Tell Me, David

The world faces a refugee crisis. More people are displaced today — by war, famine and climate — than at any time in human history. Among the most vulnerable are people persecuted for their sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics.

But even as the number of refugees and asylum-seekers skyrockets, countries that once provided a safe haven are pulling up the welcome mat — and demonizing immigrants, especially LGBTQ ...

In a wide-ranging interview with David Hunt, Jessica Stern recounts pivotal moments in her career, from her work as a scholar and global human rights activist to her tenure as the top queer diplomat in the U.S. State Department during the Biden administration. 

Stern, now a senior fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard, critiques the Trump administration’s retreat on LGBTQ human rights and offers her optimistic p...

Mainstream news outlets regularly cover LGBTQ stories, reporting on everything from queer culture and the arts to political and legal struggles for equality around the world. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 1990s, most news organizations paid little attention to LGBTQ news beyond coverage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

In the decade after Stonewall, most news about the gay and lesbian community was covered by a few ...

Jennifer Knapp burst onto the Christian music scene in the late 1990s with an energy and honesty that resonated with thousands of young people searching for meaning and connection. Knapp’s first three albums sold over 1 million copies and earned the singer/songwriter two Grammy nominations and a Dove Award for New Artist of the Year in 1999.

But success took its toll. Exhausted by the pace and pressures of the industry, Knapp stoppe...

Over 5 billion people around the world use social media — and each of them spends, on average, about two-and-a-half hours a day texting, watching videos, gossiping, posting cat pictures and getting the latest news. But in an era of A.I. hallucinations and deepfakes, can you really trust what you hear and see online?

 One queer journalist is taking up the challenge of building trust — and an audience — on TikTok and other social medi...

The drive for legal equality for LGBTQ people has faced strong headwinds in the Caribbean in recent years. In February 2024, a court in St. Vincent and the Grenadines dismissed a challenge to the nation’s archaic antigay criminal codes, saying the laws were justified on the grounds of public health and morality. And an appeals court in Trinidad and Tabago reinstated that nation’s anti-sodomy laws in March 2025, ruling that the colo...

In more than three decades as a proud transgender man, Jamison Green has worked to advance the social, legal and civil rights of the trans community. Now he’s moved from making history to writing history as one of the authors and editors of a new book, “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States.”

The book, eight years in the making, includes the voices of 42 contributing authors. In nearly 800 pages, it spans more than ...

The Trump administration has Harvard University in its sights, threatening to cut off federal research dollars and bar international students from enrolling. It’s part of a wide-ranging assault on higher education, designed to force schools to abandon their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

While the battle rages in federal court, Harvard is breaking new ground in its efforts to advance LGBTQ Human Rights in the U.S. an...

The global struggle to secure the human rights of LGBTQ people has a powerful advocate at the United Nations: the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the advocate’s voice could be silenced in July 2025 if the U.N.’s Human Rights Council fails to renew its mandate. 

Behind the scenes, an international coalition of nongovernmental organizations is ca...

Efforts to restrict the rights of transgender Americans got a boost from the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court June 18, 2025, when justices ruled 6–3 that a law banning gender affirming health care for young people in the Southern state of Tennessee meets the barest standard of constitutional review. 

The ruling imperils the rights of transgender youth across the nation, allowing similar laws in 20 states to remain in ...

When Elon Musk and his cadre of juvenile tech bros took a chainsaw to the U.S. federal government this year, they said they were out to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. It just so happens that most of the departments they slashed were either regulatory bodies with statutory authority to regulate Musk’s businesses or agencies that had run afoul of President Donald Trump’s vision for a less inclusive America. At the top of the list:...

You are what you eat, says the old adage. For a diverse group like the LGBTQ community, what and where we eat has defined us in myriad ways for generations. Coming out and dining out have long been complementary experiences, helping queer people find love, friendship and fellowship over patty melts, pizza or even lobster thermidor, if you’re in a fancy mood. In his new book, Dining Out, Erik Piepenburg explores the history and infl...

The legacy of colonialism weighs heavily on member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, former territories of the British Empire. In the Caribbean Republic of Trinidad and Tobago that legacy is shackled to a 16th century law that bans same-sex intimacy. Efforts to strike down the antigay law were successful in 2018, heralding a new era for Trinidad and Tobago’s 100,000 LGBTQ citizens. But the fight isn’t over. An appeals court re...

The Trump administration continues to rewrite history, scrubbing official websites of any mention of transgender, queer and gender nonconforming people and causes. Critics have called its efforts a digital book-burning, reminiscent of the public bonfires staged by the Nazis in the 1930s. The latest target of this growing right-wing cancel culture is Pauli Murray, a pioneering human rights leader whose childhood home in Durham, Nort...

If President Donald Trump has his way, the United States Defense Department will soon discharge as many as 15,000 transgender service members from the nation’s armed forces. Among the brave men and women standing their ground against the purge is Col. Bree Fram, an officer in the U.S. Space Force.

Fram, who joined the military in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, brings decades of experience to the Pentagon, where she wor...

In its attacks on transgender Americans, the Trump administration is attempting to erase the T in LGBTQ — removing the initial from websites, publications and even the signage outside the Stonewall National Monument, where trans activists led the 1969 rebellion that launched the modern gay rights movement in the United States.

To counter the hate and transphobia promoted by the administration, far-right politicians and media outlets...

Trans journalist Erin Reed covers a beat that hits close to home: Republican attacks on trans people across the United States. She’s a respected independent voice with a large following on social media, where her work has been viewed more than 250 million times in recent years. Reed met Jan. 30, 2025, with a group of trans people and their supporters to review the growing list of anti-trans executive orders coming out of the Trump ...

Colleges and universities in the United States are quickly abandoning their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. In this episode, David Hunt discusses this U-turn on DEI with Renee Wells, assistant vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion at Queens University of Charlotte. 

Wells formerly worked at North Carolina State University, where she worked to blunt the impact of the state’s anti-transgender “bat...

Increasingly, work just isn’t working for LGBTQ people — especially for those of us who choose to come out and stay out on the job. New studies show a distressing trend, with companies backtracking on their support for a welcoming workplace. Alarmingly, 63% of LGBTQ workers say they have faced discrimination in their careers, and 70% feel lonely, misunderstood, marginalized, and excluded at work.

In this episode, David Hun...