coal power plants.
Trump likes awards because they temporarily fill an enormous hole in his soul, one that his family members have discussed in the past. The cavernous aching inside that makes him so pathetically desperate for external validation has its roots in the neglect he suffered in early childhood.
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This is just the latest in the list of fake awards Trump has been given by wealthy and connected people who know he’s an egocentric simpleton who will fall for this trick.
Foreign countries also know how to play him. Israel gave him two awards so far in his second term – the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor and the Israeli Prize – while several other countries, including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, have given him awards. It’s such an easy way to manipulate him that it would frankly be a dereliction of duty for the leader of any organization or government to not give him some made-up prize if the body they lead needs something from him.
This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak. His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved.
psychologist (and the president’s lesbian niece) Mary Trump
And then there’s the Nobel Peace Prize, which he coveted so much that he even said he was willing to invade Greenland to exact revenge on the Scandinavians who refused to give it to him. Last year’s recipient, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, possibly hoping he would leave her in charge of the Latin American nation after he invaded and deposed its previous leader. However, once Trump got what he wanted from Machado, he left her out in the cold.
Most adults would be ashamed to accept an award that was duly bestowed on someone else. While, as children, they may have cried when another kid got to blow out the candles on their birthday cake, most grown-ups would consider it condescending to be given a prize for nothing.
But Trump accepts all these fake participation trophies, like a 4-year-old being told that he’s special for the first time in his life.
Something is deeply wrong with Trump, and it’s not just his recent cognitive decline. As Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine Professor Bruce Davidson said in a recent media appearance, it’s likely that whatever Trump has going on in his head is just disinhibiting him, making him “more like [he was] beforehand.” This yearning for awards and prizes has likely always been lurking in Trump’s mind, but he had some control over it in the past, at least to maintain appearances.
Trump’s out niece, Mary Trump, has a theory about just that, which she laid out in her 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough. She wrote about her family, calling Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, a “high-functioning sociopath,” whose cruel parenting limited her uncle’s ability to feel emotions.
She also wrote about a tragedy the president faced as a toddler. When he was just two-and-a-half, his mother was hospitalized for a year, and he was left alone a lot of the time. His father, the “sociopath,” wasn’t very caring for his son.
Mary Trump, who is also a clinical psychologist, wrote that this period of early childhood is “the most crucial developmental period in any young child’s life,” and her uncle was severely neglected in this moment. Mary Trump says that her uncle has “psychological and emotional problems.” And her grandmother, Donald Trump’s mother, continued to be ill throughout her uncle’s childhood.
“So he never felt safe, he never felt loved, and I think if you start from that kind of deficit and you never find somebody to fill in the gaps or to heal you, then you are at the mercy of anybody who may find you of use,” Mary Trump wrote.
“Nothing is ever enough,” she continued. “This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak. His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved.”
Dr. Kirk Honda, a marriage and family therapist, professor, and podcaster, discussed Mary Trump’s book and provided some more explanation on the psychological theory behind her analysis of how the neglect Donald Trump suffered may be linked to his emotional neediness today.
“People with narcissistic personality disorder typically were treated like this when they were young,” he said, noting that he is simplifying current theory on narcissism. “They were neglected. When you’re emotionally neglected as a child, you have this choice that you have to make. You say, ‘Well, it’s either my fault or it’s their fault.'”
“For people who decide, ‘You know what? It’s their fault. It’s not my fault I’m being neglected, it’s their fault,'” he continued, “the benefit of this approach is that you still maintain some level of self-esteem, or at least a three-year-old’s version of self-esteem. But the con is that now everyone’s an idiot to you, everyone’s stupid, and you can’t depend on other people.”
This leads to the belief that a person is very independent, they need no one and actually can’t rely on anyone since others won’t be there for them, and that they’re superior to others. But that belief is fragile and requires constant validation.
“If other people believe I have a self, then I can believe that I have a self,” Honda continued. “But I have to constantly make sure everyone understands that I am awesome and that I have a self because that’s the only way to distract me from the fact that when I look inward, I don’t see anything.” Narcissists, when they stop trying to get validation and look inward, “it’s terrifying. I’m broken, meaningless, I’m empty, there’s nothing there.”
This is also why narcissists are very worried about other people getting more validation than they get, because it’s a threat to the idea that they are strong and everyone else is weak. That observation seems relevant when it comes to Donald Trump and the prizes he covets; there is no prize he clearly wants more than the Nobel Peace Prize, which his rival, the one person he constantly compares himself to – Barack Obama – won in 2009.
While Trump may have been the victim of his parents back when he was a toddler, he’s 79 years old now, beyond just “an adult,” and he definitely has the resources to find better ways to address his brokenness.
Instead, he’s the most powerful person in the country, inflicting his mental health issues on the rest of us.
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A new ruling from the U.K.’s highest court, following their decision last year that trans women are not women under the law, has made the already confusing legal aftermath “completely incoherent,” according to a leading trans rights organization in the country.
This week, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled on a case that challenged the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s interim code of practice in the wake of last year’s ruling that the legal definition of a woman under the country’s 2010 Equality Act is based on “biological sex.”
The EHRC has been embroiled in controversy ever since, over issues like the use of bathrooms by trans people. That initial code of practice was criticized on all sides as confusing and tossed out in October. But the court addressed it in this case brought by the Good Law Project, which challenged it.
Even as the EHRC is revising guidance, the court weighed in on what was and was not permissible in their last attempt at a code of practice for employers, service providers, and others affected by the ruling.
Justices agreed that workplaces must provide single sex bathrooms on the basis of sex assigned at birth, which would prohibit a trans employee from using a restroom that aligns with their gender identity.
But service providers — everyone from restaurants and bars to hospitals and government facilities — may allow trans customers to use restrooms matching their gender.
Service providers should be “guided by common sense and benevolence” rather than be “blinkered by unyielding ideologies” when providing bathroom facilities, The Independent quoted one justice.
The double standard has heads spinning across the pond.
“The legal situation for trans people, employers, and service providers is now completely incoherent,” a spokesperson for the Trans Solidarity Alliance said. “What bathroom a trans person can use in a pub may now depend on whether they are there as an employee or for a drink.”
The justices additionally ruled that in an office or other workplace settings, employers may provide gender-neutral bathrooms for use by all staff, including trans employees.
But “it is unclear how trans people without access to gender neutral facilities will be able to do their jobs,” Trans Solidarity added.
Absent those facilities, trans staffers are in the awkward position of outing themselves using a bathroom that doesn’t align with their gender, while they “may have been using gendered facilities without issue for years.”
“The High Court has clarified that trans people should not be forced to use facilities in line with their birth sex, but it is hard to see how treating us as a ‘third sex’ at work aligns with the privacy protections in the Gender Recognition Act or the Human Rights Act,” the group said.
“We must be allowed to transition and move on with our lives with privacy, not be outed every day at work.”
In a passage that portends continued controversy surrounding their ruling, the court said on Friday that it was “fanciful” to suggest that the law seeks to regulate “every possibility that can arise” when providing facilities.
The notion that a person or employer was required to “police” the use of toilets “reveals the application of a ‘logic’ so strict that it is divorced from reality and from any sensible model of human behavior.”
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Secretary of the Departmeny Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem fired a pilot over a blanket but then immediately regretted her decision when she needed the pilot to fly her home, so she reinstated them.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Noem has been flying around the country in a luxury 737 MAX jet with a private cabin in the back and rumored affair partner Corey Lewandowski (both Noem and Lewandowski are married to other people). DHS is leasing the jet and is trying to buy it for $70 million.
The Journal reports that Noem and Lewandowski frequently berate staffers and question their loyalty, even giving them lie detector tests.
In one incident, Noem and Lewandowski were forced to switch to a different plane because of a maintenance issue. When they got to the second plane, they saw that Noem’s blanket hadn’t followed them over, so Noem and Lewandowski fired their U.S. Coast Guard pilot.
“The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination,” the Journal reported. “They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.”
DHS is not commenting on the matter and just vaguely said that Noem “made personnel decisions to deliver excellence.” Noem denies having an affair with Lewandowski.
During the Biden administration, Republicans spent years raging at former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for supposedly flying around the country in a “private jet,” even though they were referring to FAA aircraft, which are publicly owned and therefore are the opposite of “private.” In reality, Buttigieg usually flew commercial.
Argentine transgender couple Solange Ayala and her trans male fiancé Isaías were delighted when José Adolfo Larregain, a friar in the parish of Our Lady of Pompeii, located in the local Catholic diocese of Corrientes, gave them his holy blessing to get married.
The friar said that he consulted with Archbishop José Adolfo Larregain, who said that, since the couple consisted of two individuals who were assigned male and female at birth (and who identify as a man and a woman), “there was nothing he could object to against us being able to get married,” Ayala told Radio Sudamericana in a recent interview.
However, on February 8, in a Spanish-language Facebook post, the archdiocese announced an investigation into their marriage and threatened to issue “warnings and formal canonical disciplinary measures” to the Catholic officials involved. The archdiocese claimed that the church “never received the ecclesiastical documentation corresponding to the formalities required for handling such cases.”
“The Church, as mother and teacher … reminds us that Christian marriage, as a sacrament, requires the fulfillment of certain essential conditions for its validity … as established by Canon Law and the living tradition of the Church…. The omission of these conditions not only distorts the profound meaning of the sacrament but can also generate confusion within the community of the faithful,” the Archdiocese’s statement read.
While Catholic weddings require both spouses to submit numerous documents (including certificates of baptism and communion, affidavits, certifications of completion for church marriage-prep classes), it’s unclear what additional documentation the archdiocese needed to solemnize their marriage, Them reported. While the church leadership obviously refuses to recognize the sanctity of their marriage, it’s unclear if the church’s disapproval will now result in the marriage being annulled.
Though Pope Francis had a mixed record on LGBTQ+ issues, the current Pope Leo XIV is considered less progressive in comparison. As a bishop in Peru, he opposed teaching about gender in schools. In a 2012 speech, he also criticized Western news outlets for cultivating “sympathy” for “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children,” both of which (he said) contradict the Bible’s teachings.
“We reaffirm our commitment to a Church that welcomes, accompanies and walks alongside people, always in fidelity to the Gospel, to the doctrine of the Church and to the legal order that ensures the correct and fruitful celebration of the sacraments,” its statement concluded.
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A bi amateur referee who publicly proposed to his boyfriend during a soccer match was beaten by three men after his story went viral. Now he’s been attacked again.
Pascal Kaiser, 29, an amateur German soccer referee, proposed to his boyfriend, Moritz, at a soccer game in front of 50,000 spectators. The video went viral online as people celebrated the couple’s happiness.
A little over a week later, on Saturday, February 7, Kaiser started receiving threats online, which included his address. Police told him he wasn’t in any immediate danger about 20 minutes before he went out to smoke, and three men appeared and beat him up, leaving him with a wounded eye.
Several days later, he was again attacked in his home. This past Monday night, two people attacked him in front of his home. He was beaten in the face and torso, the French sports outlet L’Equipe reports.
Kaiser was supposed to be under police protection. Police arrived 30 minutes after the attack.
Kaiser came out as bisexual in 2021, one of the few people associated with professional men’s soccer to come out as LGBTQ+. He said that he came out so that people could see “a man loving a man in football,” according to Attitude.
“I see this as my mission: to create visibility,” he told the German LGBTQ+ news site Schwulissimo last year. “To be a voice. And to encourage people who haven’t yet dared to speak up. I know how lonely it can be when you think you’re the only one. I want no one to have to think that way anymore.”
In that interview, he talked about the “DMs with death threats” that he had gotten since coming out. “But they don’t break me. Because for every hate message, I receive five in which people tell me: ‘You helped me accept myself.’”
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The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from withholding billions in federal funding to the state in retaliation for its refusal to allow schools to out transgender students to their parents.
As The Advocate reports, this week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education and the Trump administration over its threat to withhold $4.9 billion in annual federal education funding unless the state allows local school districts to notify parents of students’ social gender transitions, which would violate California law.
Last month, U.S. Department of Education (ED) accused the California Department of Education (CDE) of violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) — a federal law granting parents the right to access their child’s education records. In a statement, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said CDE had “egregiously” abused its authority by “pressuring school officials to withhold information about students’ so-called ‘gender transitions’ from their parents,” under the state’s Support Academic Futures & Educators for Today’s Youth (SAFETY) Act.
The 2024 law prohibits “parental notification” policies in school districts and protects teachers and administrators from retaliation if they choose not to follow district directives to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents. LGBTQ+ advocates contend that outing children to unsupportive parents without their consent can be dangerous, and Bonta and California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (D) have argued in court that students have a constitutional right to privacy from their parents in the state.
In his February 11 complaint, Bonta challenges the ED’s claim that the state is in violation of FERPA. He argues that the law “only requires disclosure of education records” and “does not require schools to affirmatively disclose a student’s gender identity or preferred name or pronouns to parents, nor does it mention gender identity.”
“Defendants have failed to demonstrate even a single violation of FERPA,” the lawsuit states. “They do not cite even one instance in which any [local educational agency] failed to disclose education records that state a student’s gender identity — or any other record — in response to a valid parental request under FERPA.”
The lawsuit says the ED exceeded its legal authority by demanding that CDE “disclose education records related to a student’s gender identity to a student’s parents where the parents have not made any request for [that] education record” and by requiring CDE “to disclose information, materials, or documents related to gender identity that fall outside of an ‘education record’ as defined by FERPA,” according to the lawsuit.
In a February 11 statement, Bonta described the ED’s threat to withhold federal funding as “a flagrant attempt … to intimidate the California Department of Education and California’s local education agencies under the guise of enforcing FERPA.”
“We will not stand by as U.S. ED uses baseless claims to attack crucial education funding,” Bonta added. “We will continue to fight to protect California’s schools and students from unfair attacks and work to ensure a discrimination-free educational environment for all students.”
In granting California’s request for a temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise ensured that the Trump administration cannot withhold federal funding while the case plays out.
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New and unattributed reporting from The Daily Mail is fueling speculation that “special envoy” and acting Kennedy Center president Ric Grenell is on his way out of the Trump administration.
According to multiple sources, the longtime gay White House official has alienated so many members of the administration that his continued service in that role has become untenable.
Grenell, described by two former colleagues as “a ruthlessly ambitious ass**le,” was the first out gay member of the Trump administration, climbing his way to the ambassadorship in Germany and later acting Director of National Intelligence in the final, chaotic days of Trump’s first term.
Grenell lost out despite allegedly bribing conservative social media influencers to talk him up online for the position. The winner of that White House competition, Marco Rubio, didn’t forget about Grenell’s campaign, according to sources.
That insider campaign followed another for vice president, when Grenell was caught floating himself to aides at Mar-a-Lago to be Trump’s running mate, according to one source close to the White House.
In July, Grenell earned contempt from Rubio and others in the administration who said his “freelancing” as special envoy damaged U.S. diplomatic negotiations to swap out Americans held in Venezuela for purported Venezuelan gang members detained in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
Soon after, Grenell was frozen out of the administration’s most high-level and sensitive foreign policy decisions, according to four diplomatic sources who’ve worked closely with him. The one-time public relations consultant has since been left to manage the fallout from Trump’s disastrous takeover of the Kennedy Center.
The unceremonious push out of foreign policy was around the same time that Senate investigators discovered Grenell was allegedly treating himself and those he described as potential donors to the Kennedy Center to lavish parties at the next-door Watergate Hotel; Grenell reportedly spent tens of thousands of dollars wining and dining unidentified guests, as well as self-dealing with friends and political allies for contracts at the presidential memorial.
In a letter addressed to “Ambassador Grenell”, a title the former diplomat ordered Kennedy Center subordinates to call him, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) wrote, “I have ample reason to be concerned by reports and information that cast doubt on your stewardship of the institution.”
“Contracts, invoices, and facility use agreements reveal that you operate the Center for the enrichment of your friends and acquaintances, to dole out political favors, and as a playground for the President of the United States and his allies,” Whitehouse said in the unvarnished takedown.
The corruption investigation and failed Kennedy Center stint aside, perhaps most consequential to Grenell’s inevitable downfall has been his relationship with Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, known around the West Wing and Washington as the “Ice Maiden.”
“Susie f**king hates his guts,” one Trump family source said.
Wiles regularly makes jokes at Grenell’s expense inside the Oval Office, and Grenell and his lackeys are known around the West Wing as “the misfit toys caucus,” according to the source.
Animosity between Grenell and the president’s doorkeeper extends back to the 2024 campaign, when Wiles denied the transphobic LGBTQ+ conservative group Log Cabin Republicans a primetime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.
“He screamed at Susie, and he told her, ‘You’re the reason why we’re going to lose this f**king election!'” the White House source said. The confrontation left Wiles uncharacteristically on the verge of tears.
“He berated Susie Wiles,” the source said. “That’s why he doesn’t have… a big job. It’s why he was never considered for Secretary of State.”
“I would say he’s extremely self-serving and ruthlessly ambitious,” one veteran diplomat who’s known Grenell for decades said. “And he can be really nasty.”
“He is bombastic and incredibly sure of himself for reasons that I don’t frankly understand,” said one former Trump official. “He was obviously on the wrong side of the administration when it came to Venezuela and Rubio,” they added.
“His 15 minutes of fame have passed.”
“Early on in the administration, Ric Grenell was going to be this swashbuckling problem solver who was gonna crisscross the globe, fixing things,” said a diplomat who worked with Grenell in Venezuela. “And that burned out.”
“Now he’s reduced to reducing the Kennedy Center.”
Grenell has privately told close friends that he plans to leave the Kennedy Center later this year, according to the Mail. It’s probably just as well, seeing as the center is scheduled to be closed for two years of renovations starting on July 4.
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