April 27, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News In the summer of 2020, Tariq Scott was in the streets of Philadelphia protesting the killing of George Floyd. The winter and spring had been hard; the restaurant in Old City where he’d been a server was shuttered due to the pandemic and his income, supplemented by the graphic design career he’d been nurturing, had dwindled to almost nothing. “I actually felt energized for the first time when I was in those protests,” said Scott, who had a

April 22, 2022 Edge Media Network Spring is in the air! Time to get outside and revel in that special time between mudslide and fire season and before the next COVID surge hits. Don't Say Gay Jojo Siwa, pop singer, dancer and outspoken advocate for LGBTQ civil rights, wasn't invited to the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, but her song was played. So the social media queen who last week traded her trademark ponytail for a super cute soft butch short do, took to Instagram to s

April 21, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News "Killing Eve" (AMC+ / BBC America) Spoiler Warning: Series finale of “Killing Eve” “Killing Eve,” which just ended in a series finale, has been quite the thrill ride. Over four seasons, 32 episodes, a dozen awards — including BAFTAs and Emmys for the series itself and the three principals — several dozen award nominations and one pandemic we have fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with the BBC spy chiller. To say there is nothing else li

April 20, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News This the second installment of a three part series. Since the end of 2019, when COVID-19 was first designated a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a disease with global impact, there have been 84 million cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. and 988 thousand deaths. According to all available data thus far, at least 20% of people who get the virus will get Long COVID, but most studies put the numbers higher — at closer to 30%. Tha

April 14, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News This is part one of a three part series. Masks came off a few weeks ago: a harbinger of Spring. On February 25, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially made mask wearing a personal assessment of risk among the vaccinated and boosted. Yet a third of age-eligible Americans have yet to get a single shot and fewer than half have gotten a booster. The unvaccinated have resisted masks throughout the pandemic, a stance de

April 13, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News For several weeks I have been working on an investigative series on long COVID, a debilitating and often disabling syndrome affecting millions of people — mostly young to middle-aged — who have contracted COVID. Like my last series on LBT women in prison, reporting this story has been by turns angering and heartbreaking. I’ve been reporting on COVID for PGN and other mainstream publications since March 2020. Last May I won the 2020 Societ

April 13, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News UK-hosted equality conference cancelled over conversion therapy row The conservative Tory-led U.K. government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson has created a human rights and public relations scandal for itself by backing down on a full-fledged ban of conversion therapy, dropping trans people from the protection. In protest, more than 100 LGBT+ and HIV advocacy organizations withdrew from the U.K.’s first global LGBT+ equality conference, r

April 6, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News Editorial cartoon by Paul Berge The war in Ukraine has all but sundered relations between the U.S. and Russia, and in that geopolitical atmosphere there is growing concern over the extended detention of Brittney Griner. With news of atrocities perpetrated in Ukraine and President Biden’s call for a war crimes investigation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Griner’s status is now particularly fraught. As a Black lesbian who is outspoken

April 6, 2022 Philadelphia Gay News Senate candidates State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta and U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb attended an April 3 debate. A Democratic debate and a Republican forum with candidates for the critical Pennsylvania Senate race were held last weekend, but neither frontrunner was in attendance. Despite not attending, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and businessman David McCormick were the topic of their respective parties’ debates as both have avoided questions from competito

April 3, 2022 Bay Area Reporter "April is the cruelest month," wrote T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, and it certainly seems to have begun that way. Usually the Oscars are a kind of one-and-done TV event: the awards night itself and then the hung-over morning-after news wraps where the hosts, fashions and various highs and lows are deconstructed on the morning shows and TV tabloids. Then it's au revoir till next year. Due to what could be called The Fresh Slap of Bel Air, we are

April 1, 2022 QueerForty.com The letters and diaries of America’s lesbian master of psychological thrillers are as gripping as any of her fiction. In this Patricia Highsmith’s centenary year, the publication of the mammoth Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995 offers a prismatic look at the history of some of the most fraught years in American life while also telling a deeply revelatory tale of the prolific writer in her own compelling narrative. It’s an e