The world has changed a great deal in the nearly 20 years since “Will & Grace” first premiered. The show, revolutionary for his portrayal of gay characters in 1998, returns this fall with the understanding that there are still more barriers to break. “When we started it was revolutionary to have two gay characters,” said star Debra Messing. “We were ‘LGB,’ but we stopped at B. My hope is we can now finish the alphabet.”
Video chat company VS Media has given Gay.com, a domain valued at millions of dollars, to a charity that will use it to assist the LGBT community. Gay.com was one of the top online gay personals sites in the world when it debuted in 1997 — and good domain names were so plentiful that companies didn’t need to invent new words for them, like “Google.” But it has lost ground to sites like Manhunt and apps like Grindr.
These past weeks have seen demonstrations of LGBT Pride across the world, from small, community-based event to the gigantic citywide parties. But the biggest thing that differentiates them is the social and legal status of the people marching. In some Pride parades, police, army and government officials have marched alongside LGBT citizens, while in other countries the participants risk harassment, imprisonment or even violence, simply for being out in their identity.
As a candidate for president, one of Donald Trump most notable breaks from conservative orthodoxy was his on-the-record support for LGBT rights. At the Republican National Convention, Trump said he’d “do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens.” That was after Peter Thiel became the first openly gay Republican to speak at the party’s convention, and after Trump told “the LGBT community” that he’d “fight” for them.
Discrimination against LGBT people is often once-removed, shielded under double-speak and fraudulent intentions. So, it’s refreshing, really, when a company comes right out and says in black and white that gay men aren’t worthy of the same protections as everyone else.
Tom Bulleit’s daughter says she stayed quiet for a decade. But eight months after leaving the distillery her father founded, Hollis Bulleit is taking to Facebook to accuse Bulleit Frontier Whiskey’s corporate owner, Diageo, of firing her because she refused to remain silent in the work world about her identity as a lesbian.
While the Trump Administration has failed spectacularly in “repealing” or “replacing” the Affordable Care Act, has been embroiled in personnel roulette, and can’t shake the dark cloud of allegations of collusion with Russia to influence the election, it may have been easy to miss the relentless anti-LGBTQ agenda that this Administration is pursuing.
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