United is apologizing publicly to gay dads and their son, and this time the airline looks homophobic in its customer service. 

The apology, the fathers tell The Advocate, isn’t fixing the damage done by United’s accusation against the couple. “Those statements are generically manufactured and only in place to protect United,” said Henry Amador-Batten.

A flight attendant spotted Amador-Batten holding his sleeping 5-year-old son on the plane and reported him to authorities. The United crew member accused him of placing his hand and arm “too close to the child’s genitals.”

When it came time to leave the flight, Amador-Batten was detained and questioned for over an hour. Amador-Batten and his husband, Joel, adopted their son and are foster parents to another boy, making any report a serious risk to finalizing adoption of their second son. 

“As soon as the news broke we emailed the case workers involved so that they'd hear it from us first,” said Amador-Batten.

Amador-Batten hasn’t kept quiet about the incident, although he says United asked him to. 

“We got a call the day after the accusation,” recalls Amador-Batten, who said the representative asked “if we wouldn’t mind keeping this low key. She even mentioned all the bad press they'd been having and that she liked her job and wanted to keep it. That was literally a part our our ‘apology call.’”

Instead the couple has appeared in local news and spoken to CNN, which is expected to air an interview with him on Monday. United issued a statement to CNN.

"In this instance, the crew believed it was appropriate to ask authorities to meet the plane and interview the customer,"the statement to CNN read. "After speaking with the customer, authorities determined that no further action was necessary. Our customers should always be treated with the utmost respect and we have followed up with our customer to apologize for the misunderstanding."

Amador-Batten and his family were on their way back to North Carolina after a trip to Puerto Rico to see his father, who was ill and then died. 

Watch the Herald-Sun’s moving interview with the couple, who describes how their family has been deeply affected by the erroneous accusation:

In this video from CNN, Amador-Batten demonstrates how he and his son were sitting on the plane.

United Doesn't Want You to Hear What It Did to These Gay Dads

In our new normal, every day brings new threats to our civil liberties. The attacks and potential attacks are too numerous to keep track of. This week, in addition to weakening our stand in the international community, right here at home the administration is weakening our commitment to civil rights. In Alabama, the faith of some adults is granted priority over the needs of youth who need homes. And in Texas, a similar effort that denies the needs of kids is under way. This all comes after the Trump administration revoked hard-won and common sense guidance to protect trans youth in schools, arguably the most marginalized population in America. That comes on top of other Trump policies and orders that incite increased public abuse of people of color and immigrants (also, science, facts, free press, health care, etc.).

This is an era in which the American values of freedom, justice, and liberty are being put to the test. The gains in civil rights made since the 1950s are threatened in ways so obvious and direct that it's hard to comprehend as real. In a time when, thanks to the efforts of Black Lives Matter activists, we were finally beginning to have what looked like a sustained conversation on race and intersectionality, we suddenly feel we're moving backward.

More than ever, we hear the call: Rise up and come together. Sometimes we do both at once, and sometimes these are necessarily separate activities. We are obligated to lace up and get out there, put pen to paper, or take to the streets, the phone lines, and social media. We have no choice but to dedicate our time and energy to our values every possible moment to protect ourselves and our children. But to do this, to burn our candles at both ends, as it were, we must also find time to nourish and rejuvenate. If we don't partake in self-care on personal and community levels, we can't sustain the drive needed. We must feed the humanity behind the work, addressing the needs they and we have every day. We need to address both the struggles that existed before this election and the challenges of this work itself. One fight did not end so that this one may begin. The difference is that now it is bigger, more threatening, and impacting more of us. 

I am exhausted, and almost everyone I know is too. And so I recall the lessons learned from countless conversations with fellow activists across the country, but especially those in black and brown communities who have long lived the life many of us are now only getting a taste of. They teach how to do that self-care. For those of us with privilege, it's a notion that may seem "soft," but to those of us without, it is about survival. 

Last summer I was invited to be an activist-in-residence at a retreat for families like mine. All the families either had LGBTQI parents or LGBTQI children. We were there to spend Shabbat together, feeding our Jewish communal needs in a rare space for and by us. I've been part of many of these kinds of programs, including years on the faculty of Nehirim, a now-defunct organization that created retreats for queer Jews, and as executive director of the Family Equality Council, where a key element of our theory of change was creating and supporting community. Each of these "instant communities" served each attendee differently. For some, it was life-changing; for others, it was no more than a weekend away with friends and without judgment. These programs are a space where you can assume acceptance and understanding. They are a refueling station, an escape from the glances and questions, the assumptions and accusations, that pepper our lives.

As we drove into the Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camp last Labor Day, my husband turned to me and said, "You owe me. Big." I'd dragged him to many of these kinds of things — and the idea of ending our summer with a bunch of strangers was not at the top of his priorities before getting back to the real world. We unloaded our stuff and took a deep breath of the Berkshire air. 

What unfolded was, for us, a retreat and rejuvenation of the greatest kind. It was a soothing balm during an election we could hardly comprehend. The conversations were easy but not shallow. The children, a variety of colors and ages and with a variety of family stories, roamed the hills, swam in the lake, and circled the campfires in the most natural way. The adults talked about adoption, civil rights, our favorite recipes, and the challenges, awesomeness, excitement, exhaustion, diffculties, and opportunities of being parents. We also talked about nothing at all, biking through farmlands and climbing a to a zipline so that our kids could cheer us on,and make fun of us for being scared. It was one of those experiences, so well-crafted that it felt not crafted at all. You looked around and had trouble believing it's only been 24 hours since you first met these people. 

I used to work at retreats for an organization called Nesiya. At one of them, the founder wrote on a wall, "A retreat is the act of stepping back to move forward." More of us need these retreats these days. We need opportunities to build community, feel safe and secure, and breathe. Perhaps we all should have been activists before November 8, but most of us certainly are now. If we're going to keep it up, we need to take care of ourselves, body and soul.  

My family is lucky to have many incredible communities. We have a diverse group of friends, a diverse school community, and diverse synagogue. Still, we're heading back to Berkshire Hills for the LGBTQI Jewish Family Camp in August.

Even in our world in which we don't always seem like strangers, Family Camp is welcome. I can't imagine what it feels like for families who feel like strangers most of the time, but I bet camp feels awesome. So we join the other families to be renewed and help renew others through listening and talking and caring. It's how we keep the hope of lived equality for all going. Personally, I couldn't do what I do without experiences like these. So for this multiracial Jewish LGBTQI activist New Yorker family, that means camp over Labor Day weekend.

GABRIEL BLAU is a nonprofit consultant, activist, and co-chair of Equality New York. Follow him on Twitter @gabrielblau.

Telling your parents you’re gay is one of the toughest things many of us have to tackle in life. After years of parental expectations that we will marry someone of the opposite sex, and have two kids and a house with a couple dogs, we worry that their hopes and dreams for us will be dashed by coming out to them.

 That dynamic is particularly powerful in China, where family is central to the culture.

China has an unofficial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. As long as no one talks about being gay, as long a gay son doesn’t have a long sit-down coming-out conversation with his parents, everyone is accepting of his “roommate” as, well, a very good roommate. A very, very good roommate.

Gay couples often go along with the charade to please their parents. While complete acceptance from their family would be wonderful, culture and traditions dictate a tough road for those gay men looking for long conversations about nontraditional love and marriage.

On top of that, China has no legalized recognition for any same-sex couples. 

Yet after talking to various patients of mine in China, I’ve learned there’s one thing that breaks through all of that, something that when included in that long sit-down coming-out conversation breaks down barriers and smooths a path toward more understanding: having children.

Family life in China is cherished, and having children — and ultimately grandchildren — is held as the greatest joy in life.

A large part of the disappointment felt by Chinese parents of gay sons is the idea of not being able to have grandchildren. Having a gay child ends the possibility of growing the family and bringing more children’s laughter into the fold.

Of course, those assumptions about gay couples not having children are remnants of a bygone era in the United States, where gay men have access to modern reproductive technologies and less-conservative views on surrogacy. In China, where assisted reproduction is not accessible for gay couples, the assumption that a same-sex couple will not have children isn’t far off.

Thankfully, that’s changing. While it’s mostly accessible to only wealthier people in China, many are finding fertility and surrogacy options overseas, including here in the United States. I’ve been proud to visit China several times, bringing information and hope about family-building to the LGBT community there.

Several of my patients in China have coupled their “coming-out” conversation with their parents with the announcement that they are having a child. They have said the impending arrival of a grandchild smooths over the sometimes uncomfortable conversation about being gay. As long as the family blossoms into a new generation, having a gay child is easier for older generations to accept.

"I put off coming out to my parents for years," one patient told me. "But when my partner and I had a child on the way, I couldn't hold back the joy of our new family member. That turned it into a celebration for my whole family."

If nothing else, when family friends ask how Johnny is doing or if there are wedding bells on the horizon, they can tell their friends that they have a grandchild on the way. That’s always cause for celebration.

No doubt this same dynamic could play out here in America. Many parents’ biggest concern about their child being gay is the idea that a gay child will not have children and raise a family, an experience the parents have already held so dear to their own lives. Talking to parents about the family-building treatment options that are available to gay men today may help ease the coming out process for many young gay men both here and abroad.

 Of course, in the United States we generally end up coming out much sooner in life. While most gay Americans will come out to their parents years in advance of expecting a child, offering parents the hope and possibility of a growing family can help, just as it seems to smooth over family concerns in China. 

GUY RINGLER is a board-certified physician in both obstetrics and gynecology and reproductive endocrinology and infertility. He is a partner with California Fertility Partners and has been helping LGBTQ people have children for over 20 years. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law a bill allowing adoption agencies, even those that receive state funds, to discriminate against LGBT people or anyone else who offends the operator’s religious beliefs.

Under House Bill 3859, which Abbott signed today, “child welfare providers will be allowed to deny adoptions and other services to children and parents based on “sincerely held religious beliefs,’” The Texas Tribune reports.

It also means faith-based agencies can “place a child in a religious school; deny referrals for certain contraceptives, drugs or devices; and refuse to contract with other organizations that don’t share their religious beliefs,” according to the publication.

Those that turn away children or prospective parents on religious grounds are required to make a referral to another agency, and proponents of the legislation said this means it is not discriminatory. LGBT rights advocates, however, begged to differ.

“This new law will have dramatic consequences on same-sex couples across Texas who are looking to open their homes and their hearts to children in need,” said Kasey Suffredini, Freedom for All Americans’ acting CEO and president of strategy, in an emailed statement. “It will have devastating consequences on LGBT youth, who now can be forced into dangerous practices like conversion therapy. Adults should always be looking out for children, and acting with their best interests at heart — and this new law runs contrary to that basic value.”

In addition to allowing discrimination against same-sex couples and LGBT individuals, the law provides cover for agencies turn away a variety of others based on religious objections, such as single parents, interfaith couples, divorced people, and members of other faiths, opponents pointed out.

“Lawmakers used religion as a weapon to pass a bill that not only harms qualified candidates who want to start families, but children,” said a statement issued by Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD. “This law was never about the best interests of Texans or of children, but about forwarding a political agenda to codify the permission to discriminate against LGBTQ Texans into state law. Discrimination has won in Texas, and it saddens me that a child can now be denied the chance to live with a deserving family simply because they are LGBTQ.”

This Sunday, give a big Father's Day hug to Ricky Martin, Neil Patrick Harris, and Perez Hilton — as well as the rest of our highest-profile gay dads.

Greg Berlanti and Robbie Rogers

Jeremiah Brent and Nate Berkus

Perez Hilton

Denis O’Hare and Hugo Redwood

Ryan Murphy and David Miller

Jeremy Brandrick and Adam Morris

Ricky Martin

Lee Daniels

Dan Bucatinsky and Don Roos

Sam Harris and Danny Jacobsen

Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka

Vern Yip and partner Craig Koch

Bill Horn and Scout Masterson

Clay Aiken

B.D. Wong

Elton John and David Furnish

Dan Savage and Terry Miller

Rufus Wainwright and Jorn Weisbrodt

Matt Bomer and Simon Halls

Alec Mapa and Jamison Hebert

Jared Polis and Marlon Reis

Jeff Lewis and Gage Edward

39 Famous Gay Dads for Father's Day

This Sunday, give a big Father's Day hug to Ricky Martin, Neil Patrick Harris, and Perez Hilton — as well as the rest of our highest-profile gay dads.

I hadn’t spoken to my father for a year when I came out to him on Christmas night in the early ’90s. After a reunion that consisted of catching up over opening presents, green bean casserole, and red wine, he hugged me goodbye on his front stoop and said, “Don’t be a stranger.” I turned toward my car, shivering in the Connecticut winter, looked back and said, “I have something to tell you.” He gazed at me in a manner that told me that my secret was out and said, “I know. I love you, kid.” And that was it. I had come out to my dad. 

On Father’s Day in 2003, sitting beside my then-girlfriend in her Toyota Camry, feeling anxious and horrible for having allowed another year to pass without speaking to him, I dialed my father’s number. We made some small talk, I wished him a happy Father’s Day, and he told me he couldn’t eat, that he couldn’t swallow any food, and that he had made a doctor’s appointment. A month later, my stepmother called, sobbing. My father had been diagnosed with stage 3 esophageal cancer. That call in June would become the last Father's Day call I ever made to him. 

My early adult life was peppered with years during which my father and I didn’t speak, and for no other reason than what appeared to be some sort of apathy on his part and a stubborn refusal to bend to what I perceived were gender stereotypes on my end that had us radio silent for 12 months or more. Calls and mea culpas were typically spurred by the holidays and my overwhelming remorse for allowing another year to pass between us. I remember the handful of times when I picked up the phone receiver that was mounted to the wall in my apartment to discover that my father had actually dialed my number — that he wasn’t waiting for me to make the first move. Those rare occasions typically involved him having to inform me of the death of my grandparents, or of an aunt we lost too young.

Once, after he’d had mild heart attack in his mid-50s, he called me just to see how I was, and while that was probably 22 years ago now, I remember I was in the kitchen of my one-bedroom apartment in Hartford’s West End, and I was surprised, happy, and a little bit worried that he called. I thought he must have been feeling mortal, and that frightened me. Whenever my father and I did join together for a holiday or just a visit, we spoke endlessly about music, movies, and books, and laughed raucously together over what may have caught our attention on television. And we often shared in-jokes about the people around us. 

For a sailor who served during the height of the Vietnam war, my dad, Alan (Gilly to his friends), would eventually share some of the most heartfelt protest music of the time with me. The Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary albums on vinyl that he gave to me when I was just 7 years old remain among my most prized possessions. I’m fairly certain I was the only preteen who trudged the streets of my hometown of Plainville, Conn., carrying a boombox and singing along to Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 in full voice without a hint of irony. 

It’s now 13 years after I watched my father take his last breath in a hospital room, and now I've been the feminism editor for The Advocate for five months, writing daily with outrage about the indignities the Trump administration has rained down upon women since taking office. I look back to my youth and to my implacability to accept my father’s reluctance to call as part of who he was. For his part, I don’t know if it was the expectation as the parent that his child should be the one to reach out, or if there were some unwritten rule of masculinity that dictated that the man never calls. That’s what my stepmother, a woman from a fairly traditional Italian family with whom I got along very well, told me once, anyway.

“He’s a man. They’re not supposed to be the ones who call,” I remember her telling me. And yet my mother and stepfather, who married about seven years after my parents got divorced when I was 11, never missed the opportunity to watch me march in the band or sing “Day by Day” in our high school production of Godspell. Shortly after high school, my stepfather’s job took them from Connecticut to Vermont to San Francisco to New Jersey, and yet, if they were within a day's drive of the restaurant where I worked, they would travel for hours, cooler packed in the backseat, just to sit at my table, where I would attempt to make conversation with them while meeting the needs of the customers at my four or five other tables. 

I was in my early 20s and coming out as a lesbian and a nascent feminist when my stepmother suggested that men don’t do the calling. I think I even retorted, “Then thank God I’m gay,” a phrase I often invoked when perceived gendered behavior reared its head. Part of my confusion with her answer stemmed from the guy I thought my dad was, the man who often told me the story about how one year at the Newport Folk Festival, he had begun to leave when he heard a clarion call of a soprano voice come out over the final number — that it was Baez and that her voice kept him from leaving. He was the guy who introduced me to Dolly Parton’s music, who took me to see Lily Tomlin in The Incredibly Shrinking Woman on one of our Sundays together after the divorce, and we guffawed loudly — father and daughter laughing from deep in our guts. And he was the man who from his hospital bed, the one from which he would die just six months after being diagnosed with cancer, who told me his favorite movie was Pleasantville, the gentle, affecting film where emotion literally flowed from black and white to color. 

That night in 2003 when my father told me he couldn’t eat, I had adamantly avoided calling him for about 14 months. I was in my early 30s and I’d gone back to school full-time to earn my bachelor’s degree. I’d been given a once-in-a-lifetime ride to Mount Holyoke College, and for several semesters I studied, wrote papers, and waited tables. It was the Easter a year and a few months before that Father's Day and I’d just finished a 10-hour holiday brunch shift. I called my dad between cashing out from work and heading home to write a paper for a world cinema class. Out of character for him, he seemed irritated that I wouldn’t be able to make it to their family meal, but school was my priority, and as if it were some sort of quid pro quo, I became irritated that he barely asked me how school was going. I dug my heels in deep and held out on calling him for a long time. I muscled my way through English and film theory classes and allowed my birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, his birthday, and Easter to pass before we talked on the fated Father’s Day. 

My dad was in and out of the hospital with great regularity from his diagnosis in July and his death on February 1, just two days into my final semester of college. If there were any lingering questions at the time about whether or not he loved me, or cared, or even noticed what was happening in my life, we sorted them out through our hospital room conversations about pop culture. Once, from his bed, tubes in his arms, stoic and strong, he said, “You know what they say is the greatest movie of all time?” And I thought it was sweet that he was reaching out to me in the language that I love — film. I asked him what he thought it was, imagining he would follow what was at the time the American Film Institute’s top film and name Citizen Kane, but he surprised me. He said, “Battleship Potemkin,” Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film about the Russian Revolution renowned for its Odessa Steps sequence. I smiled, impressed because my father had been paying attention to what I’d been studying at school all along. 

Five years after I said goodbye to my father, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary died, and I was besotted. I cried for hours while listening to “Early Morning Rain” on repeat on YouTube. It seems unreal to me now that for years I obdurately protested my father’s reluctance to pick up the phone, couching his inaction in what I perceived was a slight against my gender, yet the symbol that cut me to the core five years after his death was the loss of a female icon famed as much for her role as a peaceful activist as for her stately beauty and inimitable alto. When I'm at my job writing about the executive orders DonaldTrump has churned out that assail women's reproductive rights and that have rescinded protections for women in the workplace, I think about my father, and I think that I fought the wrong battle against a guy who loved three-part harmonies and a movie — Pleasantville — in which the world is colored by the ability to feel. 

TRACY GILCHRIST is the feminism editor for The Advocate. Follow her on Twitter @TracyEGilchrist.

Point Foundation, the nation's most prominent scholarship-granting organization for LGBTQ students, has announced its 2017 scholarship recipients, and it’s by far the largest and most diverse group in the organization’s history. 

From more than 2,000 applicants, 52 recipients were chosen — 27 LGBTQ students were chosen to be Point Scholars, while 25 LGBTQ students were chosen from community colleges to expand Point’s Community College Scholarship Program. This year’s scholarship recipients include veterans of the armed forces, award-winning artists, international LGBTQ rights activists, creators of nonprofit organizations, and young scientists. 

Two-thirds of Point Scholar class are people of color, nearly half of them identify as transgender, gender-nonconforming, or intersex, and eight were formerly homeless. In the group of community college recipients, 60 percent of the students are the first in their families to go to college, nearly half of them identify as transgender, gender-nonconforming, or intersex, and one-third identify as bisexual, polysexual, or queer. 

Here’s to a great school year ahead!

Learn more about the Point Foundation at PointFoundation.org. 

Adil Mansoor
Carnegie Mellon University, Theater

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Born in Karachi, Pakistan, and raised in the Chicago area, Adil Mansoor is a Muslim-raised and queer-identified theater director. What began as bullying in high school and ostracism from his community evolved into a commitment to marginalized folks and dismantling structural oppression. As a director, Adil believes that centering the stories of LGBTQA+ people and folks of color will shift the dominant narrative away from heteronormativity and white supremacy. Adil began his journey as an artist educator at Northwestern University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 2008. After graduating, he has worked with many organizations including Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Chicago/Pittsburgh Public Schools, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Since 2012, Adil has been the program director for Dreams of Hope, an arts education organization supporting LGBTQA+ youth. Each year, he works with a youth ensemble to create an original play exploring LGBTQA+ history and experience. In 2013, he started Dreams of Hope's sQool program, bringing social justice centered arts programming to schools and community spaces. In its first three years, sQool engaged over 3,000 people in art making and conversations about the LGBTQA+ community. Adil is also a founding member of Hatch Arts Collective, a performance group committed to creating socially engaged art. In addition, he has directed for Quantum Theatre, Bricolage Production Company, Pittsburgh Playwrights, and others. Adil is pursuing an MFA in directing at Carnegie Mellon University as a John Wells Fellow and will further develop his capacity to honor underrepresented voices. 

Bodo Lee
Wells Fargo Point Scholar  
Yale University — Ethics, Politics, and Economics

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Bodo Lee was born in Dallas and moving to Oro Valley, Ariz., in fifth grade. There, he has attended a charter school for grades 6-12 where he found a community that became a second family to him. Although his high school career involved a liberal arts education with an emphasis on STEM fields, he found a passion for economics and politics primarily during his junior and senior years. At school, Bodo served as treasurer of the National Honor Society, and he founded Peer Diversity, a group that works with the Anti-Defamation League to train student leaders to identify and combat discrimination, hate, and bias. This experience gave him an outlet to challenge injustices of all kinds including the prejudice often facing the LGBTQ community. Outside of his high school studies, he served on his town’s Youth Advisory Council before becoming president in 2016. Along with this, Bodo was a board mrmbrt the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing care and education for those living with HIV or AIDS as well as the LGBTQ community. It was these two organizations that ignited in Bodo a passion for politics and advocacy. Bodo is a student at Yale University, where he plans to study ethics, politics, and economics while continuing to be an advocate for equality and justice. 

Donna Scaffidi
University of Michigan Law School

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Donna Scaffidi has committed her life to serving and supporting marginalized communities. A first-generation college graduate who overcame poverty, Donna graduated magna cum laude with a BA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she was actively involved with several organizations to cultivate positive social change for black, Latinx, and LGBTQA+ communities. Due to her civic engagement and desire to pursue a career in law, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute selected Donna to join the Congressional Internship Program in the spring of 2015. Through this opportunity, Donna worked for U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), focusing on technology, health care, education, poverty, and LGBTQA+ policy issues. This experience fortified Donna’s desire to become a lawyer and led her to explore the intersection of public interest/government and private practice. After graduating college, Donna began working in the legal recruiting department of a preeminent global law firm where she served as an LGBTQA+ leader and advocate. Then, prior to law school, Donna was selected to be an SEO Law Fellow, and she worked during the summer before law school at another leading international law firm. She has been working to create and sustain a pipeline of diverse talent for those interested in pursuing a legal career. One of Donna’s goals after law school is to return to a law firm to continue these efforts, combining her passion for creating justice for all with her desire to work on sophisticated legal issues. 

Eric Gonzaba
George Mason University — History

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Despite proud Texan parents, Eric Gonzaba is thoroughly Midwestern. Born in Missouri and raised in Michigan, Eric attended high school in rural southern Indiana, where he came out as gay sophomore year. Backed by supportive family and friends, he became deeply involved in LGBTQ advocacy. At Indiana University, he served as outreach coordinator for the school’s LGBTQ+ Culture Center and the GLBT Alumni Association, tasked with organizing programming and educational events for the wider university community on queer issues. While organizing an event on the history of LGBTQ Hoosiers, Eric became interested in uncovering and telling the histories of queer people outside the coastal gay landmarks of San Francisco and New York. He curated an exhibit on Indiana’s LGBTQ history using only T-shirts archived in a local gay library. Later, as a graduate student at George Mason University, Eric developed the T-shirt project into a digital archive and museum titled Wearing Gay History. The site contains nearly 4,000 historical LGBTQ T-shirts from around the world, spanning five decades of vibrant history. The site earned a 2016 National Council on Public History Award. Eric’s research focuses on the cultural politics of the late twentieth century United States, with a particular interest in African American and queer history. His dissertation, titled "Because the Night: Nightlife and Remaking the Gay Male World, 1970-1990" examines the politics of racial discrimination at gay nightlife establishments in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Eric’s dissertation argues that sites of gay nightlife divided queer communities along racial, sexual, and class lines. Eric hopes his career as a historian will help empower others to uncover the complicated and often overlooked histories of LGBTQ people. 

Felipe Gomez
Wells Fargo Point Scholar
University of Pennsylvania — Mathematical Economics 

Pronouns = He/Him/His

During fall of 2004, Felipe and his mother immigrated from Colombia to the U.S. in hopes of an improved future. However, what they received was a life full of belittlement, homelessness, adversity and poverty. Having grown up in the ghettos of Chicago and Miami, Felipe knows what it means to have absolutely nothing. He invested his time and energy into school, but when high school began, Felipe’s only safe haven was destroyed by the constant bullying and hate he received for being different. After a year of horrid experiences, he decided he had to make a change. Felipe became the first student in his school to come out as gay, and then also became the first student in his school to create a Gay-Straight Alliance. At first, his fellow students were not accepting of him. However, when Felipe began implementing the GSA’s mentoring program as well as educating the school on gender/sexuality topics and debunking popular misconceptions, the GSA’s membership grew. His school eventually became extremely tolerant, and Felipe graduated in 2017 with summa cum laude honors. His life goal is to create a nonprofit that caters to abused, queer Latinx teens from demotivating households as well as creating a society more socially aware and accepting of queer people and immigrants. 

Harper Zacharias
George Benes, MD & Michael Mallee, EdD Point Scholar
Bard College — International Relations

Pronouns = They/Them/Theirs

Growing up in a conservative neighborhood in Chicago, Harper struggled with their sexuality and gender identity. When they were 13, they moved to Deerfield, Ill., as their parents went through a traumatic divorce. It took them until the age of 15 to come out. That same year, their father disowned them. They sunk into a deep depression but eventually recovered through the support of friends and teachers. They quickly realized they had a capacity to create meaningful change in the world and decided to start with their high school. Harper became the president of Deerfield High School’s Gay Straight Alliance their junior year and spearheaded the first campaigns for gender-neutral bathrooms. Before they finished high school, they decided to expand their activism nationally and joined Trans Student Educational Resources, a youth-led nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming the educational environment for trans and gender nonconforming students through advocacy and empowerment. Since joining, Harper has risen to the role of program director. Harper is the first trans athlete at Bard College, where they study Global and International Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, and has worked to make athletics more accessible for queer and trans students. In addition to serving on the Educational Policies Committee, they are Ppresident of the Queer Student Association and Trans Life Collective. As a result of their work, Bard awarded them with the Ralph Ellison Award, a prestigious privilege given to a student who has shown a dedication to eliminating discrimination in the community. Harper is also a research assistant for their adviser at Bard as well as at the World Policy Institute. After graduating, Harper plans to pursue their Ph.D. and continue their activism. 

Kerri Cecil
University of Southern California — Film and Television

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Kerri Cecil is a filmmaker who was born in Southern California but raised by her mother in rural Minnesota in an extremely conservative Christian household. She struggled with her gender identity from an early age, and when it was discovered by her mother that this was no mere "phase," she was cast out from her home at a very young age. After 20 years of homelessness, survival sex work, and drug addiction, which led her to some dark places including jails and prisons, she was finally able to learn how to live a productive life with some help from the Emerging Leaders Academy. Kerri was introduced to the realm of possibility, and she decided then and there to follow her dream of becoming a filmmaker who can empower others and help create social change for the transgender community. Enrolling at Los Angeles City College, she completed its film and television program with honors and with her first short film won her first award. While at LACC, Kerri helped create and lead an on-campus LGBTQIA organization called the Spectrum Alliance club, which now has an annual Trans Awareness week, including a Trans Day of Remembrance. Even though she is the first in her family to graduate from college, her family still ostracizes her because she is transgender. But Kerri has built an amazing life for herself and is now attending the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she is pursuing her undergraduate degree. 

Kevin Contreras
Wells Fargo Point Scholar
Pitzer College — Pre-Med

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Raised in Los Angeles by a traditional Mexican family, Kevin became well acquainted with discrimination at a young age. Throughout his adolescence, he was often bullied for being the only openly queer student among his peers. Despite his unsupportive community, Kevin has worked to combat the effects of discrimination by organizing LGBTQ+ acceptance events, hosting antibullying forums, and even convincing school administrators to make designated restrooms gender-neutral. As president of both his school and the Gay Student Alliance, Kevin regularly met with school district officials to discuss LGBTQ+ related issues, racial equality, and other social justice topics. In addition to his community efforts, Kevin provides resources, as well as support, to over 80,000 people struggling with their sexual and gender identities on his blogging platform. Aside from his work with the LGBTQ+ community, Kevin also cofounded a nonprofit organization, the Engineer Factory, in the summer of 2014, which serves to inspire marginalized children to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Suffering from an eye disorder that will eventually lead to blindness has motivated Kevin to study to become a researcher and a doctor so that he can help thousands of people in need. As an undergraduate at Pitzer College, he will further LGBTQ+ causes, pursue community outreach for LGBTQ+ youth, and use his knowledge to become an agent of change within all marginalized communities. 

Khushboo Panjwani
Rim-Freeman Point Scholar

University of Texas at Austin — International Relations, Anthropology

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Khushboo Panjwani is an international relations and anthropology double major at the University of Texas at Austin. Having witnessed many human rights abuses from a young age, Khushboo's passion for human rights and protecting others manifested early on. What Khushboo values most in her academics is exposure; to knowledge and ideas that she does not yet possess, and to experiences she has not yet acquired. It was with this mindset that she entered university. She worked with refugees as an intern for the International Rescue Committee in 2014 and served as an ambassador for the Aga Khan Foundation | Partnerships in Action in 2015. In the summer of 2015, Khushboo interned for Impilo Phambili in South Africa, where she conducted research in townships that were formally designated for black occupation by apartheid legislation. This is where her passion for cultural understanding and the intersectionality of oppression grew. In the summer of 2016, she fell in love with the language of Arabic at the intensive Arabic Summer Institute at UT. It was not until the fall of 2016 that Khushboo realized she was part of the LGBTQ+ community. After coming out to her friends, family, and entire Muslim community, she faced much discrimination, and as a result became a financially independent student. As of spring 2017, Khushboo is the vice president of Amnesty International UT Chapter. A Pakistani, Muslim, queer, independent student, and woman, Khushboo has experienced and witnessed marginalization in many forms. She hopes to focus her academics on the intersectionality of oppression and bridge gaps in cultural understanding.

Kuhan Jeyapragasan
HSBC Point Scholar
Stanford University — Applied Mathematics

Pronouns = They/Them/Theirs

Kuhan Jeyapragasan is a Stanford University student from Toronto, Canada. Their involvement with the LGBTQ community started in high school, after speaking to a teacher who shared their experience as an LGBTQ South Asian individual. This discussion made Kuhan realize how few South Asian LGBTQ individuals are well-known, and the importance of sharing stories to reduce isolation and provide support to the LGBTQ community. Kuhan’s activism started in school, as executive of the Queer Straight Alliance, Pink Day Crew, and Gender Equity Club. They also became heavily involved in community service, volunteering and doing advocacy work with organizations including the 519 Queer Community Center, Delisle Youth Services, LGBT Youthline, and Supporting Our Youth. In Toronto, Kuhan also conducted research on LGBTQ youth homelessness, suicide prevention, and mental health challenges faced by the LGBTQ community. At Stanford, Kuhan’s field of study is mathematical and computational sciences. Coupled with a minor in economics, Kuhan hopes to apply technology and data to solve large-scale social problems. Kuhan is also heavily invested in student activism and has been involved with the NAACP, private prison divestment work, effective altruism, and social justice groups. In total, they have accumulated over 2,500 volunteer hours and will continue to volunteer to ground the policy work they hope to be doing in the future. Outside of social justice work, Kuhan loves playing chess, singing South Asian music (classical and Bollywood), learning new languages, and traveling. 

Kylie Blume
Novo Nordisk Point Scholar
University of Minnesota Medical School — Medicine

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Kylie Blume is a student at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where she is pursuing her dream of being a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ community through medicine. Driven by her own experiences with transphobia in medical settings, she is passionate about reforming medical education to welcome aspiring LGBTQ physicians and train all health care providers to be competent in caring for LGBTQ patients. Kylie grew as a leader through her efforts to challenge University of California Davis Health to better care for its LGBTQ patients as community representative on the Vice Chancellor's LGBTQI Advisory Council and as a core planner of the UC Davis Improving OUTcomes Conference. Upon matriculating to UMN Medical School in 2016, she harnessed her passion and leadership skills to establish the first annual UMN MedED LGBTQIA+ Health Care Symposium. She is working to establish a free student-run trans hormone clinic, TRANSform Hormone Clinic. Kylie’s efforts are inspiring her peers to join her in improving the medical school’s capacity to train LGBTQ-sensitive and competent physicians. She is also collaborating with the administration to improve the school’s curricula and support of diverse students through her roles as chief diversity officer on the Medical Student Council and president of Pride in Health Care. Kylie is engaged in national LGBTQ health advocacy through her board position on GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Health Equality, where she creates resources for health professional students nationally so that they can collaborate and contribute to deconstructing LGBTQ health inequities. 

Landon Marchant
HSBC Point Scholar
Williams College — Computer Science

Pronouns = Them/Them/Theirs

Born and raised on a flower farm in rural Wisconsin, Landon Marchant has traveled a long way from their conservative religious upbringing. At the age of 18, Landon enlisted in the United States Air Force, hoping to suppress their gender identity and sexuality. However, instead of turning Landon cis and straight, the military introduced them to countless successful and happy LGBTQ people. Since an honorable discharge in 2011, Landon has devoted their time to helping LGBTQ troops and veterans. Landon has held numerous leadership roles in SPART*A, an LGBTQ military organization, since its inception in 2013. In particular, Landon has supported fellow transgender service members by connecting troops with educational and health resources, emergency housing, and employment assistance. They also cochair the SPART*A fitness group, a personal passion that has led to improved member morale. Landon has built an expansive network of nonprofits, veterans’ organizations, and individuals dedicated to supporting LGBTQ service members and veterans. In order to pass on this wealth of knowledge, Landon maintains a comprehensive index of resources for LGBTQ veterans and for any veteran hoping to continue their education. Acceptance into Williams College has only served to deepen Landon's passion for helping LGBTQ individuals succeed. As a disabled veteran and former trade union apprentice, they know the importance of strong support networks and economic stability. Landon intends to continue supporting LGBTQ veterans achieve their post-military goals, as well as work to change the way we think about socioeconomic mobility, skilled labor, and military service. 

Le’Priya White
Oberlin College — Sociology

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers or They/Them/Theirs

Le'Priya White was born and raised in Chicago. Being an openly queer woman of color, Le'Priya knew that she wanted to help foster healthy spaces for queer and trans people of color. Creating a sense of community through activism and education is the goal she has set for herself to accomplish during her time at Oberlin College. During her freshman and sophomore years, Le'Priya has taken on several leadership positions, such as being cochair of La Alianza Latinx, a group dedicated to providing a space for Latinx students, and Zami, a group that operates as a safe space for queer and trans people of color. She is the co-coordinator of Queer Beers, a monthly community gathering for queer and trans students. At the end of her sophomore year, Le'Priya cofounded Queer and Trans People of Color (QTPOC) Hall, ensuring a community for QTPOC to live in a space dedicated to the love and support of queer/trans folks.

Le’Priya was awarded the Mellon Mays Fellowship in March — a program dedicated to increasing the number of underrepresented minority groups and supporting those students on their path to pursuing a Ph.D. Her research will focus on the accessibility of health care for marginalized groups living with HIV and their experiences with institutions due to social factors such as housing instability, poverty, lack of employment, and education. 

Logan Alcosiba
Wells Fargo Point Scholar
San Francisco State University — Humanities

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Learning to live for love instead of to die from hate, Logan Alcosiba came out as transgender once her sophomore year began. When she was greeted with open arms, Logan made it her mission to ensure all kids were treated the same. To spread awareness and acceptance, as well as build a better understanding of diversity for her peers, Logan became as involved as possible in her community, dedicating her time to school, leadership, athletics, drama, and clubs. This would lead her to become the first openly transgender athlete, ASB president, and homecoming queen for the city of Newark, Calif., a proud achievement for her community considering the loss of Gwen Araujo a decade and a half prior. In the middle of her high school career, Logan founded her school’s annual Transgender Presentation to teach students and staff about the transgender experience as well as her school’s first LGBTQ+ Support Club, where students could safely express themselves while organizing school events and learning about the community’s history. Because of this, the welcoming environment surrounding Newark Memorial High School improved and still continues to grow. All the while, Logan was physically transitioning, breaking down barriers in transgender health care. With much perseverance, Logan became the first minor in Northern California to be approved for and undergo any gender-related surgery, allowing future youth the same opportunity. Her personal transition allowed a community to transition. Being herself allowed others to do the same. This, Logan knows, will continue. 

Michael Arellano
Western Michigan University — Dance/Behavioral Science

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Michael Arellano was born in Shelby Township, Mich., where he lived until moving to start school at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. Being a dancer since age 3, Michael experienced a lot of harassment at a young age and became ashamed of both his craft and his sexuality. Toward the end of high school, Michael began to embrace being a dancer and a proud gay man. While in high school, Michael danced at Suzette’s Masters of Dance and became an instructor in 2013, teaching students in styles such as jazz, ballet, contemporary, and more. He was also a member of the National Honor Society and volunteered his time by tutoring at Malow Junior High, packing food at Gleaners Food Bank, and helping at Frasier Villa Nursing Home. In 2015, Michael received the Medallion Scholarship from Western Michigan University. Through the Medallion Scholarship Program, Michael has cofounded a registered student organization called Blessings From Broncos, which is a branch of the national nonprofit organization Blessings in a Backpack. Blessings From Broncos works to provide food for underprivileged children during the weekends. Michael is excited to continue his studies in dance and psychology and to broaden his activism to the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. 

Molly Griffard
New York University — Law

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Molly Griffard is an aspiring civil rights and liberties lawyer studying at NYU School of Law. She was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri. She got her start as an activist and organizer as a teenager by volunteering on campaigns to stop the use of the death penalty in Missouri. In 2009, Molly graduated from Macalester College, where she majored in political science. As an undergraduate, she spent many hours outside of the classroom campaigning for progressive candidates and causes like voting rights for students and low-income people and higher education affordability and access. Before law school, Molly worked at the American Civil Liberties Union as a state advocacy strategist on the LGBTQ-focused Out for Freedom Campaign. In this role, she worked on legislative, ballot, and public education campaigns to advance policies including marriage equality and LGBTQ nondiscrimination, while fighting back against anti-LGBTQ measures. Before joining the ACLU's Out for Freedom Campaign, Molly worked on numerous LGBTQ state campaigns, including the 2012 ballot campaign in Maine and legislative campaigns in Washington, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Utah. In law school, Molly is focusing on gaining advocacy skills and a deeper understanding of the legal system to put to use for social change. 

Nolan Boggess
Grinnell College — Theater and Dance

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Nolan grew up in Des Moines, where he attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school. Although Nolan knew his family would accept his sexual identity, he was worried to come out as gay at his predominantly conservative high school. After coming out his senior year, he was disheartened to learn that his high school had denied a teaching job to an openly gay man. Vowing to stand up for those who don’t feel comfortable in their schools because of their sexuality, Nolan decided to attend Grinnell College and get involved with the Queer Mentorship Program that creates mentor relationships between LGBTQIA+ students. Now serving as the co-coordinator, he has the opportunity to match student mentees and mentors through a program of education, advice, and support. Nolan is a theater & dance and anthropology double major who participates in all facets of the Theatre and Dance Department at Grinnell. In the spring of 2017, Nolan directed and produced a student musical theater production on campus. Nolan’s goal is to create a nonprofit theater company in the Midwest dedicated to producing shows by LGBTQIA+ playwrights or focused on LGBTQIA+ topics that would also offer educational and outreach programs to the community. 

Oliver Stabbe
University of Rochester — American Sign Language / Psychology

Pronouns = He/Him/His or They/Them/Theirs

Raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Oliver had inadequate exposure to LGBTQ-relevant education. When he realized he was transgender at 15, Oliver struggled with finding information that would help in discovering and supporting his identity. Oliver realized that in an age where the availability of information is so largely based on environment, disability status, race, gender identity, sexual identity, income, and other identities that have minority statuses, accessibility can drastically improve a person's life. Since then, Oliver has committed himself to researching and advocating for people of diverse intersectional identities and mental health. He has continued his advocacy in a variety of ways: by researching LGBTQ and disability history at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, working in disability policy in D.C., helping coordinate the 2017 Women's March on Washington, conducting an honors thesis in psychological flexibility, and answering calls and promoting accessible options for a peer-to-peer crisis hotline. Oliver is a double major in psychology and American Sign Language with a minor in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. He plans to pursue a graduate degree in clinical psychology and to continue his advocacy for the LGBTQ community. 

Omar Salman
Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine — Medicine

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Omar Salman was born in Kuwait to two Palestinian refugees. Due to violence in the region, he became a refugee himself when his family fled the Gulf War. He came to the U.S. at age 8 and lived in Tennessee, where he faced a great deal of stigma as a gay Muslim immigrant in the South. Omar pursued a career in medicine and eventually studied biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University. During this time, he was outed and experienced a period of homelessness until eventually being connected with resources to regain his footing. After this experience, Omar became passionate about minority and LGBTQ+ health. He spent a summer in Sierra Leone working with a program for HIV patients. He then founded and facilitated a support group for HIV-positive men of color at a health center in Massachusetts. In medical school, he became vice chair of LGBTQ+ issues for the American Medical Association. In this role, Omar wrote a resolution to end the discriminatory deferral period for MSM blood donors that led the AMA to oppose the ban and write the FDA to reconsider the policy. He also facilitated sexual health courses for LGBTQ+ teens, set up a health fair and screenings at Pride, created and led LGBTQ+ provider competency workshops for students and providers, and launched a mentoring program for medical students to mentor ELL students in the region. He also currently serves as an associate director for the MSV Foundation, a philanthropic organization for Virginia’s medical society and conducts research on medical devices for children with neuromotor impairments such as cerebral palsy. When he is not studying, Omar enjoys distance running, vegan cooking and baking, and volunteering with kids. Omar hopes to eventually work in pediatrics and advocacy to address health disparities faced by LGBTQ+ immigrants and people of color. 

Sarah Daoud

University of Chicago — Social Work

All Pronouns

Sarah is a queer, gender-fluid femme of color and the child of Muslim refugees. Working to better their communities through internal, interpersonal, and systems change has been vital to their resistance and existence. Sarah made the decision to pursue social work after reporting from refugee settlements abroad, where they intended to promote human rights through investigative journalism. Steadily, Sarah realized the limitation of a journalist’s work and felt called to a different kind of action. Since then, Sarah has dived into social work through several different avenues: performer in educational theater, abortion clinic escort, teaching artist in Chicago Public Schools, organizer with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, director of Take Back the Night at Northwestern University (where they also helped reform campus policy on sexual assault to be more inclusive of queer survivors). Of great importance to Sarah is the work they did as a resource advocate at the Broadway Youth Center from February 2015 to June 2017, where they supported queer and trans young people experiencing homelessness. While in school in Chicago, they will be interning at the Chicago Women’s Health Center, a feminist health care collective that serves people of all genders at a sliding scale. After graduating with their master’s in social work from the University of Chicago in 2018, Sarah hopes to start a program for LGBTQ youth of color that integrates mental health care, popular education, and creative learning to provide youth access to activism, emotional tools, and life skills to succeed despite inequitable conditions. In our increasingly harmful world, Sarah is dedicated to supporting queer and trans youth as they learn to love themselves, radically and unapologetically, and gain a healthier understanding of their resilience and power. 

Shannon Moran
University of Michigan — Chemical Engineering

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Shannon Moran was born and raised in Michigan in an Irish Catholic family. Her parents supported her love of math and science, and in 2012 Shannon received her BS in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT, Shannon discovered an aptitude for scientific research, resulting in multiple high-impact peer-reviewed publications and a research fellowship at the National University of Singapore. After spending three years in management consulting at the Boston Consulting Group after college, Shannon began her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2015. Her research focuses on the computational study of non-equilibrium material fabrication. Despite her academic successes, Shannon remained closeted until the end of college. After volunteering with the O4U (Out for Undergrad) Business Conference in 2013, Shannon came to appreciate the importance of authenticity in the workplace. She continued to volunteer with O4U, eventually organizing the second-ever O4U Engineering Conference as programming director and establishing a foundational curriculum for future conferences. During her Ph.D. studies, Shannon has spearheaded a series of communications workshops on research project management through the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering and Center for Entrepreneurship, reaching hundreds of engineering students. Through her work with O4U and oSTEM (Out in STEM), she is deeply committed to serving as a mentor to LGBTQ students in STEM fields, developing networks of LGBTQ individuals in these areas, and enabling students with the skills needed to be successful leaders in STEM. 

Tony Vo
Seattle University — Doctorate in Educational Leadership

Pronouns = He/Him/His

Tony is the son of Vietnamese refugees. His parents political persecution in Vietnam to provide the family a brighter future. His upbringing, Tony realized, was a pattern seen in many Southeast Asian communities — low-income, first-generation, and limited English. As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Tony founded a student organization named Asian Coalition for Equality that highlights invisibilities of the Asian community. He also advocated at local, state, and national levels for resources and data that captures the realities of Southeast Asians and organized panels and presentations debunking the “model minority myth.” Tony believes in the power of communities to heal themselves. From 2009 to 2012, he took part in participatory action research for the Vietnamese community and learned their strengths and needs, culminating in a report used to advocate for resources for his community. In 2012, he founded an annual 5K walk/run with neighborhood friends to foster health, build community, and raise money for local nonprofits. This belief in communities led him to student leadership work in the community college system where he advised the Queer Straight Alliance and other organizations. From there he pursued an Ed.M. at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He plans to continue work in higher education providing pathways for underrepresented students to enter, graduate, and leave as critical leaders. Tony is inspired by the resilience of his mom and sister who ground him in his identities and roots, supporting him on his journey in pursuit of higher education. 

Valerie Weisler
Muhlenberg College — Inequalities of Education

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Valerie Weisler was a shy high school freshman when she came across a student being bullied and said two words that changed both of their lives: “You matter.” The student’s response that her words “validated” him planted the seeds for the Validation Project. Having experienced bullying herself, Valerie launched the project to help other teens gain confidence, believe in themselves more deeply, and develop the skills to address social justice issues. Teens identify their skills and passion, partner with mentors in their field of interest, and then design campaigns making a positive impact in their community. Valerie has been recognized with the National Jefferson Award for Peace and Justice and the Princess Diana Award from former Prime Minister, David Cameron. She also serves as a Human Rights Campaign Ambassador. Valerie's self- designed entrepreneurial curriculum has replaced government-led anti-bullying courses in nearly 1,000 schools across the globe. Leading The Validation Project kindled Valerie's interests in education. Now a student at Muhlenberg College, Valerie is dedicated to learning about the inequalities in education. She seeks to work for the U.S. Department of State, where she has served as a speaking ambassador since August 2016, the U.S. Department of Education, or another platform to make sure every child is provided with the resources and supportive environment to pursue their passions. 

Vanessa R. Watson
Barbey Point Scholar
Fashion Institute of Technology,
Production Management in Fashion and Related Industries / Technical Design

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Vanessa Watson is a fashion engineer on a mission: connecting you to clothes that fit your personality and your bum. Innovation and diversity are themes that inspire her as she works tirelessly to create systems that facilitate access and equality. Vanessa and her younger sister were raised in rural New Jersey by their mother in a single-parent home with tremendous support from their maternal, extended family. Though resources were often scarce, access to and the pursuit of academia was a constant. Acknowledging her Queer identity revitalized her desire and ability to thrive after an arduous battle with depression and as a survivor of suicide. Vanessa is an entrepreneur, a creative individual, and most importantly a student of life. An undying passion for fashion led her to enroll at FIT. As a production management and technical design student, Vanessa is working to revolutionize the apparel industry. Her applied focus looks at how 3-D technology can empower both the retail consumer and supply chain management channels. She is also the founder of UnBoxxed, a platform that integrates fashion and technology, “providing access to apparel that reflects who you see yourself to be — without rules, boxes, or constraints.” One thing is for sure: Vanessa's journey from medicine to fashion has taught her to see far beyond the fold. 

Wandi Che
Duke University — Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Wandi Che was born and raised in China. Since childhood, Wandi witnessed her mother fighting for girls’ education rights in a conservative area. Although her mother eventually gave up due to the overwhelming pressure, she has profoundly influenced Wandi to care about others and things beyond oneself. Wandi is determined to carry on serving more people in need.

In high school, besides being holding leadership positions in several school clubs and the student government, Wandi began to actively engage in feminist and queer activities and activism outside of school, despite all the political pressure and difficulties along the way. She devoted substantial efforts to building the queer community and raising public awareness on queer and feminist issues, in a homogeneous culture of conformity. She volunteered at Beijing LGBT Center, Third China Women’s Film Festival, and Gay and Lesbian Campus Association of China. Based on her experience, she cofounded Audre Lorde Feminist Club to bridge the gap between different communities and extend the impact to high schools and colleges. Moreover, Wandi has been actively involved in social justice advocacy including national campaigns against gender discrimination in the college recruiting process along with other activists.

At Duke, Wandi plans to major in women’s studies and international comparative studies to better understand transnational feminist and queer theories and issues. She works at the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity at Duke, volunteers at Dove House for homeless women in Durham, N.C., and goes to all kinds of events and activities on campus and in the local community. In the future, Wandi aspires to become a leading activist in feminist and queer activism in China. 

Ximena Ospina Vargas
KPMG Scholar
Columbia University — Business

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Ximena is an undocumented trans activist and student seeking to amplify the visibility of the queer immigrant community. She was born in Cali, Colombia, but raised in the United States after moving to Elizabeth, N.J., with her family at the age of 5. Growing up in a mainly urban impoverished setting, developing comfort with a queer identity was a difficulty at home and school. Much of the inspiration for a fight for queer justice is Ximena's own experiences with reparative therapy, bullying, and homelessness, which taught her the value of solidarity and belonging to a community. Before attending Columbia University, Ximena paid her tuition in cash due to FAFSA being denied to undocumented students. To sustain her education, she has worked in varying industries such as manufacturing, retail, travel, and nonprofit. Ximena's favorite experiences were internships at United Airlines, which taught her how to be proudly queer in such a corporate setting, and her role in Community Access Unlimited, a nonprofit for the disabled. Ximena prides herself in her volunteer work for her communities; she is a regular Section Leader in New York's Pride March and a regular translator for the New York Immigration Coalition. Since attending Columbia, Ximena has been involved in the creation of the school's first formal undocumented student group. 

Yingyi Wang
Kevin Hummer Point Scholars
University of Washington — Gender, Women and Sexualities Studies

Pronouns = She/Her/Hers

Yingyi grew up in a traditional Hakka family in southern China, Guangdong. She came to experience in early childhood the intersections of oppression for being an ethnic minority in China and for her gender identity as a woman in a patriarchal Hakka family. Upon realizing her bisexuality and after coming out, it became even more difficult for her to reconcile between her family and sexuality. These lived experiences have helped Yingyi reflect upon the intersectional inequality for LGBTQ persons and ignite the fire in her to engage in change and organize toward social justice in China. Yingyi started her activism as a young feminist in college in 2011 to campaign for gender equality. She believes that hope lies ultimately in education. In order to effect change, from 2011 to 2014 she became a sex education peer trainer for Marie Stope International China. In 2013, Yingyi cofounded the first national bisexual organization, r&B bisexual group, to raise the awareness of the Chinese queer community and beyond on issues pertaining to bisexuality, intersectionality, nonbinary sexualities. In 2016, the group published the first handbook on bisexuality in China. Yingyi also serves on the steering committee in a regional LBT organization from 2015 to 2018. Yingyi received her master’s degree from the University of Hong Kong with her pioneering research on cooperative marriage between gay men and lalas in mainland China. Her doctoral research looks at the precarity of nongovernmental organization workers, including LGBTQ activists, in neoliberal China. Yingyi is always finding ways to bridge her activism and scholarship so as to help promote a just society. 

Point is also welcoming 25 LGBTQ students to its expanded Community College Scholarship Program, thanks to continued support from Wells Fargo.

They are as follows: 

Alexander Kees Bomgardner

North Lake College
Irving, Texas — Accounting

He/Him/His

Alexander "Sander" Kees Bomgardner began life in Colorado Springs, Colo. At the age of 16, he moved down to Texas and began attending North Lake College. While there, he joined the Gay-Straight Alliance on campus and became heavily involved with the LGBTQ community at the college. Due in part to the support he had with the North Lake family, Sander came out as transgender to his family, friends, and the world. Sander also continued to lean on the support of North Lake as he became the president of Student Government for 13 community colleges in Northwest Texas, and vice president of the college's Gay-Straight Alliance. He plans on transferring to Texas A&M Commerce to complete a bachelor's of science in accounting.

Amme Lahaie
Bellingham Technical College
Bellingham, Wash. — Process Technology, Mechanical Engineering

She, her, hers, he, him, his

Amme Lahaie was born in California to teenage parents. Her family moved to Elma, Wash., when she was a freshman in high school. She came out to her family at the age of 14. It was a tough road being a young lesbian in a small town, so she sought acceptance within the LGBTQ community at organizations as Queer Youth and Stonewall Youth. At age 37, Amme finally made the commitment and sacrifice to pursue her dreams of a college degree and a stable future. She is currently attending Bellingham Technical College, where she is a dual major student in process technology and mechanical engineering. She works as a peer navigational coach and tutor for the Trio & STAR Programs. Amme also helped establish the Gender and Sexuality Alliance on the BTC campus and will start a position this fall as a student life coordinator.

Andrés Bautista
Glendale Community College
Glendale, Ariz. — Psychology and Gender & Women's Studies

He/Him/His

Andrés Bautista is a first-generation Mexican-American student. He is studying sociology and gender & women's studies with plans to transfer to University of Arizona in the fall of 2018, where he will continue his studies and involvement in the LGBTQ+ community. Andrés is the 2017-2018 president of the LGBT+ Club at Glendale Community College and has been participating in several projects to help the LGBTQ+ youth community. Andrés wishes to expand his knowledge and create a strong LGBTQ+ youth organizing presence in central Arizona.

Bryant Couvillon
Georgia State University Perimeter College
Atlanta — Public Policy

They/Them/Theirs

Bryant Couvillon is out and proud as a non-binary, transgender, and pansexual person. Bryant was born in Pittsburgh. At age 9 they moved to Birmingham, Ala. Coming out at 12, they faced discrimination and bullying throughout middle and high school. This helped motivate them to become very active in the world of LGBTQ+ advocacy. Bryant won the Stephen Light Youth Advocacy Award in 2012 at the age of 15 after facing a potential lawsuit with their high school due to LGBTQ+ discrimination. Struggling to find acceptance for being transgender, Bryant moved to Atlanta at the age of 18 to finally start embracing their true self. They are pursuing a degree in public policy with ambitions to run for public office in the near future. They are passionate about all things civil rights, human rights, animal justice, and environmental justice.

Bryant is also in the process or working to revitalize a nonprofit in Atlanta with goals of creating a center or community healing, love, and advocacy for the queer and trans communities. They have a strong love for children, and they are also a nanny. They plan on becoming a foster parent to LGBTQ+ teens, because they believe in radical mothering and that children are the light of the future. Bryant has two main life goals: create meaningful political change, and become a strong and loving parent.

Bryce Taylor
County College of Morris
Morristown, Ill. — Dental Hygiene

He/Him/His

Bryce Taylor was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and grew up in the small town of Jefferson, S.D., with his two brothers (one a twin), and three older sisters. He attended the same school, Elk Point–Jefferson, for elementary, middle and high school. Throughout high school, he participated in drama, choir, show choir, as well as all-state choir, all while working hard to maintain good grades and making time for family and friends. After graduating high school in 2015, Bryce enrolled in Western Iowa Tech Community College. In spring of 2017, Bryce came out as gay to his family and friends. He received positive feedback from his loved ones, who continue to support and love him. Bryce plans to enroll in the dental hygiene program at the University of South Dakota in 2018. He also plans to become a more active member of the LGBTQ community.

Celene Reyes Aparicio
Long Beach City College
Long Beach, Calif. — Psychology

All pronouns

Celene is a first-generation college student, born and raised in beautiful Long Beach, California. From the moment they started kindergarten, they fell in love with reading & learning, so much that they would often get teased for always carrying a book. Unfortunately, toward the end of their fifth-grade year, they began their battle with depression for a few reasons, one of them not knowing how to come to terms with their sexuality. This, along with their parents’ divorce, took a toll on their academic career for almost a decade. Although they came to terms with their sexuality right before entering high school, they soon started to struggle with their gender identity, not knowing exactly what they identified as, until one day they stumbled upon the term “genderqueer” and everything clicked. Finally being able to identify themselves, Celene returned to Long Beach City College in 2016 after a four-year gap with a renewed passion for their education and fell in love with the LGBTQ+ club on campus, Queer Space. Having been elected to a second term as President of Queer Space for fall 2017, Celene plans to reach out to LGBTQ+ Youth in Long Beach while working on their associate degree in psychology, which is only a steppingstone to their doctorate of psychology. As a psychologist, Celene will work with LGBTQ+ youth & their families to help them during times of confusion, doubt, and isolation.

Chloe Lannes
Diablo Valley College
Pleasant Hill, Calif. — English

She/Her/Hers

Chloe Lannes was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. The eldest in a blended family, Chloe spent much of her childhood helping her parents care for her four younger siblings. As she aged, she found it increasingly difficult to maintain a balance between her life at home and the personal changes she underwent. Eventually, she turned to academics as a means of coping and, with the immeasurable support of her teachers, found herself within the material of her English courses. Today Chloe is a highly accomplished student. She is an English tutor in Diablo Valley College’s writing lab, where she meets with a diverse population of students, many of whom are learning English as a second language. Chloe also volunteers in her community and works part-time.

Through her experiences as a student and a tutor, Chloe has learned to appreciate the wide variety of perspectives a diverse learning community offers. Chloe is passionate about helping others find their voices, and she hopes to build a career in education with a focus on the LGBTQ community. She believes in empowering marginalized populations of society through a model of education that values each student's unique experience. In the future, Chloe would like to see an academic environment that acknowledges and cherishes the experiences of LGBTQ students and intersectionality in student identity.

Christina Quiñonez
Berkeley City College
Berkeley, Calif. — Social Sciences

She/Her/Hers

Christina Quiñonez was born to a single mother who had migrated to Los Angeles from Guatemala to flee a civil war in her native country. At age 12, Christina began to embrace her true identity as a female, only to receive a lack of affirmation and support from her family. While navigating her teens as a minor without a stable home or family, she met Cris Beam, who provided much needed moral support and continually encouraged Christina to steer her personal narrative through education. To support herself financially, she took a part-time job with an HIV epidemiology program, which helped her understand how critical HIV prevention is for the transgender community as well as socioeconomically disadvantaged communities of color. Her passion for preventing HIV led to continued professional service within marginalized communities, such as Bienestar and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. In 2007, Christina was nominated by her peers to be featured in the first Angels of Change calendar and fashion show, which raised funds, awareness, and support for transgender youth. She also joined the California Mental Health Service Act (Proposition 63) Multicultural Coalition to help bring new perspectives to mental health systems. Christina is currently working at the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at the University of California, San Francisco, while attending Berkeley City College, majoring in psychology. She eventually hopes to obtain a bachelor’s degree and work as a trainer and program developer.

Daffodyle Milka Lexine Saget
Miami Dade College
Miami — Sociology

She/Her/Hers

Daffodyle Saget was born in Haiti, but when she was 5 years old her family emigrated to America so that they could give her all the opportunities that their country could not provide. As she grew up, she soon learned that access to those opportunities was not easy and that her race, class, sex, and sexuality would become barriers and burdens. Daffodyle felt isolated in her predominantly white schools, humiliated by her financial circumstances, lacking in her femininity, and upon realizing her bisexuality, ashamed. The treatment she received from her peers, family, church, and society took a toll on her. She internalized all of that negativity, and it started to affect her grades and social interactions. With the help of an observant counselor, she was able to overcome her depression, and become brave enough to get involved in her school GSA and become more active in the LGBT community. Daffodyle took a year off after graduating high school. That year she officially came out and gave back, traveling to Haiti to work at an orphanage who's children she was able to relate to and pass the baton of healing. She later enrolled at Miami Dade College majoring in sociology. Daffodyle wants to examine the barriers she and others face and educate others on these issues using multiple platforms and focusing on social issues by making documentaries, creating art installations, and putting these issues into context in films and novels.

Daniel Gomez|
East Los Angeles College
Monterey Park, Calif. — Neuroscience

PGP: male/he/him/his

Daniel Gomez is a 21-year-old gay man who was born and raised in east Los Angeles. He became cognizant of the importance of empowering and raising awareness for the LGBTQIA+ community when he faced severe criticism from a religious household when he came out at the age of 15. Realizing that the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation in communities of color was apparent in his neighborhood, Daniel joined several organizations on campus to advocate for the rights and respect of all students. Daniel is currently an honors student at East Los Angeles College, and he is pursuing a degree in neuroscience. He is also involved in several academic enrichment programs such University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Community College Partnership, Loyola Marymount University Undergraduate Research Scholars Academy, and the California State University, Northridge, Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity Promoting Opportunities for Diversity in Education and Research program. Daniel hopes to transfer to a university by fall of 2018, and upon completing his undergraduate degree, he plans to go to medical school and become a surgeon.

Diana Campos
Richard J. Daley College
Chicago — Engineering Science

She, her, hers

Diana Campos is a native of the south side of Chicago. In spite of all the stereotypes and negative imagery connected to the city she loves, Diana still works to create a world of value through her actions in her community. Diana’s academic and personal goals are fundamentally based on her desire to be of service to others. In two decades as a teaching artist and nonprofit administrator, she has worked to make the arts accessible to youth all across the city. Diana has developed a unique dance curriculum through her own company, BreakThrough Movement, in which the performing arts are a vehicle for activism and self-exploration. BreakThrough Movement students have created work that reflects their unique perspective on immigration, LGBTQ bullying, and gun violence. It is Diana’s fervent determination to create safe space for more youth to embrace their innate potential. Diana is currently seeking an associate in engineering science degree and plans to pursue degrees in math and physics at Illinois Institute of Technology. Ultimately, her desire is to create a new education model that combines her artistic and STEM worlds into a curriculum designed to elevate the quality of education, thereby helping break the cycle of poverty that plagues the most violent communities in Chicago.

Gramoz Prestreshi
Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C. — Social Work

He/Him/His

Gramoz Prestreshi was born and raised in Kosovo, part of the former Yugoslavia. At age 21 he came to America, was granted political asylum, and later became a citizen of the United States. In his new country, he is has committed himself to getting a higher education degree and making a difference in the lives of others. Gramoz is an honor student at the Catholic University of America. He has been an important international resource to the LGBTQ communities of Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Gramoz hopes to be a social worker helping the LGBTQ community when he finishes school.

Justin Deal
Cleveland State Community College
Cleveland, Tenn. — Pre-Nursing

He/Him/His

Justin Deal is from Copperhill, Tenn. He is an incoming sophomore at Cleveland State Community College. Justin takes part of many aspects of the college; he is an honors student, serving as the 2017-18 Student Senate president, and is a member of many clubs. As someone who has taken great interest in extracurricular activities, Justin utilizes his leadership skills to help recruit new students into different organizations, including the newly introduced Allies program at CSCC. After receiving an associate degree, he plans to transfer to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and major in nursing.

Kevin Canton Mancia
Santa Monica College
Santa Monica, Calif. — Mathematics

He/Him/His

Kevin Canton Mancia was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and was raised in the small town of Quezaltepeque. Six months after his birth, his parents departed his home country for America, leaving Kevin under the care of his paternal grandparents. Little did he know that at 6 years old, he would reunite with his parents in Los Angeles,  which would prove to be a critical turning point in his life. Learning a whole new language and culture proved difficult as Kevin was forced to adapt quickly to his new environment. Despite these challenges, Kevin’s persistence and passion for learning allowed him to pick up English quickly and excel academically. In addition to growing up in America as an immigrant and a person of color, Kevin would also come to terms with his sexuality as a teenager. After coming out in the summer of 2015, Kevin began to look for ways to contribute to the LGBTQ community. When he started college, Kevin along with some friends founded Santa Monica College’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance. Since then, Kevin has been a proud member and has helped provide a safe and welcoming environment for LGBTQ students through his involvement as a club officer and as a commissioner in student government. As Kevin pursues his undergraduate degree in mathematics, he hopes to ultimately apply his degree in law, medicine, or academia while continuing to give back to his LGBTQ, immigrant, and Latinx communities.

Barovier Kevin Allybose
Norwalk Community College
Norwalk, Conn. — Liberal Arts

He/Him/His

Barovier Kevin Allybose (“Kevin”) migrated from Jamaica, where he was born, to the United States in December 2014. He has since been seeking asylum in the United States, the country he now calls home, due to homophobic persecution in Jamaica. Having lived experience of homelessness, he now dedicates a lot of his time to work with LGBT youth who have been in similar situations, particularly in areas of mental health and homelessness. He plays an active role in the social life at his local LGBT center, Triangle Community Center, where he also volunteers at different fundraising events.

Kevin enrolled at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut in the fall of 2016 as a full-time student. Though he is also working full time, Kevin plans to complete his second and final year at Norwalk Community College in the spring of 2018. His hard work and dedication have earned him honors status at the school. Kevin plans to complete a bachelor’s degree in economics and then pursue a career in a field related to his degree.

Lucas Dickerson
Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College
Perkinston, Miss. — Art

He/Him/His

Lucas Dickerson was born in Hattiesburg, Miss., and raised in various southern states. He grew up with his dad and sister and at age 16 decided he would be happiest living as a transgender male. Although living as a gay, transgender man in the southernmost area of Mississippi proves to be a challenge, he strives to enjoy his new life. Lucas is attending Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College and hopes one day to teach digital arts at a college level. After finishing school, he plans to be politically active to help bring equality to LGBTQ people, as well as provide awareness and resources to those who live in poverty.

McKenna Palmer
Santa Monica College
Santa Monica, Calif. — Gender Studies

She/Her/Hers

At just 20 years old, McKenna Palmer already has extensive experience advocating for the LGBTQ community. McKenna came out in high school and promptly became president of her school's GSA There she witnessed the sometimes-horrific struggles that today's queer youth encounter. She made it her life mission from there on to advocate for LGTBQ youth and began an internship at the It Gets Better Project. That affiliation has helped her become an internet personality. She has interviewed drag queens and LGBTQ activists, and even covered the red carpet at Buzzfeed’s first Queer Prom. McKenna plans to use her public speaking skills to be a voice of empowerment for LGBTQ youth and minorities.

Nia Clark
Los Angeles City College
Los Angeles — Communications

She/Her/Hers

As a transgender youth of color who spent most of her childhood in foster care, Nia Clark consistently struggled to find acceptance and support from the adults around her. While most would understandably distance themselves from such rejection and intolerance, Nia has spent over a decade changing the system from within as a child welfare professional and LGBTQ youth advocate. Nia currently works at LifeWorks, the youth development and mentorship program at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. As mentoring coordinator, she is responsible for overseeing more than 50 active one-on-one mentorship matches between LGBTQ youth and adults each year. She is also a part-time trainer for the Human Rights Campaign's All Children - All Families Project, an initiative that provides a framework for child welfare agencies to achieve safety, permanency, and well-being by improving their practice with queer youth.

Thoroughly impressed by Clark’s hard work and extensive background in child welfare, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA) enlisted her help in launching a two-year national pilot project to provide more inclusive mentoring services and resources for LGBTQ youth by using the best practices of Nia’s own mentoring program. To date, she has trained BBBSA sites in Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Diego, as well as the national headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Nia is a communications major at Los Angeles City College. She eventually plans to obtain her MSW and become a social work professor so she can continue teaching adults to affirm and support LGBTQ youth in systems of care.

Nina Lockshin
Diablo Valley College
Pleasant Hill, Calif. — Sociology

She/Her/Hers

Nina Lockshin is a young professional artist who loves to engage in the fine arts, musical composition, and filmmaking. She has a goal of becoming a college professor and a sound editor for film. She is the first on her maternal side to attend college and considers herself a representative of the potential of her ancestors and family that were held back due to finances, prejudice, and immigration statuses. Nina currently attends Diablo Valley Community College in the Bay Area, with hopes of transferring to Mills College for women in Oakland. She is a strong activist in the LGBT+ community, having worked for the HRC and other political groups. She is an out and proud queer woman of color and strives every day to break the societal boundaries around her.

Preston Shatwell
Rogers State University
Claremore, Okla. — Marketing

He/Him/His

Preston Shatwell is a native Oklahoman, born and raised in Tulsa. Preston is a first-generation college student attending Rogers State University, where he is seeking a business marketing degree. He plans to use the professional skills gained to advance causes of great importance to him. Growing up in a conservative state, still considered hostile to the LGBTQ+ community, Preston experienced marginalization and discrimination throughout his upbringing. He uses every experience, negative or otherwise, to inspire his work for better opportunities for future LGBTQ+ generations. Preston leads the longest-running intercollegiate legislature in the country working to promote political efficacy and leadership in college students around Oklahoma. He serves as chair of the National College Democrats of America’s LGBTQ+ Caucus and works to elect progressive candidates to the Oklahoma legislature. Preston is committed to being part of the progress for the LGBTQ+ community and wants to share the same love, support, and empowerment Point Foundations gives him with the LGBTQ+ community.

Robert Darkwood
Fullerton College
Fullerton, Calif. — Pre-Nursing

He/Him/His

Robert Darkwood is an undergraduate student at Fullerton College with a passion for nursing and an interest in law. The resilience of overcoming an impoverished childhood that included alcohol/drug domestic violence has inspired him to study human health, as well as explore the impact of emergency medicine volunteers in communities overwhelmed by natural disasters. Robert has held internships in medical/surgical care and student health outreach, cofacilitating blood drives with the American Red Cross, and received a 2017 Exemplary Service Award from Community Outreach Education and Prevention Health Scholars. He represents the 24,000 students of Fullerton College in various, important student government committees as well as the community service-based honor society Alpha Gamma Sigma.  He was chosen to receive the 2017 Associated Students Senator of the Year Award and 2017 Gay and Lesbian Association of District Employees scholarship for the North Orange County Community College District. Robert dreams of applying his strong resolve to help solve health problems. He would like to earn nursing and law degrees to improve health care policies with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Sergio Tundo
Harry S. Truman College
Chicago — Pre-Nursing

They/Them/Their

Sergio Tundo was born in Wayne, N.J.. They went to college for a year before deciding to take some time off. Sergio devoted two years working as an AmeriCorps member, first doing disaster relief and then HIV prevention outreach in Chicago. They also previously worked with the Global Network of Sex Work Projects as a regional coordinator, engaging with current and former sex workers on stigma they face when receiving care for HIV and STI testing and treatment. Sergio is currently a program coordinator for an HIV program in Chicago and is in school working toward their degree in nursing. Sergio’s aim is to complete their degree program and go on to improve LGBTQ+ community health care.

Stevan Perea
Santa Monica College
Santa Monica, Calif. — Political Science

He/Him/Has

Stevan Perea was raised in the San Francisco Bay area, but he currently resides in Santa Monica, where he is a political science major at Santa Monica College. He is a member of Alpha Gamma Sigma Honor Society and Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society as well as a Presidents’ Ambassador. Additionally, Stevan is a youth education advocate at the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center where he is a mentor and tutor to at-risk youth. Stevan is passionate about providing support and encouragement to those with limited options and he is driven to assist at-risk and homeless youth build a better and brighter future through education and academic achievement. Stevan is deeply fascinated with the workings of the American government and public policy and plans to attend graduate school for a dual JD/MBA.

Tomás Castillo Bukakis
College of the Canyons, Santa Clarita, Calif.
Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, Calif. — Film

He/Him/His

A native of Costa Rica, Tomás Bukakis was at age 17 lost, alone, and forgotten in the “foreign” land of the United States; a place where he never intended to end up. He spoke no English, didn’t know his rights, and hardly had any. He couldn’t legally work or enroll in school. For months he was homeless, living on the streets and moving between many shelters until he landed in a transitional living program at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. During this time he managed to learn English by carefully listening to others speak, by reading every piece of literature he could lay his hands on, and by watching every episode of How I Met Your Mother. In 2015 he became a legal permanent resident of the United States. He put himself through school by working several jobs. Today, Tomás is well on his way to completing a film degree at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., where he has become a member of the student government by being voted the cultural coordinator for the student body. He continues to improve his English and is also studying Chinese. His second major is communications. He hopes to take his communication studies into an international relations major and to apply that knowledge to the media and entertainment businesses. Tomás is an active member of Hollywood’s LGBTQ community. He is involved in causes that include HIV awareness, human trafficking, Native American, and immigration issues.

Tremaine “Trey” Jones
Miami Dade College
Miami — Social Work

He/Him/His

Tremaine “Trey” Jones is a native of Miami. Trey identifies as an Afro-Bahamian American queer and prefers masculine pronouns. As early as age 5 he recognized his queerness. However, due to his Catholic and Episcopalian background and Bahamian heritage, he believed that exploring his queerness was not a possibility. However, due to his supportive mother and sister, Trey has been able to expand his thinking and explore queerness. After graduating high school, he organized an effort to end the criminalization of youth of color in Miami with Power U Center for Social Change. Soon after, he was introduced to Pridelines, an LGBTQ organization in Miami. Over the years Trey took on various roles at Pridelines. After Trey’s transition out of Pridelines’ youth programs he continued to be involved with organizations to provide support groups for LGBTQ youth in shelters, coordinated events for gay, bisexual, and queer men of color, and co-created a summer long social justice leadership institute for youth. In 2017 Trey became the community relations manager at Pridelines.

Trey is a past board member for the Alliance for GLBTQ Youth, has been a part of the Miami-Dade Department of Health’s Miami Collaborative, PrEP Workgroup, and Black Health Initiative, has facilitated workshops at the United States Conference on AIDS, and has been nominated for HIV counselor of the Year by the Florida Department of Health. In 2016 Trey created and was chair of South Florida’s first intergenerational conference focusing on HIV and its impact on the community. In his free time Trey enjoys taking care of his godson, Michael, in-line skating and practicing the Afro-Brazilian martial art of Capoeira.

On the two-year anniversary of the Obergefell ruling that sent marriage equality nationwide, the Supreme Court ruled today that Arkansas can’t stop same-sex couples from being listed on birth certificates.

Arkansas had tried to undercut the high court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling issued on June 26, 2015 by claiming that birth certificates can list only biological parents. Meanwhile, birth certificates for straight couples list a mother’s male spouse, even if that man is not the biological father.

The Arkansas Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the state, which had hoped to learn today whether the court would hear an appeal by the same-sex couples, referred to as Pavan v. Smith. Instead, the justices issued a summary ruling even without hearing oral arguments.  

“As this Court explained in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Constitution entitles same-sex couples to civil marriage ‘on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples,’” the court ruled. The justices seemed perturbed that the Arkansas Supreme Court had ignored the particulars of the Obergefell ruling, and they citied their own decision repeatedly.

“Indeed, in listing those terms and conditions—the 'rights, benefits, and responsibilities' to which same-sex couples, no less than opposite-sex couples, must have access — we expressly identified ‘birth and death certificates,’” they wrote of their Obergefell decision.

Basically, Arkansas must treat same-sex couples the same as it does straight couples, the court ruled.

“The Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision, we conclude, denied married same-sex couples access to the 'constellation of benefits that the State has linked to marriage,'” the justices wrote. “As already explained, when a married woman in Arkansas conceives a child by means of artificial insemination, the State will — indeed, must — list the name of her male spouse on the child’s birth certificate. And yet state law, as interpreted by the court below, allows Arkansas officials in those very same circumstances to omit a married woman’s female spouse from her child’s birth certificate. As a result, same-sex parents in Arkansas lack the same right as opposite-sex parents to be listed on a child’s birth certificate, a document often used for important transactions like making medical decisions for a child or enrolling a child in school.”

The decision was unsigned but Justice John Roberts, who dissented in Obergefell, did not join in the dissent on this ruling. Instead, the dissent was written by Neil Gorsuch, who was joined by Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. 

Supreme Court Tells Arkansas It Must List Same-Sex Couples on Birth Certificates

* Article updated July 5 to clarify Meyers' prior relationships. 

From the outside looking in, Nico Tortorella doesn’t seem all that different from the straight cisgender character he plays on the sweetly addictive hit comedy Younger, which had its fourth-season premiere in June. From Sex and the City creator Darren Star, Younger began as a rom-com that follows a middle-aged woman (pretending to be a 20-something) who falls for a man in his 20s (Tortorella). TV Land has already renewed Younger for a fifth season, ensuring the show (and Tortorella’s reign as one of TV’s hottest men) lasts at least through 2018. And as the show has grown, so too has Tortorella’s public openness.

There’s no doubt Tortorella is leading man material — tall, beefy, and what my Latino grandmother used to describe as “a very nice-looking white man.” But once he starts talking about love and defying the gender binary, having sex with men, and how he “would give it all up, everything in my life, to be able to carry a child myself,” you get the sense that this is a very different kind of Hollywood star.

Tortorella is also the guy behind the super popular podcast TheLove Bomb, now in season 2, where each week he interviews one of the many, many people he loves. He’s committed to shaking up norms around gender and sexuality. His decade-long polyamorous romantic partnership with Bethany Meyers, a fitness and lifestyle entrepreneur (who identifies as gay) is proof. It’s a different kind of queer relationship, they admit, one that is thoroughly open and modern and enduring.

“There are those pockets of the world, in so many places, that ‘gay’ just doesn’t exist, where there’s no representation,” Tortorella says, speaking of a gay man who escaped North Korea and discovered that gay people exist elsewhere. “And it’s not that different than the representation that existed in Hollywood for the last hundred years. … There’s like one love story and it’s between a white man and a white woman.”

Tortorella — who has been described as queer, bisexual, demisexual, and sexually fluid — and Meyers, who usually dates women and identifies as gay — are open with each other and the public about their romantic relationships with other people. They may defy labels, but Tortorella is absolutely fine if you want to give him one.

“I think for so long there’s been like one quote-unquote normal way of life,” he says. “And anybody that doesn’t live in that structure needs to find a home of sorts. And I think labels are really important for kids, especially, [who] can’t find their tribe where they are, and need to go find their people, their family. For that reason, I think labels are extremely important.”

An increasingly staunch and vocal LGBT advocate, Tortorella may have initially gotten ribbed as a closet case, but there’s no closet large enough to hide his emotional sophistication and unbridled sexuality. Just as the actor is very different from the dashing men he played in The Following and Odd Thomas (and the recent Menendez: Blood Brothers with Courtney Love), fitness guru and former pro cheerleader Meyers is far from a stereotypical cuckolded girlfriend of a rising star.

Tortorella and Meyers have been in love for over a decade, and their relationship seemingly has but one rule: to love each other. Boundaries are more or less nonexistent when it comes to having additional relationships outside their own. It’s an idea founded on trust, and a notion that has yet to be fully understood across the cultural mind-set. Even they don’t have a word to describe it, except for possibly being “witnesses” to each other.

It’s this idea of love that inspired Tortorella’s The Love Bomb, in which he explores love and the labels attached to it.

His first guest, and arguably the most important, was Meyers.

The first episode sparked a much-needed dialogue on what it means to be part of a polyamorous arrangement as well as the fluidity of love and sex.

“I think the way I use the word fluidity is like fluid in everything, fluid in train of thought; not this, not that; beyond definition. It doesn’t always have to be one thing,” he explains. “The one thing anybody can talk about, no matter race, religion, sexuality or gender, is love. Everyone has some sort of explanation, feeling, memory, backstory, or idea of love. The most magical thing about [The Love Bomb] has been no matter where you come from in the world, no matter who you’re sleeping with, or who you’re in love with, the last question I always ask is: ‘What is love?’ And for the most part, they all sound exactly the same.”

Polyamorous relationships have been around for centuries, yet it’s only now that people are becoming less afraid to speak openly about them. Tortorella and Meyers's relationship is 11 years in the making and survives on what they refer to as a “day by day” pace, knowing that no matter what happens they’re always going to be in each other’s life. As Tortorella explains, this type of trust needs to be sealed before exploring such nonconventional avenues. It doesn’t happen at the beginning: “It’s not like you can jump on Tinder and look for a Nico or Bethany,” he says.

Meyers also admits that due to a lack of examples of similar relationships, she had to teach herself how to navigate the rules. “I think we’re raised with this idea that you’re supposed to go and find ‘the one,’ especially women,” she explains. “You’re looking for your Prince Charming. You need to be proposed to. There’s this one person you’re searching to find, so the idea of finding a stability partner, and having other things on top of that, feels too messy. Then the dating apps make sense because now it’s easier to find ‘the one.’ You can swipe back and forth. You can do a preliminary screening. It’s [like] a business tool.”

Though Tortorella and Meyers fight to live their truth beyond labels, they understand the world’s necessity for words. Identifying as “more of a pansexual,” Tortorella embraces calling himself bisexual to help battle bi erasure. “I can be emotionally, physically attracted to men. I can be emotionally,  physically attracted to women. The ‘B’ in LGBTQ-plus has been fought for, for so long. I’m not going to be the person that’s like, ‘No, I need a ‘P,’ I need another letter!’ I stand by people that have paved this way for somebody like me."

He says he originally thought "the term bisexual very much so lives in the binary of gender, and which I don’t believe in." Most bi activists argue bisexual simply means attraction to your own and other genders.

"I believe in the spectrum, the full universe of gender and sexuality, and probably I fall more into the pansexual fluid terms which fall into the umbrella of bisexual in LGBTQ-plus," Tortorella says. "I think when I was first having this conversation, I didn’t like the term bisexual because I think it was a little dated for this generation; people weren’t using it. It kind of puts people into this box. [But] I respect the term bisexual. I use it because I respect it.”

Meyers identifies as gay (“I know more women who call themselves gay than they call themselves lesbian,” she admits), but also embraces the queer label. She says Tortorella is the only man she can imagine having a relationship with.

Love and sex, says Tortorella, are just two different things, though Meyers’s family tends to disagree.

“That was the hardest thing about coming out to my family,” Meyers recalls. “When I did it, I broke up with my girlfriend and then decided to come out. So because I wasn’t in a relationship, it was like, ‘I don’t want to know what you’re sleeping with.’ They didn’t talk to me for a long time, this is years in the making of things, but that’s when I was like maybe I should have done this when I had a girlfriend, just to feel validated. It’s so annoying that in your sexual preference that a relationship needs to make you feel validated.”

Tortorella agrees, adding that nobody imagines straight couples, like Meyers’s brother and sister-in-law, having sex; but if the person is queer, it’s a different story.

“No one thinks about them fucking,” he says. “But the second I tell them I’m dating a dude, the first thing he thinks about is my dick in his ass. It’s disgusting. Like what the fuck is wrong with you that that’s what you’re thinking?”

“Whereas you’re not like, ‘Oh, you guys are getting married?’I bet he’s going to stick his penis in her vagina,” Meyers jokes.

Tortorella says, “We need to get our head out of that place. I really think that that’s the biggest harm that we have done. Even the word ‘sexuality.’ What’s your ‘sexuality?’ It shouldn’t even be about sex. Sex is a by-product.”

Despite Tortorella and Meyers’s understanding that jealousy is part of being human, for them it’s different. In fact, they told me they never get jealous when the other is dating someone of the same sex, like Tortorella’s highly public relationship with Los Angeles-based hairstylist and Instagram star Kyle Krieger. It’s only when they’re dating someone of the opposite sex that jealousy intervenes, mainly because there’s a chance of having a child, and they both desperately want to have a baby together.

“I really want to be pregnant,” she says. She plans on freezing her eggs in the next few years.

Tortorella turns to her and adds, “I think if you’re dating another woman and you talk about adopting a kid, or using [my semen] to have a kid, outside of us, yeah, I totally can get behind that. But the thought of you getting pregnant from another dude that you were dating, I don’t know, it hurts in a different way.”

When the first episode of The Love Bomb was recorded, Tortorella was in a relationship with another woman. He starts off the first episode with a poem he wrote: “This isn’t selfish, it’s free. I’m not gay. I’m not straight. I’m me.” Ultimately, he admits, that relationship crumbled because there was no space for him and Meyers in it, though he thought (or hoped) there would be.

The love they have is evident in their charged glances, which have likely gone unchanged since the night they first met at a college party in Chicago. It was their confidence that drew each other at first. From there, they were on and off again for years, never actually breaking up officially (though he attempted a half-ass breakup when they started dating, it lasted only seconds).

It was at the beginning of Tortorella and Meyers’s relationship when they realized their love didn’t need to be sanctioned with names or labels. Even when they lived together as a couple in Los Angeles, they never called each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.” (“We’re family,” Tortorella says.) That was when, they both admit, they knew their relationship was something much more evolved, much more enlightened, and much more real. They credit meeting each other with finding their destinies in life. After all, it was Tortorella who introduced Meyers to yoga. Now she’s one of the preeminent fitness influencers, known more for her gorgeously tattooed and butchy beautiful body than her relationship. Soon, she’ll be launching a new fitness at-home app designed for women called Be.Come.

“Labels can be very frustrating,” Meyers says. “They’re evolving because people always make new words. Part of me wants to say we’re going to move to a label-less society, but I don’t know. Maybe [in the future] we’ll just have more words.”

Admittedly, Tortorella and Meyers are still inventing the constructs of their relationship, and labels are the least of their struggles. The duo don’t live together. (“We live together great but we live better separately,” he says.) The biggest hurdle, thus far, is other people.

“I tried to create a relationship along these lines with other people I’ve dated,” she says. “We’re still figuring it out.”

“We’re still figuring out the best way we can bring other people into our relationship,” he agrees. “I think we’re in the best place now [that] we’ve ever been, but we’re definitely still on an amateur level.” Then he urges, “If anybody is reading this and wants to give us some advice, and has been living this way for a long time, seriously, we’re sponges! We’re so down to hear stories because these stories aren’t told often.”

The truth is Tortorella and Meyers know their relationship is a threat to others. “[Past partners] didn’t fully realize and understand who we are and what we mean to each other,” Tortorella admits. “Like, ‘OK, you have Bethany, [but] where do I fit into the puzzle?’ ‘Am I ever going to be as important as Bethany is?’ And what’s the answer to that? How do I best answer that question?”

“So many people have this idea that if you can love this, you cannot love this,” she adds. “And I don’t understand, because I do. I can have feelings for two people. There are different kinds of feelings, they fulfill different needs. I don’t find it very realistic to think that I’m going to get everything I need out of Nico.”

Despite the depth of their love, they share this notion: It’s impossible to get everything they need — nurturing, care, support, sex — from the other person alone. For example, Meyers makes it clear Tortorella is the person she goes to when she needs a dose of encouragement, but not necessarily the person to whom she’ll spill her guts when she needs a good venting session. She can find that elsewhere. And that’s OK with him.

Their sexual needs exist along the same lines. Tortorella says he’d rather wait to have sex until the love blossoms in a relationship, while Meyers has no qualms about her love of casual sex. The best part is, despite their contrasting approaches, their goals are ultimately the same: to reach empowerment, fulfillment, and satisfaction. So what if they happen to take different avenues to get there?

“For me, sex is such an explosive exchange of energy between two people that if you’re not connected, energetically, before you have sex, it can be damaging,” Tortorella says about the rising hookup culture on apps like Grindr and Tinder. “If you open yourself up to somebody on that level it can be damaging to yourself and damaging for the other person if there isn’t trust there. … That being said, I totally understand people who want to have casual sex. I think what you have to do in this scenario is stay in your lane. Find people who want similar things — physically, energetically, and emotionally. If some dude wants to fuck this girl but she wants to do something else, that can be an issue.”

Meyers, who was raised in an ultra conservative Christian family, has a different opinion: “I think sex can be really fun and really empowering. I think for someone who’s raised in a culture where sex is so bad and you can’t orgasm… I find a lot of empowerment. And I do think there’s a lot of responsibility to be up front and honest. I’m proud that as I’ve aged, I have been [honest]. I think women haven’t gotten to feel super empowered with sex for a very long time.”

In spite of what Tortorella’s Instagram photos may suggest, he is quick to say that, at 29, he too is still trying to discover his own empowerment when it comes to sex.

“I don’t think I’ve hit my sexual prime at all,” he confirms. “As sacred as I look about sexuality, I’m so obsessed and passionate about learning more about sexuality. I’ve been talking about making The Love Bomb into a TV show and what it would be like. Right now, what it looks like is me going into the field and looking at all sorts of different types of sexuality and energy connections with people so I can get a better understanding. I don’t think I know enough, I don’t think I feel enough, and I don’t think the world knows enough of it.”

They’re both still learning how to navigate this brave new world, they admit. But as a Hollywood leading man, one of the most valuable lessons Tortorella has learned was about his responsibility now that he has this place in history. He’s one of the first actors who plays a straight leading man and love interest on TV to come out as bisexual. It was an epiphany that came two years ago after becoming sober.

“In the last 50 years … for somebody like me, that plays more of the leading man role, there has been an unwritten set of rules that exist,” he says, arguing that gay and bi actors have been limited in what TV producers have allowed them to do. “To be honest, I think when I got sober two and a half years ago, I took a look at my life, and what I represented in Hollywood. And what I wanted to represent outside of Hollywood. I [decided] there’s no room to not be myself in all of this. If people are going to be having a conversation [about my sexuality] for whatever reason, if that’s even a possibility, I’m going to be the one leading the conversation. If there were somebody when I was growing up talking like we’re talking, things would’ve made so much more fucking sense.”

He thinks kids today can eschew labels because LGBT leaders have been so successful at making a place in the world for them. He can talk about this for hours he says, but insists, “I think that if we all just saw each other for people and individuals and didn’t try to give each other these [labels], the world would be such a more beautiful place. There would be so much more love if we just saw each other. As much as I love getting worked up in these conversations, imagine how much energy we’d save if we weren’t having them, if it didn’t exist, if we were all just people and we could love [who] we wanted and it wasn’t an issue. Granted, is that some utopian idea? Yeah, sure, but what if? What if we allowed ourselves to just be ‘me?’”

Love makes afamily, the saying goes, but — as LGBT parents quickly discover — love isn’t enough: money plays a central role as well. From family creation to securing legal ties and finding welcoming schools, parents and prospective parents may face additional, unique financial obstacles because they are LGBT.

It’s not all dollar signs either. Costs may also come in terms of time and other trade-offs. Lack of family support and an unfriendly political climate can add to the challenges. Balancing financial, emotional, and time-management needs can require a combination of frugality, creativity, and luck.

Getting Pregnant

Infertility can be costly for anyone, but it can hit queer families particularly hard. Most insurance companies will not pay for fertility treatments until after a certain number of failed attempts to have a child without it. For different-sex, cisgender couples, that simply means having unprotected vaginal intercourse.

For individuals or couples who only have uteruses, however, this means inseminating at a medical clinic, explained Liz Coolidge, a family and parenting services coordinator at Fenway Health in Boston. Costs vary depending on the clinic, but Fenway charges an initial fee of $300 plus $250 for each standard insemination. Unless the person or couple is using donated sperm, they must also buy a sample at an additional $400 to $1,000 per vial, plus $200 for the cryogenic shipping.

Even with an infertility diagnosis, infertility coverage is only mandated in 15 states, and the specifics of what (and who) is covered vary, according to Resolve, the National Infertility Association. In 2016, four lesbians filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state of New Jersey over a mandate that women demonstrate infertility through “two years of unprotected sexual intercourse” before treatments are covered. In response, Gov. Chris Christie signed a law this spring that requires infertility treatments be covered for parents of any sexual orientation.

Two New York bills are pending that would mandate infertility coverage “regardless of [the] sexual orientation, marital status, or gender identity” of the insured. Hawaii has a similar bill. Since 2013, California has required equal coverage for LGBT prospective parents; while Maryland requires insurers provide married same-sex couples the same benefits provided their heterosexual counterparts.

The costs of infertility can quickly add up. “We definitely live paycheck to paycheck,” said Nicole, a high school English teacher. She and her wife, Bethany, a child development specialist, live in San Diego with their 1-year-old son, who they had after a long battle with infertility. They own a home, but have no savings.

The couple first tried to get Nicole pregnant at a clinic through intrauterine insemination, which has a better success rate than intracervical inseminations (the “turkey baster” method typically done at home with a syringe). After multiple failed attempts at $2,000 a pop, they discovered Nicole’s fallopian tubes were blocked. They switched to in vitro fertilization, where the eggs are taken out and fertilized in the lab before being placed in the uterus. Their plan was to use Nicole’s eggs and have Bethany carry them. The cost of IVF in San Diego was over $17,000 per attempt. Their insurance only covered medication. The couple took out a loan and got creative: they rented a house in Colorado Springs, where a clinic offered the same procedure for $10,000. Bethany got pregnant on the first try.

They’d like to have another child, but, “financially, right now, we can’t afford to,” Bethany said. Nicole and Bethany have also been unable to afford the legal protections of a second-parent adoption and a termination-of-rights document from the donor, which they said would cost about $3,000. Instead they drew up their own document for the donor, based on online examples. Both of their names are on their son’s birth certificate, but — after the election — they’ve started worrying they need the added strength of a legal adoption.

“At some point we were literally broke,” said Katrina, who faced infertility issues with her wife Tiffany. The couple, who produce the video blog Two Mommies and a Blessing, live in upstate New York where Katrina works part-time as a counselor and Tiffany is a police detective.

When Tiffany and Katrina started their journey to parenthood in 2007, Katrina said, “Tiffany was barely making $900 a month, our rent was $600, and we had one car that always had issues.” Katrina was unemployed, unable to keep a job while taking off so much time to see specialists.

The couple initially chose IUI because it was what their insurance covered. They elected an open donor (one who allows contact once the child turns 18) “because it was cheaper.” Tiffany’s insurance paid for 75 percent of the procedure, but not the sperm or medications. They tried four times without success, paying about $7,000 in total.

They took a year off, then tried again with a new clinic and new donor. In the meantime, Katrina had been diagnosed with only one working fallopian tube, and their insurance now covered IVF and most of the medications. “That was a huge relief,” Katrina said. They had also managed to save the $2,300 out of pocket for sperm, medications, and co-payments.

Still, “money was always a worry,” Katrina admitted, but added, “We desperately wanted to have a child of our own, so we would have sacrificed even more if we did not get pregnant.” Luckily, they did, and their son is now 7.

New Yorkers Chelsea and Chris, who publish the video blog LBC Party of Five, bore the cost of infertility treatments while raising two special-needs children, who Chelsea had from a previous marriage. Chris works in law enforcement and Chelsea is a paralegal. Chelsea conceived her first two children easily, but tried unsuccessfully for two years to have a third, with four rounds of IUI costing about $5,500. Chelsea also went through two surgeries for endometriosis, a condition of the uterus lining that can contribute to infertility.

Chelsea and Chris went to a different clinic and were advised to try IVF, “which scared us solely because of the costs involved,” Chris said. They took out a personal loan to buy supplemental insurance, which covered two IVF cycles, but not the medicines
or sperm, which added $5,600. Still, they managed to get pregnant.

After they had their third child, Chris came out as transgender, which had financial implications for them as well. He explained, “I opted for a more expensive insurance plan to ensure that hormone replacement therapy and any related surgery would be at a minimal out-of-pocket cost.”

Sometimes, misinformation about LGBT people can also add costs. Tom*, a transgender man who works in digital publishing in New York, recalled trying to conceive with his then-partner, a cisgender woman. They tried multiple times with sperm banks and a nurse friend helping them do IUI at home.

“Late in the game” they discovered their insurance would cover pre-conception testing, even though they were queer. Through testing they learned Tom’s partner, “the one into whom most of the expensive bank sperm went,” was “100-percent infertile.” Tom ultimately got pregnant with their fourth donor. The couple is now separated and sharing custody of their 7-year-old.

Foster Parenting and Public Adoption

Private-agency adoptions in the U.S. cost $20,000 to $45,000, while intercountry (or international) adoptions can run even higher, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But adopting through the foster care system is, in some places, mostly cost free.

Heron, a lawyer and senior policy analyst at an LGBT think tank, is a bisexual woman partnered with a cisgender man. They live in the “incredibly expensive” Boston area. They first “tried for a womb baby,” but when that didn’t work, “it made sense to think about adopting publicly” because they couldn’t afford to go private.

“A year since our kiddo joined our family, we’ve been able to buy a house with our long-term savings, but only because we did not have adoption fees,” Heron said.

Children who have been in state care often get health insurance, a monthly stipend, and — in some states — free tuition at state colleges and universities. Heron explained, “These incredible benefits have truly allowed us to focus our energy and money on making sure kiddo can grow up as healthy and safe as possible.”

Gay dads Loch and Phillip, who now live in Tennessee but foster-adopted their children in California, chose to foster-parent because Loch had been in foster care himself and Phillip was raised by a missionary on a hospital ship, where he “witnessed great need.”

The couple said going public had unanticipated costs associated with it. “The major cost was time,” noted Loch. “With weeks of training, county and state inspections, interviews, and more.” After a placement, “You have social worker visits, visits with the bio parents — one or both — separate therapy visits — emotional, physical, occupational, educational — numerous doctors’ appointments, and court appearances.” Additionally, as a foster parent, “you don’t have as much flexibility with schedule” and can’t make decisions for the child that a full legal guardian could.

Regardless, Loch calls foster parenting “the best decision we ever made because we now have a beautiful 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter.”

The family recently moved to Tennessee largely so their biracial children could be near “their own racially diverse, extended family.” And yet their kids are among the few children of color at their schools. “The kids have come home with more questions about skin color and why they look different from us,” Loch said.

Concerns about race raised financial issues, too. Their daughter’s preschool “has a lot of racial diversity amongst the staff” and a good curriculum, so even though it is “a little more expensive than the average” and “required us to look at our budget,” they feel it’s worth it.

With their son, they assumed he would attend a new school being built near them, but the building was delayed, and it looked like he’d have to move to an unwelcoming school. Homeschooling or private school weren’t options because they “would’ve put an undue strain on us economically.” Luckily, the couple got approval for their son to stay in his current school until the new one is ready. “But being a same-gender household nearly led us to having to restructure our whole financial existence so that our son could go to an open-minded school,” Loch acknowledged.

Divorce and Transphobia

Not all the financial difficulties LGBT parents face come from forming a family: some come from the dissolution of one. Meghan, a transgender woman, went through two divorces that have left her financially challenged. An executive at a software company, she said she is now “living month to month.” She had a child with her first wife, but when she transitioned — in a conservative area of Texas — she lost her family. The costly divorce took seven years to finalize. Meghan provided alimony and child support until their child was 18, and covered college rooming fees.

She and her second spouse had a daughter together via a known donor. The two women separated two years ago, and they are currently going through divorce. They share custody. Meghan is paying approximately $1,500 per month in child support and trying to enact a second-parent adoption, which they hadn’t done earlier. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can get legally protected today,” she advised. “Plan for the down times and the changes.”

For the second-parent adoption Meghan is paying about $10,000 in legal fees and $1,500 for the home study and background check required in Texas.The cost isn’t just financial, Meghan said, pointing to the stress and invasiveness of the process and the probing questions about her own childhood and being trans.

She worries about the potential for trans discrimination — in court and her life. “That’s one of the hard parts about being trans,” she admits.

Still, Meghan is committed to providing for her daughter and to making things work with her current partner, who has a 5-year-old son. “Whatever we do, it’s about the kids. It’s our sole purpose,” she said.

Before Beginning

The costs of building a family can begin long before it comes together. A transgender bisexual woman, Hannah is not yet a parent, but decided to bank her sperm before going on estrogen, “to protect my reproductive options in the future.” In contrast to those who get paid to donate sperm, the freelance writer, educator, advocate, and comedian who lives in New York has to pay for the costs of banking it herself. “Insurance covered absolutely none of this,” she said.

A certified emergency medical technician (although not employed as one), Hannah was able to find a cryobank that offered half-price discount to “first responders.” Opening the account and getting initial medical testing still cost about $2,000 at the discounted rate. She was charged $125 for each new “deposit.” She stopped after 13 vials. Storage was $500 per year, with discounts for multiple years — she was able to get 10 years for just $1,500. “I hope I will find a partner and stability by 2022, otherwise I will need to re-up my storage,” Hannah noted.

In order to cut up-front costs, she opted out of certain additional testing, but said, “I may have to do some expensive screening of the sperm upon thawing, to even be able to use it.”

There’s also no guarantee of success. She’s been told that “any given vial has about a 25 percent chance of taking” using ICI. As Nicole and Bethany learned, IVF has a higher success rate, but that comes at a price. “I have no idea when I will have a partner and that kind of money,” Hannah said. Nevertheless, “I am a lucky one who had some limited means, and was creative enough to shop around for this discount.”

But, she reflected, “I am not even sure if I will ever be able to afford to actually use [my own sperm]. [But] I am in way better shape than so many other trans people I know.”

Finding a Way

These stories of fiscal challenges and difficult trade-offs are fairly representative of most LGBT families. Single LGBT adults raising children are three times more likely to have incomes near the poverty line compared to non-LGBT ones. Married or partnered couples are twice as likely compared to their straight counterparts, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute. Even those with more assets than the average person may find the costs of starting and raising a family very difficult to manage. The parents here are making it work, but it can be challenging.

“I’ve cut back on a lot,” Meghan said. She drives a used truck with 300,000 miles on it.

While trying to start their family, Katrina noted, “We were so broke, with little support. Tiffany worked countless hours, we hardly went shopping.” She sees an upside to their frugality. “I think this made our relationship even stronger because we focused on our love and togetherness.”

Despite the challenges, Nicole advised other LGBT prospective parents, “Keep searching for options that you can make happen. It is more possible than you think.”

Chris and Chelsea added, “The highs will be high and the lows will be low, but when you look into the eyes of your child for the first time it makes it all worth it!”

DANA RUDOLPH is the founder and publisher of Mombian.com, a GLAAD Media Award-winning blog and resource directory for LGBT parents.

Editor’s note: Last names withheld for privacy . *Not his real name.

A sex-positive queer woman on the “mind-fuck” of being in what looks like a traditional (hetero) nuclear family. 

Lori Selke is anLGBT, fat, sex-positive activist and journalist who started her publishing career in the pages of early-’90s zines like Fat Girl and Black Sheets. She later co-curated “Perverts Put Out!,” the longest-running spoken-word series in San Francisco, and edited the famous lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs. She’s since authored and edited numerous books as well as writing for publications like Girlfriends, Curve, and SF Weekly. For many years her nontraditional, San Francisco Bay Area family consisted of three adults and two children (plus a cat). Now Selke, 46, and warehouse manager Guy Gayle, 48, who have been together 12 years (and legally wed last year) are raising twins, Simone and April, 8, in a postmodern way.

(RELATED: This Is What a Queer Family Looks Like)

You’ve had a nontraditional relationship for decades. Did that change with motherhood?
Not really. Guy and I are still polyamorous, although the kids take up most of our time — they’re totally our “primaries.” And I, at least, don’t have any regrets about that.

Have you ever needed to explain your family to others, especially as a mixed-race, poly family?
I often choose not to explain and let people either ask or make up their own stories about how our family fits together. I’ve talked to the kids about how to handle misplaced assumptions about their race and family makeup because I figure it’s coming sooner or later, but for the most part we’ve been lucky. We live in Oakland [Calif.] so our kids are often easily “clocked” as having parents of different races. I’ve sometimes had to remind people about the kids’ third parent — my now ex-husband and the kids’ legal, but not biological, father. I’m sure people wonder sometimes how he “fits.”

You’ve always claimed your space, self-identifying as a “dyke” even when you had a husband. How do you and Guy now identify?
Guy and I both ID as queer, which to us means explicitly rejecting heteronormative gender and relationship roles, from the division of housework to the assumption of monogamy. Parenting hasn’t changed that at all, though currently being in something that looks like a traditional nuclear family from the outside is definitely a bit of a mind-fuck.

Comic book power couple Amanda Deibert and Cat Staggs on Wonder Woman, geek culture, and making sure their daughter sees queer representation.

It’s easy to see how Cat Staggs and Amanda Deibert fell for each other, because we ended up nerd-crushing hard on the adorkable couple the minute we sat down to talk about their work as one of the creative teams behind DC’s new Wonder Woman series — Wonder Woman ’77.

As self-proclaimed super fans of the 1970s Wonder Woman television series starring Lynda Carter, Staggs and Deibert jumped at the chance to work with Marc Andreyko on the new print and digital series based on the iconic show.“It helps that my wife knew every scene and every episode,” jokes Staggs, a longtime illustrator for DC. “When they first announced the Batman ’66 [series], I remember telling my editors at DC, if you guys ever touch WonderWoman ’77, I want to be a part of that process, I don’t care what I have to do!”

Staggs’s enthusiasm for the project shows in her amazing imagery that really captures the mood of the old TV series, yet in a fresh, modern, female-empowering way (and the likeness of their Wonder Woman to Lynda Carter is uncanny). Deibert, a successful comedy writer for TV and web, who had recently also begun writing for DC, admits she was equally excited when asked to write some stories for Wonder Woman ‘77. “Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman from the ’70s? Uh, absolutely!” she says. “But the writer acknowledges feeling a little intimated too. “It’s like, oh yeah, the most iconic female superhero of all time, sure, no pressure.” But she says her attitude when sitting down to write was, “Let’s just do it and try to make a cool story and not think about the fact that everyone’s going to hate me if I ruin their childhood. I’m just basically writing episodes of the show that I would want to see.”

Deibert says another challenge was writing stories about a strong female character set in the 1970s. “With female empowerment being where it was at the time ... I wanted to acknowledge that things were progressing, but weren’t exactly great.” 

But pulling Wonder Woman from the real constraints facing the ’70s TV show freed up Deibert in other areas. “I get to make choices like, the alien — the monster — can also be female, and that when she gets teamed up with a double agent, that can also be a female character, which probably wouldn’t have happened in the actual show.”

Though it seems natural that these two amazing talents would work together, Staggs and Deibert say they were a couple before they started collaborating professionally. The first thing they worked on together was the hilariously true-to-life web comic strip Hot Mess, for the women-centric comedy site Comediva. Deibert admits Hot Mess was “just embarrassing stories from my life. I was writing other stuff for them and I kind of pitched the collaboration. I was like, well, hey, I write funny stuff, and my wife is this extremely talented illustrator — we could probably put that together!”

Since then, the pair has worked on numerous projects together, including a story titled “Brave” in the Love Is Love book — a huge collaborative comic book project from which all proceeds go to survivors and the families of those who died in last year’s devastating mass shooting in Orlando. “It’s over 300 creators between writers and artists. Everything was donated — the paper, the artwork, the writing, the printing, so all proceeds go to the families and the victims,” says Staggs. Edited by two other gay comic icons — Marc Andreyko and Phil Jimenez — Love Is Love not only topped The New York Times’ Graphic Books Best Sellers list earlier this year, it is now in its fourth printing.

“We immediately wanted to be a part of it, both as a lesbian couple that both work in comics, and because I grew up just outside of Orlando, so for me, it felt a little extra personal,” says Deibert. “For us, it was never a question of would we want to be involved.”

Deibert and Staggs have several exciting collaborations lined up. “We’re doing some more comic stuff, like John Carpenter’s Tales for Halloween Night,” says Deibert. “I’m also doing a story that Cat’s illustrating, in the anthology, The Secret Loves of Geek Girls [Volume Two]. That’s a cool one because it’s all love and sex and romance, but it’s all true, they’re all autobiographical.” 

“A very deeply nerdy child who read books all the time,” Deibert feels a special connection to geek culture. The story she is writing for Geek Girls“is about my coming-out process and how it ended up getting entwined with me being a fan of Harry Potter in kind of a weird way.”

These days Staggs and Deibert truly seem to be living their dreams, and their successes in their respective fields serve as wonderful inspiration for their latest collaboration, motherhood. Deibert says that she is more determined than ever “ to make sure that we’re creating more gay content, so that [our daughter] can see representations of her own family as she grows up. Because I still think that we are so underrepresented.”

Founders of San Diego's IndieFest, this bisexual couple faced down homophobia, discrimination, a seven year delay, and death itself in pursuit of family. 

Bisexual musicians Danielle LoPresti, 48, and Alicia Champion, 35, (who also identifies as nonbinary) became a couple the same year they launched San Diego’s IndieFest, a popular music fest that brings together LGBT and mainstream artists and fans.

Since 2004, IndieFest has grown from a small get together to one of San Diego’s premier events. While falling in love and putting on an annual festival, Champion and LoPresti were also dreaming of building their family. But it wouldn’t be until 2011 that their dreams began coming true. The couple, who married in 2014 and are now working on adopting a second child, share their story — and how it almost became a tragedy.

LoPresti: Once Alicia and I created IndieFest in 2004 and began the 10-year process of growing it, I felt like we became part of a San Diego family larger than anything we’d experienced before. It was beautiful, the way so many different people came together to stone-soup our way from one year to the next of celebrating the best of our communities. The closeness created over those years still informs our sense of what is possible when people join around a shared vision. What many people did not know was that for seven of those years, we were trying to adopt a child, something that had been a fantasy of mine since I was a kid. What we did not know was that we were walking a treacherous road — one filled with so many heartbreaks that I quite literally felt, those last two years, that I might not survive the process.

Champion: As a same-sex couple we ran into many hurdles not customary for heterosexual pairs. Because most countries — at the time — did not view us equally, I was irrelevant on paper. Danielle essentially applied for adoption as a single mother in every country we attempted — from Eastern Europe, Africa, Central America. Because of this, my financial information couldn’t be contributed to the household income requirements. We lived with a male housemate at the time, a dear friend of ours, whom I had to say on paper was my boyfriend to justify the three of us living under one roof on the applications. In the interviews, I had to vouch for Danielle’s ability to parent as a “friend,” not her partner, and I of course was never interviewed as a potential parent. It sucked.

LoPresti: We started looking internationally after a terrible experience I had with my first social worker at San Diego County adoptions, who actually told me I may never be seen fit to parent. After seven years of failed attempts and rejections, I felt like I was slowly dying of a broken heart. This feeling was actually the motivating force behind two decisions that eventually helped us break through the red tape that had been holding us back. First I found a free support group, though San Diego Youth Services, of adoptive parents. I will never forget the first day I went. When it was my turn to talk, I opened my mouth, began to cry, and asked for positive stories. I shared that for six years, all I’d been hearing was one sad, tragic, or negative thing after another. And I desperately needed to hear what I knew was out there — the happy stories of families being built. For over an hour one woman after another thrilled me with the most magnificent success stories of their kiddos and how their families came to be. These same women became mentors, angels, and the light at the end of a horribly long tunnel.

Next, in 2010, I went back to San Diego County Adoptions, reported what happened in my last experience, and asked to be assigned to someone different who would treat Alicia and I with respect. Once these two things happened, everything began to change for us. Now we could pursue adoption as a couple. Along with concurrent planning, we became part of the voluntary relinquishment program at San Diego County. We were told again and again that it could be years longer before we’d be matched. But finally, after only six more months, our luck changed, and Lucian was born into our lives.

Champion: This was also the first time both Danielle and I got to apply as a couple — as registered domestic partners, because Prop. 8 was in effect.

LoPresti: We named him Xander Lucian LoPresti-Champion, but call him “Lucian,” our light. To this day we maintain a close and loving relationship with his birth family. From the very first days of his life, Lucian began hearing his story. Adoption is celebrated in every way in our home. It’s the symbol of our worldview — family happens when love grows between beings. The presence or absence of blood ties have absolutely no bearing on what makes family for us. It’s love. It may sound like a gay Hallmark card, but the truth is, once you’ve lived this, you know with 100 percent surety that love does make a family. Magical, scary, transformative, boundary-busting love. And oh, my God, are we ever lucky to have finally found it.

Champion: We were on cloud nine for a long time, even with the sleep deprivation and hardship of learning how to be professional musicians within this new paradigm of motherhood. We gratefully thought that the worst was behind us, when Danielle developed a terrible cough. It lasted for a couple of months before she saw a doctor because we both just thought she was run down from the sleep deprivation. But then, on her birthday in 2013, when Lucian was just a year and a half, she was diagnosed with a hybrid form of lymphoma.

Mediastinal diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma with some characteristics of Hodgkin disease, stage III B was the diagnosis. [That was an advanced stage of cancer.] Stunningly, there were seven tumors in her body; the biggest one was the size and shape of my heart, lodged between her heart and breast bone. We were utterly terrified. After almost a decade of being together, after those seven long, painful years searching for our little guy, this is one challenge we never anticipated would be part of our story.

LoPresti: All this trauma has morphed into a constant awareness of the miracles that led to where we are now. Not because we “make” ourselves think this way, but because it’s become our central truth. How can we survive so much disappointment and loss and not remember every single day how lucky we are that our child is finally here? The cancer, on top of all this, only further cemented what lies at the heart of the LoPresti-Champion family: gratitude. Total, absolute, unforgettable gratitude — for our son, for our marriage, for our lives.

The animated film that went wowed the world has two out creators.

A short film about a middle schooler whose heart literally leaps from his chest over a crush on another boy captivated the world last week, racking up more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than 72 hours. It’s been a wild few days for filmmakers Beth David and Esteban Bravo, who brought the idea from pitch to viral sensation over a span of 18 months. Both believe this sudden success stems from the personal significance of the story to each of the out creators’ lives.

In a Heartbeat resulted from the collaboration of two Catholic school graduates, one a lesbian from Ohio and the other a gay man from Mexico City, who ended up studying at the same Florida digital animation program. “It’s the kind of story we wish we had seen growing up,” says David. “A lot of the underlying feelings of fear and guilt that our main character goes through, it’s a very personal story.”

It’s also a significant amount of ground to cover over four minutes of cartoon video, but rave reviews from around the globe show David and Bravo managed to convey the complex sentiments into a condensed number of frames. Since being posted, as of this writing, the video has had more than 21 million plays. The filmmakers talked to The Advocate about the process of making the micro-masterpiece.

The seed of an idea came in 2015 as the filmmakers prepared thesis pitches while studying digital animation at the Ringling College of Art & Design. The two at that point were still working with another student, Hannah Lee, who came up with idea of a young boy with a crush whose heart literally leaps out of his chest. The filmmaking team presented a pitch, initially involving the boy chasing after a girl he liked, but advisers rejected the concept. Lee set out on her own with a different concept (which turned out fine, by the way) but David and Bravo still saw potential in the uncontrollable heart.

The two suddenly found a new direction to the story with a simple tweak. What if the main character pined for the most popular kid in school — another boy. Suddenly, protagonist Sherwin would feel a yearning he didn’t understand for handsome Jonathan, a boy who offered no promise of reciprocation. This time, the pitch got a green light from advisers.

This angle made the story much more personal to the filmmakers, who mined their own feelings and personal experiences to flesh out Sherwin’s character. “We would open up to each other and talk about what it was like to be LGBT,” Bravo recalls. “There wasn’t any situation for me, thank God, where I would be exposed before I was able to accept being gay even to myself, which is what the main character faces, but I know the terror I would have felt.”

The filmmakers sketched the characters, establishing ages of 13 and 14 for Sherwin and Jonathan, a time in life when crushes grow the most intense, David says. The two would wear uniforms reminiscent of those that filled the classrooms at the Catholic schools Bravo and David attended in their youth. The filmmakers traveled to Mother of Mercy High School in Cincinnati, which David attended, taking pictures to reference while developing the setting. “The front entryway in the film is more or less the front entryway of my high school,” David says.

Bravo says for the school building, the Gothic structure needed to appear especially classic and daunting. “We wanted to school to feel like it came from an older era, to represent a past thinking,” he says. This wouldn’t be a welcoming environment for a gay kid. Bravo didn’t want the film to read like a condemnation of private Catholic schools and never recalled outright homophobia taught in the classroom when he grew up. Rather, he recalls homosexuality being so taboo no one discussed it at all. In a film with no dialogue, the regressive atmosphere would inform Sherwin’s confusion.

With characters and a setting in place, the pair storyboarded the project, earning periodic approval from faculty advisers. They developed beat boards to show the major emotional points of the film. The two completed a rough animatic in May 2016 that first brought the characters into motion.

By the time the film needed a score, David and Bravo knew they had something special on their hands. While Ringling undergrads often work with a group of available composers used to collaborating with student filmmakers, Bravo and David elected to hire a veteran with experience on much larger projects. The two became enamored of the music of Arturo Cardelús, who scored the Netflix series Call Me Francis. David says she contacted the composer in Los Angeles and sent the animatic. “We didn’t think we’d get a hold of him,” David recalls. “No one at Ringling had approached him before, but we got in touch with him and he was excited about the film.” He agreed to take the job.

(RELATED: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Making of In a Heartbeat)

David and Bravo set up a Kickstarter page to raise the money to hire the composer and a sound designer. If they met a $3,000 goal, they could cover the $2,200 fee for Cardelús with another $800 to pay for a sound designer. In a video for the crowdsourcing effort, they announced a lofty stretch goal of $5,000, which would cover the cost of a live studio ensemble. In less than 30 days, the campaign raised $14,191.

With Cardelús officially hired around December, the two students devoted virtually every waking hour to completing In a Heartbeat, now conscious that at least 104 Kickstarter backers anticipated the final product. The filmmakers and composer sent notes and video back and forth. Bravo says the short doubled in length as it evolved from animatic to fully formed film. “We needed more character moments to humanize the characters,” he says. “We need to give as much time as the film needed to breathe in the right moments.”

Bravo won’t even guess the number of manhours that went into the film, which clocks in at four minutes and five seconds with credits. Ultimately, the students submitted the final film for approval in April. Faculty accepted the thesis, and the film was included in a Best of Ringling showcase for 2017.

David and Bravo graduated from the school in May and now live on opposite coasts. David took a job in Los Angeles at JibJab Bros. Studios, where she works on the children’s show Ask the Storybots. Bravo isn’t sure what his own future holds. As an international worker, he still needs to figure out his visa situation before plotting his future in the United States.

But both filmmakers say In a Heartbeat won’t be their last collaboration. “We enjoyed working on this project and would like to take things further,” David says. And Bravo jokes that surviving the intense filmmaking processes validates their creative synergy. “We lived in the same apartment, went to eat at the same places, worked together on something for a year and a half,” he says, “and we didn’t want to kill each other.”

For a moment right now, they relish the attention heaped on In a Heartbeat.“The two of us do think one of the reasons why a lot of people in the LGBT community are responding and connecting to it is because of our perspective, and that we really draw from a personal place and portray it in a genuine way,” David says.

Bravo relishes that the film has found an audience among gay and straight viewers alike. “For those LGBT people who see it, we just want them to know they are not alone,” Bravo says, “and that other people feel the same way, and we just want people to love themselves for who they are. For people who are not LGBT, hopefully it will help them understand a little better that just as you don’t have control over who you have a crush on, that’s exactly the way somebody else who is LGBT would feel.”

Meet the Lesbian and Gay Man Behind Viral Smash Heartbeat

The couple filed suit against their lawyer who failed to secure the adoption.

There’s really no good outcome for such a horrifying story as the one a female couple in Iowa endured when the baby they were in the process of adopting — who’d lived with them for three months — was reclaimed by his biological parents only to die at the hands of his birth father. The couple, Rachel and Heidi McFarland, who sued their former lawyer Jason Rieper in 2014, alleging he acted negligently in failing to compel the child’s birth mother to sign a release-of-custody document, was awarded $3.25 million in damages last week, according to People.

The story began when the McFarlands planned to adopt the grandson of one of Rachel’s co-workers. The couple attended the boy’s birth in December 2013.

“We coached [the mother] through labor,” Rachel said of the child’s birth mother, Markeya Atkins, according to People. “I cut the umbilical cord. He was in our arms and care the second he was born. We both wanted a boy and both wanted to name him Gabriel. It is a strong name. It is my favorite story from the Bible.”

But by March of that year, after Gabriel had lived with the McFarlands for nearly three months, Atkins decided she wanted the child back for fear that the McFarlands would shut her out of his life entirely, and 10 days later he was back with his biological mother. 

“[Rieper] said there is nothing left for us to do: She wants him back and you have to give him back,” Rachel said about being informed by their lawyer that there was no recourse. “It was horrible. There are no words. We had him for 78 days. We loved him from the first idea. We cut his little mohawk off. All we have left of him is his hair, and little did we know that would be all we had left of him.”

And as gut-wrenching as having to give up the baby they loved and cared for was, the story only became grimmer. About five weeks later the McFarlands discovered during a local news segment that Gabriel’s biological father Drew James Weehler Smith murdered the infant. A medical examiner found that the baby died from head trauma, according to the Des Moines Register. 

Smith was convicted of murder in 2015, and sentenced to 50 years in prison. And while the judge in the malpractice suit against Rieper sided with the McFarlands, Rieper’s attorney David L. Brown maintained his client should not be held accountable for the murder of the child. 

“You can’t control the emotion of a birth mom, and you can’t control the emotions of a 16 year-old birth mom,” Brown said, according to People. “At the end, [Atkins] wasn’t going to do it and the suggestion that Jason was to force her to do it would be unethical for him.”

The McFarlands have since adopted a baby girl and Heidi later gave birth to another daughter, but the couple will be forever devastated by Gabriel’s loss, they said. 

"He is the baby that made us mothers," Rachel told the Register. 

The law violates the Constitution by allowing state-contracted agencies to discriminate against LGBT people and others who offend their beliefs.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its Michigan affiliate are suing that state over a law that allows publicly funded foster care and adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBT people and others because of religious objections.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the 13,000 children in the state’s foster care system, contracts out the placement of these children with foster or adoptive families, and some of the agencies under contract have religious affiliations. Under a law passed in 2015, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision, the state must not “adverse action,” including the stripping of funds, against agencies that reject prospective parents on faith-based grounds. The agencies must refer the parents elsewhere, however.

The law not only allows discrimination against prospective parents but places children at risk, ACLU attorneys said in a conference call today announcing the lawsuit. Even when prospective parents can go to another agency — sometimes there is not another option in their part of the state — “children don’t get to choose the agency they are assigned to,” said Jay Kaplan, staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan’s Nancy Katz and Margo Dichtemiller LGBT Project.

Named plaintiffs in the suit include two couples, Kristy and Dana Dumont and Erin and Rebecca Busk-Sutton, who were turned away by state-contracted agencies because of these agencies’ religious objections to same-sex couples. “They didn’t even know us and they are basing the decision on who we are married to,” said Kristy Dumont. The agencies, according to the suit, were St. Vincent’s Catholic Charities and Bethany Christian Services, both in Lansing. The Busk-Suttons were rejected by another Bethany office, in Madison Heights.

Another named plaintiff is Jennifer Ludolph, a Michigan resident who went through the state foster care system as a child and was ultimately placed with a nurturing family. She says the religious objections law could have interfered with her placement, as her foster father is an atheist.

The suit contends that the law violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids any establishment of religion by government, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection of the laws. It was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and names as defendants Nick Lyon, in his official capacity as director of the Michigan DHHS, and Herman McCall, in his official capacity as director of the Michigan Children’s Services Agency, a sub-agency of the DHHS.

The lawsuit does not challenge any private agency’s right to apply religious considerations in arranging adoptions that do not involve state government, ACLU attorneys said, but when these private agencies are using taxpayer dollars to make arrangements for children in state custody, they are obligated to follow the Constitution.

Coinciding with the lawsuit, the Movement Advancement Project today unveiled its “Kids Pay the Price” campaign against the Michigan law and others that allow religious objections to play a role in state-funded adoption services. There are similar laws in Texas, South Dakota, Alabama, North Dakota, Mississippi, and Virginia. Also, a bill is pending in Congress that would allow "religious objections" nationwide. It would cut federal funding by 15 percent for state or local governments' child welfare services programs if they punish contracted agencies for turning away clients due to religious objections.

MAP created and released a TV commercial on the matter, in partnership with the Child Welfare League of America and the National Association of Social Workers, and sought to air it on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. Fox News rejected the ad as “too powerful,” said MAP executive director Ineke Mushovic. Watch below, and go to MAP’s website for more on the campaign, including a new report, “Kids Pay the Price: How Religious Exemptions for Child Welfare Agencies Harm Children.”

The world’s largest children’s magazines are (finally) representing LGBT families.

After a campaign launched by a lesbian couple, Highlights magazine, one of the oldest and largest children’s magazine publishers in the U.S., began including same-sex parents in several of its publications. Images of two-mom and two-dad families appeared in the February issue of Highlights (its magazine for 6-to-12-year-olds), and in the March issues of Hello (for children from birth to age 2), and High Five (for 2-to-6-year-olds).

The action was spurred by a social media campaign beginning last October, when mom Kara Desiderio wrote to express disappointment that her daughter didn’t see two-mom families like hers in Hello. Her spouse, Kristina Wertz (director of engagement at Funders for LGBTQ Issues), then posted on Highlights’ Facebook page noting the need to reflect the diversity of the world and saying she hopes Highlights“embraces that diversity.”

Highlights’ initial response on Facebook was reluctant, explaining, “We understand your wish to see your family’s situation represented in Hello. For much of our readership, the topic of same-sex families is still new, and parents are still learning how to approach the subject with their children, even the very little ones. We believe that parents know best when their family is ready to open conversation around the topic of same-sex families.”

Highlights added, “We will continue to think deeply about inclusion—specifically, how to address it in developmentally appropriate ways for our broad audience.”

This led to hundreds of further comments on Highlights’ Facebook page urging the publisher to include representation of LGBT families. A grassroots #HighlightLGBTFamilies hashtag campaign on Twitter also took off.

Highlights eventually issued a statement saying it now sees “we can be more reflective of all kinds of families” and demonstrated this in the February and March issues.

Afterward, the right-wing group One Million Moms, a project of the American Family Association, launched a campaign urging people to cancel their subscriptions. (AFA has been classified as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.) When asked if the criticism from the right made the magazine rethink its decision, Highlights’ PR department reiterated a commitment “to depicting diversity of all kinds in our publications.”

As for additional LGBT representation, the PR department said it was against policy to share specific plans for editorial content, but “Highlights is committed to publishing content that allows every child to see themselves on our magazine pages or in our apps…. We are very much committed to being inclusive and are proud of that commitment as we believe that it’s an important step in helping children learn and understand the value
of kindness.”

Still, Highlights is playing catch-up to competitor Cricket Media, another children’s magazine powerhouse, that has for several years included LGBT people in many of its titles. Stephanie Hoaglund of Cricket’s media relations department said via email that Cicada, its teen magazine, “continually strives to represent teens in LGBT and other underrepresented groups.” Other examples of LGBT inclusion have appeared in the company’s Cricket and Muse magazines, both for 9-to-14-year-olds.

While Cricket Media has published little LGBT content for younger ages, Jestine Ware, associate editor of its Spider magazine for 6-to-9-year-olds, affirmed via email she has a few items scheduled for next spring, and said, “I’m very interested in including content that includes LGBTQAI+ families in an organic way.”

Highlights Adds LGBT Families

James Mathis, whose daughter committed suicide because she was gay, tells Ellen DeGeneres why he crashed a Roy Moore rally to protest. 

The Alabama peanut farmer and father whose heartrending protest of Roy Moore earlier this week that was spurred by his lesbian daughter who committed suicide, appeared on Ellen DeGeneres’s show. James Mathis, whose 22-year-old daughter Patti Sue Mathis killed herself in 1995 because she was gay, crashed a Moore rally on Monday prior to the Alabama Senate race that Democrat Doug Jones won despite Donald Trump’s endorsement of Moore. Amid Moore’s supporters, Mathis stood with a sign that highlighted accused child molester Moore’s virulent antigay stance. And a video of the protest in which Mathis begged people not to vote for Moore went viral. 

Mathis admitted to DeGeneres that he was antigay at the time his daughter came out in 1995 “due to his teachings growing up,” adding that he was an ass at the time and he regrets it. He also told DeGeneres that Pattie Sue came to him at one point and said that she didn’t want to be gay, so he helped make appointments with doctors who could get to the root of her ailment. Referring to himself as "naïve" for thinking she could be cured, Mathis said that after several visits with doctors and psychologists who said there was absolutely nothing wrong with his daughter, he began to change his views about LGBT people. 

Regarding why he felt it was necessary to actively protest Moore, Mathis told DeGeneres:

“There’s a man running for the United States Senate who said that gay people are perverts, gay people are committing a crime because they’re gay. I wanted people to realize that’s serious — a United States Senator that feels that way about people. He’s going to hold his hand up and say, ‘I uphold the Constitution.’ The Constitution said, “All men are created equal.” And that’s the way they should be treated. Gay people have rights, just like people who are not gay.”

DeGeneres thanked Mathis for taking action against Moore and gifted him with a donation to The Trevor Project in Pattie Sue’s name. Watch the moving video below.