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In 1992, James Dale sued the Boy Scouts of America after they kicked him out for being gay. The case lasted nearly a decade and made it all the way to the Supreme Court.

While SCOTUS ultimately ruled against Dale in a 5-4 decision, his case paved the way for LGBTQ inclusion across the organization. In 2014, the Boy Scouts started allowing gay boys to join the organization. Three years later, the organization began allowing trans boy scouts, and a year later, girls became eligible for membership.

But today, Scouting America is presented with a new challenge as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has put the organization “on notice,” and has threatened to pull Pentagon support if they fail to erase what he calls “an insidious radical woke ideology,” which includes allowing trans scouts and girls to join the organization, and promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer sits down with Dale to talk about his experience suing the Boy Scouts of America and why he’s ready to speak out against the new challenges created by Hegseth, who he describes as a “terrorist.”

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today I’m here with James Dale, and you may be familiar with that name because in 1992, he sued the Boy Scouts of America after they kicked him out for being gay. While Dale ultimately lost the case, it paved the way for much LGBTQ inclusion in the Scouts. But now that’s at stake, as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is sparking a new fight threatening to remove Pentagon resources if Scouting America doesn’t erase everything that he says is “woke.” James, thanks so much for coming on the pod today.

James Dale: Thank you for having me.

SM: So you guys actually reached out to us and we weren’t really aware of everything that was happening behind the scenes with the Secretary of War, with Pete Hegseth. And I want to ask you all about that. But first, I want to understand your history as a Boy Scout a little bit more. So tell me about how you got into the Scouts and your history with the Scouts before you were kicked out.

JD: Yeah, I grew up in suburban New Jersey in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So I think when I was 8 years old, I became a Cub Scout and I stuck with it. And pretty much, I would say most of my adolescence, I got more and more involved in the Scouting program. I was in different troops, I was in leadership positions, so I stuck with it when I was in college. And then in my second year at Rutgers, I came out of the closet and I came out pretty quickly. I went from coming out in September of that year, 1989, to running the Gay Alliance in December. So a few months after that, I was speaking at a conference on the needs of gay kids to guidance counselors and teachers. It was the Rutgers School of Social Work Conference. And as a result of that, I appeared in the local paper. The Scouts saw that, and ultimately sort of the wall came down. “You’re no longer allowed to be in the Scouting program. We do not allow gay people in Scouting. Homosexuals are inconsistent with the values we put forward,” which was really a gut punch to me. I didn’t expect Scouting to be welcoming me as an openly gay man, but I didn’t expect a formal policy that I’d never heard of. It really seemed to run contrary to everything the Scouts stood for, which is about welcomeness, inclusion, leadership, community. So all of the things that I was hearing from Scouting actually told me to come out and be a leader, be honest in your relationships. So as a result of that, this started this, you know, 10-year legal battle, because I was expelled in 1990, and then it reached the United States Supreme Court in the year 2000. So pretty much my entire 20s, you know, are defined by this lawsuit.

SM: But that wouldn’t have been typical for a gay person coming out in their teens in the ‘90s, right? I find it really impressive, it probably took a lot of courage to actually be like, “No, this isn’t right and I’m actually gonna sue the Boy Scouts of America.” So how did you get from being kicked out for being gay to going and saying, “I’m gonna sue this massive organization?”

JD: So for me to go from being the co-president of the Gay Alliance to suddenly saying, “Let’s sue the Scouts,” it was a leap. But you know, in the mind of an idealistic, somebody raised by the Scouting program, taught to believe in the process and taught to believe in American values, it really wasn’t that big a stretch. And I also was raised Lutheran. I was pretty religious as a kid with my family. I went to church pretty much every Sunday and taught Sunday school. And again, my religion wasn’t dogmatic, it wasn’t hateful. So I wasn’t receiving a lot of anti-gay messages from the social institutions around me, but I guess maybe I was a ballsy 19-year-old kid who thought that this is wrong and I’m gonna challenge it.

SM: No, it’s super interesting. And I wanna get to like what’s changed because honestly, your advocacy paved the way for a lot of change in the Boy Scouts. So in 2000, you ultimately lose the case, which was literally called Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. That’s you! And the Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to freedom of association allowed the Boy Scouts to exclude a gay person from membership in spite of a state law requiring equal treatment of homosexuals in public accommodations. So, that’s a mouthful. Explain what that means.

JD: So basically, New Jersey is one of the first states in the country to amend their nondiscrimination law to include gay people, gays, lesbians, bisexuals. I think that’s all it was at the time. So basically going through the New Jersey court system, the first judge called me a sodomite 18 times. He was horrible, despicable. As a result of that, I got a lot of press. So basically this guy was so homophobic in New Jersey that it made national headlines. Other people had lost to the Boy Scouts, but never had someone been such a bigot as the guy who was a bigot to me. Then I won an appeal after that. But then [the] New Jersey Supreme Court, who is the final say on state law, said unanimously, “We in New Jersey believe that this type of discrimination goes against what we believe in as a state.” Like, expelling somebody from an organization because they are gay—as a public accommodation, they are going against everything we as a state are trying to do. So that was an incredible victory. Rarely has there been a unanimous decision from a state court on LGBT rights. And this is in 1999, so that was huge. Naively, when they appealed to the Supreme Court, they said, “Well, this is great. Suddenly, the Supreme Court is gonna put an end to this discrimination, not just in New Jersey, but across the country.” But basically I believed that they would do the right thing, and they did not. By one vote, but they did not. They gave the Boy Scouts of America a First Amendment shield to say not “Have you been anti-gay since you, for the 100 years you’ve been around?” but “Do you want to define yourself by being anti-gay?” And they said, “Yes, we do. Just like the Ku Klux Klan defines themselves by their animus towards Black people and Jewish people, a whole host of people, we wanna define ourselves by our anti-gay discrimination.” So the Supreme Court gave them the right to define themselves by their bigotry. So they were oblivious to the cost, the price of that bigotry. So they leaned into this and then America leaned away from them. Days after I lost, the backlash against Scouting started and then a month later and then six months later, then a year later. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, every single media across the country was saying the Boy Scouts lost instantaneously. Members were leaving, dollars were evaporating, the Boy Scouts of America became toxic. Like other youth organizations that were not anti-gay but not pro-gay suddenly said, “We’re not anti gay, we welcome gay people” because they’re all terrified of suffering the same backlash for bigotry the Scouts did. So the pollyanna in me can look back on this now and say, “Wow, my loss inspired a movement that forced the Boy Scout to change.” It inspired people. So in terms of what I believe in, I believe losing was better than winning.

SM: That’s what I was wondering, was it a blessing in disguise? Because since that lawsuit, things have really changed at the Boy Scouts. They’re now Scouting America, where they allow girls in. And I remember in 2015, I was working at The Wall Street Journal and I actually followed this kid, Joe Maldonado, he was an 8-year-old trans boy. And I documented the first openly trans boy going to a pack meeting, I think, in New Jersey. And we filmed the whole thing. And it was so powerful to see this kid who was just dying to be a Scout actually finally be able to go. And I feel like Joe, to me, now that I think back on filming with him that day, I hope he’s doing well now about 10 years later, was really able to do this part and parcel because of your advocacy that paved the way. Is that how you feel?

JD: I do. I think when Joe’s case came up, and I kind of followed that pretty closely, I think the Scouts were fucking terrified. They’re terrified that the same thing was going to happen to them all over again. And they were struggling to stay alive. They were struggling to be relevant. It was also, not to kind of leave this out of the narrative, too. There’s also a whole bunch of cover-ups of pedophilia that was taking place in the program. So instead of focusing on that problem, they focused on the gay people, right? They kind of had their eye off the ball.

SM: Sounds like the Evangelical church.

JD: It does, it sounds—exactly, very similar. So I think by the time the Joe thing came down, I don’t wanna say they crumbled, but they were like, “Oh my God, we gotta get out in front of this, trans kids are welcome.” So then they allowed trans kids in and they’re like, “Oh my god, but like then gender, what do we do about this gender thing? So, well, I guess girls are welcome too.” It kind of just, I don’t wanna say it crumbled. But essentially when they started to compare themselves to the values they had, this bigotry they were bringing along didn’t make sense.

SM: Yeah. And I mean, I could talk to you about this history for a long time. But I’m sure a lot of listeners are wondering like, “Why are we here now? What’s the news behind this?” And if you do fast forward to today, there is a new fight brewing as Pete Hegseth is essentially trying to “kick woke out,” or at least that’s what he says. For the folks who don’t know, Pete Hegseth has a very transphobic, homophobic track record. You can read all about it at UnclosetedMedia.com if you like. But before I ask you about it, I want to play a clip where essentially, Hegseth is threatening to pull military support unless Scouting America changes its membership rules. So here is a clip of a video that the Secretary of War account posted to its Twitter on February 27th where Hegseth is essentially putting Scouting America on notice. So Bella, if you wanna play that clip and then James, I’d love you to respond to it and tell us about it.

JD: Sure.

Pete Hegseth: After 2012, however, the Boy Scouts lost their way, and a once great organization became gravely wounded. Diversity, equity and inclusion; DEI crept in. The name was changed to Scouting America. Girls were accepted. The focus on God as the ruler of the universe was watered down to include openness to humanism and earth-centered pagan religions. Scouting became an organization that no longer supported and celebrated boys. They even welcomed the destructive myth of gender fluidity and transgenderism to infiltrate their membership. Along the way, standards were lowered and merit destroyed in favor of an insidious, radical, woke ideology that is anti-America and anti-American. The changes Scouting America made since 2012 have also jeopardized their relationship with this department. And I was very seriously considering ending our support of Scouting altogether. We have a department to protect, after all. Beyond that, the policies Scouting America have in place violate President Trump’s Executive Order 14173, entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” But before making this big change, I decided to meet with the current Scouting leadership to convey our deep concerns. Based on that face-to-face conversation, and subsequent conversations, Scouting America agreed to make several key reforms. The department’s support for Scouting is contingent on them making substantial progress toward reaching these and many other positive changes in the next six months. At that time, we’ll vigorously review progress and decide whether or not to continue our support. The onus is squarely on Scouting America to deliver. If we’re unsatisfied with Scouting America’s progress toward and commitment to the agreed-upon reforms, we will find them in violation of the president’s executive order and cease our support.

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SM: So, a lot to unpack there. I mean, filled with obviously transphobic dog whistles and such. To the folks who don’t understand why there is a relationship here, can you kind of explain the relationship between Pete Hegseth military and Scouting America because I think some people are like, how are they even connected and why could Hegseth’s pressure actually have consequences if they don’t cave?

JD: The Scouting relationship with the U.S. Government goes back many, many years. They’re chartered by an act of Congress. In terms of the Department of Defense, I remember being in Scout camp and you would see the surplus peanut butter from the Department of Army, or the tents were surplus military tents. There’s a very tight relationship between the U.S. government and the Scouting program, for like 125 years essentially. But what’s on the table right now with this very particular moment is particularly military families. When kids are in Scouting and their parents are in the military—if you’re like a military brat—basically your parents are moving every two years from military bases all around the world. You feel uprooted. So Pete Hegseth is going to take away that relationship, take away the access the Scouting program has to military bases across the globe. So that’s like an intangible price on that. And they’re threatening to take all of that away. So Pete Hegseth didn’t just say, “We have an agreement.” He said, “We have an agreement and if they don’t fall into line in the next few months, we’re gonna reevaluate that and take stuff away from them.” So it’s just a threat, it’s a bullying tactic.

SM: And he’s essentially giving them, from what I’ve seen in the reporting, a six month deadline. They have to do this in the next six months. And from everything that you’ve seen, what exactly does he mean? Like we see “get rid of woke” and these kind of quick sound bites, but like what specifically is he trying to get them to do?

JD: I’m sure he would love, just like you said, the name to be the Boy Scouts of America. He would like girls out, trans kids out. For whatever reason, gay white men seem to be OK right now. We’re in the cabinet, we’re horrible people too.

SM: Why do you think that though? Why are gay white men okay?

JD: I do not under—I mean, probably because the ground game has been so much longer. I think we’re just not there yet with the trans community. There’s just a lot more work that needs to be done. I think we need to go out there. I think we need to see visible trans leaders. We need to meet people that are trans. People need to understand that this vilification that’s happening isn’t real. It’s a distraction. It’s BS to cover up for their own flaws in policy and government work. So they’re scapegoating people that are less than 1%, less than half of 1%. There is no issue of trans kids in Scouting. It’s not a problem. These are made up problems to rally the base and get people upset. They’re not real problems. So what this is about is, just like he’s gone after universities and law firms and pretty much everybody in America, the United States government, the same day we went to war, Pete Hegseth posted the seven minute video that you showed a clip of essentially saying, “We need to take on the Scouting program because they’re all wrong.” First of all, what does Pete Hegseth know about Scouting? He was never a Scout. He was never even in the program. So I don’t know why he’s so fixated on this. And from talking to people that were, quote-unquote, “negotiating with Pete Hegseth,” which, you don’t negotiate with a mobster. You don’t negotiate with a terrorist. So unfortunately, Scouting America, and I understand why they’re negotiating with this terrorist, they’ve negotiated. So it’s a slippery slope, and it’s a dangerous place to be in, kind of getting to bed with somebody like, unfortunately, the Secretary of War.

SM: You call him a terrorist?

JD: He is; we are terrorists, I can speak quite honestly. I’m sure I’ll be called un-American now, but I would put my American credentials on the line anytime, toe to toe with Pete Hegseth. You know, I literally am happy to go toe to toe on who is a better patriot. I believe in fairness for all Americans, and he—that’s just a whole other—

SM: No, no, but I think it’s interesting because I think a lot of people water down the language they use to describe certain folks in this administration. Why do you believe he’s a terrorist?

JD: We’re terrorizing! First of all, they’re terrorizing the Scouting program, that’s obvious, right? They’re terrorizing other countries left and right. We’re creating messes around the world. I mean, I feel like this is a little bit out of the scope of this program. We’re creating chaos and disasters around the entire world. Is that not a terrorist? We’re inflicting terror all over the world!

SM: And one other thing, back to that quote, you said, “I don’t know why he did that the day we went to war, why he came after Scouting America.” Why do you think he did?

JD: Well, what this really was, having heard what happened in the room or portions of, or third person or first, second person, what happened in the room. Pete was really—trans wasn’t the focus. Trans was the red meat or the thing he was able to make out of it. He want[s] it to be the Boy Scouts of America again. He didn’t get that. They held firm on that. He wanted to kick out 200,000 girls. He didn’t get that either. So I think what happened was he was able to find some gray space or misunderstanding about how they’re validating if people are biologically a boy or a girl and what that looked like. I think he wanted to check birth certificates. Like, the Scouts aren’t gonna check birth certificates. So he was trying to find ways to claim a victory when he essentially lost, because there are enough senators and congressmen, Republicans, that are actually saying, “Don’t cut off funding to the Scouts.” So he needed to come out of this negotiation he was doing with the Scouting program and claim victory. So that’s what all this anti-trans rhetoric is really about. It’s really a gender war. It’s really about masculinity and toxic masculinity at that. It’s about reinstating this lost perception of what the world used to be. And I don’t know what problems he had with his parents, but you know there’s something there that needs to be unpacked by a therapist and I’m not qualified for that. You know, he’s got—a lot of these people, I don’t understand their problems with gender and why it’s so threatening that a woman is in Scouting or a girl’s in Scouting. How does that threaten him? How does that make his world different?

SM: And why do you think he’s saying in that quote, “We need to return to the focus on God as the ruler of the universe and earth-centered pagan religions and an openness to that”? I mean, I don’t even really understand that but what does that tell you from like what that messaging because that’s obviously intentional wording that’s written for him. Why is he saying it like that?

JD: Like you said those are dog whistles. They’re perfect dog whistles that are going to get his base upset. It distracts from the war at hand, distracts from these other things. I mean I don’t think he was trying to, if he wanted to make news out of that story, he could have done a better job. He could’ve released that video and he’d been negotiating with them for months. I don’t know why the video had to come out the same day. It was obviously a pre-recorded video. It wasn’t like he did it on the spot or [got] caught in a press conference. That was a planned media drop. The day we went to, or hours before we went to the war, they went to war at like 1 a.m. the next day. So for whatever reason, he timed it for that news cycle to get it out there, probably to piss off the queer community and to rally his base as they went to war. So that’s probably what his strategy was there. Of course, the Scouting program, their response was horrible. So they allowed this media narrative from the Secretary of War to go out there and filter the airwaves. And you see news organizations like Erin In The Morning, a big trans kind of a newsletter on Substack as well, going out there and saying the Boy Scouts caved on trans kids. I mean, there’s a memorandum of understanding between the Scouting program and between the Department of War. A contract that basically said what they agreed to and what they didn’t agree to. That has not been made public. That has been made essentially a form of confidential by the Department of War. So I encourage people to file Freedom of Information Acts to get that document because I would love to see what Scouting actually agreed to and what the Department of War agreed to because that is what they did or didn’t cave and that’s the truth in what happened. I wasn’t in the room, I’ve heard what happened in the room, but the only way to know for sure is to look at that document, but let’s find out what they actually agree to and let’s try to hold the Scouting program accountable to do the right thing. Because I just read, I just read this morning that the Jamboree that’s coming up in the end of July, the National Jamboree, where kids from across the country and around the world come together to camp and skillshare and have cultural exchanges and whatnot. The last time at Jamboree, they had something called an LGBT inclusion space, essentially. Basically trying to make it the big tent and make sure that everybody felt they had a space to go to where they’d be fully embraced and accepted as their true self. Um, I just found out today that there will be no LGBT one this year. So again, the information is kind of coming out drip, drip, drip, what they agreed to and what they didn’t agree to. So I would love to know really what happened and I would love to put pressure on the Scouting program to not bend the knee and not cave in to—you can’t negotiate with a terrorist. You can’t.

SM: And also interesting, you’re on the board for Lambda Legal. Will you guys sue? Can you guys sue? Is there a legal battle to be had here?

JD: You know, I don’t make those decisions for the cases we take, but I was talking to the executive director, I mean the CEO, Kevin Jennings, and he was like, “We could be defending the Scouts.” We could be. So this op-ed that I wrote for Time recently, this Supreme Court decision where I lost, which was horrible, I mentioned that before, basically gave the Scouts the right to say, “These are who our members should be. Our members are not going to be gay people, they’re gonna be boys.” At that time they said, “No girls.” So basically, Pete Hegseth and the U.S. government is undermining that decision where I lost. They’re undermining the Scouts ability to decide who their members should be, right? The Scouts are saying, “We want trans kids.”

SM: Yeah, I want to read something. No, no, no. Sorry, I’m interrupting you. But I want to read something just because it’s totally related. So you wrote in Time magazine recently in an op-ed that the Department of War is threatening to pull military support unless Scouting America changes its membership rules. And you say that is not a legal argument, it is an authoritarian overreach of a private organization. So why wouldn’t you sue?

JD: Yeah, well, we have to have a plaintiff coming forward. Again, I don’t make those decisions, but I think it’s ripe for an opportunity.

SM: Do you think somebody should sue?

JD: I think so, yeah. Because if the Supreme Court can overturn the decision where I lost, maybe that’s going to be a different way. But I find myself defending this horrible decision that expelled me from Scouting, defending that decision now. I’m defending the Scouts that kicked me out. Defending or supporting at least, so it’s very weird. It’s a very weird time in America with all the stuff going on and how everything is backwards.

SM: Because it’s interesting because essentially like what you write in that Time magazine article and what you’re saying is that like what Hegseth is doing completely contradicts what the Supreme Court ruled against you for, which makes it technically illegal.

JD: Yeah, but you know, you can’t have it both ways. You know, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, U.S. Government Administration, the White House, what do you want? Decide where you’re gonna play. I just need to know what the rules are because you can’t keep changing the rules and that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to constantly change the rules to benefit themselves and their donors and their supporters and their base. Let’s just have one set of rules and have it be consistent. Because I could argue, defending that horrible decision where I lost. And that’s what I’m doing now, but I could also argue that they shouldn’t have kicked me out in the first place and let New Jersey’s gay rights law stand. But which is it? I could argue both, and I think I do pretty well. I think they’re the ones that are going to have no logical consistency to their argument.

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SM: I think it’s also interesting. I think one thing you said too, is that not coming after gay white boys is interesting. And I think a lot of people say, “Oh, trans is one thing, you know, LGB is another thing.” But I just want to flag to our viewers, to our listeners, that Pete Hegseth also has a very anti-gay track record. And here’s just one example when he served as the publisher of Princeton’s conservative campus newspaper, the Princeton Tory, in an editor’s note titled “The Rant.” He outlined the publication’s anti-gay views, and he said, “The movement to legitimize the homosexual lifestyle and homosexual marriages is strong and must be vigorously opposed. Homosexuals themselves should not be demonized, however, their lifestyle deserves absolutely no special legal status.” So I just find it so interesting that all these folks are saying it’s just the transgender community we’re coming for, but it’s not, is it?1

JD: Yeah, I mean, I don’t suffer fools gladly. I mean trans people are the canary in the coal mine. You know, the same people that hate trans people, and that gets them really excited kicking them out of Scouting or trying to, are the same ones that don’t like me. So I see the parallels here, but you know for whatever reason it’s just not in fashion to be anti-gay, anti-gay male right now, right? You know we got Scott Bessent as the Treasury Secretary, Richard Grenell ran the Kennedy Center. There’s lots of horrible people that are gay men. So I don’t want to cover for them. But I also believe we’ve seen this in history, we’ve seen this in other authoritarian regimes where you’re safe for one minute and suddenly you’re not. So don’t get a false sense of confidence and comfort. The same people that hate them hate you too.

SM: We’ve talked so much about policy and specifics, but obviously at the end of the day, this comes down to the human toll this takes on kids on children, right? Um, when you think about like the little Joe Maldonados or the little James Dales even, what are your concerns about what these decisions could do in terms of their life, their comfortability, their mental health, their wellbeing?

JD: One of the reasons earlier this year or last year, we started to think again about Scouting. It wasn’t because suddenly they allowed gay men and gay kids in because I felt like society has already caught up with that for the most part. Not that we should be naive and rest in our laurels. We need to be vigilant about defending our rights. But I felt like they weren’t leading on that issue, right? Society forced them to allow gays in. I felt that particularly on the trans issue, they were leading. They were leading. And it didn’t take a lawsuit for them to allow Joe in, right? It happened almost instantaneously when the issue came up, they kind of got on the right side of history. So I felt like they had been leading on that. So I fear now that the messages Scouting are sending to trans kids is that “you’re welcome, but you’re not welcome,” or “your value is debatable.” And the messages are unclear. I think Scouting needs to come out there, which is not really what they’re doing right now, really strong and really loud, about where they stand on these issues and who they wanna be. Who does Scouting America wanna be? Do they wanna go back to the old days where they’re caving and they’re doing the wrong thing? Or do they wanna to be the organization they should have been all along and align themselves to their values and the values of fairness and equality and community acceptance and leadership. They need to be leaders on this issue. They need to lead and highlight the trans members in the organization and celebrate them, not kind of put them on the chopping block.

SM: If you could talk to Pete Hegseth, what would you say to him? What would you want to say to him if you had a chance to speak to him?

JD: I don’t get it. Like, really, seriously, how does a trans kid, you know, a 15-year-old trans kid in a Scout troop, where they’re all welcoming the kid, why is that rubbing you this way so much? I don’t understand what’s going on. These are just kids, right? This isn’t about military readiness or whatever BS they have for their other -isms and their other hatred of people. These are just kids trying to find a place where they belong. That place in the ‘80s, the Boy Scouts were that for me. And then they expelled me. But now they’re saying, “We welcome trans kids.” Trans kids are in Scouting. They’re getting along with the other kids. We’re not reading about these horror stories about trans problems and Scouting, it’s a non-issue. It’s a made-up story. Don’t we have better things to worry about? Isn’t that war in Iran much more important and valuable worth of your time than taking a war with a youth program that’s trying to build American citizens into the best they can be?

SM: James, I’m so grateful for your time. And this was a really fascinating conversation and an important conversation to have because I don’t think we’re talking about it enough, especially as there’s gonna be decisions made soon. So thank you so much for speaking with me and coming on the podcast today.

JD: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a great talk.

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This story was originally written for Gay Times Magazine.

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Shlomo Satt remembers first thinking he might be gay at 13 years old after seeing an article about gay marriage in the newspaper. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish community on Long Island, New York, Satt immediately felt anxious about what this could mean for his future.

“I think that’s when I started thinking, ‘Oh, am I that? Am I gay?’” Satt, now 30, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.

As Satt came to realize he was gay, his anxiety skyrocketed. He was aware that only half of Orthodox Jews—and 20% of ultra-Orthodox Jews—are accepting of homosexuality.

“In my community, it’s very shunned to be gay,” says Satt. “So it was really, really, hard for me to accept that I was attracted to other men, because I was like, ‘It’s not what the Torah says you’re allowed to be.’”

Unlike more progressive denominations, Orthodox Judaism advocates for a more literal understanding of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Torah. For example, verses such as Leviticus 18:22, which states that “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” are more likely to be interpreted verbatim by Orthodox rabbis.

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“One of the hallmarks of growing up Orthodox and queer is feeling really alone,” says Satt. “It’s not something we talked about.”

Stories like Satt’s represent what’s motivating LGBTQ people to leave Orthodox Judaism. While little research has been done, one 2023 study from Brooklyn College CUNY found that only about 15% of LGBTQ people left Orthodox Judaism directly because of their sexual orientation or their religious views on homosexuality. Other reasons for leaving the denomination included religious views on homosexuality, being judged, bullied or alienated, emotional abuse, trauma, wanting more freedom and mental health issues.

“It was really hard for me to engage in [Orthodox Judaism] and not feel deep shame or trauma,” says Satt. “That’s why I left.”

Growing Up Orthodox

Unlike many Orthodox Jewish families, Satt’s parents allowed him some access to technology and even played secular music like The Beatles. Still, he had no television in the house growing up and zero education about LGBTQ people.

“I didn’t even know that someone could be gay until a friend told me in sixth grade,” he says. “For most of my upbringing, it wasn’t like homophobia was espoused. It just was literally not talked about.”

After the newspaper article triggered Satt’s “gay awakening,” he struggled to keep his feelings inside. “It was really hard for me to accept that I was attracted to other men,” he says. “All I wanted was just to be straight.”

Staying silent about his emotions took a toll. He worried that his dreams of having a big Jewish family would be unattainable. “I wanted to have a wife and kids and be normal within my community, and it felt like I couldn’t have any of that if I was gay,” he says.

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By around age 15, Satt’s stress levels reached a breaking point. “I had a night where I was just really, really depressed and crying to God about my sexuality. It was really hard for me to cry at that point, because I was so not tuned in with myself.” He decided to meet with a school psychologist who was part of the Orthodox community. After telling the psychologist he might be gay, the response he received was, “We can fix that.”

Satt remembers initially feeling immense relief at the thought that his sexuality could be cured. “I was so joyful,” says Satt. For the next three and a half years, he worked with members of the Orthodox community who practiced conversion therapy.

The Turning Point

This therapy, which has been widely discredited for decades, culminated with Satt doing a retreat through an organization called Brothers Road, where participants were encouraged to reenact their trauma in front of each other. He was forced to beat up a punching bag with a metal baseball bat, pretending it was his mother. “I don’t know what the purpose of this was, but it was horrible. And doing this for 35 adult people, it’s totally insane and super humiliating.”

After the therapy failed, Satt began to question the negative messaging he had been taught about being gay. “The things that are more innate to me, I believe, are from God. I didn’t choose to be gay, I just was gay,” he remembers thinking.

With the help of a licensed trauma specialist, Satt reconstructed his relationship to Judaism. He is still Jewish today, and has plans to pursue rabbinical school, but he left Orthodoxy behind. “I actually started really heavily diving into spirituality as a means of meaning in my life, as a means of connecting with my Jewish roots and my tradition, but in entirely different ways. One hundred percent progressive, 100% equitable, only learning with people who conferred my identities,” says Satt, who now identifies as a “post-denominational Jew.”

This transition hasn’t been easy. Satt has lost all contact with his family and describes losing the relationship with them as “the hardest thing” in his life.

Unfortunately, Satt’s experience isn’t unusual. An article written by the founder of Jewish Queer Youth (JQY), a nonprofit mental health organization, found that from 2016 to 2023, over 2000 queer youth from Orthodox families accessed support services provided by JQY. And amongst closeted Jewish Orthodox gay men, concerns about the impact of their sexuality on family relationships are a common theme.

Despite this, Satt says he’s experienced immense joy since accepting his sexuality, healing through therapy with an affirming Orthodox rabbi, and having a Jewish wedding where he married his long-term partner. “I started to, slowly but surely, take back my own narrative and live the life that I wanted.”

The Rabbinical Perspective

While one 2025 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that some ultra-Orthodox communities are moving away from uniform rejection of homosexuality, gay rights remain controversial in many Orthodox communities. For example, Chabad, a major movement within Orthodox Judaism, states on its website that when it comes to queer desires, “even if it burns inside for a lifetime, the best thing for you, for your health, and for your ultimate satisfaction in life is to subdue and re-channel that desire.”

Mark Dratch, an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem, says that there is a limit to the accommodations an Orthodox synagogue can make.

“The sense of alienation, the sense of depression and the person’s emotional and sometimes physical well-being, that’s part of a rabbi’s responsibility,” Dratch told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “So I think there’s room to be welcoming and embracing, while at the same time living with this kind of dissonance of what tradition requires.”

Though Dratch ultimately views queerness as being in opposition to Orthodox Judaism, he still believes it is his duty to try and support LGBTQ congregants. “I may not like this part of you, but if I don’t embrace you, then we’re going to lose the other 95% of your Jewish commitment,” he says.

Dratch says LGBTQ Jews would be welcome to attend services in his synagogue, but he wouldn’t marry a gay couple. “It may not be good enough for some LGBT people in these communities,” he says. “They want to be more than tolerated.”

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Marceline’s Story

It’s not just gay people who struggle. As early as 9 years old, Marceline Franco locked herself in her bathroom and wrapped a towel around her head, trying to picture herself as a woman. Assigned male at birth and raised in a Syrian Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York, Franco felt intense guilt for wishing she was a girl.

“I desperately, more than anything, wanted to be a woman,” says Franco, now 30 years old. “I would sit in the bathroom as my only safe space to cry and pray and beg.”

Staying quiet about wanting to dress as a woman and go by a girl’s name put an immense amount of stress on Franco. “One of my fantasies as a kid was that I could wake up in a woman’s body. But in the bed next to me was a clone of me that could live out the rest of my life as my family and community would have wanted,” she says. “I felt horrible that I would rob them of me.”

A Shared Experience with Conversion Therapy

By the time Franco entered college, she decided to see an ultra-Orthodox therapist. “Over the next four and a half years, I participated in some version of conversion therapy,” she says. “[My therapist’s] view of it was more of a fetish/escape, and that it was something that I could learn to control and basically bury.”

Franco’s therapist taught her to think of herself in four parts. When Franco suggested that there was a fifth part—a girl—her therapist shut the idea down. Franco found the elimination of this part of her troubling. “It was the erasure of my transness with this person in a professional setting, which is deeply, deeply problematic,” says Franco.

Similar to Satt, conversion therapy didn’t work. And after watching queer comedian Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special “Nanette” for a college class, Franco began to question her therapist even more and started reconsidering her religious upbringing.

“I no longer was able to hold the belief that the Torah was true,” she says. “I realized that I may be holding onto religion to protect myself from coming to terms with the grief of being alone in the world … and justifying staying closeted.”

Franco ultimately left organized Judaism behind.

Six months later, she came out as trans. In order to explore her gender, she cut contact with her family. However, upon trying to reestablish a relationship with them as a woman, things did not go well. “I was nearly barred from my own grandfather’s funeral and I was barred from a family Shabbat meal mourning him. Two weeks later I was kicked out of my cousin’s wedding for showing up dressed as myself,” she says.

“The grief is immeasurable. It is nearly impossible to mourn people and relationships that are actively still living in this world. … And to move through all these major life moments alone has been really difficult.”

Despite this loss, Franco still practices elements of Judaism that resonate with her and has found joy and meaning in her transition. “Once I just started speaking my mind, saying how I felt, it stopped being confusing. I stopped hating myself for having these feelings. I just started loving myself.”

How Satt and Franco Learned to Move Forward from Religious Trauma

Both Satt and Franco left the Orthodox communities they grew up in.

Still, Satt says Judaism has been the healing force for him. “It brought me back into a relationship with God, The Infinite, The Sum of All Good,” he says. “It ultimately made me feel very connected to myself, to humanity and to my heritage.”

Satt is thrilled that some rabbis are fighting for more inclusivity in the Orthodox Jewish space, but unless more begin to follow in their footsteps, he believes LGBTQ Jews will continue to disaffiliate from the denomination.

Though Franco no longer practices Judaism, she still finds meaning in some of the lessons she learned when she was.

“When my therapist was my mentor, she had me start to look at the world as having divine providence. And I did see a lot of that in my life. To this day, I still do,” she says. “And I just have reinterpreted that God doesn’t care that I’m Jewish or not. God loves me as I am.”

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This story was done in partnership with LOOKOUT, a nonprofit newsroom focused on accountability journalism for the Southwest’s queer community. Subscribe to their newsletter here.

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A LOOKOUT and Uncloseted Media investigation has found that millions of dollars from various state motor vehicle departments are being funneled into far-right groups that use that money to lobby lawmakers and fund litigation that defeat equity measures for millions of people across the country, including for women, people of color and, more specifically, LGBTQ people. And it’s all being done through what’s on the back of people’s cars.

In a nationwide sampling of state specialty license plate financial data since 2020, more than $7 million has gone to groups that have helped champion anti-LGBTQ legislation, funded litigation that struck down conversion therapy bans, and promoted Christian nationalist values that have direct ties to nationally recognized anti-queer groups.

The findings of the newsrooms include:

• Many specialty state license plates fund organizations that have indirect ties to extremist groups, although Uncloseted Media and LOOKOUT’s investigation found that four states give money to Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups, including the American Family Association (AFA) and members of the Family Policy Alliance. Those states are: Arizona, Montana, Florida and Mississippi.

• Since 2019, Arizona’s “In God We Trust” license plate has given more than $1.4 million to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The group is most well known for supporting legislation that bans trans youth from gender-affirming care and access to gender-aligned bathrooms and youth sports, and for recently winning their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, striking down Colorado’s conversion therapy ban.

• A majority of states in the U.S. have a specialty license plate that has brought in tens of millions of dollars for the Choose Life movement, a Christian conservative anti-abortion campaign that has been supported by ADF.

To be clear, specialty license plates are different from popular “vanity” license plates. Those license plates—celebrating status as a “RCKDRMR” or boasting being “2KEWL4U”—have specific rules that prevent duplication or offensive terms. (Though there have been arguments over what is considered “offensive.”)

But every state also has a series of specialty license plates that are used as fundraisers for special causes or groups: California has license plates for coastal protection access and firefighters; New York has a plate for Lupus Awareness and Autism Awareness.

For these plates, fees paid to the state are redirected to organizations that have applied to have the license plate made and met the qualifications.

In Arizona, for example, groups that want to create a specialty license plate must get a lawmaker to sponsor legislation establishing the license plate into the state register, raise $32,000 for setup fees and have the design approved by the state Motor Vehicle Division. Not every group achieves that goal. If they’re successful—and with the governor’s signature—$17 of every plate purchase goes to the organization.

A similar process exists in Montana, where any qualifying nonprofit can launch a plate with a $4,000 deposit, and there are few mechanisms to revoke it beyond low circulation or failure to meet broad “public welfare” criteria.

But in states across the nation, that apolitical process is now a cash-grab for anti-LGBTQ groups.

In Montana, for example, the Montana Family Foundation earns $25 from each “In God We Trust” specialty license plate—raising more than $400,000 since 2019—while advancing laws that define sex as binary, restrict gender-affirming care for minors and limit trans people’s access to restrooms.

Down in Florida, two specialty license plates have given over $450,000 to Florida Family Voice, a group that publicly supports the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

And in Mississippi, the AFA—which operates media outlets like American Family Radio and American Family News, formerly known as OneNewsNow, and has a long record of promoting anti-LGBTQ rhetoric—launched a specialty plate that nets the group $24 per plate and has already generated more than $8,000 since rolling out this year.

But politicians have taken notice: In Arizona, for example, Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill recently that would have allowed a state license plate’s funds to go to Turning Point USA. She argued that license plates “should remain nonpartisan.”

But there’s the rub: License plates have been funding partisan political projects for more than a decade.

A National Campaign

It’s unclear where the first “In God We Trust” specialty plate appeared. What is known is that the version in Arizona has been arguably the most successful. Between 2012 and 2019, ADF’s “In God We Trust” license plate flew under the radar and only came under scrutiny in 2019 when an Arizona Department of Transportation spokesperson said the organization had collected $827,000 in five years.

Originally approved in 2008, ADF started gathering money through the license plate when it was officially rolled out in 2012. But the idea gained popularity in 2016 under the banner of the Project Blitz campaign, a national coalition of Christian organizations that aimed to get “In God We Trust” on as many public surfaces as possible, including cars, claiming it was the national motto for the country.

The campaign continued. In 2017, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation—one of the main organizations behind Project Blitz—had proposed model legislation that would have continued the success of ADF’s campaign by pursuing a “National Motto Display Act” that would display “In God We Trust,” in public buildings and on license plates across the U.S.

The caucus has also proposed model legislation that banned gender-affirming care for all transgender Americans as far back as 2016. It also promoted legislation that favored heterosexual relationships and marriages.

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According to the secular group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, ADF has aligned itself with Project Blitz and has filed amicus briefs alongside the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation in religious freedom cases.

ADF has been using Arizona as its home base for its conservative Christian, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ positions since it was founded in 1994. The organization was created by 35 Christians, including Alan Sears, who co-authored the 2003 book “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.”

The nonprofit has drafted gender-affirming care bans across the country and helped write Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which limits classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity.

Since 2019, Arizona’s open records website shows ADF has received $1.4 million in disbursements from specialty plates.

LOOKOUT and Uncloseted Media reached out through email to ADF seeking clarification on how much money they’ve brought in total with their specialty plates, and how they’ve used that money. They did not respond.

“This is money that was, and continues to be, used to weaponize religion against vulnerable people,” Nick Fish, the president of American Atheists, told LOOKOUT and Uncloseted Media.

State Sen. Juan Mendez (D-Tempe) sponsored a bill to remove the plate in 2019. The bill died in committee.

In Montana, Florida and Mississippi We Trust

The strategy itself is not new.

The anti-abortion group Choose Life, Inc. first introduced their specialty license plates in Florida in 1998. Today, “Choose Life” plates are available in 33 states and Washington, D.C., often marketed as supporting adoption while directing funds to anti-abortion organizations, including affiliates of Choose Life America Inc. and the Family Policy Alliance, a coalition of conservative Christian organizations in 39 states that opposes marriage equality, transgender rights, sex consent education and bans on conversion therapy.

As of 2019, Choose Life America, Inc. reported raising $28 million nationwide. And—with the help of ADF—they have fought for their ability to have plates in multiple states, including Arizona, New York and New Jersey. ADF also defended North Carolina’s plate from a legal challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union.

And while states have been slow—or altogether unconcerned—in stopping political groups’ maneuverings using specialty license plate funds to pay for lobbying or lawsuits, groups have accelerated their push into the cash cow for their own political gains.

In similar fashion to ADF, the Montana Family Foundation is collecting $25 for every license plate sold that features a waving flag and an image of the Liberty Bell with the phrase “In God We Trust.”

Since the organization launched in 2002, they have helped pass or promote state laws that define sex as binary; that criminalize gender-affirming care to anyone under 16 years old; and that ban trans people from their gender-aligned restrooms. The organization is allied with the Family Policy Alliance.

Since Montana Family Foundation began making money from the license plates in 2019, they have raised over $400,000.

Montana has a much simpler process for introducing new specialty plates than Arizona: Any 501(c)(3) can submit an application to the Department of Justice’s Motor Vehicles Division along with a $4,120 deposit and fees. So long as they meet a small list of requirements, including that “the primary purpose of the organization … is service to the community through specific programs that promote improving public health, education, or general welfare,” they will likely be approved. Currently, state law only allows for existing plates to be revoked if they either violate these requirements or drop below 400 total plates in circulation.

In Mississippi, meanwhile, all standard license plates previously read “In God We Trust.” But that changed in 2023 after a lawsuit brought by American Atheists. In response, the AFA last year launched a new specialty plate bearing the slogan, which gives them $24 per purchase.

The AFA owns and operates conservative media organizations which frequently promote anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and misinformation. In a 2015 article, their vice president declared that “homosexuality is a sin” and that “the LGBTQ agenda imposes sexual anarchy.” And in 2019, they published an article about “the inescapable link between homosexuality and pedophilia.”

Already, the group has gained over $8,000 in plate sales in less than five months of receipts, according to publicly available data.

Florida has two license plates that fund Florida Family Voice (FFV)—a state-level affiliate of the Family Policy Alliance.

According to the group’s website, proceeds from the state’s “In God We Trust” and “America the Beautiful” specialty plates fund scholarships for young people to participate in Patriot Academy, a right-wing educational program that aims to “train citizens to understand and influence government policy with a Biblical worldview.” FFV has also hosted a summit in collaboration with Project 2025 authors The Heritage Foundation on “empowering parents to protect children” from “transgender ideology,” and they were strong supporters of the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

The funds for the two plates—more than $3.8 million combined—go to the In God We Trust Foundation and America The Beautiful Fund, both nonprofits led by Christian activist couple Martin C. and Janet Boire. Since 2017, the two groups have together donated over $453,000 to FFV, as well as $154,000 to TPUSA, according to their tax filings.

The newsrooms reached out to the Family Policy Alliance, Montana Family Foundation and American Family Association on questions about their anti-LGBTQ work and the money brought in from their specialty plates. They did not respond.

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Other States

LOOKOUT and Uncloseted Media also identified license plates in other states that fund groups that tangentially support anti-LGBTQ advocacy.

In Alabama, a specialty license plate emblazoned with the “Don’t Tread on Me,” or Gadsden Flag, donates more than $40 of its proceeds to the Foundation for Moral Law, a Christian conservative nonprofit that advocates against marriage equality. They’ve also filed amicus briefs supporting several ADF cases, including the one that overturned Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, as well as others pushing for states to out LGBTQ kids to their parents and grant foster care licenses to couples who refuse to accept trans identities.

The group was founded by former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was suspended from his position for violating the Supreme Court’s legalization of gay marriage and later fell into political irrelevancy after several women and girls accused him of sexual assault or harassment.

Uncloseted Media and LOOKOUT were unable to identify contact information for Roy Moore, but reached out to his wife, Foundation for Moral Law president Kayla Moore, via email, and received no response.

Like Montana, specialty plates in Alabama are approved by a simple application process, though they notably claim that they do not consider applications from “political organizations.”

The Christian Home School Association of Pennsylvania (CHAP), a state affiliate of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), also has a specialty plate. Co-founded by former ADF CEO Michael Farris, HSLDA advocates for Christian home schooling and has fought for the parental right to spank children with an instrument. CHAP’s website states that they oppose gay marriage and gay sex.

Advocacy groups aren’t the only ones raking in funds. Virginia also sells license plates that fund Liberty University, a private evangelical college with strong connections to the anti-LGBTQ right.

Students at the college are required to agree to a code of conduct called The Liberty Way, which bans “statements and behaviors that are associated with LGBT states of mind,” including holding hands with a person of the same gender or using pronouns different from those assigned at birth.

The university has especially strong ties with Liberty Counsel, the Christian legal group that petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn gay marriage last year.

A Legal Precedent

States have taken racist license plates off the road in the past.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could refuse a request by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to release a specialty license plate in the state featuring the Confederate battle flag.

The ruling allowed Maryland and Virginia to rescind and recall similar Confederate flag plates in their own states, creating a legal precedent for the removal of plates that didn’t align with state values.

“Public funds should promote the public good,” said R.G. Cravens, senior research analyst with the SPLC. “As budgets tighten everywhere, states should prioritize support for inclusive civil society and democratic institutions, not subsidizing anti-LGBTQ+ extremists.”

And not everyone who is deeply religious or conservative is on board. One Arizona woman, Roxanne Grona, who describes herself as a conservative Christian, said she wouldn’t want to give money to groups that use religion as a cudgel to do harm against queer people:

“I had an incident with a great-grandchild that has chosen a different way of life than I would have chosen,” she said. “In no way, if I bought an ‘In God We Trust’ license plate, would I want any money to do anything to harm that child or anyone else’s child.”

Additional data reporting by Joseph Darius Jaafari.

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At 13 years old, I remember looking in the mirror in my Toronto bathroom and thinking, “Yeah, I’m a lesbian.” At the time, I thought it was a dirty word. Thinking back, it could be because the first time I heard it was when a family member said, “I don’t know what a lesbian is, they are like aliens.”

And although I walked around in camouflage Crocs with a rainbow My Little Pony charm, plaid knee-length shorts and a shark tooth necklace (yes, these are all, in my opinion, stereotypically lesbian apparel!), I didn’t feel like I fit the mold. The longer I thought about it, the worse I felt, so I buried my feelings deep inside.

Now I am 25, and I have been out since I was 22. Three years ago, I never could have imagined that I’d be working for a queer news publication and celebrating Lesbian Visibility Week (LVW), an annual event meant to honor and uplift lesbian perspectives and highlight the hardships our community faces. To me, LVW is so important because, frankly, it has been an absolute shit show getting here, to a place where I feel love and joy most days.

I think back to the frustration of constantly being asked, “Do you have a boyfriend?” Of watching princess movies and seeing a broken girl only find herself when her prince charming arrives. I remember listening to music that was always about heterosexual relationships. I remember feeling left out in high school when, one by one, my friends got boyfriends.

I tried the boyfriend, and I tried really hard for it to work at a large detriment to my wellbeing. I brainwashed myself into thinking I was probably bisexual, which I told my closest friends around 16 and unsuccessfully told my parents at the same age. I was probably subconsciously using this as a litmus test of their acceptance and to soothe the anxiety I felt around my sexuality.

Learning to love who I am did not only come from me unraveling my internalized lesbophobia and dissecting the oppressive societal messages of heteronormativity. It came from meeting an awesome community of lesbians and queers. I found people who understood my worldview and who showed me the ropes. I no longer had to stutter over concepts like lesbian loneliness or my frustration with misogynistic straight men.

They all just got it.

Without this community, I am not sure if I could be as warm and confident in myself as I am today.

And while I still experience homophobia, like being spat on while walking with an ex in downtown Toronto or having a stranger yell in my face “Are you fucking lesbians?” in Kensington Market, the joy and love still outweighs the nasty.

So, as the sentimental dyke that I have become, I decided to ask a set of lesbians in my orbit—including my friends as well as Uncloseted staffers, board members and followers—if they would share a little bit about what makes them love being a lesbian. And now, I can share it with all of you. Here they are. Happy LVW!

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Timi Sotire

“

Falling in love with her was a reset. I felt like a kid again, hopeful about the future. We’ve had to overcome many obstacles to be together but I’d choose her in every lifetime. I was sick with a long-term health condition when we met, and hanging out with Sophia really helped me with my recovery after my surgery.

Bella Sayegh

“

Being a lesbian is one of the most beautiful things in the world. To be authentically yourself in resistance and joy is so special within the lesbian community.

Parker Wales

“

When I met Liv, I finally understood why almost every song is about love.

Gillian Kilgour

“

There is no connection quite as perfect as between lesbians, no one sees me like my lesbians do.

Chyna Price

“

There’s many things I love about being a lesbian. But here are my top three:

1. There’s just a deeper understanding when it comes to being loved by another woman.

2. The next one would be the sense of community, especially being a POC masculine-presenting lesbian. I don’t feel like I’m cosplaying as someone else like I felt like I was doing before I came out.

3. There’s so much history going back to the 1800s on how we found and fought for our love. That fight makes me proud because it shows me … that we’ve [found] ways to express our love even when it was misunderstood, illegal and deemed as madness.

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Hope Pisoni

“

Before I knew I was a lesbian, romantic relationships seemed suffocating—it felt like everyone would expect me to act my part in the meticulous performance that is heterosexuality. But meeting my spouse and discovering our identities together showed me just how freeing it could be to love without a script to follow.

Leital Molad

“

It was the joy of watching the New York Sirens defeat the Toronto Sceptres at our first professional women’s hockey game—surrounded by hundreds (maybe thousands?) of cheering lesbians.

Angela Earl

“

I spent years building a life that looked right. But I never felt settled, and eventually I started asking what would actually make me happy. Coming out was about more than who I love, it was letting go of everything I was told to be. The last few years have felt like coming home to a life that had been waiting for me.

Tali Bray

“

What I love about being a lesbian is what I love about being in love…the wonder and joy of “oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.” I love moving through the world with women.

Izzy Stokes

“

I didn’t fall in love until I realized that queerness was an option. My queer friends have helped me see so much more than I grew up seeing. I’m so proud of us, and I’m so grateful for my lesbian community.

Nandika Chatterjee

“

When I met my fiancée is when I started to feel most like myself. That meant loving myself for who I am and embracing my identity as a lesbian. I felt free in a way I have never before. That’s the long and short of it.

Liz Lucking

“

The love and joy of being a lesbian is getting to live the life I dreamed of but never thought I would get to have!

Reflections

As I read these beautiful entries, it’s not lost on me that we’re still living in a world where lesbians are more likely to struggle with maternity problems, fetishization and compulsory heterosexuality—not to mention the intersectional pressures of racism from both inside and outside the queer community. That’s part of why, according to a 2024 survey, 22% of LGBTQ women have attempted suicide, and 66% have sought treatment for trauma.

So if you are a lesbian who isn’t out or doesn’t feel safe, I hope you read this and can glean some hope from these messages. So when you look in the mirror, you know that it’s okay to release the weight—which can feel so heavy—of a heteronormative world.

We still have a long fight until all lesbians can feel safe to be themselves, but this is a community that does not back away from the tough, from the joy, from being loud and from all the other things that it takes to start a small revolution.

Hell yeah, lesbians! Here’s to you.

*I am signing off with my cat on my lap and a pride flag over my head <3.

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Matt Bernstein, also known as Mattxiv on Instagram, where he boasts 2.2 million followers, is one of the most influential internet voices for young queer progressives in the U.S. Through vertical videos, uniquely curated social posts and a podcast called “A Bit Fruity,” Bernstein tackles the most pressing—and controversial—issues of our time, but presents them in an accessible and bite-sized way that meets the moment of how consumers want to receive information in 2026.

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Spencer sits down with Bernstein to talk about why far-right podcasters are dominating the internet, the state of the Democratic party on trans issues and why “nobody [his] age cares about legacy media.”

Watch the video or read the full transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today I’m here with Matt Bernstein. He got his start posting rainbow-colored makeup looks with political messaging on socials. Since then, Out Magazine has called him one of social media’s most prominent political voices. With 2.2 million followers on Instagram, Matt doesn’t mince words as he speaks about his support for Zohran Mamdani, his critiques of both Republicans and establishment Democrats, and his unrelenting advocacy for the queer and trans community. Matt, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Matt Bernstein: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

SM: So, for the very few listeners who have never heard of you, who are you and what do you do?

MB: Man, well, my name’s Matt. I am 27. I just say that I make a podcast called “A Bit Fruity” where I do political and cultural commentary. For much longer than that, I have been on Instagram, Twitter, just kind of like a gay about the internet. I became, over the last number of years, really just increasingly politicized, and I kind of just run my mouth in a way that I try to make constructive, especially during these highly turbulent times.

SM: For backstory for the folks there: You went to NYU, you studied marketing and photography, and I believe you started posting makeup looks with political messaging. So, tell me how you went from those initial looks to where you are today. Was there a moment where it all popped off for you, or was it a slow burn? Tell me about the kind of progression.

MB: Yeah, it really happened over time. I think, you know, there’s a portion of my audience online that has followed me since the makeup days. Now I reach a broader audience. I think I reach also older people who just are into talking about politics and who, you know, might not have cared about it when it was coming to them in the form of these highly aestheticized makeup looks. But it’s always been a slow crawl in terms of adult professional life. This is the only thing I’ve ever done because by the time I finished college, and I did finish college, it was a full-time job.

SM: Obviously, you don’t come from a professional journalistic background, but the videos you come up with are really smart, really poignant and really topical. What goes into your brain when you’re like, “This is really important and something the world needs to see,” and then how do you kind of go about constructing the story, really? Because what you’re doing is storytelling.

MB: What I do is try to capture people’s political imaginations through storytelling, whether that be through celebrities, whether that be through these human interest stories. That’s one of the beautiful things about doing this as a job that I’m so grateful for, is I get to just think, “What am I totally captured by? What can I not stop thinking about?” Whether it’s like a right-wing grifter or, you know, Israel’s co-opting of Jewish identity to use as a shield behind which they can commit genocide. Like these are things that I never shut up about in my real life when the cameras aren’t on and when the phones aren’t in front of me. I just then try to channel those ideas and opinions that I really have, that take over my brain, into something that I can share.

SM: I find it interesting, though, because you said this is what you talk about when the cameras are on or are not on, right? But a lot of people don’t feel that impassioned to make it their entire job. Have you always been that way from when you were like a little kid? Like, have you always had that kind of fire?

MB: Yes, I would say. I mean, it wasn’t, you know, like, as a 10-year-old, I didn’t have that fire about like, Israel, for example. But I have always been like a litigator for sure, in my personality, and my parents used to tell me growing up, they were like, “You need to be a lawyer because you never stop arguing,” which I think drove them crazy sometimes. And also, I did not want to go to law school. So now I do this instead.

SM: We’re living in a country right now where roughly 40% of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide in the last year, right? I know you’ve talked about wanting to reach people in the “Bible Belt,” wanting to reach people in red states. Like when you’re producing your work, how does that come into play with what you put out there and how?

MB: As I’ve become more of a political person, like yes, everything’s political, but like someone who really talks about politics head-on all the time, I am very passionate about trying to expose in this current moment, like, why transphobia has just become this issue that’s stuck for the right. And so now I try to focus, I think a lot of my energy on being truthful about what’s actually going on, so people don’t feel shy about standing up for it forcefully.

SM: And I think your voice is super important to the conversation because the truth is far-right and anti-LGBTQ influencers dominate on socials and in the podcast ring. I want to read you a few stats, and then I want to get your—I’m actually really curious why you think this is. So 6 of the 10 podcasts in the U.S. on Spotify come from right-wing perspectives, and right-leaning online shows get nearly five times as many viewers as left-leaning ones. These include Joe Rogan, who is number one on Spotify and has falsely said that trans people are perverts who commit the majority of mass shootings. We also have Tucker Carlson, number four in the U.S., who’s claimed that gender-affirming health care allows adults to “basically molest and abuse children.” And then we have Candice Owens at number 10, who has called homosexuality a social contagion and has blamed gay men for pedophilia in the church. Why are these the top 10?1

MB: I mean, wow, there’s a lot of reasons. I just, those quotes strung together, it’s really…

SM: It’s shocking.

MB: Yeah. It’s really wild. It’s a multi-pronged issue. One, of course, and I talk about this a lot, is that there is an ecosystem propped up on corporate, institutional billionaire support that creates all of these podcasts, all of these right-wing media celebrities. They are funded. They do college campus, essentially recruitment, through things like Turning Point USA, PragerU, they will go and scout talent and pick people out and give them microphones and give them studios and give them advertising deals, and make it a sustainable career, if these young on-camera talent are willing to say the right lines, that of course supports power, that supports billionaires. Because really wealthy people in this country, and we saw this exposed with for example, a lot of the Epstein stuff, they love right-wing culture warrior fear-mongering bullshit, because it protects them from any sort of widespread discussion about class inequality, which is what they are, of course, very afraid of. Like these people don’t have to do Patreon, these people don’t have to do crowdsourcing. But it’s like, if you want to be a right-wing podcaster and you are beautiful and charismatic and can say the right lines, because the opinions you’re willing to espouse are those that flatter power, power will reward you for that. But it’s also, it’s unchallenging. Yes, unchallenging to power, but also unchallenging to a lot of people’s own internal biases and privileges and prejudices. Like if you are uncomfortable with trans people, for example, for any reason, but like, let’s say maybe it forces you to ask questions about your own relationship to your gender or stuff like that. It’s very comforting to have someone tell you, “You’re right, trans people are bad, you shouldn’t be thinking about these things, and you should hate them and here’s why.” It’s just hard. It’s hard. It’s hard to be a principled person who wants equality for all people all the time. There’s a lot of things that make that a hard thing to advocate for, and it’s uncomfortable.

SM: No, I mean, what you say is 100% right, because if you look at the stats, the money behind far-right podcasters completely eclipses anything close to what is, on the money behind people on the other side, if you will. And I saw one of your videos, the other, I think it was like last week or something like that. And we had done an article about how the far-right chose Riley Gaines for the sports debate. And she was this, you know, a conventionally attractive woman who tied for fifth place in a race where she competed against a trans athlete, and since then she’s appeared on Fox News 29 times and been hired as an official spokesperson for the Independent Women’s Forum, a far-right organization known for anti-trans activism. Since that infamous race, she sued the NCAA, headlined nationwide speaking tours, and launched The Riley Gaines Center at the Leadership Institute, which is affiliated with The Heritage Foundation, who wrote Project 2025, right? So, I think what we try and do is unpack all those ecosystems and those orbits, and you try and do that as well. But like why—it’s not that hard, spoiler, to actually report on this and figure this out, but so few mainstream outlets actually talk about her in that way. They’ll actually just have her on as an advocate for women’s rights. Why do you think people are so afraid to actually go there when it’s not like the reporting is that hard?

MB: In my opinion, when it comes to these mainstream news outlets, like the ones we consider to be left of center, whether it’s CNN or The New York Times, they don’t care that much about queer people either. And you’re right, it is easy to figure out every aspect of Riley Gaines’ complete and total grift. I mean, given how famous she is and how much direct access she has to the president of the United States, and the fact that there are laws in multiple states named after her that target trans women. Like, someone who tied for fifth place in a college race four years ago couldn’t get over it, didn’t even care that much initially, but was incentivized to become more cruel through an influx of income from right-wing media outlets like Fox News, Fox Sports, et cetera. They don’t report on that. And if anything, if Riley Gaines gets referenced in these left-of-center mainstream news outlets, they’re just like, “Oh, you know, advocate for women’s sports,” or something. And it’s a real shame because people deserve that bigger story. But I think a lot of it comes down to these outlets just don’t care that much about trans people. And so new media has to do that work.

SM: And want to circle back to your answer. You were saying, you made a good point that far-right podcasters, influencers, they have way more money behind them. Like “they don’t need to go on Patreon,” kind of thing. Why do you think there isn’t similar money in the left sphere?

MB: Well, because where is that money gonna come from? The leftist billionaires? Point to them. There aren’t too many. You know, there’s a way to make a lot of corporate money as maybe, a mainstream liberal in new media, like a sort of what we would say, like “DNC Darling.” But ultimately, two things: One, that requires espousing the most sort of “milk toast” positions that are completely unpopular today. Like you know, those people will never talk about the genocide in Gaza. Those people won’t talk about trans issues too forcefully, they won’t talk about taxing billionaires, they won’t talk about the ways that all of these issues intersect. It’s just kind of the types of people that are very safe for, you know, the Democratic Party donors to invest in, and they don’t get much of an organic audience, which is why I can’t even really name a good example of those types of people off the top of my head. But they’re on YouTube.

SM: People in the U.S., especially right now, don’t trust traditional media, I think, for a variety of reasons, but, you know, only 28% of Gen Z adults say they trust mass media, and 37% of adults under 30 say they actually get their news from influencers. And as somebody who used to work at 60 Minutes, which is right over there—

MB: Yeah, rest in peace, Bari Weiss.

SM: Well, yeah, exactly. I really appreciated the integrity. I did think it was a great place to work and was amazing journalistically. But I do think it’s a shame what’s happening with Bari Weiss there and with the people being put in charge. What do you think is the future for legacy media as more of these billionaires start putting people in positions of power that are essentially just self-fulfilling prophecies?

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MB: Well, I think it’s falling apart. I mean, that’s not even really an opinion. We have the numbers to back that up. I think, you know, all of CBS’ programming, for example, has like, the viewership has fallen since Bari Weiss has taken over. And I think Bari Weiss is a great example of just, like, institutional corporate media really overplaying its hand in how propagandized they think the public is actually willing to be. You know, CBS, now pandering to Trump with and owned by Paramount Skydance, is trying to appease power to the extent that they put in Bari Weiss, someone who nobody organically cares about, and someone who is a far-right anti-trans pro-Israel fanatic. And she’s, I think about how she was in the lead up to her becoming the head of CBS, she was doing this panel where she was talking about how “The young people, they don’t want these radicalized voices anymore. They don’t want people like Hasan Piker. They want everyone to come back to normal, to the center, like people like Alan Dershowitz.” And it was such an amazing moment of just demonstrating how out of touch these people are that Bari Weiss sincerely believes, or is pretending to believe, that the youths yearn to hear more from Alan Dershowitz. It is so unbelievable. But look, their viewership is plummeting because nobody cares.

SM: And you think, you’re saying nobody cares, and you think the reason she got that gig, editor in chief of CBS News, is because she’s just the mouthpiece that they want?

MB: Of course, of course, and look, she is performing for an audience of one, which is David Ellison, and he’s performing for an audience of one, which is Donald Trump. And the interesting thing is, they will, you know, they’ll keep getting funding, like, I don’t think CBS News is going anywhere, even if their viewership plummets, but its influence wanes, and that’s important.

SM: I really think, like, the younger folks and Gen Alpha coming up behind Gen Z are really able to identify the transparency and the BS of some of this. Do you find that too?

MB: Yeah, I find that to be true, of course. I think, you know, nobody my age cares about legacy media anymore; it is a dying medium. The thing I worry about is that just because things exist in these new spheres of podcasting or social media doesn’t mean that they’re savory either. So, you know, there’s a lot of bad actors. And in some ways, aspects of new media have also started to replicate the same problems that have existed in corporate media, where you have influencers who similarly want to end up being in the room with presidential administrations, for example. And so, then those influencers on their channels will also only say the things that are, you know, approved.

SM: Well, and that’s one of my big, big concerns as somebody who came from more mainstream places, there’s standards departments, there’s legal departments, like, there’s like teams of editors who actually vet things out, right? So, if we go to an independent place, like we do lose some of those stop gaps and I think there are arguments that that’s a bad thing. And, that people who—I think there’s a lack of media literacy in the United States right now; they get more attracted to charismatic leaders, right? So, I’m kind of concerned from that perspective that it’s going to be influencers telling us the news. You know, obviously, you’re somebody who does their homework, but a lot of people don’t. Like that’s a big concern, no? In terms of where we’re going with independent journalism.

MB: It is a big concern. I was just talking about this in my most recent episode, where we talked about sort of the astroturfed, semi-astroturfed campaign against Chappell Roan and everything that that was about. But so much of that was facilitated through posts from bot accounts, accounts that were men pretending to be women, and you know, one thing that you can say about Jake Tapper, as heinous as I personally find him, is that you know when you’re watching him on cable news that that is Jake Tapper. You don’t even know, when you’re reading stuff on Twitter, for example, if it’s coming from the person you think it’s coming from, or from the place you think it’s coming from. I’m a child of new media. I love it. I, of course, as someone who works in new media, am of course incentivized to tell people to invest in the voices and the creators that they find are trustworthy online. But you have to do all of that vetting, and you have to be skeptical. And right now, I worry that some people are not doing that.

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SM: I know you talked a lot about how Mamdani actually talked about trans people and advocated for trans people. If we get closer to the midterms and then eventually 2028, like what would your advice be to Democrats on their messaging on LGBTQ issues? On trans issues? Like what do they need to do better? How could they improve?

MB: The thing is, you are never going to appease the anti-trans mob by sacrificing, “Okay well we don’t have the sports issue, so I’m just gonna do what Gavin Newsom did and I’m gonna say yeah you know trans people in sports is unfair” because anyone who has paid close attention to the right wing’s attack on trans rights knows that this is not about starting and ending with sports. In fact, it’s not really about sports at all. Riley Gaines actually said it very transparently herself in a New York Times profile that they did on her. She said, “The gender ideology issue is a house of cards, and it’s all gonna fall down once we get that sports issue.” She knows this, the right wing knows this, Democrats must know this too, that they’re not waiting for you to make a compromise on trans rights. They’re waiting for you to basically concede the whole issue, which is what we’ve seen Gavin Newsom start to do a little bit, because he’s like, “Oh, well, if that’s the cost of winning,” but it’s not. Look at what Zohran Mamdani just did in New York City. He won, I think, on that issue in particular by being able to neutralize the issue. Most people don’t organically care about, for example, trans women in sports. Like, it’s not a big issue. In fact, most people don’t, A, know a trans person, or don’t know that they know a trans person. They don’t pay attention to children’s girls’ sports. And furthermore, they don’t know a trans girl who’s playing a school sport. What are we even talking about? This is not an organic thing that people care about. People care about being able to live, making a livable wage, having social services that work. These are the things that people can actually feel. And so, what Zohran Mamdani did, very effectively, was he neutralized the issue by saying, you know, “What do I think about trans rights? I think every New Yorker, trans, cis, anyone, every New Yorker deserves the right to live with dignity and to be celebrated and cherished and to not worry about how they’re going to have to pay rent next month.” He just, at every opportunity, he was able to neutralize the issue by taking the fearmongering out of it and injecting into it a statement about what people actually care about, which is their material conditions.

SM: And when you see politicians and like, honestly, presidential candidates, there’s a lot of buzz about people like, you know, Buttigieg and Newsom going to be the next president or the Democratic candidate, when you see them kind of compromising on trans issues, that really pisses you off.

MB: It really pisses me off. I made an entire podcast about how we deserve better than Gavin Newsom, and I believe we do. I think it’s immoral, obviously, because I care about trans people. I care about my brothers and sisters, but also because it is poor political strategy. You’re conceding that you don’t understand how this issue works, and you’re conceding, furthermore, that you don’t have a belief system of your own. I just find it to be such spineless politicking.

SM: Who do you like? Like, who would you want to see as the next president of the United States? Can’t say Zohran Mamdani.

MB: Yes, we can’t say Zohran Mamdani. I mean, I think, you know, based on the options that seem reasonably available to us right now, mind you, no one is officially running yet, but you know AOC has become the first, I think like major hopeful to say that she will cut off aid to Israel and weapons to Israel, which is a very important issue to me. [She’s] also someone who does not throw LGBTQ people under the bus and has found a way to be a very popular leader, I would argue, not in spite of that, but because she has demonstrated a commitment to principles.

SM: So you mentioned “spineless Jake Tapper,” you know, you critiqued CNN, and like a lot of the kind of left-of-center news publications. If you were consulting these news organizations on actually telling the news as it is and reaching mainstream America, what would your advice to them be?

MB: In the case of Jake Tapper, I actually don’t find him to be spineless. I find him, to be ideologically disgusting, because he is so, he’s just such an anti-Palestinian racist, as is evidenced by this strange war he’s waging on CNN Primetime against Hasan Piker while we’re at war, so I don’t know why that seems to be the thing he thinks is worth devoting eight minute segments about, but anyway. I mean, it’s hard because the structure, the financial structure at play with traditional media is such that I don’t think that they could even follow my advice, which is, of course, to say actually listen to the people and reflect the interests and the views of the people. But the problem is when your whole corporation and media outlet is funded by other corporations and billionaires, it makes it a lot harder to reflect popular sentiment when popular sentiment is, for example, like “tax the rich,” like we have wealth gaps, we have wealth inequality that’s like Gilded Age levels. And how are you gonna talk about that when your station is only on air because of the people making the problem? You know what I mean? So, I mean, I have a prescription for what they could do, but I just don’t know if they can do it.

SM: I’m curious if anything from your upbringing or your coming out story really inspires you and motivates you because you’ve kind of been on the side of adversity before?

MB: The traumatic memories of being in the closet, of always being scared that you’ll be “found out,” of this sort of surveillance paranoia that I feel like a lot of queer people internalize when you’re really young because you just always want to be safe and you don’t want anyone to know. I don’t cling to those memories, but I do hold on to them because I never thought that I would be in a position to like be fully myself with the nails and the makeup, but also just be fully myself and expressing every facet of who I am and my world view and all of that stuff. I never thought I would be able to do that. I distinctly remember being in the closet as a kid, and my mom driving me places, and me sitting in the back of the car, and just knowing that there was something wrong because I had looked at the Calvin Klein underwear packaging the wrong way or something. And that terrorized me, those feelings, for years. When you’re so young to even be thinking about things that way. It changes your brain, I think, forever. And I try to stay grateful every single day for the freedom that I wish all queer people could just take for granted because it exists, but unfortunately, it doesn’t. And I feel like, I don’t know, every queer person who gets to grow up and live their lives as adults, it’s a miracle, really, given the way the world is.

SM: And Trump has said, talking about like the war in Iran, he said that Iran, “throws gays off buildings” in a recent interview, in a way to show how dangerous they are as a country. I don’t need to tell you he’s railed against the LGBTQ community in rhetoric and policy. How do you view Trump’s anti-LGBTQ rhetoric about other countries, about countries he’s either at war with or he is beefing with?

MB: Well, it’s, I mean, I encourage people to learn two terms. One is pinkwashing, and one is homonationalism. And they both are core to the belief that you should be able to commit atrocities across the globe, but particularly in majority brown countries, majority Arab countries, because of what you view as a more progressive country that we have here, based on like, having gay marriage. And it’s not true. I mean, the amount of pushback I’ve gotten for advocating for Palestinian human rights and dignity based on, “Oh, well, what would happen if you went to Gaza as a gay man?” Well, if I went to Gaza as a gay man, I would be bombed by Israel. So, it’s kind of a moot point, all of our, all of our safety and security is intertwined. And I think especially to hear that, you know, it’d be one thing to hear that from like a liberal Zionist Democrat who’s like, “Oh, well, you know, but I supported gay marriage here, and you never get to gay marry.” It’s still a bullshit argument, but especially coming from Trump, who actively does not support LGBTQ rights in the United States, to hold up LGBTQ rights in the United States as some sort of shield from which you can hide behind and talk very genocidally about people in other countries and say, “Well, look, we have gay rights here. We need to bring gay rights there.” You don’t even want gay rights here. So, like, bitch, please.

SM: I feel like that’s maybe a good place to end on. Matt Bernstein, I could talk to you for a lot longer, but I know you’ve got to go. Thanks so much for speaking to me and Uncloseted Media today. We really appreciate it.

MB: Oh, it’s a real pleasure. Thank you for having me and letting me run my mouth.

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This story was written in partnership with Gay Times Magazine.

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When Evan decided it was time to tell his boyfriend that he voted for Trump, he couldn’t get the words out. “I was stuttering for 20 minutes straight on the phone,” he told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.

Once he finally worked up the courage, he was met with pushback: “He made fun of me. … He called me a racist and a white supremacist,” says Evan, a 21-year-old math major who lives in Long Island, New York.

That pushback isn’t unusual: According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 83% of queer men typically vote Democrat. One key reason gay men swing left in 2026 is because of the Trump administration and MAGA-aligned politicians’ track record on LGBTQ issues. Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has terminated more than $1 billion worth of grants to HIV-related research, removed the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument and shut down the LGBTQ-specific option on the 988 youth suicide hotline.

Because of this, many of the fewer than one in five LGBTQ men who cast their ballot for Trump in 2024 face judgment for their political affiliation.

“People think that I hate myself for being gay, and that I’m a gay traitor. … I wish there were more gay conservatives or moderates,” says Evan, who requested to use a pseudonym due to fears over retaliation for his political views.

Navigating Dating and Relationships as a Gay Trumper

Nick Duncan, 43, can relate to Evan’s fears about being an open Trump supporter: “I mostly get hatred. I’ve never lost a conservative friend because I’m gay, but I’ve lost all of my gay friends because I’m conservative,” says Duncan, a hospitality executive who lives in Miami. “I’ve divorced myself from what I refer to as the Alphabet Mafia.”

Duncan says he feels so unwelcome by the LGBTQ community that he’s hesitant to attend certain queer events. “Nowadays, I would never go to a Pride event,” Duncan told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “I don’t feel that I would be safe.”

Despite these concerns, Duncan doesn’t hide his political views when looking for love. “I’m in a long-term relationship now, and when I have been on the dating market, I’m very open and upfront about [my political views]. So I think it just weeds out most people who would have an issue.”

For Evan, political differences have been a source of tension in his relationship even before he told his boyfriend who he voted for. “When I first met him, he asked me if I liked Trump. … He was kind of scaring me. So I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Evan recalls. “He said, ‘Good answer, because if you said yes, I couldn’t even talk to you.’”

Since revealing his conservative identity, Evan has had multiple arguments with his boyfriend about politics. “This guy, who I’ve been dating for almost a year, he’s way too far left. … The first proof is he thinks there’s more than two genders,” says Evan. “I tried telling him there were only two genders, and he got mad at me.”

Though Evan believes there are only two genders, research suggests that gender is a spectrum allowing for multiple gender identities.

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Proud Gay Trump Supporters

According to a 2025 report from Pew Research Center, 71% of LGBTQ adults view the Republican Party as unfriendly towards LGBTQ Americans. Duncan thinks these critiques are unreasonable: “The Republican Party is not nearly as anti-gay as [leftists] believe,” he says. “The Trump administration has plenty of openly gay people in the administration, and Trump actually supported gay marriage before it was cool.”

Gay members of the Trump administration include Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as Tony Fabrizio, a pollster and strategist. Additionally, Trump did tell The Advocate in a 2000 interview that though “the institution of marriage should be between a man and a woman,” he thinks amending the Civil Rights Act to grant the same protection to gay people that we give to other Americans is “only fair.”

But since then, Trump has appointed Supreme Court Justices who have denounced marriage equality and Cabinet members with anti-LGBTQ track records, including Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi.

Duncan says part of the reason he isn’t worried about Trump’s anti-LGBTQ track record is because he doesn’t view being gay as the most important part of his identity: “The most important part of who I am is as a father.”

Duncan is not alone: A 2020 report from the UCLA Williams Institute School of Law found that Republican lesbian, gay and bisexual people are more likely to feel connected to other parts of their identities than their sexual orientations.

Evan doesn’t identify with the community at large and does not like to be referred to as “LGBTQ” or “queer.”

“I realized I’m normal. I’m not LGBTQ,” he says. “I’m just gay.”

Evan’s desire to be seen as “normal” rings of Vice President JD Vance’s 2024 comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he said Trump could win the “normal gay” vote. During this same interview, Vance suggested that parents of genderqueer children use their children’s identities as a rejection of having white privilege. Vance received significant backlash for these comments, with the Human Rights Campaign responding to the vice president’s remarks over X.

Some Gay Republicans See the GOP as More Friendly

For Chris Doane, 56, voting Republican is the only choice that makes sense, as he believes voting for a Democrat goes directly against his interests as a queer man. “Conservatives don’t want to murder gays. They want them saved,” he says. “Muslims vote Democrat, because if the Democrats win, they get to stay [in the U.S.], they get to take power, and they will murder gays brutally with a smile on their face,” says Doane.

Doane’s comments are unfounded and display racist stereotypes peddled by far-right American media: One study from the Brennan Center for Justice compiled data from 1984 to 2020 and found that racial resentment is more prevalent on the right than on the left.

Doane was raised in a conservative family in Bryan, Texas, and isn’t out to his family because he fears that they won’t accept him. For him, voting Republican is part of his heritage. “I was told, ‘Don’t ever let Democrats in control. They’ll ruin our country,’” he says. “That’s pretty much what they did, and that’s why President Trump is working overtime to straighten it all back out.”

Trans Rights and Gay Republican Men

Though Doane and other gay Republicans hold a range of views, a common thread is a hesitancy around trans rights. So, they align more with the Trump administration, which has railed against the trans community with Trump’s policies and rhetoric.

For example, Doane sees being able to transition as a matter of personal freedom but thinks gender-affirming care for trans kids is a step too far.

“When it comes to transgender, I have nothing against that. I just believe that when you make that transition, it should be at a point where your brain is fully developed … and you’re actually going to enjoy that transition,” he says.

He also holds the view that for a trans person to be accepted as their correct gender, they must fully physically transition. “If you’re gonna transgender, transgender all the way. If you’ve still got male parts on you, you don’t belong in the women’s dress room.” However, research suggests otherwise, with a 2025 study indicating that policing bathroom access can lead to mental distress in trans youth.

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Duncan has his own doubts.

“I disagree with the integration of gender ideology and radical wokeism into the LGBT community. You are free to live under any delusion you so desire. You’re not free to require me to live under your delusion as well,” he says. “But if somebody wants to live as a man or a woman, however it is, I firmly believe they have the right to do that. I would never get in the way of it.”

Duncan also believes that education about LGBTQ people should be limited in schools. He sees adolescence as a fundamentally confusing time, and believes an education about LGBTQ communities would “add on layers of confusion.” This belief seems to be in line with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which has banned education on gender identity and sexual orientation in Florida’s classrooms from pre-kindergarten until the end of eighth grade, though there are exceptions for health lessons.

“It’s okay to tell kids that some boys like boys, some girls like girls, some people like both. But it just needs to be kept vague and general,” Duncan says. “However you are is okay. We don’t need to expose children to gay media because if you’re gay, you’re going to know.”

Duncan does not believe heteronormative bias in mainstream media is a problem, though a study published in Equity & Excellence in Education found heteronormative biases in schools may harm queer students. “The vast majority of people are heterosexual, and a functioning society is built on a heteronormative bias,” he says. “It is important to understand that we are the extreme minority and society is not responsible for conforming to us.”

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They Approve of Trump and Don’t See Him as a Threat

While LGBTQ Americans see the Republican party as unfriendly towards queer people, Duncan and Doane aren’t worried about being stripped of their rights. Duncan says the 2015 passage of gay marriage solidified his equal rights. “We have marriage as gay men. I have every right that a straight man does,” he says.

Doane also feels that his rights are secure under Trump 2.0 and approves of the president so far. “I voted for that great, big, beautiful wall because we were being overrun by illegals,” he says. Doane also approves of U.S. interventions in Iran and Venezuela, though he criticizes Trump for “leaving [Venezuela] way too soon.”

Similarly, Duncan is generally approving of Trump’s handling of immigration. “I don’t love what we’re doing as far as deportations, but we had to get some control over the illegal population,” says Duncan. “I wish there was another way, but I can’t think of it.”

Duncan and Doane are certainly in the minority as queer men who approve of Trump, but as far as they’re concerned, Trump is delivering on his promises. “Overall, I’m happy,” says Duncan. “I’m getting pretty much exactly what I voted for.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article stated that Trump told The Advocate in 2000 that legalizing gay marriage was “only fair." That was incorrect. He told the publication that he thinks amending the Civil Rights Act to grant the same protection to gay people that we give to other Americans is “only fair.”

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate to Uncloseted Media

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At 24 years old, when I was interning at ABC News, my colleague took a Snapchat video of the back of my head. For the first time, I spotted a bald spot about the size of a quarter. Over the next eight years, my hair loss progressed. The classic drugs you see advertised from companies like Hims and Keeps worked a bit, but the hair kept shedding on my pillow and in the shower.

As a young gay man working in Manhattan media and living in Hell’s Kitchen, I felt doomed. As a kid, I was made fun of for having a head the size of a bowling ball. And despite my mom telling me that a bigger head meant a bigger brain, I felt that if I lost all my hair I’d look like Mr. Burns at best and an alien at worst.

It shattered my self-esteem. The anxiety I already struggled with transformed into depression.

I felt really ugly and started catastrophizing: I’ll never have another boyfriend, I’ll always need to wear a hat and I’ll need to continue walking out of rooms backwards.

I cried to my best friends and family to the point where they were equally annoyed and concerned.

You may be reading and at this point thinking, “Can he just get over it?” or “What a drama queen. It’s just hair!” And you are most entitled to feel that way. But the problem is these feelings represent an epidemic of body dysphoria and pressure to look and feel perfect that we gay men savagely place on each other.

The stats don’t lie: Gay men are more likely to suffer from eating disorders, engage in compulsive overexercise and use diet pills. We talk about our appearance more than straight men, report greater body dissatisfaction, are more concerned with trying to look like men in the media and place more importance on the prevailing cultural beauty standard, which includes having a full head of hair. Unlike our heterosexual counterparts, intrasexual competition causes us to compare ourselves to our hookups and our boyfriends: Abs, dick size, height, teeth, weight and… hair(!) are all on the table.

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As I continued to shed, it was all becoming too much. I knew something had to change. Around this time, my friend Bennett flew to New York to hang out with me about six months after he got a hair transplant in Turkey. We were lounging by a pool and he took his hat off to flaunt his restored hairline. I was mesmerized. I started researching and learned that at least five gay guys I knew (and my straight barber!) all went to the same doctor 5,000 miles away in Istanbul (or Hairstanbul!).

As a nervous nelly, I didn’t know if I could do it. But when one of my straight besties and director extraordinaire, Kenny Wassus, encouraged me to go and said he’d come along to film it, I couldn’t say no.

So we got the documentary green lit by Business Insider, booked flights and did the thing.

The doctors told me I had had too much hair loss to restore everything in one procedure. They promised to restore my hairline but weren’t able to work on the bald spot on the back of my head (though I can go back for a second procedure whenever I like).

A year and a half later, I am thrilled with the results. Even though they are imperfect, going to Türkiye represented taking control of something that was fueling my anxiety and crushing my self-esteem. There is a feeling of pride in having done everything I can to fix something I was deeply unhappy about.

And sure, my biggest wish is that gay men feel less pressure to have the ideal body and that we don’t live in this unprecedented culture of comparison. But it is what it is!

On Saturday, the Business Insider documentary finally dropped. People in the comments section were for the most part ruthless: “the hairline looks like a doll’s.” … “why would you not do the bald spot tf lol” … and “I’m pretty sure that doesn’t look like 4k grafts.”

But unlike before my transplant, I didn’t care. I was busy blasting “Hair” by Lady Gaga and feeling proud of myself for getting the care I needed to affirm how I wanted to look. That affirmation has truthfully silenced my anxiety surrounding my hair loss and in turn has transformed the way I walk through life.

You can watch the full documentary here:

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• Trump administration agrees to return rainbow Pride flag to New York’s Stonewall monument (The Associated Press)

  • The Trump administration said Monday it will resume flying a rainbow Pride flag on a federal flagpole at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City, reversing course two months after removing the banner from the first national monument commemorating LGBTQ+ history.

• After 16 years in power, Hungary’s Orbán concedes ‘painful’ election loss to rival Magyar (CBC)

  • Record voter turnout delivered election result with global repercussions.

• Baylor University to host gay Christian speakers at Turning Point USA counter event (The Dallas Morning News)

  • The event has drawn “strong concerns” from some Texas Baptists as the Christian school has long denounced same-sex relationships as a “deviation” from the biblical norm.

• New Bryon Noem bombshell puts Kristi Noem’s anti-trans politics under harsher spotlight (The Advocate)

  • The latest report alleges Bryon Noem described fantasies about feminization, adding new political pressure on the former Homeland Security secretary as critics cite hypocrisy.

• JD Vance says Trump’s post of himself as Jesus was ‘a joke’ (USA Today)

  • “I think the President of the United States likes to mix it up on social media,” Vice President JD Vance said.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: While more than four out of five LGBTQ men voted against Trump in 2024, some gay men are still proudly MAGA. Why? Emma Paidra investigates.

• 🆕 WEDNESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” I’ll be speaking with Matt Bernstein—or Mattxiv—a progressive commentator with 2.2 million Instagram followers who OUT Magazine has called “one of social media’s most prominent political voices.”

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate to Uncloseted Media

Subscribe now

UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

This story contains mention of suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know needs support, resources are available here.

On March 31, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) voted 8-1 to overturn Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy. In their ruling, which was seen as a huge blow for LGBTQ rights, SCOTUS sided with lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom and in turn paved for 22 other states and D.C. to overturn bans.

More than half of the nearly 700,00 Americans who have experienced conversion therapy in the U.S. are minors. And the discredited practice is linked to depression, PTSD and suicidal thoughts.

Sami Tacher and their father, Greg Tacher, have experienced the devastating impact of conversion therapy firsthand. Greg, a former elder at the International Churches of Christ in Seattle, initially rejected Sami’s gay identity and supported their journey through years of a conversion therapy program that would result in unbearable loneliness, suicidal ideation and trauma that they still carry today.

Through that time, though, Greg slowly deconstructed his faith and has since left the church. Today, the father and son duo say they’ve come full circle and are “best friends.”

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Sami and Greg share their story.

Watch the full podcast above or read the transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to Uncloseted with me, Spencer Macnaughton. Today, I’m here with Sami Tacher and their dad, Greg Tacher. Sami recently wrote an essay for Uncloseted Media about the devastating effects conversion therapy had on them growing up. Greg, who was an elder at their church, rejected Sami’s gay identity because he believed that so-called same-sex attraction was sinful. But there’s a silver lining. Greg has now left the church, and Sami and him are best friends. Greg and Sami, thanks so much for coming on and speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

GT: Thanks for having us.

SM: I actually wanted to start, Greg, with you. I wanted to learn a little bit more about your relationship with religion. You were an elder. Talk to me about what that means for somebody who doesn’t know and tell me a little bit about church life and the conception of homosexuality in that world.

GT: My love of spirituality found a home in religion. There were some good initial drivers putting me in that space: love, peace, getting the message out to other people, being on the side of God, those kinds of things. And I think over time, the organizational elements completely took over and crystallized. And so some of the spirituality that I sought after originally became very dogmatic and dualistic. It was very either—

SM: Extreme?

GT: Quite extreme. It’s very black and white. Homosexuality was clearly an either or, and it was a not. It was a bad thing. It was definitely that way. So I carried that with me.

SM: So obviously Christianity spans so many denominations and different belief systems, but you were an elder, I think in the International Churches of Christ.

GT: Yeah.

SM: Just for people who might not be religious at all, what was the expectation if you had a kid or a family member who was gay?

GT: ICOC, as it was called, is called, was definitely a splinter, a sliver of a broader arena of non-denominational Christianity. But there were certain things that they bit down on hard, that would classify it as definitely a sort of... Let me get this right…

Sami Tacher: Something that I’m hearing you call attention to, they wouldn’t say this but certainly some sin was considered worse or had heavier implications than others, and homosexuality was at this end of the spectrum of all sexual sins which had a very heavy impact.

GT: That’s a great point. Some of these categorical sins became just what Sami said. They became worse than others. And sexuality had this whole den over it, a shadow over it. Homosexuality was dangerous. It had another little piece to it. And so, to my knowledge, I didn’t know any other elders or even leaders who had homosexuality around them in their family or people they knew, so when it sort of arrived at our doorstep, the initial reaction [was] “Oh my God this must be really bad.”

SM: Because you see it as dangerous.

GT: That’s right, exactly right. It was actually dangerous, that’s right. The thing that came along with homosexuality is, now what do we do with you? If you’re in the Church, especially if you’re a leader in the Church, we’re not just gonna kick you out. What do we do with this category of people?

SM: And Sami, so you’re growing up in this church, before you and your dad had any conversation about you thinking you might be gay, like what were the feelings that you internalized as a kid?

ST: Yeah, I mean, especially when I was young, homosexuality was a hidden thing. It wasn’t discussed. The only times that it would exist for me was the once every three years that there was a sermon where it was brought up in a list of sins. So even in my first feelings of homosexuality, I think I just characterized it as like, “Well, I’m being led to sin, I am being tempted. That’s normal, it’s just like when I wanna do any other sin.” I didn’t necessarily metabolize that information as like, this is a part of who I am. But that came in time because I recognized that I wasn’t attracted to women. It was a whole dance. But yeah, I do remember when I knew I was gay, I remember saying those words to myself.

SM: How old were you?

ST: Probably 11 or 12. I mean it was basically a death sentence, it was like, there’s just no way out of this one. I have no choice but to just do whatever I can to keep my family afloat because like they’re the ones that have a chance. And our family was integrated so heavily because of the eldership. Before he became an elder, I was actually pulled aside by one of the ministers and explained that one of the expectations of an elder is that all of your family is faithful to our movement specifically. And that was something that came up. So I knew going into everything that if I were to “become gay,” if that’s where I go with this, I live this out, I incorporate this into my life, then I’m making a difference for the sake of my father and for my family and our status. That was so important, I just didn’t wanna break that.

SM: That was all really interesting, but you say you realize you were gay, you thought it was a death sentence. Really?

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ST: Well, I think, especially at that point in time, my whole life was built up towards the idea of heaven. And we said often enough that there’s no guarantee life on earth will be good, happy, easy, [but] life in heaven will be worth it. That’s the whole point. But yeah, of course it’s going to be painful and it’s going to suck. I think I just realized that my life on Earth is going to be unlivable, and there’s probably not a lot of hope for me getting into heaven anyways. So it’s probably just pain for me for the rest of my existence.

GT: You know, Spencer, part of the challenge, and it’s hard to describe the mindset, but it’s quite thick. And I think this exists in conservative religions, especially Christianity. But there is a believed bifurcation. It’s an either or; you’re going one way or the other. And that’s all there is. There’s no other space. So what Sami is explaining, I think, is this idea that if this is true for me, there is nowhere to go. So the death sentence isn’t dying, the death sentence is there’s no hope. There’s zero hope. And there’s no hope for my family having a good life in this space. There’s no hope for me. I’m going to interrupt my dad’s potential leadership or whatever that might mean. That’s disruptive. But then even in the end, I’ll be separated from God for all eternity. That is a shared belief that resonates throughout the weekly meetings and all of this that you’ve got to be in this certain path otherwise forget about it, it’s not going to go well for you, and hopefully God will forgive you. So this is happening in this environment and then Sam is like, “Oh crap, here I am.”

SM: So Greg, you’re an elder at the Church. You have high status at the Church. You see homosexuality as dangerous. Sami, you’re worried it’s a death sentence. At 12, I think, Greg, you find gay porn on Sami’s computer. Take me back to that moment.

GT: I think when this showed up, I think my initial response, as best I can remember it is, “How do we fix it?” That’s really where I went, how do we handle this, manage this? And I carried with me the belief that if you don’t get a handle on this, you might not make it to the pearly gates.

SM: Was it anger, fear, worry? Like, what were the exact emotions you felt towards Sami in that moment?

GT: I think it was fear for sure, and shame, and some of that was brought into my own life about my own views about homosexuality, and quite honestly, just ignorance and judgment, which I just carried with me that surfaced at this time commingled with this very conservative, small-minded religious worldview.

SM: Take me to the moment where you confront Sami, maybe Greg, tell me about how you confronted Sami and then Sami, tell me about how you remember receiving that confrontation.

GT: I think likely I was motivated, like, we got to get after this. So we’re going to have this conversation. But it definitely was delivered, no doubt, with this massive amount of authority.

ST: Everything in my body, um, just fully tensed and told me that I have to listen. But yeah, that was the moment that everything was like, I don’t even have a choice. You know, this idea of like, I could hide this and then maybe sneak away. There is no sneaking away. Like I’m being watched, so I have to make sure.

SM: And what do you remember your dad telling you and then how did you respond?

ST: Gosh, I get it in flashes. I remember hearing that God wouldn’t love me if I lived that lifestyle. That I would get killed, someone would hunt me down, or I’d kill myself, so just don’t do it.

SM: And Greg, how does it make you feel to hear Sami recount that?

GT: It’s brutal, you know? At the same time, there’s a beauty in being invited to share in suffering, right? Because I mean, I was there. So that there’s a beauty in that too, right. It’s like I get another opportunity real time, in this moment, to walk with my son through life. So yeah, it’s brutal, it’s so painful. I feel quite honestly grateful to be invited to this space because it’s an opportunity to expand the heart.

SM: It makes you emotional.

GT: Oh, yeah. Yeah! Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, I feel sad for unnecessary pain that I caused my son. Yeah, hell yeah. That goes against something that’s so central not only to just being human, but to a father-son connection for sure.

SM: And Greg, you sought counsel from the Church after you found that out, is that correct?

GT: Oh yeah, I mean there was protocol for this kind of stuff. But I had a few people I could fight in where I felt like it wouldn’t be too disruptive.

SM: And my guess is that when you seek counsel from the Church, none of the folks you spoke to were saying, affirm Sami, accept him as a gay person, anything like that.

GT: That wasn’t coming up. No, I think initially it was like, “Let’s not tell anybody and let’s figure out a plan,” and essentially it was control measures, right? Let’s, without saying it that way, but let’s keep this under wraps and we’ll deal with it as we go.

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SM: It’s so crazy, because the way you guys are describing the strategy, it’s like you’re covering up a murder, but he’s just… Sami’s just gay.

[Sam and Greg laugh]

GT: Well, and murder Spencer is interesting because Sami used the language death sentence. This is where we’re connecting. It is in that space where we know nobody’s going to come out of this and go, “Oh, this is okay. This is great. Let’s work with it.” It’s like we’re going to have this long slow death walk to inevitability, whatever. Yeah.

SM: Well, and Sami, I know obviously you were on board with a strategy to suppress a lot of this and we don’t need the whole story because we have an amazing essay that you should read by Sami at unclosetedmedia.com, but you did seek out conversion therapy. So give us the spark notes of that. How did you get there? How did you find it and what was it like?

ST: Yeah. In my mind, I thought everyone was talking, but I think I was probably obviously gay to anybody who knows what gay is. So there was a counselor at camp. We would go to camps, that was a part of the church culture. There’s a counselor from another church who sought out a relationship with me who is queer and was able to introduce me to Strength in Weakness, which is an organization run by Guy Hammond, but he had this online ministry and it was from within the ICOC, specifically to help people battle their unwanted same-sex attractions. And it was like all of this confusion that had been built up like “what do we do, we need a plan” and all of a sudden we were being handed a script of a plan by somebody who is trusted by certain names in the Church that were a really big deal. And the fact that it was a community? I was... At this point, I had never met a queer person that I knew of. So this community of people who are not only queer but trying to live the lifestyle that I’m trying to live because I’m trapped in this system, it gave me the hope that I lost. This idea that I am headed for a death sentence. It’s like, this is my only way out. So I found it and that kinda changed everything. When we were talking about “what’s the strategy going to be,” we got a strategy guide which completely changed the conversation.

SM: What did that strategy look like? Give us specifics on what you were supposed to do to manage same-sex attraction.

ST: Yeah, I mean, essentially this idea of temptation. You are going to be tempted. That is inevitable. So you have to make as few temptations appear in your life as possible. Control your environment, control who you’re with, control who you’re around. So for me, that meant make sure that you never look at a guy. Don’t look at them. And if you start to look at them, you need to never see them again. Oh, you have a friend, you’re starting to get close, you’re starting to get attached, that’s dangerous. Cut it off, push them out of your lives. I remember Capitol Hill in Seattle is in the queer neighborhood. I remember being there as a teenager and walking around and seeing pride flags and seeing flyers for queer events and being with somebody and telling them I need to not come to this neighborhood because it’s going to try and lead me towards a life that is happy or tell me that there’s a life that’s happy out there as a queer person. So I need to stay away from this community.

SM: You were seen kind of as the star student, I believe, right? Guy really thought you were the poster person and you started almost becoming a conversion therapy influencer a little bit. Like you’d upload YouTube videos and try and tell other people to do the same thing. Tell us a little about that.

ST: Guy Hammond really appreciated me. I kept trying to do more for the ministry. That happened around the same time where I would start taking calls for people. I was answering a lot of questions for people, and then yeah, I started making videos about my experience and what was working for me, and I remember the first time that I met Guy Hammond, he made a big deal out of the fact that I’d never kissed a boy. That was really important, that I’d never... Fallen into temptation.

SM: So you’re taking calls, you’re telling people how to do it, that you can do it. You’re kind of becoming the poster boy in certain ways of this organization. But inside, you are not feeling good. Take me, if you’re comfortable, inside how you were mentally because I know it was not good.

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ST: Yeah, it was bad. I’d say it was really, really bad. I just felt so alone in all of it. And there were so many days where I just didn’t see how this was feasible. I think especially being a teenager and going through all of the hormones of being a teenager, feeling like my sexuality completely dominated everything in my body. I have no control over it. And this is going to be for the rest of my life because I’m counseling men who are in their 40s, 50s, people who are married for over 10 years. All I’m hearing is that this is impossible, and it hurts, and people feel hopeless and that’s how I felt. And it’s this idea that maybe I can control it now, but how am I supposed to leave my family home where there’s so much control and constraint and I have all of these supports and keep it up? I just didn’t see how that was possible.

SM: And are you comfortable, there was a part where you wrote about one of the darkest moments and—

ST: Yeah, yeah.

SM: Are you comfortable if I read an excerpt from your essay?

ST: Go ahead.

SM: OK, so you wrote that: “The hardest thing was the loneliness. Inside the church I was the person with the secret defect. Outside of it I was unbearably Christian. I didn’t belong anywhere. I spent hours on the Strength in Weakness chat room waiting for just one friend who understood me. Nobody came. By the time I was 17, I consistently thought about killing myself. More than once I stood on top of a parking garage looking down onto the street wishing for a breeze to take me.” I mean, it’s unbearable even to read those words, but we know there’s so many little Sami’s out there right now experiencing that. Why did you decide to be so vulnerable and write that for the world to see? It takes a lot of courage to do that. A lot of people would not.

ST: Yeah, the reason is because that’s what conversion therapy does to people. It happens very consistently. There are so many people who face suicidal ideation and kill themselves. It’s horrible. It’s absolutely horrible. It happened to a very close friend of mine from Strength in Weakness. Their name was Brandon. They were transgender and they were forced to de-transition and they had just left the church, and every day that I’m fighting this fight that I am fighting within my body and that I’m fighting this fight for my community, I’m just trying to think of what would’ve kept Brandon here because I really wish that they were here with me. And that’s every little Sami and every little Brandon that’s out there. Every single one of them deserves to have a long, happy life and I want that to exist as a possibility for all of them.

SM: A hundred percent, and you know, we’re in a time, and I say this stat a lot, but I’ll say it until it changes, in a time when roughly 40% of LGBTQ kids seriously considered suicide in the last year in the United States. That stat is inexcusably high. Greg, I want to see when you hear or read that excerpt from Sami and understand that that was part of their experience in conversion therapy, it must be shattering to hear that as their dad.

GT: Yeah, I think what shows up for me, certainly Sami’s suffering, for sure. And then there’s a part of me that goes, yeah, that’s kind of reasonable for what was handed to Sami. And at the same time, the other thing that shows up for me is how distant you can be as a human walking alongside another human in the same community, that’s church or whatever, and have no idea this stuff is going on and feeling like you’re toeing the line and doing the right thing, and the human element has been eviscerated. And before you know it, in situations like this, the other person just exits life. And you’re left going, “What the hell was that? What is going on?” Because you can be so disconnected by these kinds of communities. You know, this kind of groupthink, this kind of small-mindedness.

SM: Retrospectively, do you feel like you were brainwashed almost? Is that a word you would associate with it?

GT: I think it’s a great word, if you think about the idea of your brain being washed. We did this all the time with consistent messaging, and the messaging would show up sometimes in your face, but a lot of times it was very subtle and kind of towed the line and all the stuff. But we did enough washing to try and keep ourselves in this mindset that we were doing the right thing and on the right path. And we weren’t washing our brains with things that actually are still in, quote-unquote, the scriptures: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, fair exchange of heart. And I think a lot of people suffer trying to, quote-unquote, do the right things, scripted by others, and lose themselves in the process, and unfortunately lose loved ones in the process as well, quite literally. Yeah.

SM: We’ve talked a lot about sadness, a lot about the struggle that you guys have gone through. But the beautiful thing, and one of the reasons I’m so happy about your guys’ story, is that you describe yourself as best friends today. So I want to know, Greg, how did you wind up getting out of the Church?

GT: I think for anybody who might be paying attention to this, or read Sami’s essay, to check themselves. I think the Church had an incredible way of providing you a story and continued messaging where the only check-in was like, are you doing these certain things or not these things and then you’re good. And you can lose touch, literally, with yourself. When we find ourselves in that space, it’s hard to get out. And the things that might help are the things that would severely interrupt that story. And I think the way I would talk about me getting out of the Church would be there were things that came to me that severely interrupted that story, and so enough of that reached the surface to my ears where it was just untenable and I couldn’t support our overall structure anymore. It was oppressive, it was controlling, it was unfair and it was unsupportive. And so, for all the things that happened to help me get to the place where I could actually see that, those were the things that helped me leave the Church. And some of them with my own kids, it was just time to go.

SM: What’s your advice, Greg, to the parents or family members who have LGBTQ loved ones and are maybe questioning? They’re maybe questioning right now listening to this and thinking, “I don’t know if I can go there,” because I think there’s a lot of people in that space who don’t go further with those thoughts.

GT: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think this is a pretty tricky and complex place, but I think one thing that tends to show up for most people in that situation is fear and shame. And I think these things tend to control, I’ll use that word, and guide much of the parents in this space about how they do this. And so what I would say is the first thing is just step away, give yourself some time to actually really consider your world view. How much respect are you giving your experience and the experience you have relationally with your offspring compared to this construct of belief that is a slice of somebody else’s imagination. Consider what your kids are going through. If they were to be going through choices around suicide regularly and they carried that within them wherever they went, take that on and sit with that and see what role you play in that and what role you want to play in that because they are your offspring. So my advice is open up, sit with experience, invite in, in a non-judgmental or reactive way, input. Especially from your kids. They’ll teach you the things that God is waiting for you to learn. And that’s happening today, even in this situation with Sami. And I would say that’s why Sami is one of my best friends on the planet, because of what I can learn from Sami. That only happens on an intimate level when your hearts are connected, but your hearts don’t get connected if there’s judgment in there. So, get a pickaxe and a shovel, get the judgment out, find a place to love, meet there, and I think the world opens up.

SM: So Sami, you go from Strength in Weakness, advocating for people to get into conversion therapy, but now you’re out, proud and happy. How do we get from there to here? And what did your dad leaving the Church mean in terms of your ability to be comfortable in your own skin?

ST: Yeah, I mean, I feel like my dad gave me a hall pass to be gay at the end. I feel like that was kind of the exit, was that, you know, he was stepping out, we were talking about it, it was like, it really doesn’t seem like this is biblical as much as it is cultural, and that’s obviously something we’re rejecting at this time, is the culture that we’re a part of. And with all of the pain that I was still feeling, because the effects of conversion therapy are long-lasting and very heavy. It’s very hard to let go of that to this day. There are days that I do not feel proud. But I accept who Sami is. And being able to integrate that way over time, it’s very, very hard work. But you know, I think love is something that comes with intuition. Our hearts are meant to be big and they’re meant to find love and to find community and the more that you follow that, the easier it gets.

SM: And now that you guys are both on the other side, when you on March 31st turned on the news and saw that the Supreme Court had overturned Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy and it was an 8-1 ruling, what were your thoughts?

ST: You know, I got pretty sick, pretty immediately. It was real scary to recognize that while people are fighting, that the battle is that uphill—8-1 uphill. I think one of the specifics of this that’s difficult is they’re trying to say free speech, [that] conversion therapy can fall in line with free speech. If you’re faced with that kind of authority against your sexuality, there is going to be major harm caused. And they’re trying to say that that should be allowed under free speech, and in licensed therapy, which I find appalling, horrifying. I feel such a depth of despair for all the kids who are going to experience it.

SM: Sami, I wanna read a quote about the decision you wrote, and Greg, have you react to it if that’s OK?

GT: Okay, yeah.

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SM: So Sami writes: “Now I am working hard to undo the trauma I endured. I am in intensive therapy. I still live with chronic anxiety and chronic pain and I’m still figuring out how to be myself. What makes the Supreme Court decision so painful is that I know exactly what kind of world it protects and what kind pain it inflicts on LGBTQ kids. People call it free speech, but it is abuse. Words taught me to hate myself. Words made me suicidal. So when I learned that the Supreme Court ruled that this kind of messaging should be protected, that adults should be free to tell children that queerness is sickness, dangerous, shameful or sinful, I do not hear an abstract constitutional principle. I hear the beginning of a tragedy for kids like me.”

GT: It’s just such a great discussion and comment for a human to protect this kind of behavior. From a Supreme Court place, like that place of authority. To be able to do that, I can’t imagine how disconnected you must be or what else might be driving you to protect something for yourself or something else you’re afraid of or fearful of. This is so far away from what is natural in the human exchange. It’s far away from love, and I agree with Sami on this point where to hide that under the guise of free speech is just kind of a chickenshit move, quite frankly. And the net effect of that is more and more and heaped on abuse, protected abuse, that’s going to continue to disenfranchise a whole, and this is the worst way to say it, but I think this is a way that they might think about it, category of humans. So, in my mind, it’s an abject failure of... responsibility. It’s a real sad moment for humanity.

SM: Well said, well said. I want to finish with you guys on a positive note by asking, you say you’re best friends, tell me more about that. What is your relationship like today? What do you guys mean to each other?

ST: My immediate response is, well, he’s my best friend, because that just holds such significance for me right there. He’s the person that I call when I have something exciting to share with somebody. It’s like, oh, I want to tell someone, because no one’s more excited to hear about what’s going on in my life. We talk about what we’re learning all the time. That’s the coolest part. We get breakfast all the time. We’ve always gotten breakfast since I was a little kid. We’d wake up before anybody else in the house, and we’d go out and get breakfast. And we still do that. Whenever I’m in town, we have to find the best breakfast and get a really, really good cup of coffee. It’s so cool to have somebody to bounce thoughts with and to have somebody who feels like they respect my thoughts and they want to hear what I have to say and they’re willing to let my thoughts be influential in their life and I get to do the same.

SM: It’s beautiful because I see you lighting up talking about your love for your dad in your voice and your facial expressions which is a beautiful thing to see. But a lot of people might not have been able to find that forgiveness. How did you...? Was it easy? Was it hard?

ST: Well, I think some important context, all of the pain that was caused came from a place of love. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily always the case. I think my dad really wanted to love me. And I think that was apparent and I could see it. But I would say my father’s humility is what really stood out. He’s willing to take a humble posture and say, “It’s very possible that I caused some of the most immense pain in your life.” I think a lot of people would never own up to the pain they’ve caused, especially for their child. Um, yeah, and I’m so grateful for his humility.

SM: And Greg, what does Sami’s relationship, best-friendship mean for you today? And what have you learned about yourself through all this?

GT: You know, I think when you put somebody in a best friend category, there has to be a couple of things that show up. One is, and this gets thrown out a lot, safe space today. It’s “I can just say it,” I don’t have to strategize or do any of that. It is safe. Sami is safe, and I’m safe for Sami. So when you can enter that space, you can experience somebody on a more intimate level than you otherwise would. And you can get to know them on so many different levels, and you can get to know so many different things about them.

SM: It’s real.

GT: That’s right, and so Sami and I have that. Another thing that I think needs to be not present in that, is judgment. You have to be able to ferret out the judgment piece. There’s certain things that come along with parenting that are very challenging because we feel like if we’re judging, we’re protecting. And so you gotta get adult to adult with the other human and take that off the table.

SM: That’s beautiful, too. You guys are so cute. I love, I love. And Greg, though, like I said, it’s been a total journey for you, you know?

GT: Oh, I think, you know, the ultimate lesson from Sami is, it’s okay to be human. I no longer need to perform as a good Christian or a good dad to hold all things together. Whatever these things might be, I can be supremely human. And I think when we’re in that space, the world opens up again.

SM: I love that, and I think that’s a beautiful place to end. Greg and Sami Tacher, your story is remarkable. Thank you so much for coming on and speaking with me and Uncloseted today.

ST: Yeah, thanks for having us.

GT: Thanks for having us.

SM: Fabulous, and we’re gonna put in the show notes for some resources for anyone who is struggling out there with mental health. And for those who want to follow and subscribe, you can find Uncloseted with me, Spencer Macnaughton, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again, guys.

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This story was originally published in The 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom.

Had the consequences not been ruinous for the men entrapped, the story would read like a comedy.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt—before he served as 32nd president of the United States—in 1919 approved a secret operation to rid the U.S. Navy in Newport, R.I. of “cocksuckers and rectum receivers.” Their method? Volunteer agents would have gay sex and then tell on the sailors they had sex with for being gay.

Roosevelt was serving as assistant secretary of the Navy and, according to historian Sherry Zane, who published an article on operation “Section A,” he even consulted lawyers to make sure the plan was above board.

Agents often made sure to get evidence more than once.

“It wouldn’t just take one time, like the covert op would have sex with someone, like three or four times before they would get the person,” Zane said.

Why did the agents need multiple encounters for evidence?

“Well, that’s questionable,” Zane said. “On the one hand, one of their arguments might have been that, you know, well, they wanted to make sure, right? Like they wanted to have enough evidence. And then there’s a lot of questions, well, they just enjoyed having sex with these men.”

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Regardless of the reasoning, Congress and the American public were not amused. Rhea Debussy, a lecturer at Ohio State University wrote about the scandal in her new book “The Lavender Bans” which tracks queer history in the U.S. military. Debussy noted that the Navy allocated $50,000 to the operation, the equivalent of just over a million dollars today.

Just over a million dollars paid for sailors to have gay sex. To root out gay sex.

“On the policy end of things, we end up in front of a congressional committee, and the congressional committee is, like, you did what?” Debussy said.

Twenty-two sailors were entrapped and charged with “deviancy” in Section A’s operations. An additional 16 civilians also got caught up in the busts, said Zane.

“There was this fear by American mothers about sending their sons … into port cities where they associated cities with vice, so the Navy wanted to clean up those areas to make mothers feel safer,” said Zane. “If you think about it, it’s about the military having this power to get rid of so-called perverts and degenerates without needing legal authority.”

Not all men were treated equally. Men labeled as “tops” were seen as less gay or not gay at all and punished less severely. Men labeled as “bottoms” or “effeminate” were punished most severely.

The consequences of being court martialed were severe and life-changing, Debussy said.

In some instances, men were sentenced to 20 years in prison.

“There are so many ways in which like this criminalization of queer identity, particularly in the context of the military, has a ripple effect throughout these men’s lives, not even just talking about a prison sentence, but talking about the stigma that comes with a dishonorable discharge, the lack of benefits, the lack of respect, all of these things that follow you,” she said.

Perhaps most surprisingly, however, the ordeal nearly derailed Roosevelt’s career. According to Zane, senators were “utterly shocked” and “strongly advised Roosevelt never be allowed to hold public office again.”

He would go on to be elected to four terms as president, and history would largely forget the scandal.

This article originally appeared in The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics, policy and power. Learn more at 19thnews.org.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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Editor’s note: This article includes mention of suicide and self-harm. If you are having thoughts of suicide or are concerned that someone you know may be, resources are available here.

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At 8 years old in rural Kansas, Hayden Dawson remembers being forced to eat outside with the dogs.

Other times, they weren’t fed at all.

“I would chew sunflowers outside because I was so hungry until my face would become splotchy with a rash,” Hayden, now 20, told Uncloseted Media.

Hayden, who is nonbinary and gender fluid, says whenever they wanted to wear boy clothes, play with boy toys or express themself in a gender nonconforming way, their foster parents were “highly offended” and worried that Hayden would be a “bad influence on the other kids.”

They lived in the turberlance for eight months until their caseworker changed their placement after noticing the severity of Hayden’s weight loss and the rash spreading across their face.

But the next home was not safe either. Or the one after that.

“You have to pick and choose,” Hayden says. “Do I wanna be happy in the identity that I am and the body that I want to have, or do I want to survive?”

From age 8 to 18, Hayden says they were placed in over 150 foster homes, which was confirmed by two other sources close to them. They say roughly 80% of the homes were “non-accepting”: their foster parents refused to use their chosen name, called them a girl, told them God doesn’t love them and they’re going to hell, and physically beat them with the Bible as they chanted, “Be gone, Satan.”

By the time Hayden was a teenager, they became suicidal, cycling through mental health facilities and hospitals.

“I felt like no one was looking out for me. I was a very angry kid because no one understood me,” says Hayden. “I felt like I had no reason anymore.”

Advocates and former foster youth describe Hayden’s experience as part of a broader pattern.

A 2021 Trevor Project brief found that LGBTQ youth who are in foster care are three times more likely to attempt suicide than LGBTQ youth who are not. And 45% of fostered trans and nonbinary youth have attempted suicide.

This is particularly alarming because LGBTQ kids make up a third of all children in America’s foster system, and trans youth enter the system at five times the rate of the general population.

In 2026, there are few guardrails that protect transgender foster youth from abuse. Even though federal law requires safe placements, it’s unclear what that means for trans youth as protections vary across the U.S. While some states have explicit protections that prohibit discrimination based on a child’s LGBTQ identity, lawmakers in at least 11 states this year have introduced bills that would allow foster parents to refuse to affirm a queer child.

“As a kid, you’re basically rolling the dice on who you get,” Currey Cook, director of the Youth in Out-of-Home Care Project at Lambda Legal, told Uncloseted Media. “It’s frustrating and exhausting that, despite clear federal legal obligations, … this administration is erasing information and protections that are critical to a large share of the young people in the system. There is no justification for that.”

A Patchwork of Rules

According to Lambda Legal, there are 16 states without any explicit child-welfare nondiscrimination protections for gender and sexuality. Additionally, only one of these states, along with 15 others, has specific guidance for child-welfare staff on how to work with LGBTQ youth, such as information about asking how they identify, how to respect their names and pronouns, and how to consider their needs when making placements. Only 11 states require specific training for caseworkers for LGBTQ youth, and 16 states do not list gender identity as a protected class.

“It’s a complete patchwork,” says Cook. “You can have a caseworker doing their best to be supportive for an LGBTQ kid and right down the street, another caseworker having their own personal opinion for whatever reason that may be saying, ‘We don’t have to do that.’”

While the 14th Amendment guarantees that youth in state custody be treated equally and kept safe from harm, these laws aren’t always followed.

“The constitution isn’t top of mind for a caseworker,” Cook says. “They’re dealing with what’s in front of them and what their agency policy is.”

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In 2024, the Biden Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) adopted the federal designated placement rule, which would have required state and tribal agencies to make affirming placements available to children in foster care who requested them. But a federal court vacated the rule last year. And last month, Trump’s HHS proposed rescinding it altogether.

“[The] rule theoretically protected children from going into a situation where they would be rejected,” says Mary Kelly Persyn, founder and attorney at Persyn Law & Policy, who focuses on child and youth advocacy. “Putting a child in an LGBTQ-rejecting household is dangerous. It’s not a philosophical disagreement. It’s actually dangerous to that child—physically, emotionally, psychologically and developmentally.”

After the rule was vacated, advocates say agencies have grown increasingly uncertain about what protections, if any, they are expected to provide.

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Threats and Rollbacks

Because HHS acts as the primary source of funding for state foster care agencies, it has significant control over them, according to Cook. “[The Trump] administration, out of the blue, has sent letters to states that say foster parents are to be affirming in their care saying, ‘We are investigating you,’” says Cook. “We haven’t seen this before.”

The letters, obtained by The Imprint, instructed agencies to “review and, where necessary, amend” policies that require foster parents to affirm the gender identity of foster youth.

In addition to threats at the federal level, a spate of bills that target affirming families is swirling through state legislatures. In New Hampshire, a proposed bill says that refusing to affirm a child’s gender identity cannot legally count as abuse, explicitly stating that a parent “is not guilty of endangering the welfare of a child … for raising a child consistent with the child’s biological sex.” In South Carolina and Georgia, versions of these measures seek to block the state from intervening in cases where parents deny gender-affirming care, including restricting how abuse, neglect and “best interest of the child” standards can be applied. In North Carolina, a similar bill became law last year.

Cook says these bills follow a “coordinated legal strategy from conservative advocacy groups,” including the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). ADF—which aided in overturning Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy in March—has challenged states that require foster parents to provide affirming homes.

Elliott Hinkle, who works with child-welfare agencies on LGBTQ issues, says the fear surrounding state laws and Trump’s executive orders has made some workers hesitant to address gender identity at all.

“There’s this confusion over what’s legal that’s actually making people scared to do their jobs,” Hinkle told Uncloseted Media. “People are so afraid to talk about LGBTQ youth that care is being delayed, kids aren’t being placed or [are] placed in unaccepting homes, or they are being ignored, and that’s harmful. … LGBTQ youth make up about a third of the system—this is not a small issue.”

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Unsafe Placements

For kids in care, the lack of standards creates a fear over where they will end up.

“[Caseworkers] should do more research before placing a child in a home,” says Grayson Dawson, Hayden’s partner, who also spent time in foster care.

“Being trans makes you more vulnerable, and a lot of the time in foster homes, you learn to hide who you are just to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach.”

Grayson says that he was mistreated for being trans and had to “dim down” his identity to receive placement. “My foster families would use our pronouns around our caseworkers,” he says. “As soon as they’d leave, they would just completely treat us like shit again.”

“As a trans kid, you’re really relying on luck to find a good housing situation,” says Amanda Finely, a mom in Kansas who took in Hayden and Grayson for a few months. “You’re relying on people who may have these same hateful beliefs. Hayden and Grayson really went through hell. I can’t imagine trying to navigate all of that as a child.”

Hayden says they went through at least eight caseworkers “that didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.”

They say when they were placed on adoption websites, they were often referred to by their deadname and by the wrong pronouns, even though they explicitly told their caseworkers they identified as trans.

Hayden’s foster agency, KVC, wrote in an email to Uncloseted Media that there is “no specific field for sexual orientation in Matching Families,” the program they use to match foster kids to families.

“Caseworkers and foster parents really just don’t care,” Grayson says. “We’re children going from abusive and terrible homes back to more abuse.”

Grayson’s and Hayden’s caseworkers did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for an interview.

Faith-Based Objections

Part of the reason foster parents are able to get away with such treatment is because of religious exemptions.

Some states allow foster agencies to refuse services or act according to religious beliefs as it relates to LGBTQ kids and foster parents. These laws are of particular concern to queer kids because Christians are far more likely to foster compared to the general population.

Lifeline Children’s Services, a private agency that has been cited as a resource on ADF’s website, “doesn’t have any policies regarding LGBTQ kids,” according to a social worker who works for them.

While she told Uncloseted Media that she tries to place LGBTQ kids in accepting families, she says that’s more of a “personal preference.”

In November 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families,” which says that parents should be allowed to foster even if they report religious beliefs that would prevent them from caring for an LGBTQ child.

On top of the order, there have been a slew of lawsuits from religious parents, some represented by ADF, saying that they should be allowed to foster even though they will not accept an LGBTQ kid’s identity.

In 2023, a Catholic couple filed a lawsuit against Massachusetts officials after the state denied their request to foster because they “would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA.”

In a 2023 case, Jessica Bates argued that her religious beliefs prevented her from complying with some of Oregon’s trans-inclusive policies, including using a trans child’s pronouns.

The court sided with Bates, saying that Oregon’s policy likely violated her First Amendment protections. While the case is ongoing, the judge ordered a preliminary injunction that blocks the state from enforcing those requirements against her.

Cook disagrees with these policies. “Individuals from any background and faith are welcome to be a foster parent,” he says. “Your personal beliefs are your personal beliefs, but they cannot transfer out to the kids you are being paid to care for and who are being placed in your care to mitigate the abuse they came from.”

Persyn agrees, saying that sexual and gender minorities need to become a protected class to safeguard them against First Amendment lawsuits.

“If we have a bunch of Muslim faith kids and we need to place them, are we going to say no if your religion tells you? Would we allow that in the case of Black kids? Would we allow that in the case of the children of immigrants?” Persyn says. “Is there any other social category that the law recognizes where we would allow that?”

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Why No Protections Are Problematic

Benjerman Xander, now 22 and living in Roseburg, Oregon, says his experience in the foster care system led him to participate in a class action lawsuit.

In the suit, it came out that the state’s foster-care data didn’t even know how many LGBTQ youth were under its care. The state assumed that only 2% of children in the system were sexual- and gender-minority youth, while the plaintiffs’ expert estimated the number to be nearly 10 times higher.

The order alleged that the state had “a policy of not asking” children in care whether they identified as LGBTQ, making it harder to place them with affirming families.

Xander was placed in the foster care system at 10 years old. He moved through 13 foster homes, eight facilities and three therapeutic homes, and said many caseworkers seemed to care more about whether a placement was “technically adequate” than whether it respected his identity.

Before he told his foster family he thought he was a boy, he remembers feeling like he had a hot iron in his throat.

“I choked on my words a little but then eventually it kind of poured out. And then once I said it, I felt so much better. I felt like that hot iron went away.”

Seconds later, his foster family erupted, saying they wouldn’t allow it in their house and immediately took him to church to get him baptized.

Many homes later, Xander was transferred to River Rock, a group home in a former juvenile detention center. There, staff stripped his access to testosterone, which he had been taking for two years.

He was teased mercilessly, with other residents calling him “shemale,” telling him he was broken, putting makeup on him against his will and physically fighting him.

“I was very suicidal. I felt like I was alone in the world, and I had no one to go to, no one to talk to,” he says. “It rips your heart apart, it rips your whole soul. It breaks you down to the point where trusting that you’re allowed to be loved, to be who you are, feels impossible.”

When Xander was finally placed in an affirming home, the difference was immediate. His new caseworker understood him, gave him options for where he could stay and tried to place him in LGBTQ households. “He changed my life.”

River Rock and the attorneys on Xander’s case did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Search for Affirming Homes

Hayden and Grayson say affirming homes save lives for trans kids. They both say that it was not until they were placed in an LGBTQ-affirming group home in Kansas that they felt their depression and suicidality began to ease.

“Through 10 years of foster care, I’d never been in a place like that,” Hayden says. “A lot of it was just abuse after abuse and no one understood. But when I got with them, they really, really helped. They need more homes like that,” they added, recalling that staff helped them get on testosterone, into therapy and into routine medical care.

Because the LGBTQ-affirming homes are in demand but somewhat undercover, they are hard to find, according to caseworkers who are looking for them.

“It even took my caseworker some time to find it,” Hayden says. “They also only have so many beds. And there are so many kids who need it.”

A caseworker in North Carolina says that it took them months to find placement for a trans girl.

“We actually found out about a hidden program with one of the private agencies in our state where a youth basically has to be referred internally,” she says. “So it’s a program within this private agency where they license foster parents specifically for LGBTQ children. But it’s not like you can find it on a Google search, which is really bizarre, because if families want to meet this need, you have to know somebody who knows somebody to get you that information.”

Looking Forward

Right now, most of the safety for trans youth relies on which state they live in and who their caseworker is.

In an ideal system, Persyn says, foster parents would not need a special rule telling them to treat LGBTQ kids with respect and dignity. But because the law still does not consistently recognize sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) the way it recognizes other identities, those protections remain fragile.

“There has to be some way to establish SOGI minority identity as an actual thing,” she says. “This is not a matter of politics or personal belief, but this is part of what the system is obligated to safeguard for the children it takes into its care.”

Hayden, who has now been out of the foster system for two years and is living in a trailer with Grayson in Texas, feels for the countless trans foster kids who are in unsafe situations. Their advice: “Do not lose hope.”

“People are going to continue to try and break your spirit, don’t let them,” Hayden says. “I know it’s hard and I know you feel like you don’t have a single person in the world, but you do.”

“There’s a huge community that cares about you,” Grayson adds. “They have your back and if you just keep fighting through your battles and keep going and find that light at the end of the tunnel, you’ll get there and then when you do get there it’s gonna feel amazing.”

In an email to Uncloseted Media, KVC’s PR and Media Relations Director Christina Santiago, wrote, “We cannot comment on any specifics regarding youth in our care due to HIPAA and privacy restrictions. However, we can share that we are deeply committed to our core values, including that the heart of our work is helping people. Our team prioritizes placing youth with families that are best suited to meet their individual needs, and we are constantly reviewing our practices and protocols. We always welcome and greatly appreciate feedback from youth with lived experience, to ensure that our mission-driven care continues to evolve with the needs of the youth and families we serve.”

Editor’s Note: Mary Kelly Persyn’s title was updated to reflect her current position.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate to Uncloseted Media

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“Supreme Court sides with therapist in challenge to Colorado’s ban on ‘conversion therapy’” was SCOTUSblog’s headline after the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar, where they sided with a Christian counselor.

Another accurate headline would have been: “Supreme Court sides with notorious anti-LGBTQ hate group to re-legalize conversion therapy in Colorado.”

It’s true: SCOTUS agreed with the arguments put forth by the lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

Missing from much of the media coverage was ADF’s history on LGBTQ rights. To fill that space, here’s what you need to know:

In 1994, six influential evangelical men founded ADF. The mission of the organization was to bolster the legal power of the Christian right. “People of faith were being outgunned in court,” ADF co-founder and former CEO Alan Sears would later tell the New York Times.

Nine years later, Sears would co-author a book called “The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today.” The book aims to “expose the goals of the homosexual movement and its rising legal activism” and talks about how the saddest part of “the homosexual agenda” is that “it is working.”

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Sears’ perspective is reflective of ADF’s legal work. Over the last three decades, the group and its leaders have relentlessly tried to dismantle LGBTQ rights in the U.S. and abroad. Their former CEO, Michael Farris, wrote an amicus brief in 2003 where he defended the criminalization of gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas. ADF has also been counsel in infamous anti-LGBTQ lawsuits, including the Masterpiece Cakeshop case that protected anti-LGBTQ discrimination and two ongoing Supreme Court cases litigating trans athletes. Additionally, their lawyers helped draft and defend the Mississippi bill that led the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The group is also powerful abroad: ADF international has set up shop in Europe’s hubs for international human rights institutions, where they push anti-LGBTQ legislation. In 2012, their former senior legal counsel spoke at a conference in Jamaica advocating for maintaining a law that criminalizes gay sex, which remains in effect today. In 2013, members of ADF were in Belize, where they worked to defend a statute stating that “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”—LGBTQ sex—could be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The group has also litigated dozens of cases in front of the European Court of Human Rights, including one that would force trans people to physically transition in order for their gender to be legally recognized.

A key reason I started Uncloseted came after I wrote an investigation about ADF for Rolling Stone, where I discovered that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had worked with them for nearly a decade.

It’s frightening that their efficacy, their ability to reach the highest levels of power in the American government and their influence over the Supreme Court continues to devastate LGBTQ Americans.

That is most evident in Uncloseted’s latest story by Sami Tacher, a gay Coloradan who says conversion therapy nearly led them to suicide. I’ll finish this article with a quote from Tacher about the effect he thinks ADF’s work, and SCOTUS’ decision, will have on LGBTQ kids:

“Words taught me to hate myself. Words made me suicidal. So when I learned that the Supreme Court ruled that this kind of messaging should be protected, that adults should be free to tell children that queerness is sickness, dangerous, shameful or sinful, I do not hear an abstract constitutional principle. I hear the beginning of a tragedy for kids like me.”

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• FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center (Ken Klippenstein)

  • President Trump’s budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.

• Appeals court allows Iowa to enforce book bans, restrictions on LGBTQ topics in classes (The Hill)

  • The state has been fighting LGBTQ groups and publishing companies since 2023, when the law was signed that K-12 libraries could not have books that depict sex acts.

• Megan Rapinoe & Sue Bird call out Olympics for introducing genetic testing to ban trans women (LGBTQ Nation)

  • “It’s just a total acquiescence to the Trump administration.”

• Man arrested after shooting at LGBTQ+ nightclub in South Carolina (PinkNews)

  • Police say 37-year-old Timothy James Truett opened fire outside Pulse Ultra Club, shattering the rear passenger window and windshield of a vehicle belonging to the venue’s owner.

• Trump announces 2-week Iran ceasefire after he’d warned ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ (NBC News)

  • The earlier threat, Trump’s most extreme rhetoric since the Iran war started, sparked a wave of Democratic denunciations but was met with mostly silence from top Republicans.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: Transgender youth in foster care often face abuse, neglect, and constant instability, with protections varying wildly by state. Sam Donndelinger investigates and highlights the story of Hayden Dawson, a 20-year-old from Kansas who spent over a decade moving through more than 150 homes.

• 🆕 TUESDAY: While more than four out of five LGBTQ men voted against Trump in 2024, some gay men are still proudly MAGA. Why? Emma Paidra investigates.

• 🆕 WEDNESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” I’ll be speaking with Matt Bernstein—or Mattxiv—a progressive commentator with 2.2 million Instagram followers who OUT Magazine has called “one of social media’s most prominent political voices.”

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused nonprofit news publication. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. YouTube // Spotify // Apple

This story talks about addiction and substance use. If you or someone you know needs help, resources can be found here.

Ketamine use is on the rise among Americans. But if you’re a gay man, that probably comes as no surprise. Gay and lesbian adults are almost four times more likely to use ketamine than their heterosexual counterparts, and a 2011 study from the U.K. found that queer men were over three times more likely than queer women to use the drug.

For many gay men—who disproportionately suffer from trauma and other mental health disorders—ketamine can offer short-term relief. But longer term use can have the opposite effect.

When Lucas Pearson first tried ketamine at 23 years old outside a nightclub in Louisville, Kentucky, he felt a sense of euphoria melting away his anxiety, depression and “sense of pain” he carried with him growing up as a gay kid in a religious household. At first, the drug was an easy escape that numbed Pearson from reality. Then, it became an addiction that impacted his mental and physical health, fueling feelings of paranoia and fear and leading to self-isolation.

In the third episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Pearson shares his story with ketamine addiction and his journey with recovery.

Watch the full podcast above or read the transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hey everyone, welcome to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. We’re thrilled to have somebody on who we featured in a recent story looking at gay men and ketamine addiction, and the intersection it has with trauma. And that person is Lucas Pearson, who was featured in Sam Donndelinger’s article about the topic. Lucas, thanks so much for coming on.

Lucas Pearson: Hey, thanks for having me, Spencer.

SM: Let’s get right into it. For listeners who are hearing your story for the very first time, can you kind of take me back to the first time you were introduced to ketamine and then walk me through spark notes—I know it’s a long journey—of where it led you.

LP: Yeah, so I was introduced to ketamine back around, it was 2014, 2015. And I was at a local bar here in Louisville, Kentucky. I was out with friends, and I just so happened to come up to a guy that asked me if I wanted to try a drug. At that time, I was still fairly new to the drug scene. And I was pretty open-minded to trying new things, so I went ahead and said yes. And this guy had like a little spoon on a necklace, and he ended up pulling a pretty good-sized bag out of his pocket and scooped some out and said, “Here you go, you’re snorting this.” And I didn’t really even ask what it was. I just said, “Okay, sure. I’ll give it a try.” And then, of course, after I ended up inhaling the drug, I asked him what it was at that point, after I’d already done it, and he told me that it was ketamine. And that was my first introduction to ketamine, and at that point, I started to feel really loosened up a lot. Things were starting to slow down a little bit and I liked the feeling of it. I really liked the feeling of it, and they had a dance floor, so I ended up walking into the dance floor area, started to dance a little bit, and start to get into that groove and really just lose myself in the music. That’s when I really started to, you know, know that this drug was something I wanted more of because it really did just kind of take away everything around me, and that’s all that mattered, from all the pain that I went through growing up and all that past trauma. It was something that I really enjoyed just kind of separating myself from reality.

SM: Tell me a little bit more about what allured you to it so much, what made it so good specifically for you, the high associated that you got in the initial phases with ketamine.

LP: I think for me it was really just getting into that space of not really having any care or worry, that numbing feeling that it gave me, to where I really just did separate myself from anything going on around me to a point that I didn’t even know, at some points, where I was in existence, because I would do that much of it. And I liked that feeling of just not really being here.

SM: People talked in the article, and you did too, about a state of dissociation where you feel like you’re not with reality. Explain that a little bit more to people who don’t really understand.

LP: Yeah, there were times where I’d be around people on it, and we would kind of get lost together in it. I really enjoyed being in this “lost world,” like an undiscovered type world, is what it felt like. And then there’d be times where I’d zap back into it, into reality, and would know at that point, I was like, “Wow, I’ve been gone for quite a while,” in this feeling of not really caring or knowing that I was even gone, I guess you could say.

SM: And when you mean “gone,” just like completely not feeling like you’re experiencing reality?

LP: Right, yeah, it was just like another type of dimension, it felt like I was in.

SM: Got it. And take me back from that first night at the bar where you were given the key from somebody, and then fast forward. How did it become a problem for you? Something that you would describe as an addiction, I think, right?

LP: Yeah, so I did it off and on after that point, but I had other drug addictions as well. And I started to use it with those other drugs, and so it became something that was a good addition to other drugs. I did a lot of stimulant drugs, so it was something that would help bring me down or neutralize my high for a while. That’s when I started to really know that I liked it a lot more, and then it became a thing where I was using it without all of those other drugs. It was just like, my brain was like, “This is what you need.” It was one of those drugs that was the easiest way for me to separate myself from reality.

SM: It’s so interesting you say that because I was just about to read my next question, which is from Sam’s really well-reported article that ketamine was invented in 1962, and as a dissociative drug, it induces a sense of “detachment from one’s body producing a trance-like state marked by pain relief, amnesia, euphoria, and a distortion of reality.” And I’m curious, we talk a lot about trauma in the gay community. So many LGBTQ people experience trauma from their past. And I know you’ve had some, and again, I’m gonna ask you about that, but like how did it help your trauma in the short term?

LP: I think for me it was just that sense of almost forgetting the trauma that was there, because at this point I hadn’t done any sort of therapy, really, to possibly help with that trauma. I thought that this was a way for me to escape that sense of pain that I had carried with me for, you know, up from childhood all the way into adulthood. So I think for me it was just, not necessarily healing from it, but it was a sense of forgetting about it.

SM: Maybe more of a Band-Aid kind of thing.

LP: Yeah.

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SM: And tell me about the trauma growing up. I know, I read in the article, you were born in a conservative Christian environment. Tell me about your upbringing and what that was like for you as a closeted gay kid. I could imagine there were parts of that that were really hard.

LP: Yeah, it was really tough. You know, I had three siblings growing up and grew up in a small town up in Indiana. We grew up in a very religious household, and from pretty much an early age, my mother and my stepfather were always very vocal about anything to do with LGBT community. They were very much against it. You know, “men shouldn’t marry men and women shouldn’t marry women,” and so on. And, you know, it was always related back to what it says in the Bible.

SM: “It’s a sin, it’s unnatural,” these types of things.

LP: Sodom and Gomorrah, all of those things. And I knew from an early age that I was gay, I knew that.

SM: How old would you say?

LP: I was probably about anywhere from 8 to 10.

SM: Yeah, I was 8. I remember I knew I was 8. Yeah.

LP: But I also knew at the same time that it was wrong to be that way, according to what I grew up with, and that’s what I was taught is that it was wrong. And so I always felt so ashamed of who I was, and it was, it was not easy. I always had to pretend to be somebody else to please those around me. So that kind of carried on into my teenage years, and that’s when I really picked up substances for the first time; it wasn’t ketamine yet, but you know, whatever I could get my hands on.

SM: But you came out to your mom, right? You came out at 16. Is that right?

LP: Yes.

SM: And what was that like? Tell me about that experience.

LP: So I sat down with her at the kitchen table, and I knew it was gonna be bad. I just knew my mother was a very reactive type of person to anything, it seemed like, so I knew it was not gonna be a great experience. It was really hard for me to do it, and I couldn’t even say it out loud at the time. I ended up just having to write it on a piece of paper because I was just so anxious. You know, like, this is it, your whole life’s going to change now because it’s going to be out.

SM: Crying, maybe?

LP: Yeah, there was a lot of crying. And so I handed it to her, and basically her reaction was, “You know, we’ve been praying about this,” and she kind of stormed out of the house at that point and got on the phone with multiple family members and told them. So that was a hard experience for me, to not even be able to really tell anybody but her, because she had outed me to the family, and it definitely did carry over into you know my adulthood years, and even now sometimes I still have a little bit of struggle of being myself. I try to be myself as much as possible, but sometimes it’s still difficult to just be me.

SM: Yeah, I could imagine. And your stepdad was, is this right? He was a pastor at the local church?

LP: My grandfather was.

SM: Your grandfather was a pastor. So it’s a deeply rooted religious family. So, you know, I know my boyfriend, for example, he comes from a very “Bible Belt” place, very same thing, no contact with his parents. That’s trauma, right? For somebody who’s not religious, listening to this, like how does that feel on the inside, in between your ears when you experience such intense rejection, related to something that is unchangeable in you, but integral to who you are?

LP: It’s really difficult. It’s difficult to, you know, and I’ve had trouble, being a people pleaser too, always wanting to please everybody else and make everybody happy, but at the same time now like trying to find my own inner happiness and peace, and it is difficult to explain to somebody, like, “This is who I am, and I can’t change who I am, this who I’m always going to be.” And I think there was even some insinuation from my mother when I got sober that, you know, “Well, you’re sober now, so you’re gonna be straight now, right?” And I had to explain to her that’s not how this works. That is still me. That has nothing to do with my drug addiction, you know?

SM: Yeah, and I want to get back to the recovery, because there is a very golden side to the story, too, that I definitely want to focus on. But first, you know, take me to where it got bad. I think a lot of people, you’ll hear, “Oh, you can’t get addicted to ketamine or it’s not something you can get addicted to,” but you really can, right? And I know everyone has their version of rock bottom, how would you? Can you take me to your, if you’re comfortable with it, your rock bottom, like when did it get at its worst? And like, how does that manifest when you’re taking it that much? I’m assuming you’re not getting that euphoria you got on night one anymore.

LP: No. And there’s different types of ketamine that are out there. It’s not all the same. And so I was always seeking out the purest level of ketamine that I could find. And for me, it became, I wasn’t just using, I was dealing out on the streets. I think that’s when I started to hit rock bottom was, you know, “I need to sell this to get enough for me.” And it got to the point where I was not really even socializing with anybody. I really started to distance myself from people and isolate, and that’s, for me, when it started to get really bad because I was more worried about “When can I get high again?” versus “When can I spend time with people?” Or “How can I get more high if I’m starting to run out?”

SM: When you’re taking it that much, we had some people in our story, perhaps you too, talk about the physical and mental effects. How did the ketamine start to impact you physically and mentally?

LP: So physically, I didn’t know really how much it was affecting me until I got clean from it. I was so tired almost every day. And so for me, like I was always tired all the time, and I thought it was just normal to feel that way: very, very tired and just kind of in a weird headspace of not really being able to function, not being able to really do normal day-to-day tasks that a normal person should be able to do, right? But for me, I couldn’t really do a whole lot of those things. It was hard for me to get through a day at work.

SM: And mentally, was it still helping the trauma, or was it doing something else?

LP: It started to get pretty bad, actually. It was not helping the trauma anymore. I actually started to get incredibly paranoid. So I got to a point where I was always thinking that everybody was out to get me. And I would have hallucinations and things. I went into psychosis many times.

SM: Wow. What’s that like? Take me back to an example of that if you’re comfortable.

LP: I was hearing voices a lot. I was hearing things outside my windows, I was hearing things outside of my bedroom, like pounding on my doors, just all these things that was like, “Man, somebody’s here to get me” type of thing. And it kept just getting worse and worse and worse. That was probably one of the points of me realizing, like, I gotta do something different.

SM: Yeah, and in Sam’s research and her story, she found that chronic ketamine use can cause inflammation, ulceration and damage or scarring to the bladder, liver, kidneys and gallbladder, and also have mental side effects, which are essentially the reverse of what it does in the short term, which is exacerbate trauma, exacerbate anxiety, depression and all the other mental health disorders that it’s supposed to help treat, or some people would say it might be able to help treat. Okay, so you kind of get to this space—that sounds horrible, by the way, and I’m sorry you went through that. How do you get out of something like that? Because I know so many folks, it’s really, really, when they’re experiencing addiction, hard to get out of it. What was your journey there?

LP: So I was in my room. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom. That’s just where I felt most comfortable, even when I was losing my mind; that was my place of safety, I guess. And I just had this moment of clarity of realizing that I was totally alone. And it was not going to end well if I kept going how I was going. And I’d been through, you know, getting locked up, going to drug court, all of these things, but it was really that moment of just feeling entirely alone. It was definitely a moment that I knew I had to change and do something different. And so that’s when I called up a friend of mine that I knew had been sober for quite a while. And, I was like, “Hey, you know, is there any way that you could help me out, like maybe take me to, you know, some sort of meeting or something about recovery?” And so he said yes, and picked me up and that’s what we did. And that was like a huge deal for me. And I felt like super at home with the people that I was around when I went to this meeting. It was nice to know that I wasn’t actually alone, there’s a lot of people that deal with very similar addictions. So it was nice to finally see that in person and talk about it and know that I didn’t have to end my life that way.

SM: Thank God you didn’t, and I’m so happy you’re here, and being a voice for other people who might still be struggling. I wanna read you some more stats, a few more stats which you already know, but obviously, there’s a huge connection to ketamine in gay men. A 2025 study found that gay and lesbian adults in the U.S. are almost four times more likely to use ketamine than their heterosexual counterparts, and a 2011 study from the United Kingdom found that queer men were over three times more likely than queer women to use the drug.

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LP: I think a lot of gay men, we like our dance parties, we love the raves and those sorts of things. I think that there are those people out there that can use it and go about their life and be fine. But, I always try to let people know that, and maybe try to be more aware of how much you’re using it because if it’s becoming like a daily thing, maybe there’s more that you need to look at, like, “Why am I using this much?”

SM: Well, and one of the things that Sam unpacked in the article is like we do have so much trauma, gay men. I think definitely like there’s a party scene, there’s obviously a chemical drug substance use issue at large among gay men, chemsex is a thing. All of these things are things, right? But then, when you think about ketamine, and you think about the trauma, like there’s so many people who grew up with similar backgrounds and upbringings as you have in these “Bible Belt” communities or in these hyperreligious communities where there’s just rejection, right? Do you think there’s something about ketamine, especially that where it helps trauma, that plays a little part in that explanation for those statistics being so high?

LP: I think it’s different for everybody, and as far as the trauma thing goes, I know there’s a lot of ketamine therapy clinics now, and you can have it just shipped to your house, from my understanding. I think it’s just a good idea to be aware of the side effects, but I’ve heard it’s worked for people with trauma.

SM: Yeah, yeah. And one thing I definitely don’t want this interview to do is negate the fact that it does help some people, and there are studies out there that show low doses under clinical settings and when done properly, it can alleviate depression or even suicidal ideation. But also to your point, it feels like there’s quite a “Wild West” right? Like we found clinics that said it would ship it to your house, and that it would literally alleviate every single mental health condition under the sun, and there was no mention that you could get addicted or there were side effects, at least on the homepages. What do you think about that? It is kind of a “Wild West,” these ketamine clinics right now, eh?

LP: I, for me personally, someone who is addicted to it, that’s probably like my last resort is to order it from a medical clinic. I think most, a lot of people know, too, if that’s the way you’re gonna go about it, you probably already have an idea in your head of, “Am I doing this for healing and trauma, or am I doing it for other reasons?” But I think it’s great if people are able to find relief through it. I think that’s wonderful. For me, it just didn’t work out that way.

SM: Yeah, I think it’s a whole separate story about the regulation and the clinics and everything like that because I think a lot of the people who get addicted, they start, you know, it’s either recreationally or a mix of both. What did you learn about yourself through recovery?

LP: When I first got sober, I went through some really intensive trauma therapy—

SM: Okay.

LP: —in the first several months. And that was extremely critical, I think, for me long-term staying sober, was to walk through all of that trauma with somebody who was not there to pass judgment, but just to listen. And that was a huge deal for me because it was that weight that I had been carrying around for so long, and to finally just spill it all out to somebody who was a complete stranger, but was a licensed medical professional. It was great to be able to do that and I knew, for me, I had to do that in order to stay sober long term.

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SM: Why do you say that? Why did you need that to stay sober?

LP: For me, it was those thoughts that continued to race around in my head. I was very good at burying all of my feelings inside and not talking about it to anybody, and just telling everybody “I’m okay” when I really wasn’t. I really do believe that trauma played a huge part in why I was picking up drugs to begin with, to numb out those feelings, so I didn’t have to face them and deal with them for a long time. So I think to finally face them and deal with them was a critical part for me to, hopefully, not pick up substances again.

SM: And what were some of the tools, especially from trauma-based therapy, I’ve never gone through any, I’ve done therapy before, but never trauma therapy. Like, how is it different? Like, what are some things in that process that were really useful that you did, or tools you learned, or things like that?

LP: He had me write out a lot of my thoughts on paper, and there’s just something about writing it out on paper that really helped me a lot, just to like, see it, visualize it, and be done with it. And he also recommended me to build a community of people around me, like healthy, good people. And not necessarily just sober people, but people who are doing things other than just hanging out at a bar. He recommended that. Now I’m able to go out into settings where there might be people drinking and there might be dancing going on, but I’m not triggered by it anymore, and I enjoy being around people that are enjoying their lives, and just finding that positivity is what he really encouraged me to do from other people.

SM: That’s awesome. And I bet, because I feel like a lot of trauma can really affect self-esteem and confidence, and a sense of who you are, did the therapy help with that, too?

LP: It did. It did a lot. I think the biggest thing that’s helped with self-esteem and courage is something else that the therapist recommended, was to start getting out and getting exercise daily. And it took me a while. I was maybe 10 months into my recovery journey before I really started to get exercise, and now it’s part of my daily life. I find some way to exercise every day now, and it’s really helped me a lot to gain a lot of self-esteem back and feel a lot better about who I am, both on the outside and the inside.

SM: And for people, there’s obviously a ton of people, including many gay men, who could be listening to this or struggling right now and kind of questioning this, and a lot of those folks might be people who had trauma too. What would you recommend to them if they’re thinking, “Maybe I don’t want to be in this position? Maybe I don’t want to keep doing K?”

LP: For me, it was just admitting, you know, that I needed to change something about what I’m doing in my day-to-day life, and that’s a first, huge step. When you finally are saying to yourself, “I don’t maybe wanna be this way anymore, I don’t wanna do this anymore.” I think that’s a huge step. And then I would say: reach out to people. Reach out to people that you know are going to be willing to listen and maybe give you some good suggestions, rather than people who are just going to downplay the fact that you maybe want to change something about yourself.

SM: I know it took Sam a long time to find you, somebody who would speak on record about this, right? And a lot of people don’t want to. Why do you say, “Yes, I want to speak about this”?

LP: I think for me, it’s the possibility that I may just help a single person from just talking about what I’ve been through. If I could just help a single person and just get the word out there that you don’t have to be ashamed of who you are. Somebody once told me that your struggles are what really do make you stronger, and you don’t have to go through it alone. There are definitely a lot of resources out there, there’s a lot of people that you wouldn’t even think would be willing to help you or listen without judgment. But you’d be surprised when you kind of start to get the word out there that you’re wanting to change what you’re doing, it’s pretty incredible. So I would say just don’t be so afraid to speak up about it.

SM: I’m really grateful that you came on. And this was a really important conversation that I think will likely help more than one person. We’re going to put a lot of those resources for folks struggling right now in the episode notes. But Lucas, thank you so much for speaking with me today. You can find Lucas’ entire story and Sam Donndelinger’s investigation on Uncloseted Media. It’s called “Gay Men, Ketamine and Trauma, A Therapy or a Trap?” Lucas, thank you so much.

LP: Thanks for having me on.

SM: And for those who want to follow and subscribe to us on all platforms, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.

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This story contains mention of suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know needs support, resources are available here.

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At 12 years old, upon returning home from school, I saw my dad sitting in the living room. I immediately knew something was wrong.

“Come here,” he said, with my computer in his lap. He proceeded to show me the pictures of men kissing that he had found in my search history.

“If you live this way, either you’re gonna kill yourself or someone’s going to go out and kill you for it,” he told me. “And neither of those things matter because God will never love you again.”

I couldn’t say anything. In our world, my dad was the one with the answers. He was an elder in our church, the second-highest rung in authority and the highest form of control. If he said it, it had to be true.

For the next two years, I pretended like my feelings weren’t there. I felt like I was just waiting for the rest of my life to collapse. I knew being gay wasn’t an option.

So when I found conversion therapy at 15, it felt like the answer. I didn’t know it would cause me to spend the next seven years of my life undoing myself.

I became one of the nearly 700,000 Americans who have gone through conversion therapy. Though 23 states have implemented some bans on LGBTQ kids from receiving the discredited practice, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Colorado must relegalize it.

When I learned the news, my heart sank. The Supreme Court made the decision to side lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

I was horrified. I understood the pain. I had experienced suicidal thoughts. And I knew that this decision would cost lives.

The Program

I was raised in Seattle in the International Churches of Christ, a high-control religious organization that was founded in the 1970s and spread to over 130 countries.

Church was not just something we did on Sundays. It was our social life, our worldview, our moral code, our hierarchy and our family reputation. It was the way we understood what was good and what was dangerous.

The messaging was constant: Church services, Bible talks, discipling times, camps, small groups, leadership meetings behind closed doors where I was told not to listen.

Everyone watched everyone. If you sinned, you confessed. Information traveled upward. Shame traveled downward.

So when a camp counselor told me in the ninth grade that he used to struggle with same-sex attraction and that he could help me, it felt like I had a way out.

He introduced me to Strength in Weakness, a conversion therapy ministry that would consume my life.

After telling my mom I had found a solution, I logged into their eerie-looking online community for people trying to resist homosexual thoughts.

In a section called “Help For All Christians,” there were articles titled “Are YOU Same Sex Attracted and Need Help? START HERE” and “HELP! My Roommate is Gay!” I paid the $55 membership fee and got going.

The expectation was up to an hour a day, sometimes alone and sometimes with other people. You read scripture. You catalogued your temptations. You prayed for strength. You reported back.

They framed homosexuality as a quick fix to a life of emptiness.

If I developed feelings for a boy, I was taught to cut the relationship off. If I found someone attractive, I was taught to confess, analyze it and shut it down. Attraction was treated like a warning flare: not yet sin, but always only one step away.

The program turned my mind into a hostile environment. I was taught that my body would betray me and that a crush was a spiritual emergency. I monitored my eyes, my thoughts, my friendships, my fantasies, my posture, my tone and my body. And because I had never been with a boy, I told myself it must be working. I was miserable and shrinking inside—but I was holding on. And in the eyes of Strength in Weakness, I was succeeding.

But it wasn’t working.

Anxiety became a permanent condition.

The Loneliness It Created

But the hardest thing was the loneliness.

Inside the church, I was the person with the secret defect. Outside of it, I was unbearably Christian. I didn’t belong anywhere.

I spent hours on the Strength in Weakness chat room waiting for just one friend who understood me. Nobody came.

By the time I was 17, I consistently thought about killing myself. More than once, I stood on top of a parking garage looking down onto the street, wishing for a breeze to take me.

The only thing that stopped me was my family. Even then, I was thinking in terms of what burden I could spare them.

Even though my strength began to falter, I stayed with the program through college.

The leader, Guy Hammond—who founded the organization and who had “lived an active gay life until he was 24 years old”—had taken me under his wing. He was likely attracted to my clean track record of having never kissed a boy.

I was flown to conferences. I began counseling older men who were struggling and making content promoting conversion therapy on social media.

Guy sung me his praise. He referred me to Exodus International, a Christian organization that promoted conversion therapy to hundreds of local ministries. The organization shut down in 2013 and has apologized for the harm it caused.

Being pulled deeper into the ministry made the performance more demanding. The more Guy trusted me, the more I felt I had to live up to the image they had built around me: the disciplined one, the faithful one, the proof that this could work. So I kept counseling people even as my own life was unlivable.

The Beginning of Escape

For years, I believed that if I held on, God might make a different life for me. But eventually, reality started outrunning doctrine. I remember I was at the supermarket and I thought the guy bagging my groceries was so cute. By the time I had gotten to my car, I had fantasized an entire relationship with him. At that moment, I realized I would never be attracted to women.

I also began to understand that celibacy, which I had promoted to myself and countless others as the noble solution, would be ineffective.

At the same time, cracks were forming in my family’s faith.

Little did I know, my dad was terrified for me. He sought counsel from the church. He started reading, questioning and trying to understand what the Bible actually taught about homosexuality instead of what he had been told.

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I remember the relief when the two of us were sitting in our old house, reading scripture and arriving at the same conclusion: The condemnation we had built our lives around was not as clear, or as holy, as we had been taught. The Bible didn’t condemn homosexuality like the church said it did.

“I’m so sorry,” he told me. He took full accountability. To this day, he has been the number-one advocate for my health and healing. He is my best friend.

For years, I lived in terror that I would destroy my family’s reputation. But in the end, the church revealed itself.

In a meeting to discuss an ongoing issue with a struggling member, my parents attempted to show them forgiveness, but the church said they were too close to see clearly. Suddenly, my folks saw the hypocrisy, the cruelty and the way power was protected and dissent was punished.

They stepped down from leadership, and over time, the church excommunicated our family, and members were told not to speak to us.

But it didn’t matter. The spell had broken and we felt free.

Shortly after, I stopped making content for Strength in Weakness.

As the distance between me and conversion therapy widened, I could finally breathe.

Leaving did not feel triumphant. It felt like standing in the ruins of my life. But I had one crucial thing before me: a future that belonged to me.

Reflection on the Supreme Court Decision

Now, I am working hard to undo the trauma I endured. I am in intensive therapy. I still live with chronic anxiety and chronic pain. And I’m still figuring out how to be myself.

What makes the Supreme Court decision so painful is that I know exactly what kind of world it protects and what kind of pain it inflicts on LGBTQ kids.

People call it free speech. But it is abuse.

Words taught me to hate myself. Words made me suicidal.

So when I learned that the Supreme Court ruled that this kind of messaging should be protected, that adults should be free to tell children that queerness is sickness, dangerous, shameful or sinful, I do not hear an abstract constitutional principle. I hear the beginning of a tragedy for kids like me.

And what hurts most is that I know the opposite is possible. 1

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I’m 31 and managing a local cafe here in Denver. I have a queer community around me that is generous, visible, funny, messy, loving and alive. I look around and see LGBTQ people building ordinary, beautiful lives. I get to belong to something that once would have been described to me as a death sentence.

There is nothing dangerous about this community. What was dangerous was the lie I was told about it. Ignorance made my world small. Education and compassion made life livable. And love gave me back a future.

That is why the SCOTUS decision feels so devastating. While LGBTQ people are some of the most resilient folks I know, I’m also acutely aware of how strong a child has to be to survive after being told, over and over, that who they are is unlovable.

Uncloseted Media reached out to Sami’s dad. In an email, he wrote that his past comments are “rough to read.”

“I don’t remember saying the specific words, but I completely trust Sami, and trust that the words would be painfully and accurately remembered,” he wrote. He added that it was shame and fear that drove his remarks and that it’s “hard to describe the gratitude” he has for Sami’s willingness to forgive him. “Sami has allowed for our relationship to continue to heal, grow, blossom and flourish. I told Sami on the phone yesterday that I’m the president of their fan club.”

Sam Donndelinger assisted in the writing of this article.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Strength in Weakness as “Strength and Weakness.” The article has been updated to correct this.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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A guest post by Hope Pisoni

When I published an article in December about how trans women in state prisons have been affected by the Trump presidency, I got a lot of backlash for writing sympathetically about some of my sources. To be clear, some of these women did commit very serious and repugnant crimes, but I don’t regret sympathetically covering the terrible mistreatment they faced. Reduxx, an anti-trans publication, published a critique of my article which repeatedly misgenders my sources; far-right influencer Andy Ngo posted my name and face on X; and angry commenters called me an “evil freak,” “sick person” and—lest you assume these folks limit their bigotry just to trans people—a “Jewish ghoul” and a “literal goblin.”

As unpleasant as this was, I try not to let it faze me. My main reaction to this whole debacle has been one of intrigue: Of all the controversial topics I’ve covered, this is the one that really struck a nerve with people.

I think that’s partly because the discourse around trans rights often fixates on the moral quality of trans people. The far-right proclaims that we don’t deserve rights because we are groomers, violent, sexually deviant, mentally ill and/or delusional.

In most cases, trans people and our allies respond by saying that we are not any of these things and therefore we do deserve rights.

While it’s important to debunk these falsehoods, responding in kind to these arguments unfortunately plays into their game. When transphobic actors say “trans people don’t deserve rights because they’re bad people,” and LGBTQ advocates respond by saying that “trans people aren’t bad people,” they are accepting the premise that bad people don’t deserve rights.

This is a problem for a few reasons.

First, it’s a rhetorical weakness. Under this framework, every trans person who does something bad immediately becomes another piece of evidence against our rights. This is why the far-right have put out so much media focused on the very small number of trans shooters or sexual predators—the more examples they find, the more they can wildly overrepresent them in coverage, which leads to the erosion of public support for trans rights. For example, despite Charlie Kirk’s assassin being cis, Media Matters for America found that at least 18 right-wing publications and influencers used a misleading report to pin the attack on trans people.

Second, it places an enormous amount of pressure on trans people to be perfect citizens: clean-cut examples that are digestible as average Americans who could be your neighbor, your doctor or your teacher. But trans people have a range of lived experiences that often don’t fit that stereotypical perfection: We’re about twice as likely to be impoverished as cis straight people, about six times as likely to be homeless and significantly more likely to suffer from depression or poor mental health. Despite this, we are still expected to be on our best behavior and play the part of perfect little angels so that we can represent the community in a “positive light.”

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On the one hand, the people who are excluded—sex workers, unhoused people, people struggling with addiction—are the very people who are the most affected by anti-trans attacks. And on the other hand, the few who are deemed presentable enough to have a platform are subjected to greater scrutiny than most people, and are often forced to flatten our complex human experiences into digestible, morally uncomplicated packages.

The stakes are high: In many cases, our careers and safety are at risk if we, say, have the wrong reaction to a notorious bigot’s death or grade a Christian student’s paper in a way that doesn’t align with their religious beliefs.

Third, as a small minority of the population, we don’t get to choose what the definition of a “bad person” is. The anti-trans movement is skilled at twisting the narrative to depict our existence as an immoral ideology devoted to committing harm: We’re “invading women’s spaces” or “mutilating” and “grooming” children. When a trans politician from Minnesota spoke against online age verification laws, right-wing media claimed she supported giving porn to kids, and that narrative spread like wildfire. Even if we play by the rules, they often change them to make us lose.

Queer movements have a bad habit of ceding rhetorical ground by propping up the most “normal” and “respectable” people and leaving the rest out in the cold—often excluding trans people as a whole. Despite their now-legendary status, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were shunned and treated as pariahs by the gay rights movement only a few years after they helped start it at the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

The idea was that trans people were simply too stigmatized and that they’d stall the progress of gay rights. That fell apart, though, when the AIDS crisis hit and the cultural backlash reversed years of progress and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it happened again. While gay rights made a splash on the national stage, so-called allies blasted trans people for daring to be upset when we were excluded from anti-discrimination bills or had our issues delayed on the House floor. While the strategy of sweeping the most stigmatized queer people under the rug got some huge wins in the short term, it gave the anti-LGBTQ movement an obvious line of attack by leaving trans people vulnerable.

And here we are in 2026, where trans people are under greater attack than ever and cis gays are having the rights they fought for rolled back.

I know I’m a few days late for Trans Day of Visibility. But if there’s one thing I’m reflecting on this week, it’s that real representation means visibility for everyone. Trans people deserve to be as complicated as any other group of people without our rights being threatened. Of course we should continue to celebrate the trans celebrities, lawyers and human rights advocates who currently stand in the spotlight. But we cannot neglect the trans people who do sex work, who’ve been incarcerated, who don’t look or act how people think they should. These are, after all, the very people who built our movement in the first place.

We do not deserve to live because we are perfect, because we’re “just like everyone else”—we deserve to live because we’re human.

We can’t fall into the trap of watering ourselves down to seem more palatable or “normal.” Because when any one of us is abandoned, we all lose.

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• A quick reminder to everyone that you should subscribe to our YouTube channel! We’ll be publishing episodes of our new podcast “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” every Wednesday. If you look now, you’ll see yesterday’s episode, where Spencer talks with me about my investigation into the Bureau of Prisons’ widespread denial of gender-affirming care for trans people. You can also watch shorts featuring our coverage of breaking news events, including on-the-ground reporting at Saturday’s No Kings protest in NYC.

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• Last week, Sam Donndelinger appeared on The Buckeye Flame’s This News is So Gay podcast to talk about her recent story on how ICE crackdowns are impacting Latino Americans’ ability to access HIV care. You can listen here.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: What does the Supreme Court ruling overturning the conversion therapy ban in Colorado look like in real life? For one survivor, it’s personal, painful, and impossible to ignore. In this deeply personal essay, we hear a survivor recount years of trauma and reflect on what this ruling means for queer youth.

• 🆕 WEDNESDAY: In the third episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Lucas Pearson shares the story behind his ketamine addiction. He reveal how party culture, unresolved trauma, and unregulated access shaped his path.

Thanks for reading! Spencer will be back next week. Feel free to email him with questions, complaints and story ideas! spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate to Uncloseted Media

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UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube // Spotify // Apple

On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order that banned all forms of gender-affirming care for trans people in federal prisons. Six months later, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from enforcing the order. This block is still in effect today.

Despite the judge’s order, Uncloseted Media’s Hope Pisoni spoke with eight incarcerated trans women and reviewed legal statements by several more and found that the BOP is still denying trans people access to gender-affirming accommodations. Over the course of her monthslong investigation, Pisoni also found that the women who stood up for themselves reported being met with intense retaliation, from lengthened sentences to physical violence.

In the second episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Pisoni breaks down the investigation.

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Watch the full podcast above or read the transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hi everyone, welcome back to UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton, a new podcast where we expand on our accountability-focused LGBTQ journalism that you may already be accustomed to from our Substack or our Instagram. And today, I am thrilled to have our very own investigative journalist, Hope Pisoni, on the pod to discuss her recent investigation that revealed how the Bureau of Prisons may be illegally denying trans incarcerated people gender-affirming care. Hope, welcome to the pod.

Hope Pisoni: Thanks so much for having me.

SM: So, let’s get right into it. You spoke to eight incarcerated trans women over the course of seven months, just unbelievable reporting, and you found that the Bureau of Prisons is illegally denying this care. Tell me a little bit more about how you discovered that and what you mean when you say they’re illegally denying them the care.

HP: So, it’s useful to take a quick step back and explain what has been happening in the Bureau of Prisons at the federal level in regards to trans people. On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order which contained a number of anti-trans provisions in a number of public spheres, including specifically a ban on federal funds being used for gender-affirming care in prisons. The Trump administration was sued by the ACLU and Transgender Law Center in the coming months,claiming this is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. A judge agreed in June that that challenge was likely to prevail in the case and issued what’s called a preliminary injunction, which means that the Bureau of Prisons was blocked from being allowed to enforce that executive order as the trial continues.

SM: So, Trump issues an executive order banning the care and then a judge intervenes and issues a preliminary injunction, meaning that that care should still, today, be legal for trans incarcerated people in federal prisons. Is that right?

HP: That’s correct.

SM: Got it. Okay, interesting. So then, you’re finding out, though, that this is not always happening, that the Bureau of Prisons isn’t still giving this care, which is supposed to be legally accessible. How specifically did you find that the trans women you spoke with aren’t able to get this care? What do you mean by that?

HP: I think it’s worth talking about, as well, what we mean by gender-affirming accommodations. There’s really three major categories, the first of which being gender-affirming health care, so hormone replacement therapy The second of which is more broadly termed social accommodations, which are things like chest binders for trans men or razors for trans women to shave facial and body hair, things that are really helpful, or female undergarments so that trans women do not have to expose their breasts to other inmates. All of these sorts of accommodations which are necessary to deal with gender dysphoria, and to just life in prison as the gender that they are. And the third is a more minor one, which was there used to be provisions that allowed transgender women to get a card that would exempt them from being searched by male guards. And those cards have also been revoked.

SM: And when it comes to hormones, obviously, those are things that can affect people physically. Some of these women have likely been waiting to get on them and are told they’re not gonna have them. What was the psychological impact for the women you spoke to when they realized they might not be able to get these hormones, which I know many of them describe as lifesaving?

HP: I spoke to some people who did indeed lose access. I spoke to a woman named Valerie, and she says she was not able to access her estrogen medication, which she had been on at that point for, I believe, 11 years, which is a very, very long time. And at that point, your body gets very used to the hormonal environment of being on medication, and the results of being off of it can be very damaging. She talked about being very on edge, very irritable, experiencing severe mood swings, all of these terrible emotional psychological effects, which is of course not to mention just the increase in dysphoria and the mental weight that that has.

I didn’t speak to this woman directly, but there was someone whose story I reviewed in legal documents who was also denied hormones for several months, who talks about having had dysphoria so bad as a result of being off of the hormones that she had essentially psychotic breaks where she was scratching at her arms trying to remove body hair that had been growing thicker and faster as a result of not being on estrogen and spironolactone.

Note: The declaration does not specifically describe these events as “psychotic breaks.”

SM: Wow, unbelievable and horrifying imagery there to think about from these conversations you had with some of these women. And we talk about gender-affirming care, and I think a lot of people know what we’re talking about when we say that, but when we say gender-affirming accommodations, there were a lot of other little things, like you mentioned: undergarments and razors. What did you learn about the impact that has when those things are taken away? Which, a lot of people might think, “Eh, it’s a razor or an undergarment.” What does this mean to these women, having those things removed as it relates to their gender identity?

HP: Yeah, and I completely understand what you mean when you say that for a lot of people, it’s not necessarily intuitive. Like, “Oh, why this is something that’s considered such a huge deal?” But the way that people explain it, it really starts to make sense. So, for instance, if you are a woman in prison and you’ve been on estrogen for a very long time, you have breasts and you have a female body, or a very visually understandable as female body, and in the federal prison you are surrounded by men, which means that you’re going to attract unwanted sexual attention. And say that you used to be able to have bras that you could wear, but the prison took them away. Now you don’t have a bra, and so whenever you’re forced to change in the communal showers or any other sort of scenario, you’re forced to expose your breasts to a crowd of men, and people describe how dehumanizing that can be, how objectifying that can feel. Or, for instance, with razors, I mean, this is something I can speak to myself. Facial hair is an extremely common and potent part of gender dysphoria for a lot of trans women and not being allowed access to good razors or being allowed to shave for very long periods of time could lead to growing a beard or a mustache, which a lot of people said can be, perhaps understandably, very bad for gender dysphoria because it heightens that incongruity.

SM: Yeah, that’s really interesting and something, as a cis man, I don’t have to think about, but it’s really fascinating to learn. So, I guess the basic question I have is: How? How are they allowed to just illegally remove a lot of this care? I mean, it’s illegal, no?

HP: Well, it’s illegal, but of course, the only people who are going to be able to report these things, a lot of the time, are the people incarcerated, and of course, they don’t have the same access to media in the outside world. For instance, in Kansas, you saw that the state took away people’s driver’s licenses, and we were able to hear about that almost immediately because people were posting on social media, reporting to the news, but if you’re in prison, you can’t necessarily do that. And more importantly, even though there are people like me who are reporters, talking to the people on the inside, the Bureau of Prisons has made a concerted effort to, in many of these cases, cut off access to the outside world. So, for starters, just the baseline things: Calls with people incarcerated, if you are not their lawyer, can only last up to 15 minutes at a time, and they have to front the bill a lot of the time as well to cover the costs of that.

SM: The incarcerated people do?

HP: Yes.

SM: Got it.

HP: So that’s an immediate barrier all on its own. While there are ways for news media representatives to schedule interviews with people, the ball is entirely within the Bureau of Prisons’ Court to decide whether or not that is allowed. So, I had multiple interview requests for longer conversations with people. One of them I just never ended up getting an answer back, and another one I was denied, told that me having an interview with that person would “[disrupt] the good order of the institution,” and I later found out from the woman that I had been trying to speak to that she was later informed by an official at her prison that if she called me on the phone, or any other reporter, she would be thrown in a more restrictive unit, which, as I mentioned earlier, more restrictive units often mean even more restrictions on access to gender-affirming care. So, it’s a double bind, and a lot of the time these women, even when people are looking, are cut off from being able to tell the press what’s happening. It’s just challenge after challenge after challenge.

SM: It’s interesting. You don’t think about how hard it would be to talk about injustice inside prison walls compared to the ease to which somebody could say, “Hey, I’m having my driver’s license revoked in Kansas.” So, it’s a really interesting comparison that you draw there.

Another theme that you found through your reporting was retaliation. When some incarcerated trans women that you spoke with tried to speak out, tried to raise their hand and say, “this isn’t right, this is illegal,” they report facing retaliation. One of the main folks in the piece was Grace Pinson, who is a prolific jailhouse lawyer, you describe her as. She’s serving time for mailing a death threat to President George Bush in 2007, but since she’s been in there, she has been a major activist and advocate for not just herself, but many other trans folks housed in prison. Is that right? Tell me about Grace and the retaliation she’s faced.

HP: Yeah, so Grace has represented herself and won in multiple cases against the Bureau of Prisons, which, as I’m sure you can imagine, is very unusual. There was some coverage of this a couple years ago with the Marshall Project, and she’s also, like you mentioned, helped over—I believe I got a list that had over 20 people on it, both cis and trans at her prison, that she’s helped advocate for themselves and stand up for their rights and represent themselves. And that of course means that she has an extra target on her back, especially because she’s been very vocal for most of the time that the lawsuit has been running about the treatment that she’s faced, about the denial of gender-affirming care and gender-affirming accommodations that she’s faced and about the retaliation that she’s faced.

SM: And you mentioned in the report that there was an incident where she was assaulted by staff in October. What happened there?

HP: Yeah, so I later heard about this both from her over the phone, and from a couple people who witnessed it over the phone and in a legal declaration submitted by her to the court. She was assaulted by staff, they broke her arm, they cut the clothes off her body, walked her down the hallway naked and left her in restraints around her torso, wrists and legs for 10 hours. And I want to read something from the legal declaration that she says she was told by a prison official. She says he told her, “Don’t play the victim. I know what you’ve been writing to that judge in DC. You did the crime and put yourself here. You know you were born with a penis and would be put in a male prison. The judge doesn’t run this prison. I run this prison.”

SM: Wow, that is a harrowing description and a harrowing quote. In a report, the BOP did confirm that the altercation took place, but they claimed that it was not in retaliation for Pinson’s advocacy and that she sustained “minor injuries.” It’s just crazy, these examples you give, Hope. I mean, the retaliation, the suppression of being able to speak with the media and then just the inability to genuinely access this care. You’ve done a lot of reporting on trans incarcerated people now, you did another story on state prisons. What have you learned about how the public views the incarcerated population, and the trans incarcerated population, based on the responses that you’ve received? I know we’ve had a lot of feedback on these articles.

HP: It has been good to see that within trans communities, there are people who do care about these issues. It’s obviously a very important and very egregious violations of rights. But there’s also been some pushback to all of the prison reporting that I’ve done. Especially my first article, which was about state prisons across the US, got a lot of pushback, especially because it got picked up by an anti-trans publication online, which was taking great issue with the fact that some of the people who were featured in that story had, in fact, done very horrible things to end up in prison. I won’t sugarcoat it. Some of the people that I’ve spoken to for both of these stories have done very horrible things to end up in prison. Some haven’t, some have. And we got a lot of pushback because of that. That article on our article picked up some decent traction.

SM: And Hope, what do you think of that on a personal level? When people say, “Look, why do these people who have done such horrible things deserve rights? They shouldn’t even have them.” That’s what a lot of the rhetoric became, especially in these far-right spaces. What do you say to that?

HP: I think that you can learn a lot about a society and a culture by seeing how they treat the most vulnerable people among them. Seeing how they treat people who are least seen as people, in a way, you could say. Incarcerated people are very vulnerable and very stigmatized, as are trans people. In the intersection between that, you see this very intense dehumanization and depersonalization, where, I think it should be fair to say, in a just society, that no matter what someone has done or no matter how we feel about someone, they should not be faced with cruel and unusual punishment. And I think that the things we’ve described, like being beaten, being put in chains, having your healthcare taken away, being forced into hormonal imbalance, all of these things are cruel and unusual. And the reason that I think that these attitudes say so much about a society and say so much about a culture is that, in a way, it shows us how people think it’s okay to treat someone when they can get away with it. “This treatment is okay for these people,” ultimately means “this treatment is okay for people.” And on a personal level, I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think that’s just and I don’t think that’s constitutional either, frankly.

SM: Well, we’re learning it is not constitutional, but they’re still operating in that way, hence the importance of your investigation. And also, I’ve learned this in the past, too. I remember when I was doing a story on far-right people way back at 60 Minutes and Nick Fuentes, the far-right nationalist, put my head, photoshopped it and put 11 of my head in an egg carton, and it went viral on Twitter. And some of these far-right people even posted your picture and started retweeting it as the journalist with these threatening messages. I mean, you cover a lot of really important stories on the LGBTQ community and the trans community. What’s that been like, receiving even just a bit of that pushback from folks who are so adversarial and immediately go on the offensive, in certain ways in a threatening manner?

HP: Yeah, there was a major right-wing influencer who tweeted about the article about our article, posted my face. There was a lot of nasty stuff that was being said about me, some very transphobic, some antisemitic, actually. I do think that it is interesting. I mean, at the end of the day, I’m fine. I’ve been able to put the distance between it and me to not have it really affect me mentally so much. But more than anything my reaction is, I think it’s interesting and indicative of some of the stuff I was just talking about, that for all of the controversial topics that I’ve talked about thus far, that the thing that has gotten me the most hate and the most negative attention by far is saying that people who do bad things don’t deserve to be abused and don’t deserve to have their rights violated. And again, I think that’s just very telling of where the cultural conversation is about incarcerated people, and even additionally how that compounds with the intense amounts of transphobia in society right now.

SM: It’s interesting, you say, the intersection of incarcerated folks and trans folks and the way people feel like they can treat that intersection just because of who they are. And Hope, I mean, where do we go now? Are they still operating illegally? What’s next for the women you spoke to? Do they just have to deal with it until further notice? What can we look for moving forward?

HP: So, the lawsuit is still ongoing. There was a fairly major development which actually broke into some news outlets in February. It’s worth noting that there had been these developments for a while, but there wasn’t a lot of news pickup until recently. The Bureau of Prisons released a new policy, which got some coverage because it’s very awful. It essentially codifies that even people who have been on hormones for years will be weaned off of them gradually and that people who [don’t] already have them will not be able to get them, which is essentially what the executive order and the memo were always saying, but said in more specific terms. I do want to note about that, I have seen a lot of coverage of this policy that has reported its passage somewhat straightforwardly, saying this is a new policy, this is what’s going to be happening now. I want to qualify that it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Checking the text of the policy and speaking with the lawyers on the case reveals that it is also covered by the preliminary injunction. So, in theory, it also should not be enforced by the BOP until the injunction is either lifted or what have you in the case of what happens with the lawsuit.

Now, as we’ve just spoken about, whether or not they’ll actually follow that is unclear. We’ve just spoken about how many times that they’ve violated the injunction in just the past year without this policy. But for what it’s worth, I spoke on background with a staff member at one prison, and I spoke with a few people who are incarcerated as well for updates. And it sounds like in the vast majority of cases, nothing has really changed, that the status quo of some violations and sometimes just malicious compliance, you could say, that’s still the same, nothing has changed. And it seems that the goal of this policy is, rather than to be introducing a new thing now, to be on the books so that when the injunction gets lifted, there’s immediately a plan and a policy to go into effect to take away these hormones and all of those things. I do want to note—there is one person for whom this new policy does seem to be in effect, and that is Grace Pinson. I got multiple people who reported to me that she, and as far as I can tell, only she—I have not gotten any other reports from any other people—did have her hormones taken away almost immediately. Which, again, is just in my eyes, a very clear form of retaliation. And not just in my eyes: This almost immediately meant that the BOP was brought back in front of a judge because he had just told the BOP to clamp down on the retaliation. And then mere days later, oh look, one of the biggest advocates suddenly had her hormones taken away. So, it’s not just my opinion. It’s also that the BOP has come under a distinct amount of scrutiny from the judge in the case for their claims that they’re not retaliating.

SM: And when it comes to the women that you spoke to, it must be just so much uncertainty, so much fear, how are they feeling? Is there any takeaway about how they’re feeling with the uncertainty of what’s happening from a legal perspective in the outside world right now?

HP: Yeah, I got a lot of messages and calls from people after that new policy went forth. I had some people who were crying on the phone. People were really, really concerned. And that’s another part of things, right? This is a thing we talk about with a lot of anti-trans policies at all levels affecting all people. You don’t always know what’s going to be enforced and what isn’t, but that’s part of how it works. It’s a scare tactic. It pushes people in an environment of fear to either sit down and shut up or, in some cases, even go back into the closet. And it’s very disconcerting.

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SM: I mean, one thing that is certainly only gonna help is explaining what’s happening in there and reporting these stories. So I’m really grateful to you for doing this investigation and all your work in this area. And the Federal Bureau of Prisons did get back to you via email. Their Office of Public Affairs, Scott Taylor from there said “We do not address allegations, and for privacy, safety, and security reasons, the Federal Bureau of Prisons does not discuss the conditions of confinement for any individual in custody. Additionally, the BOP does not comment on matters related to pending litigation or ongoing legal proceedings.” If you want to see their full response, you can head to unclosetedmedia.com. Hope, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing this really important investigation. If you want to read Hope’s full investigation, head to unclosetedmedia.com, and please subscribe and like and follow UNCLOSETED with me, Spencer Macnaughton. You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts or on YouTube. Thanks again, Hope.

HP: Sure, thanks for having me.

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

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By: Elizabeth Smith

Given the current climate for transgender people in the U.S., pseudonyms have been used for the author and her twin.

James decided to use his name and pronouns prior to transition in this story because he feels it is representative of the beginning of his transition, which he says is an important part of his story.

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When I was a little girl, I loved brushing my twin sister’s hair. Julia always hated dealing with it and would ask me to sling a hair tie around it three times to make an extra-tight ponytail. Before leaving for elementary school each morning, either my mom or I would use spray and bobby pins to trap her hair in place.

It was hard to watch all of that long blond hair fall on the floor at the hairdresser’s in Atlanta in 2015.

At 11 years old, I remember sitting in the waiting chairs with my mom, who was crying out tears that mingled both salty grief and sweet relief.

Despite my own feelings of sadness, I remember looking at Julia’s reflection in the salon mirror. Above where the black salon cape was fastened around her neck, all I could see was a beaming smile that took up her whole face. I couldn’t remember a time when I had seen her like that.

She left the hair salon that day with a short, side-swept fringe. A boy’s haircut. Soon after, Julia started going by James and using he/him pronouns.

While my brother and I are identical twins, we do not share the same gender. This has been my reality for over a decade. James’ metamorphosis into his true self has taught me so much about the transgender community. I also believe my perspective as the identical twin of a trans person can be a valuable offering to help people who misunderstand the community—or see gender as a so-called social contagion.

Here’s my story.

A few months before the salon visit, I was sitting in my bedroom on my iPad that my grandmother had just gifted me for my 11th birthday. I had been watching YouTube videos of people making wearable mermaid tails from waterproof fabric.

I came across a video on TMZ of Jazz Jennings, a 14-year-old girl who was swimming in a purple mermaid tail. In the video, Jazz explained that she was transgender and that she loved wearing the tails because they made her forget what was between her legs.

Jazz was the first openly transgender person I had ever come across.

I ran to my mom, who was sitting in Julia’s room with her. “I think this is what Julia is,” I told her while I pressed the video up to her face.

I remember Julia watching inquisitively as my mom tried to hide her reaction. Though Julia didn’t say anything, I think that’s when she had finally been able to put a label on the feeling she had felt her entire life: transgender.

Somehow, I had always had a sense that I had a twin brother, not sister.

Growing up, I liked Barbies. My twin, on the other hand, dressed up as a muscly cop for Halloween two years in a row. On character history day in elementary school, she fought tooth and nail to dress up as Christopher Latham Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter, instead of women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony. After her teacher said she had to dress up as a female figure, she dressed as Sholes anyway.

At our fifth-grade graduation ceremony, the school told her she needed to wear girls’ formal attire. Still, Julia strode across the stage in a tiny tux, becoming the first known girl at the time to sport such an outfit in our Georgia elementary school.

Shortly after showing my family the video of Jazz, my memory feels like a series of vivid scenes.

There’s a scene of me, Julia and my mom at Kohl’s shopping in the girls’ clothing section for back-to-school outfits. Julia clutched her chest, hard, and told my mom she couldn’t breathe. She was having a panic attack, but couldn’t articulate why.

After my twin told us he wanted to change his pronouns and go by James, there’s a scene of my mom pacing the house frantically, tearing paintings of me and my twin off the wall, and flushing them down the toilet as she sobbed through clenched teeth. Though my mom wanted what was best for her child, it was hard for her to come to terms with the changes. For the first few months after the name change, she said she felt like Julia was “gone.”

Shortly after starting at a new middle school in Georgia, James was diagnosed with gender dysphoria after starting therapy. With seventh grade and puberty just around the corner, my mom had no idea what to do next. So we went to see our childhood pediatrician, who told her that “this was just a phase” and that my brother would “get over it soon enough.”

I knew our doctor was wrong.

I remember the three of us going to our long-time Methodist church to ask our priest for guidance. The priest responded with a typical “We love you… BUT” monologue. My mom asked the priest to pray for my brother’s mental health, but the only thing my priest must’ve heard was “transgender,” and the only thing he must’ve thought was “sin.”

I knew our priest was wrong.

Eventually, my mom made the decision to leave our red state, which currently has 12 anti-trans bills making their way through the state legislature. She wanted to find a place where my brother would be accepted. A place where he could find therapists and doctors who would help him figure out what to do next. We packed up our house, where James and I were born and raised, and drove to our new home in Colorado.

Shortly after arriving, I remember harrowing screams—the kind that are fueled by sheer panic—from my brother in our new living room after he got his period. He had menstruated months before me, and had started puberty blockers too late because doctors in Georgia wouldn’t help him.

As the years passed, my brother got the gender-affirming care that I watched save his life. As the dysphoria lifted, he had fewer panic attacks.

As James moved toward his true self, I sort of became the control subject of an experiment. When he started hormones at 15, we began looking different for the first time in our lives. His face grew more angular than mine. A blond mustache came in, followed by an adolescent beard. He grew an inch taller. His frame filled out in ways mine never would.

I was a living measure of how far he had traveled from our original shared image.

But so many things were unchanged. We still had the same smile, the same laugh, the same cadence, the same timing. Our hair color and our eyes still matched. He was a boy now, and I was not. But we were still, somehow, the same.

I’ll admit, it took some adjusting. It’s well-known that identical twins cherish their identicalness. I mean, how cool is it when two people look exactly the same? But when I look at my brother now, I don’t mourn Julia—I still see James as the person I’ve known my whole life: My platonic soulmate, my best friend and ride-or-die. My twin.

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Today, people often say to us, “You look awfully alike for boy-girl twins.” Each time they ask, we give each other a knowing look before we say “fraternal” in an effort not to confuse them. People nowadays have a hard time coming to terms with the sentence, “We are identical, but we are different genders.”

I wish more people could have the privilege I had of learning about the trans community. At 11 years old, I learned the difference between gender and sex. At 12, I learned that someone who identifies as one gender may begin to experience the puberty associated with another gender and that a mismatched puberty can be detrimental to their mental health. And at 13, I learned what gender dysphoria really meant after my twin was diagnosed with it.

My brother’s experience taught me that the societal construct of the gender binary of “man” and “woman” is unfixed and subjective. For us, even as two identical little “girls,” I now realize how idiotic it is to assume we both craved pink Barbies.

Today, dozens of states have passed laws restricting or banning the gender-affirming care that allowed my brother to become his true self. I think about the times when he clutched his chest in the girls’ section of a department store. Or when he flexed for photos in his muscly cop costume. Or when he screamed in our Colorado living room as if the world was ending.

I think about all of it when people tell me transgender identity is a choice, or a phase, or a contagion. I was there. I witnessed his yearslong transition.

While Julia might have been the caterpillar version of my brother, who James is today is a metamorphosed butterfly. And damnit, that butterfly is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I love you, James.

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Keywords: HIV criminalization, sex offender registry, HIV disclosure laws, HIV-positive individuals.

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For nearly 17 years, Lashanda Salinas-Hicks remained shackled to the reality of life on the sex registry: She was legally required to stay 300 feet away from schools, parks and playgrounds, and she was forced to report to the sheriff’s office four times a year or risk a felony charge.

That’s because in 2006, Salinas-Hicks’ partner pressed charges against her after a break up, accusing her of having sex without disclosing that she was HIV-positive. Although she says her partner knew of her status before engaging in intercourse with her, that didn’t stop her from being jailed for about two months, put on a three-year probation and forced to register as a sex offender.

“I was in a state of depression for 17 years because, if I went out, I had to constantly watch my back,” Salinas-Hicks told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES.

Though not physically behind bars, the 44-year-old retreated from public life. While Tennessee law specifies that incidental or accidental contact with minors is not technically a crime, Salinas-Hicks says law enforcement told her from the start that she “can’t be around any kid” or she’d risk being thrown in jail.

Out of fear, she listened to that directive. She no longer went to church services as children stood in the pews. She no longer shopped during the day, opting to get groceries early in the morning when she was less likely to be around children. She couldn’t even be around her family, whom she didn’t see for the extent of her time on the registry, save for her disabled sister for whom she cared.

“It’s like ripping a Band-Aid off of a sore,” Salinas-Hicks says of her time on the sex offender registry.

Despite the fact that Salinas-Hicks was and remains undetectable—meaning the amount of the virus in her blood was so low that it’s impossible to transmit through unprotected sex—she was resigned to nearly two decades of life on the sex offender registry.

Salinas-Hicks is one of the more than 4,400 Americans who have been forced to register as a sex offender because of their HIV status, according to data aggregated by the Williams Institute. And today, 32 states still impose criminal penalties for HIV-positive people who fail to disclose their HIV status before sexual intercourse.

As of this year, five states—Louisiana, South Dakota, Arkansas, Ohio and Washington—may require registration on a sex offense registry as part of the punishment for a conviction under HIV-specific laws.

Despite the availability of HIV prevention drugs, such as pre-exposure prophylaxis, there’s still an effort to harden HIV criminalization laws in some parts of the U.S. In January 2025, New York Republicans introduced a bill to make the state’s current misdemeanor statute on HIV transmission more punitive, and Louisiana introduced a bill to make the “intentional infection of a sexually transmitted disease” a felony.

“[The laws are] a relic of the past,” Jada Hicks, senior positive justice project attorney at the Center for HIV Law and Policy, told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “You could technically in some states be virally suppressed, incapable of sexually transmitting to another person and still be convicted for an HIV-related [offense].”

Laws Written for a Different Era

The U.S. was the first country in the world to instate HIV criminalization laws, with dozens of states implementing them during the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1987. Some states, including Florida and Louisiana, maintain a “civil commitment” provision, meaning an individual who has already served their prison sentence for HIV-related charges may be subject to involuntary commitment to mental health or medical facilities.

These laws were implemented under the assumption that HIV is incurable and a death sentence. But advancements in medication, such as antiretroviral therapies, have rendered this legislation obsolete. In 2024, an estimated 57% of those living with HIV in the U.S. were undetectable.

These laws may still be in place because of a knowledge gap. A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found the majority of Americans remain unaware of certain HIV preventative measures.

“Not a lot of people understand HIV. They don’t understand the realities surrounding the roots and risks of transmission,” Hicks says. “I think a lot of people still think of HIV as a death sentence.” She says it’s this ignorance that is condemning innocent people to lengthy sentences and the confines of a life on the sex registry.

“These sentences … are extremely and unduly harsh,” she says.

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Infection as Victimization

In some cases, Hicks says people living with HIV don’t even need to engage in sexual intercourse to receive charges. In various states, an HIV-positive person can face criminal charges if they spit, vomit or bleed during an interaction with law enforcement.

Even discussing sex can lead to criminal charges for those with HIV. In many places, prostitution is treated as a misdemeanor, but in states like Tennessee, someone with HIV can face a felony charge of aggravated prostitution. “Even having a conversation and agreeing to engage in sexual activity in exchange for money can be enough under some state laws to result in a conviction,” Hicks says.

Jose Abrigo, HIV project director at Lambda Legal, says that these laws are frequently co-opted as a lever of power in abusive relationships.

“What the data says is that HIV criminalization is used by abusers,” Abrigo told Uncloseted Media and GAY TIMES. “Their partner will say, ‘I’m going to go to the police and say that you had sex with me while having HIV.’”

Racist, Homophobic and Transphobic Laws

Abrigo says these statutes disproportionately target minority groups. “They’re also incredibly racist. … They’re also incredibly homophobic. They’re also incredibly transphobic.” Since the laws are predicated on enforcement, Abrigo says that trans and queer people of color—who are often the most policed and surveilled—encompass the brunt of individuals forced to enter the sex offender registry.

According to the Williams Institute, Black Americans are most likely to be arrested and convicted for HIV-related allegations.

“It’s a dual punishment,” Abrigo says.

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The Law Versus Public Health

These laws may also be exacerbating the spread of the virus. Because most state statutes require an individual to have knowledge of their status as a prerequisite for prosecution, many people adopt a “the less I know, the better” mindset to shield themselves. Hicks says the slogan among some communities has become “take the test, risk arrest.”

While HIV rates have plummeted in the U.S.—falling from a peak of about 130,000 annual cases during the mid-1980s to an estimated 32,000 in 2022—criminalization laws present a roadblock to further mitigation.

And those efforts come during a tumultuous time for individuals living with HIV. Despite announcing goals to defeat the HIV epidemic in the U.S. in 2019, President Donald Trump has slashed federal funding for HIV research. And last year, he ended a 37-year tradition of recognizing World AIDS Day.

“Under this administration, I actually think we’re going to see continued increase of carceral approaches, meaning I think that we’re going to see states trying to further criminalize based on health status,” Hicks says.

Small Changes Come Too Late

In some pockets of the U.S., there are changes taking place. In 2023, Tennessee overturned its statute requiring HIV-positive individuals to be listed on the sex offender registry. While the law still carries felony offenses for individuals who fail to disclose a positive HIV status to sexual partners, the reversal of the sex offender registry provision meant 154 Tennesseans—including Salinas-Hicks—would no longer be required to be listed.

When Tennessee modernized the law, the first thing Salinas-Hicks did was visit her younger cousin, who was 2 when she first entered the registry.

“I went to her and I hugged her and I told her, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I’m your cousin and I want to get to know you,’” she says.

Salinas-Hicks played a pivotal role in overturning Tennessee’s law. She lobbied at the state Capitol starting in 2021, participating in demonstrations like the Day on the Hill, an event for community members to speak with lawmakers. She says she shared her story with senators as a way to “hit them in their heart” and educate them on how outdated laws are hurting people.

“We’ve got to get up there to the Capitol and get in these people’s heads,” she says.

Maryland and North Dakota also repealed their HIV criminalization laws last year.

But overturning the sex registry provision to Tennessee’s HIV criminalization law was only half the battle. The underlying charges for criminal exposure to HIV in the state remain a felony. Salinas-Hicks says that advocates have pushed to reduce that charge to a misdemeanor, but the state government wasn’t open to that amendment. And so, advocates continue to push to reduce the charges associated with HIV exposure in Tennessee, as well as in 31 other states.

For Salinas-Hicks, the fight is a matter of adjusting to the current reality of HIV, a disease that is no longer considered a death sentence, and which doesn’t define a person’s life. “Let’s fix the laws to match the science,” she says.

Salinas-Hicks’ former partner did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.

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On March 13, Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order establishing New York City’s first ever Mayor’s Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.

The office’s activities include “assisting agencies in developing and supporting liaisons to the LGBTQIA+ community,” “advancing measures to ensure agencies do not engage in discrimination,” “developing legal resources to ensure the City’s sanctuary protections for LGBTQIA+ individuals are upheld” and “providing support for LGBTQIA+ people and their families fleeing anti-LGBTQIA+ oppression.”

Mamdani appointed Taylor Brown to lead the agency, making her the highest-ranking transgender person in the history of New York City government.

Mamdani, who has an excellent track record on LGBTQ issues, wrote on X after signing the order: “Queer New Yorkers deserve to be not just protected, but celebrated in this city. Together, we will fight for their right to live a life of dignity, safety, and unabashed pride.”

While more cities and counties have in recent years made similar efforts, many cities—large and small—still have no government bodies designed to address LGBTQ issues.

But in the places that do exist, they’ve had a meaningful impact.

During the COVID-19 pandemic—which disproportionately impacted queer people—Philadelphia’s LGBTQ affairs office released a COVID-19 resource guide for LGBTQ people, which included lists of queer-friendly food pantries and health care services as well as resources for free and reduced Wi-fi from LGBTQ community centers and programs. They later collaborated with the city’s Human Resources Department to develop guidelines and trainings for better supporting trans employees after city workers reported difficulties.

In Santa Clara County, Calif., their office is pushing back against the federal government’s attacks on the trans community. Last year, their advocacy helped push the county’s executive director to recommend carving out $1.27 million from the budget for Valley Medical Center’s Gender Health Center amid federal cuts to gender-affirming care.

In Atlanta, their office helped to establish an annual LGBTQ Cultural Humility Training for city employees and elected officials. They also aided in allocating $100,000 for HIV program resources and in creating Youth Pride, a festival and summit for LGBTQ youth.

As the federal government continues its unprecedented attack on the LGBTQ community, it’s imperative that politicians at the local level implement stopgaps like offices of LGBTQ affairs to help their queer constituents. And even when Trump is gone, targeted resources that are created by advocates who are explicitly elected to look out for LGBTQ people are critical.

• We just launched the first episode of our new podcast: “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton”! You can watch the first episode, where I interview Katy Faust, the new leader of the campaign to overturn gay marriage in the U.S, here:

• On Monday, March 30, the Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce is hosting its inaugural Economic Development & Growth Exchange in Ottawa. The event will include networking with LGBTQ entrepreneurs and innovators, a panel on queer tech and AI and more. You can register for the event here: https://queerchamber.ca/event/q-edge/

• Black Trans Activist and Drag Performer Shyyell Diamond Sanchez-McCray Killed in Virginia (Them)

  • Sanchez-McCray, a title holder in many pageants, was 42.

• ‘It’s a Nightmare’: The Human Toll of the Catholic Church’s Trans Healthcare Ban (Trans News Network)

  • Missing hormones. Canceled surgeries. Bureaucratic denials. Late last year the Catholic Church banned all trans healthcare across its sprawling networks.

• Senate blocks Trump-backed trans sports ban in Republican voting bill (The Advocate)

  • Democrats reject effort to add restrictions on transgender athletes to the SAVE Act as debate drags on.

• Ann Arbor local and state elected officials call for Monroe athletic director to be reinstated (Michigan Advance)

  • Over 30 elected officials and local leaders from the Ann Arbor area sent a letter on Thursday to the Monroe Public Schools Board of Education and Superintendent Andrew Shaw calling for the district’s athletic director, Chet Hesson, to be reinstated.

• Transgender girls told to leave Girlguiding groups by September (BBC)

  • The organisation that oversees girl guide groups in the UK has said transgender girls must leave the organisation by September.

Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: While HIV treatment has developed significantly over the years, the laws haven’t caught up. Over 4,000 Americans have been forced to register as sex offenders because of their HIV status, with laws still on the books allowing it in five states. Jake Angelo investigates the human cost of these laws.

• 🆕 TUESDAY: In a guest essay, Elizabeth Smith shares her perspective as the sibling of an identical twin who transitioned. Smith writes: "My brother’s metamorphosis into his true self has taught me much about the transgender community that was previously unknown to me."

Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:

Donate to Uncloseted Media

Subscribe now

“UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton” is a new podcast by Uncloseted Media. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: YouTube // Spotify // Apple

When Katy Faust was 10 years old, her mom and dad divorced. After that, her mom began a relationship with another woman.

Faust says she loves her mom. So it may surprise you to learn that she’s now at the helm of The Greater Than Campaign, a new coalition of at least 47 anti-LGBTQ groups fighting to overturn gay marriage. Faust and her campaign argue that children are victims when raised by gay couples.

In the premiere episode of “Uncloseted, with Spencer Macnaughton,” Faust speaks about her campaign, her motivations—both professional and personal—and why she believes her efforts are the “right-wing boogeyman” LGBTQ media has long feared.

Watch the full podcast above or read the transcript below.

Spencer Macnaughton: Hey everyone, welcome to Uncloseted with me, Spencer Macnaughton, a new podcast brought to you from me and the team at Uncloseted Media, an investigative LGBTQ-focused newsroom that launched in September 2024. We’re thrilled to bring you a video and audio podcast that offers you exclusive scoops, raw interviews and voices you don’t here anywhere else. We’ll be publishing a podcast episode every single Wednesday morning, and it’ll go straight to wherever you get your podcast. And for our very first episode, I’m thrilled to interview Katy Faust. She is the leader of a new campaign called Greater Than, which is a coalition of what she says includes 100 organizations, many who have very anti-LGBTQ track records. Katy’s at the helm, and her goal is to overturn Obergefell and gay marriage nationwide in the United States. Katy, thanks so much for speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

Katy Faust: Looking forward to the chat, Spencer.

SM: Fabulous. Yes, so without further ado, let’s get right into it. You founded Them Before Us in 2018, I believe. For the viewers, listeners who have never heard of that, just tell us what it is. What is Them Before Us?

KF: It is a movement that aims to center the child in all conversations about marriage and family. Children have a fundamental, natural right to be known and loved by the two people responsible for their existence, their own mother and father. And we think that that should be the dominant perspective when we’re looking at all different aspects of marriage and family, whether it’s in the cultural, legal or the technological—that those two adults do things for children that no other adults do. It grants them their biological identity. It helps children answer the question “who am I?” in a way that unrelated adults do not. When children are raised by the two people responsible for their existence, they get the perfect gender balance in the home 100% of the time. That distinctive male love and female love that maximizes their development and satisfies their longing to be loved by a mother and a father. So we think that children should supersede, their rights should supersede the desires, the agendas, the identities, the feelings of adults. And that requires that everybody—single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile, conform to those fundamental rights. Because the only alternative is for children to lose their rights so adults can have what they want. And we think that’s an injustice.

SM: No, I know that children’s rights are integral to Them Before Us and a lot of your work. So tell me a little bit, with Them Before Us specifically, what is the work you guys do to try and achieve that goal?

KF: Well, we want to change hearts and we want to change laws. Anytime that these legislative matters are being debated, we want the perspective of the child represented. So whether that is sharing resources with lawmakers—we don’t do any direct lobbying, but we do try to inform lawmakers about the interests of children and the benefits of being raised by their mom and dad and the drawbacks when they are separated from them, especially intentionally and commercially. But also you need to make the case in the public sphere. So in these kinds of cultural conversations, we also try to change hearts by helping people understand the harm to children when they grow up without their mom or dad.

SM: And the Greater Than campaign, that was launched in, I believe, January of this year, and it’s now a coalition of over 50 organizations, and you’re at the helm of this. And this is really a new effort to overturn gay marriage in the United States. Peel back the onion for people who have never heard of this campaign, what is it? And how did it form? It’s impressive that that many organizations banded together in this way. I’m assuming it took a lot of organization.

KF: It did. But thankfully, there’s a lot of good people that have been doing good work for a long time and have held on to the reality that children need their mother and father. Marriage is the tool that most effectively gives it to them. So Greater Than is the effort to recenter the child in marriage policy. Because what happened when Obergefell passed is we centered something else. We centered adult validation and adult identity. Marriage is not a way to afford dignity or validation to adults. It is, at its heart, the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known because it unites the two people to whom children have a natural right. And that purpose was subverted when we actually removed a man or a woman from that union. So it’s very clear that gay marriage as policy is incompatible with the reality that children come from a man and a woman, need that man and woman, benefit from being raised by that man and woman and have right to that man and woman. So that is the Greater Than campaign. We are here to say that children need their mother and father.
SM: If that’s the argument, saying that they are the folks who should be raising children, that’s the way to do it, let’s overturn gay marriage. Do you also have your sights set on illegalizing things like divorce or illegalizing things like adoption or illegalizing things like single mothers going through IVF and having a child on their own? Should all of those things be illegal as well?

KF: We’ve allowed adults to make all kinds of decisions about their own personal lives, even though it very often is harmful to children. But what took place in Obergefell is different.

SM: How so?

KF: We’re not just saying: “You can arrange your personal lives,” right? “You can make the decisions that you want for your own romantic decisions.” We actually enshrined a version of the family that excludes a child’s mother or father, and we said it is now unconstitutional to elevate the one family form where they do not have to lose their mother or father to be in it. There’s a difference between permitting and promoting. And Obergefell promoted a form of family that excludes one or both natural parents of a child.

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SM: But aren’t we promoting family structures like divorce when you legalize the opportunity for people to divorce? So should we take that right away from Americans? The right to divorce, the right to adopt? You’re still permitting those things which would go against your coalition’s core argument, no?

KF: So I’m talking about natural rights. I am talking about things that are endemic, things that should be recognized by the government, but not provided by the government.

SM: And if they don’t come from the government, where do they come from?

KF: They come from a natural law. They come from what we can observe about human nature and the structure of the world around us. It is actually a system of understanding natural rights, again, that was utilized by our founders to set out the Bill of Rights, something that they think is inherent to all of humanity based on looking at the natural world. They did not appeal to scripture, they appealed to natural law. And it is on that basis that we find our freedom and our prosperity that has allowed this nation to not only flourish, but also protect the genuine human rights that have allowed us to have such a great level of flourishing. So I do not think that adults have a right to adopt. And I don’t think adults have a right to divorce. And adults do not have a right to same-sex marriage. Those things may be very desired, but they are not natural rights. On the other side, children have a right to life, so do you and so do I. But children also have a natural right to be known and loved by their mother and father because it meets that criteria of being pre-political, not something someone has to provide for you and something everybody has in equal measure. There actually are very few natural rights that exist in the world. And just because somebody wants something does not make it a right that the government or a provider has to deliver to them.

SM: That’s actually a really interesting thing: “A child has a right to be loved by their mother and father.” So just a personal example, my boyfriend grew up in a gay evangelical town where his parents did not love him, pushed him out, did not accept him. He’s now no-contact with them. He’s representative of millions of gay kids across the country. Do you think there should be a similar fight to stop evangelicals from parenting gay kids? Shouldn’t kids have the right to parents who love them unconditionally if they’re gay or straight?

KF: Gay kids have a right to be loved by their mother and father. They need them just as much as everybody else. And it’s incredibly painful.

SM: Yeah.

KF: When they get that rejection from their parents because they crave it, they long for it, they’re made for it. And it’s crushing. It’s crushing when there’s that rejection. So gay kids need their mother and father too. I exist in the evangelical world and I do know of one scenario where people have kicked out their gay kid for how he identified. They also kicked out their heterosexual kid for sleeping around. And I’ll tell you, in my world, I know a lot more gay kids that have cut off their Christian parents for failing to completely go along with their identity. They’ve said, “we want to love you. We want to be in a relationship with you, but we are not gonna use your preferred pronouns. And we’re not going to attend your wedding because we feel like this not only goes against our convictions, but we would like our children’s children, we’d like our grandchildren to have a mother and a father.” So I would say that rejection really goes both ways.

SM: It kind of counters your argument if you’re saying that it goes both ways in certain situations, but not others. Like, it’s a child’s right to have a loving mother and father, which you said. There are tons of kids across this country who don’t have loving mothers and fathers simply because of their religious affiliations. And you’re extremely working in tandem with a lot of these organizations so it’s hard for me not to recognize some kind of hypocrisy. I mean, you have a lot of evangelical parents who are involved in corporal punishment, who are rejecting their kids, who are saying get the F out of my house simply because of your sexual orientation. And is it not a child’s right to be gay? Does this not counter the argument that you have for overturning gay marriage?

KF: What do you mean by “right to be gay?” I mean, you’ve actually just packaged so many different rabbit trails that I’m actually not sure where to begin. Why don’t you dial down and let’s get really specific about certain organizations or certain practices or certain parents or something. And then we might be able to make a little more progress because right now it kind of feels like you’re just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what’s gonna stick. So what do you wanna talk about here? Like what exactly do you want to talk about?

SM: Sure, let’s talk about some of the coalitions and the allies in the Greater Than campaign. So one of them is Focus on the Family, where they’ve said that same-sex attraction is preventable and a treatable condition, it’s biologically unnatural. Another is Liberty Counsel, who have said that—

KF: Well, let’s go one at a time.

SM: No, no you asked, let me answer.

KF: Okay. Because I want to answer it.

SM: Please, but if you don’t mind letting me finish, please. The second one is Liberty Counsel, who have said that gay people know intuitively that what they are doing is immoral, unnatural and self-destructive, and that they are not controlled by reason, but rather controlled by lust. And a third is Family Watch International, and they have worked with politicians in Uganda who have passed bills criminalizing homosexuality. Can you denounce those groups that you’re allied with?

KF: No, I’m not gonna denounce those groups. No way I’m gonna— Are you kidding me? Focus on the Family has been working so hard for decades to try to build strong families. And I know them, they are never, they were not coming from the place of “you should reject your gay children.” If that is what you think, you actually should follow them every now and then. They have so many resources on being compassionate with your kids if they have a different kind of gender identity. You are, that is one of the worst strawmans I’ve actually ever heard.

SM: Well, it’s just direct quotes. I mean, it’s literally direct quotes, I’m not saying anything.

KF: That they don’t think that it’s biologically determined? Is that scandalous to you?
SM: That same-sex attraction is preventable? Do you think it’s a preventable and treatable condition?

KF: Can you please show me the exact quote and the context? Show that to me.

SM: They have said that1.

KF: I’m not gonna denounce Focus on the Family. Are you kidding me? Some of their research—

SM: That’s fine. You don’t have to get fired up about it, you don’t have to denounce them. I’m just asking you.

KF: No, they’re doing incredible work. And actually, they’re completely grounded in all of the research, especially as it relates to factors that contribute to same-sex attraction. Yeah, they’re really, really good.

SM: Yeah, what makes them so good about treating same-sex attraction?

KF: Because they deal with it honestly. They recognize that it’s not biologically determined, but they also recognize that it’s often not chosen. It’s not necessarily something that somebody goes, “hey, I think I’m gonna choose to be attracted to somebody of the same sex.” They recognize that, very often, there’s all kinds of factors involved in that that are environmental, and beyond the control of the child that experienced it, and that is why they come at it from the perspective of “hey, you need to deal compassionately with your kids if they come and say, ‘I feel like I’ve got same-sex attraction, or identify as gay, or I think that I’m transgender.’” They’ve got all kinds of great resources on understanding where your kid is coming from.

SM: And so you stand with all the allied organizations of the Greater Than campaign?

KF: Their message and their mission is not my mission. I am not there to approve of everything that they say, but everybody in that coalition believes that children have a right to their mother and father, because we’re all very familiar with the research and the natural law systems and the common law of the United States that all point to that being a self-evident reality. And that is the message that we’re communicating through the Greater Than campaign.

SM: Tell me how you guys got all together. It’s 56 organizations. Like I said, it’s really impressive. How’d you guys all get together for one big organization? And you’re at the helm of this. You’re kind of the star, if you will. How’d you become the star and get all these other organizations together?

KF: Thanks, Spencer. I’ve just needed somebody to acknowledge that I am giving the main player energy here and you’re the first one.

SM: Really?

KF: I really appreciate it.

SM: Wait, I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. Really?

KF: I’m kind of being sarcastic, but also, we can do this. I totally can. How did it all come together? I asked them, and it’s not 50, it’s 100.

SM: Wow.

KF: We just don’t have everybody listed on the website. So I did a little research on your platform where I think that you’re looking into the ecosystem of organizations, hate groups that are trying to come against LGBT interests or something like that. There actually has not been any kind of organization or coordination. I know you guys think that there’s some big right-wing boogeyman. There really never has been, but this is. This is the organized effort that you guys have suspected existed, but really never has. And everybody came together because we all understand that children are being victimized in this culture. Not solely because of the redefinition of marriage, but Obergefell really did crystallize so much of what we’ve already seen taking place in culture as it relates to law and technology. And so this is a coordinated effort that I’m really honored to say, all these organizations did get in on eagerly.

SM: What do you think about your perspective surrounding children’s rights is more persuasive than, say, Liberty Counsel’s efforts using Kim Davis as a plaintiff last year that the Supreme Court rejected?

KF: I wrote about the Kim Davis case at World Magazine, and I said I’m glad they didn’t take her case because she was the wrong victim and they’re asking the wrong question. And honestly, this is a problem that the right has had for a long time. Pro-gay marriage activists framed gay adults who could not get what they wanted in the marriage debate as victims. And the right framed religious Christians who wouldn’t be able to arrange the flowers they wanna arrange or bake the cake they wanted to bake as the victims. And the reality is adults are not victims of bad marriage policy. Children are victims of bad marriage policy. And it is their perspective and their voice that needs to be central to the conversation. We’ve all been called hateful, homophobic, bigoted white supremacists for so long, and honestly it did used to make a lot of people on the right cower because we actually love our gay family and friends, and we want to serve people who are different from us, and those kinds of accusations did silence people for a while. But then we realized it really didn’t matter how loving we were, it did not matter how reasonable we were. People were going to call us that name regardless.

SM: Obviously you’re super passionate about this and I know that it’s personal, there’s a personal element to this too. Your parents divorced at 10, right? And then your mom is a queer woman, right? She’s in a relationship with another woman. And tell me about how that personal experience inspired what you do today and your fight because obviously some people are going to think there’s a huge contradiction there.

KF: Well they can think whatever they want. The reality is that there is no contradiction. And in fact, it is their worldview that is absolutely upside-down as it relates to my experience. So my mom is not a queer woman. She does not identify that way. She has been in a relationship with her partner probably since— I’ve probably been living with lesbians longer than you’ve been alive, Spencer, if I’m doing the math right about your age.

SM: Nice

KF: So this was never a, “oh, I’ve got this axe to grind, oh, I’ve had this terrible experience.” I didn’t get into this because I was terribly wounded as a child. I got into this because I had been working with kids for 20 years when the gay marriage debate started raging. And after working with junior highers and senior highers, college students, working at the largest Chinese adoption agency in the world, I had never yet met a kid that did not care whether or not their mother or father loved them or was in their life. So how do I reconcile this with my own upbringing? It is actually to say that it is your camp, your agenda, that is lying about me.

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SM: Whose agenda?

KF: I would say the LGBTQ agenda to overhaul the family and elevate gay marriage as some form of civil right. That is lying about me and my experience, because my experience says my mother and my father, who thankfully I was connected to before and after the divorce, both of them were irreplaceable in my life. But the gay marriage rubric says, actually, two random men who are completely unrelated could have substituted for my mother and would have had zero impact on my development, my identity, my understanding as a woman, my ability to mother. It is the greatest lie because my mother is so critical to me. She’s critical to my understanding of myself as a woman. I am now a mid-century woman and she still mothers me. So if gay marriage is true, she is completely replaceable and optional in my life. And it’s one of the most dishonoring things that you could say about a mother.

SM: And so, after you were 10 then, I could imagine given the passion you feel for having those two parents’ presence and in the same household, was there trauma for you?

KF: Well, you’re 10 and you have to kind of roll with what divorce brings you. So I don’t think that I was super aware or reactive to that. You just have to adapt.

SM: But I’m assuming if you’re this passionate about it now, it must have been like a massive struggle for you from 10 onwards. Take me inside your head. Take me inside little Katy’s head.

KF:Yeah, divorce is devastating for kids. It’s devastating. It’s actually an ACE, an adverse childhood experience, as divorce researchers often say.

SM: But I want to know, I’m actually really curious about you personally. Tell me about little Katy after 10. What did it do to you internally to have that happen to you? Cause that from your perspective is, I’m assuming, traumatic.

KF: It’s traumatic because your mother and father are not living in the same house anymore and you’re only gonna get 50% of each one. And thankfully, my mother and her partner had a lot of stability. I didn’t necessarily have that at my father’s house. So you did have a lot of different— my father dated and eventually remarried. So it’s just divorce world for kids. Did it mean that I was horribly traumatized with an axe to grind? No, it didn’t. I learned to get along with it just like most children of divorce do.

SM: And there’s obviously a swath of research that would disagree with what you’re saying here about how gay parents are lesser than biological parents in terms of their ability to parent. I don’t want to go tit-for-tat with you. I’ve heard you speak about other studies before.

KF: Well, I would like to hear the studies that you feel are reliable and informative and credible on this topic. Since you brought up the studies, I just would like to hear which ones you point to to say, this is really good research.

SM: Sure, sure. Yeah. First, I’ll point to one that you point to, which is that you argue that same-sex parenting is harmful because children intuitively long for both motherly and fatherly love. And one of the studies that you often cite is the New Family Structures Study, right?

KF: I do cite that sometimes.

SM: Yeah, and that was from 2012, which was primarily funded by the Witherspoon Institute, which you worked for, which is trying to overturn gay marriage and was funded through $700,000 worth of grants. So, I mean, that’s kind of funny, no?

KF: Well, good research is expensive.

SM: Well, if it’s your conservative organization funding it, it’s a little bit of a nothingburger of research if they’re looking for something that the president at the time wrote was a study designed to, quote, “settle the question in the form of public debate about what kind of family arrangements are best for society.” I mean, it’s kind of funny that you’re citing that one.

KF: I just want to hear your critique of Regnerus’ methods. What methodology do you feel like he really got wrong there?

SM: I think the idea of citing the place you work, where it was funded, $700,000, the place you work at the Witherspoon Institute, which is an ideologically bent organization that has a perspective on it, there’s an issue with citing that study.

KF: I didn’t work there at the time. I was very happy to work there later though. They’re really doing incredible work.

SM: But you’ve cited that many times since you worked there.

KF: Yeah, I totally have. Love them. Absolutely, love them.

SM: Yeah, yeah, I bet.

KF: I love them because the methodology is good. Why do we cite Regnerus? Because he has really good methodology2. So tell me, if you’re talking about the no differences and that kids fare no different, tell me what studies you feel are really credible and authoritative to make that claim.

SM: I mean, there’s swaths of studies from the UK, from Australia, from many different places that—

KF: Which ones, Spencer?

SM: Well, first—hold on. Hang on. I don’t want to argue with you, Katy. First, I just want to say, can you tell me that there’s some kind of conflict of interest there, of you repetitively and repeatedly citing a study that was primarily funded by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative organization that is trying to overturn gay marriage when you had worked there as well. Is there not a conflict of interest there in terms of citing that?

KF: So the study was conducted in 2012. I think I started with the Witherspoon in 2014, and there is no conflict of interest. There’s no money flowing both ways for me to pitch something. I simply go where the great research is.

SM: You’ve never been paid by the Witherspoon Institute?

KF: Oh, I’ve totally been paid by them, thank God. They really helped me through paying the soccer fees and the camp fees when I was working five and 10 hours a week for them. Yeah, they were a godsend to me. And if you think that I’m promoting Regnerus because I’m making, at the time I was making $500 a month, then that’s a pretty great, hot angle, Spencer. And really, the study that I cite the most is by Dr. Sullins3 because he’s the one that actually culled government data. But let’s just go back, you brought up research, “kids don’t fare any different, there’s all these studies.” Spencer, before we move on, tell me which studies you feel are credible and authoritative, showing that children have fared no different.

SM: So there are comprehensive systematic reviews from the UK4 and Australia5 studying data from over 30 years that have showed that parents’ sexual orientations are not a significant determining factor for the quality of a child’s development. So that comes from BMJ Global Health, there’s another one here from the National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information.

KF: So you’ve just listed a comprehensive review from a couple different aggregates. What studies are they citing that you feel are specifically authoritative?

SM: I can send you them later if you like.

KF: I’d like you to do it right now, since this is a really important point.

SM: I don’t think it’s useful for us to go tit-for-tat. I described the studies to you. I listed where they were from for our audience as well. We can link them in the show notes after for anyone who wants to look at them and dissect the methodology. We’ll also link the study from the Witherspoon Institute in fairness to you.

KF: Spencer, give me a few criteria that sociologists tend to use when they want to take some conclusion they have and extrapolate to the general population, what criteria would they use for those studies?

SM: Look, I am not a sociologist. I’m a journalist. What I can say though, what I can say is that your argument to overturn gay marriage is flawed.

KF: Are you saying you want to move on from the study conversation?

SM: I’m saying I’m letting you know a personal thing, if you don’t mind.

KF: Alright.

SM: That I have countless friends and people in my life who are amazing people, who have amazing kids, who are parenting amazingly. And I think right now, your work in this space to overturn something that gave equal rights to same-sex people is something that is going to pull rights away from a marginalized group of people.

SM: So tell me, Greater Than campaign, it’s reported there’s as many as 56 organizations in this coalition. You’re saying there’s 100, so even more. Tell me about the process. The ultimate goal is to overturn gay marriage in the US. What’s the game plan? How do you actually get there and make it happen? Because there’s obviously been other efforts that have failed. How does this make it different to where you can actually effectively overturn it.

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KF: I don’t know what efforts have been tried, except for the Kim Davis case.

SM: Yes, the Kim Davis case.

KF: Yeah, which definitely was sort of a shot in the dark, long shot. I don’t think that anybody’s ever tried this before. We are going to create a credible judicial strategy that centers the child in the conversation, not the adults. We’re going to change public opinion. We’re going to make it very, very clear that there is a direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization in that children are not being raised by their mother and father, and the way that this has reshaped parenthood laws so that unrelated adults can acquire children outside of biology and adoption through intent-based parenthood laws that spring from Obergefell, in essence rendering children as functional accessories and commodities to be awarded to adults based on state-backed contracts, not because of their best interest like adoption does.

And then we’re going to create materials for the church to help them understand that it is their job to protect children. This is what the church has done in every century it has existed, in every country where it has been established. The church stands for children. And there’s a lot of churches, I don’t know if you’ve been exposed to them or not, that are not very clear about marriage. Why? Because they don’t want to offend people that disagree. But we need to be clear about marriage because when you look at it sociologically, this is the vehicle—man-woman marriage that is permanent for life is the vehicle that best protects children, and that’s not something the church should be quiet about.

SM: What are the minute details you will try to do to make it happen?

KF: I’m not gonna share the minute details with you, Spencer, I’m sure that you understand.

SM: And what’s the timeline? Do you think we could see this, if it works, and the strategy is effective, this year, could it get overturned?

KF: I don’t have a timeline. My guess is it’s going to be slowly, slowly, slowly and then all of a sudden.

SM: And to gay, lesbian, bisexual people who hear this argument, who hear what you have to say, who are listening to this interview right now, who are maybe pulling their hair out and saying, “This is equality and what you’re doing is discrimination.” What do you say to those folks?

KF: Children have a right to their mother and father. Why is it that legalizing gay marriage always seems to infringe on that right? That’s what I would say.

SM: What else have I not asked that you wanna say? I wanna really give you the microphone to say anything that I have missed asking you.

KF: No, I don’t think so. I gotta go pick a kid up from early release.

SM: Katy Faust, the person at the helm of the Greater Than campaign and the founder of Them Before Us, we want to get different varying opinions on this podcast. And I really am grateful for you coming on and speaking with me and Uncloseted Media today.

KF: Great, thanks for having me, Spencer.

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In September 2025, the National Conservatism Conference hosted a meeting of America’s biggest right wing players in Washington, D.C. Some notable attendees included the Alliance Defending Freedom’s (ADF) president Kristen Waggoner, Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, and U.S. representatives and government officials, including Tulsi Gabbard and Sebastian Gorka.

On the evening of its second day, Katy Faust took the stage: “We, as a country, have to do what no other country has dared. We retake marriage on behalf of children. … A massive coalition spearheaded by my nonprofit … aims to do exactly that,” Faust, the founder of Them Before Us—a 501(c)(3) whose goal is “defending children’s right to their mother and father”—told the crowd.

A video of her speech would later be uploaded to YouTube with the title: “How Obergefell Commodified Children.”

Four months later, and just two months after the Supreme Court rejected a case aimed at overturning Obergefell, Faust launched the Greater Than Campaign, a coalition of at least 47 anti-LGBTQ organizations united to reinvigorate the fight to end gay marriage.

Faust has advocated against gay marriage for over a decade, declaring in 2021 that she and her organization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, “have a very modest goal of a total global takeover of all conversations around marriage and family.” Since entering the spotlight during the Obergefell v. Hodges case in 2015, she’s pushed her own vision of the anti-marriage equality movement.

“We think that children’s rights should supersede the desires, the agendas, the identities, the feelings of adults, and that requires that everybody, single, married, gay, straight, fertile and infertile conform to those fundamental rights,” Faust told Uncloseted Media. “When Obergefell passed … we centered something else. We centered adult validation and adult identity.”

While Faust’s rhetoric may sound less overtly hateful than that of others on the far-right, many of her policy goals are similar.

“[Her] rhetoric can be difficult to refute because she uses progressive rights language to advance a regressive, evangelical agenda,” says R.L. Stollar, a child liberation theologian and children’s rights advocate. “It sounds good on the surface, but it’s just sugar-coating. You have to look beneath the rhetoric at her policy ideas to understand the danger.”

Faust has been mentored, employed and thrust into the spotlight by well-connected leaders in America’s far-right Christian and anti-LGBTQ spaces. After facing numerous setbacks, the anti-marriage equality movement has anointed her as its leader and is following her strategies.

“There actually has not been any kind of organization or coordination,” Faust says. “I know you guys think that there’s some big right-wing bogeyman. There really never has been, but this is. This is the organized effort that you guys suspected existed, but really never had.”

“And everybody came together because we all understand that children are being victimized in this culture,” she says, adding that there are actually 100 organizations involved in the campaign and that they “just don’t have everyone listed on the website.”

Early Activism – AskTheBigot

Faust’s activism began in 2012 when she started an anonymous blog called AskTheBigot.

The blog’s stated mission is, in part, “to debunk the perception that those opposing gay marriage do so only because they are hateful, fearful (homophobic) or ignorant.”

In some of her posts, she argues that “opposite-sex parenting is ideal,” calls for Christians not to attend gay weddings because “to attend would certainly give the appearance of endorsement,” and speaks against gender transition.

After being doxxed by pro-LGBTQ bloggers in 2014, Faust decided to continue posting publicly. In a later article called “Thank You for Doxxing Me,” Faust writes that the incident “multiplied [her] platform a hundredfold.”

The Witherspoon Institute

Faust’s profile would be boosted by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank that has been influential in fighting gay marriage since its founding in 2003. Witherspoon’s founder and president helped lead a campaign by the National Organization for Marriage to artificially “raise the costs of identifying with gay marriage” by associating it with pedophilia and threats to children.

In the lead-up to Obergefell v. Hodges, Witherspoon published multiple articles by Faust in their journal, and Faust later said in an interview that she was mentored by the institute’s co-founder Robert George and executive director Ryan Anderson.

At Witherspoon, Faust got a job designing the teen version of CanaVox, a project of the institute that “hosts reading groups to study and discuss the beauty of marriage as one man, one woman, for life.” She also hosted CanaVox’s “Dear Katy” video series, where she answered questions from readers and viewers, advising them to not attend family members’ gay weddings and to teach their kids that “transgenderism is very similar to anorexia.”

When one viewer, Alice, asked about their teenage children’s friends coming out as bisexual, Faust said that “even if teens only experiment with same-sex foreplay, say with kissing, it can rewire their brain to develop a deeper inclination towards same-sex intimate activity. This experimentation is a slippery slope to high-risk sex.”

Faust Gains Notoriety

As Faust rose to greater notoriety, she began to be cited as an expert on the marriage debate. She wrote amicus briefs in cases litigating gay marriage, including Obergefell; got an op-ed in USA Today; and spoke against gay marriage in Australia and at the Taipei Marriage Rally in Taiwan.

ADF, the Christian legal group currently fighting to overturn Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy, featured her in a panel and a video after discovering her articles for Witherspoon.

Using this momentum, she founded Them Before Us. Since launching in 2018, the group has submitted amicus briefs in multiple cases, including one opposing LGBTQ-inclusive birth certificates. They’ve also produced media aimed at turning public opinion against gay marriage, including a curriculum for equipping churches to “defend the rights of children.”

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The group also pushes for anti-LGBTQ policies in the corporate space. Last year, they published a set of Human Resources guidelines for companies designed to exclude LGBTQ families. They recommend that companies refuse to cover artificial fertilization and gender-affirming care and deny parental benefits to gay couples, claiming that “same-sex couples can not furnish a child with the gender-diverse parenting that maximizes child development and satisfies the child’s longing for maternal and paternal love.”

The group continues to grow, earning over $900,000 in revenue in 2024. This was propelled by large donations from nonprofits like the Servant Foundation and National Christian Charitable Foundation, who fund other Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate groups like ADF and Family Research Council.

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Personal Connections

Faust distinguishes herself from other anti-marriage equality activists with her softer rhetoric towards gay people, often crediting her friendlier tone to her own family connections. Her mother and father divorced when she was 10, after which her mother began a long-term relationship with another woman.

In the article that put her on ADF’s radar, Faust introduces herself as “the child of a loving gay parent” and says, “My parents’ divorce has been the most traumatic event in my thirty-eight years of life.”

“It’s traumatic because your mother and father are not living in the same house anymore, and you’re only gonna get 50% of each one,” she says. “And thankfully, my mother and her partner had a lot of stability. I didn’t necessarily have that at my father’s house.”

Where Did Greater Than Come From?

Faust began pitching the campaign that would become Greater Than last June, presenting it as an alternative strategy to that of the far-right Christian legal group Liberty Counsel, who unsuccessfully represented Kim Davis last year in an effort to overturn Obergefell.

Unlike Liberty Counsel, Faust’s focus is on turning public opinion against gay marriage and passing state laws that could “create the kind of live issue that the justices could then rule on”—the same strategy used to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“It’s taking a cue from the anti-abortion movement,” says Peter Montgomery, research director at People for the American Way. “They built public support in red states to get laws passed that dramatically restricted or banned women’s access to abortion, knowing that then those laws would be challenged and would give the right-wing court a chance to overturn it.”

When the court declined to take up Liberty Counsel’s case, Faust wrote an op-ed arguing that the effort failed because Davis was the “wrong victim,” and the case was asking the “wrong question.”

“This is a problem that the marriage debate has had for a long time,” Faust says. “The reality is, adults are not victims of bad marriage policy—children are victims of bad marriage policy, and it is their perspective and their voice that needs to be central to the conversation.”

Other far-right groups seem to agree. Faust told the North Carolina Family Policy Council, “When I reached out to major national organizations, state level policy organizations, individual influencers, I’d say 90% said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s do it right now, and let’s do it with all our might.’”

Many members of the Greater Than campaign have expressed extreme anti-LGBTQ views. Focus on the Family is known for promoting conversion therapy and has described same-sex attraction as a “preventable and treatable condition,” and Liberty Counsel has said that gay people are “not controlled by reason,” but rather by “lust.”

“Their message and their mission is not my mission,” Faust says, adding that there’s “no way” she’s going to denounce them. “I am not there to approve of everything that they say, but everybody in that coalition believes that children have a right to their mother and father.”

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What Does the Research Say?

One of Faust and Greater Than’s core arguments to overturn Obergefell is that same-sex parenting is harmful because children intuitively long for both motherly and fatherly love, which she claims are impossible for same-sex couples to provide.

“I had been working with kids for 20 years when the gay marriage debate started raging. … I have never yet met a kid that did not care whether or not their mother or father loved them or was in their life. At minimum they were curious,” she says. “That kind of loss or rejection or separation created a lifelong wound that they were still struggling to overcome.”

To prove this, she frequently cites the New Family Structures Study, a 2012 study by sociologist Mark Regnerus that was primarily funded by $700,000 in grants from the Witherspoon Institute.

“Good research is expensive,” says Faust.

The institute’s president at the time wrote that the study was designed to “settle the question in the forum of public debate about what kinds of family arrangement are best for society” and that he was “confident that the traditional understanding of marriage will be vindicated by this study.”

Since publication, the study’s results have been called into question by researchers. Marc Musick, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin, conducted a review of the study’s methodology and concluded that it “is fundamentally flawed … and should largely be disregarded.”

Other publications argue that the study’s methodology fails to control for childhood family instability and that most of the negative impacts it associates with same-sex parenting are actually attributable to that instability.

“Why do we cite Regnerus? Because he has really good methodology,” Faust says.

Faust also references work by sociologist Paul Sullins, whose work includes a retracted paper that claimed to demonstrate the success of conversion therapy.

There is a swath of research disputing her arguments: Comprehensive systematic reviews from the U.K. and Australia analyzing data from over 30 years have shown that parents’ sexual orientations are not a significant determining factor for the quality of a child’s development.

“We have already, in our international human rights standards, very clear standards that family means much more than just men and women, just this single type of family,” says Bia Galli, senior policy and advocacy advisor at Ipas, an international reproductive justice organization. “The distortion that if family is not like that, it will cause damage to children—this is complete nonsense and lacks completely scientific evidence.”

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Co-opting Children’s Rights

Faust’s definition of children’s rights, which forms a rhetorical basis for Greater Than, is based on four principles: “Protect children’s right to life” by restricting abortion; “protect children’s right to be raised by their mother and father” by restricting same-sex marriage and parenting; “protecting bodies” from gender-affirming health care; and “protecting minds” from sex education in schools.

Faust’s definition differs from the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty ratified by all eligible U.N. member states except for the United States.

“Under this convention … states have to consider [children’s] evolving capacities to make these autonomous decisions about their futures, their sexual and reproductive health for example,” Galli says. “So these types of definitions are completely against those standards from international human rights law. It gives away their autonomy and puts them just under parental authority, even if it conflicts with their own views and opinions.”

Research has shown that gay couples are more likely than straight couples to adopt, and that foster care systems in the U.S. are severely overburdened. Because of this, advocates argue that restricting gay couples from parenting means that fewer children will have stable families.

“When you restrict families to a heterosexual nuclear family, then it cuts off so many avenues of connection and support for children,” says Stollar. “It is robbing them of the opportunity to join or participate in a family that might be very eager to protect and love that child and give them the elements that they need to thrive.”

Stollar says that the Christian far-right in the U.S. has historically opposed children’s rights movements. When Barack Obama pushed for the U.S. to ratify the U.N. convention in 2010, he was blocked by a coalition of Republican senators who signed a resolution opposing the treaty because of its restrictions on corporal punishment and its protections for sex ed and child religious freedom. That resolution was pushed by the Parental Rights Foundation, a right-wing Christian group founded by former ADF president and CEO Michael Farris.

“[The evangelical right] have been very successful and very zealous in opposing ratification of any children’s rights into law in the United States, so that alone causes me to have significant distrust towards [Faust’s] project,” Stollar says.

Stollar says that Faust’s argument works partly because there’s some truth to it in that children are frequently devalued and commercialized. But the solution, he says, isn’t attacking LGBTQ rights or abortion—it’s for children to be given the agency to advocate for their own needs.

“A healthy movement for children’s rights is going to acknowledge that children need two things: They need to be protected, and they also need to be liberated,” he says. “You have to have both. … If they’re just protecting children, which is what I think Faust is trying to do … then protection is gonna be counterproductive.”

Uncloseted Media was unable to reach Faust’s mother for comment. Her mother’s partner declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Spencer Macnaughton.

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