LGBTQ+ older adults may have an easier time finding long-term care facilities that are welcoming and inclusive, and providers will have a benchmark to see how well they're doing when a report this spring measures best practices across the country.

SAGE, a group that advocates for LGBTQ+ seniors and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation are compiling an updated version of their Long-Term Care Equality Index (LEI).

The index, designed to be a resource for LGBTQ+ older adults and caregivers, also aims to encourage providers such as assisted living centers and hospice communities to be more inclusive. The first report was released in 2021.

Almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the current Mpox outbreak a public health emergency. There have been nearly 29,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. since May 2022.

Mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) is a viral disease that presents with flu-like symptoms and a rash that can spread via skin-to-skin contact. It is not a sexually transmitted infection and is rarely lethal. The Mpox outbreak in the U.S. has primarily affected men who have sex with men (MSM) and has brought up painful memories of stigma and discrimination during the early days of the HIV epidemic.

Carlos Rodrigues and fellow researchers compiled CDC data to assess the public health response to monkeypox in the U.S. The figure above compares monkeypox diagnoses in 2022 to HIV diagnoses in 2020 by racial group.

Every year, the Southern Most HIV/AIDS Ride (SMART Ride), the second largest AIDS bicycle ride in the country, holds a fundraising bike ride in Florida to raise money for HIV causes. This year, at the end of the 19^th annual ride, they were $12,000 short of a million dollars when founder Glen Weinzimer challenged everyone to raise the remainder of the goal. According to the South Florida Gay News, the crowd cheered — and then smashed their goal.

On January 15, 2023, Weinzemer announced the final total for the Ride came to $1,043,270, making the organization’s lifetime total $15,954,344 since its inception in 2003.

Black LGBTQ+ stories have become more visible in recent years, as daring creatives and unforgettable characters continue breaking through a white-dominated movie industry. From documentaries and biopics, to romantic comedies and dramas, this unranked list of films are a testament to the beauty and complexity of the Black LGBTQ+ experience, all of which we consider a part of the queer film canon.

“Toward the end of their lives my parents ate nothing but ice cream—though my father liked to put peanut butter on top of his.” —Andrew Holleran, The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2022)

Over the past decade or so, younger therapists often refer older couples to me for sex therapy. This has increased as I have aged. Frequently, I suggest that I might assist the therapist’s work, so that working with aging and sexuality becomes more of a regular part of their psychotherapeutic work. This offer of supervision is often declined, mostly because of a denial of the relationship between sex and aging and death. But sexual relationships later in life are at the heart of it all; it is the peanut butter on top of the ice cream. A renewed focus on our bodies late in life, and our sexual selves, can make Waiting for Godot more comic and less tragic.

Older partners, and by older I mean from the late 60s to late 80s, sometimes give up on the idea of an active sexual life in exchange for a comfortable relationship. But eventually the comfort becomes discomfort. The body must be served. And the call to a therapist, awkward as it is, is a recognition that sex and intimacy are linked more viscerally than comfort and relationship.

Over the course of decades, LGBTQ+ athletes have represented their nations around the world at international sporting events. The accomplishments of queer people across multiple disciplines are remarkable and we're here to celebrate them...especially as states and sports leagues look to restrict trans athletes.

Here are 27 notable LGBTQ+ athletes from around the world who've made their mark.

PHILADELPHIA — The process of finding oneself in an archive can be slow and confounding. Searching for political affinities, moments of resonant joy, rage, or mourning can sometimes feel fractured or out of reach. At the same time, the archive offers glimmers of a world still coming into focus and the realization that we are a part of something larger. Selections from the Archives, organized by Rami George at Philadelphia’s William Way LGBT Community Center, presents a mosaic of Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ communities from 1960 through 2000 that incites feelings of kinship and intimacy. Through the material we see the conditions of how history is made, what stories are told, and the intersectional communities we are a part of across time.

George is both a curator of the archive and an artist making interventions. Intent on blurring that boundary, they consider the exhibition itself as a kind of artwork, a poetic space that opens new modes for seeing and feeling history. Images of everyday moments, political demonstrations, and excerpts of print media from Philadelphia’s LGBTQ communities are spread around the galleries. Original archival material and reproductions sit side by side, picturing couples embracing and drag queens gracefully posing right next to bundles of protest signage reading “Defund the Fund” and “Lived with AIDS, Killed by Cuts.” A neighboring excerpt from TransSisters: The Journal of Transexual Feminism (1995) expresses an urgent poetic and full-bodied call to advocate for trans people’s right to thrive — to “laugh, cry, love” — and seems inspired by Zoe Leonard’s famous “I Want a Dyke for President” (1992).

BERNARDSTON — Inspired by the popular bimonthly Rainbow Elders group, the Bernardston Senior Center has started its own LGBTQ group for residents in northern Franklin County.

The group, which convened for the first time on Friday, is set to meet monthly to connect, educate each other and the community, and advocate for LGBTQ issues.

“This group of elders has more needs,” said Donna Liebl, a volunteer with Rainbow Elders who attended the North County LGBTQIA+ group meeting. “We were taught to be invisible.”

Bernardston Senior Center Director Jennifer Reynolds, who is also the organizer of the group, said now is an opportune time to create affinity groups like this locally. She said there are more than 100 bills in state governments that would take away LGBTQ rights, including 18 states that seek to ban transgender athletes from competing.

Read the rest of the article on the Greenfield Recorder website

The percentage of adults in the U.S. who identify as LGBTQ increased slightly year over year, to 7.2% last year, according to a Gallup Poll released Wednesday.

While that’s just a slight increase from 7.1% in 2021, it’s more than double what it was a decade ago, when Gallup found just 3.5% of the U.S. population identified as something other than heterosexual in 2012.

Gallup asked more than 10,000 adults nationwide how they identify in telephone interviews last year.

For the first time, the organization recorded the identities of LGBTQ people who said they are something other than lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. It found that about 5% of LGBTQ adults identified outside those terms. Most of them — about 0.1% of all U.S. adults — said they are queer, pansexual or asexual.

Anti-LGBT violence has hit a decade-high, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association Europe’s (ILGA-Europe’s) 2023 report, which now reveals 2022 was “the most violent year for LGBTI people” across Europe and Central Asia.

The review sheds light on how the positive trends of previous years seem to be reversing, and how rising hate speech from prominent public figures and organisations has serious, tangible consequences on the LGBTI community’s wellbeing, equality and human rights.

Read the rest of the article on the Impakter News website

If there’s one thing I wish more people, especially people outside of movement spaces, would do, it’s engage with the works of movement workers, activists, writers, and artists of the past more frequently than only on the days and in the months we’ve designated as the “time to do so.”

There has not been any better time in history for us to interact with literature, artworks, photographs, love letters, journals, video recordings, audio recordings, and so many other types of materials from the queer people who made our lives possible than right now, and yet it always feels as if many queer people are not or cannot take full advantage of this great privilege. I do think the inability to sift through these materials is more structural and systemic than anything else. And I also fear that like so much of the rest of American and “Western” culture that wants to turn its back on history in favor of moving towards some glittering future, many people — even those of us who owe our existence to the work of so many who came before us — have a difficult time seeing the value in learning from the work of the past. But in order to actually build that bright future we want so badly, we desperately need to.

The LGBTQIA+ Aging Project at The Fenway Instituteprovides support and technical assistance to elder service organizations who are interested in developing community programs for older LGBTQ+ adults in their area. To learn more about starting virtual or in person programs in your area please contact us at (857) 313-6578. We also provide technical support for LGBTQ+older adults who need help joining these programs or are interested in starting one in their town.