Russell T Davies has made a drama about how easily an ordinary man is turned into an enemy. In County Durham, a Reform-run council has shown how easily a community is told it is no longer welcome. The two stories arrived within days of each other, and read together
Love Island returns to ITV2 on Monday, and before a single coupling-up has taken place, the thirteenth series is already doing what the show has done reliably for nearly a decade: forcing a conversation about homophobia that it has no real interest in having. Incoming contestant Jasmine Muller, a
There is a swimming pond on Hampstead Heath that has been used by women since 1926. It is fed by springs, flanked by ancient oaks, and attended by a community of swimmers who regard it with something approaching devotion. It is also, depending on whom you ask, either a sanctuary
On 29 April, 405 members of the European Parliament voted in favour of an EU-wide ban on conversion therapy. The measure is not yet binding, and the European Commission must still decide whether to take it forward as formal legislation. But it represents the most significant institutional statement against
For a generation of LGBTQ+ Poles, the past decade felt like living inside a political experiment designed to prove how much indignity a community could absorb before it broke. Under the Law and Justice party, "LGBT-free zones" were declared across swathes of the country. Municipal governments passed
The Equality and Human Rights Commission laid its final draft Code of Practice before Parliament on 21 May, and if you are a trans person living in the United Kingdom, the document reads less like guidance and more like a slow, bureaucratic eviction notice from public life. The code follows
When the mother of one of your children publicly tells you to stop endangering the life of another, something has gone profoundly wrong. That is where we are now with Elon Musk, whose sustained campaign of hostility towards his trans daughter Vivian Wilson has prompted Ashley St Clair, who shares
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon has launched a blistering attack on Black and gay supporters of the MAGA movement, calling them "self-hating," "naive," and "pick-mes" during an episode of his YouTube show LEMON DROP. The openly gay journalist, who has become an
Something is fracturing across British public life, and it is happening simultaneously in places that are supposed to have nothing in common. The political party that markets itself as moral common sense is haemorrhaging freshly elected councillors over social media posts sympathetic to Nazi imagery and, separately, undisclosed careers in
There is, in the machinery of British entertainment journalism, a compulsion to anoint. Someone must always be the next someone else, the heir apparent, the torch-bearer for a community that never actually asked for a single representative in the first place. For the best part of a decade, Russell
For years, many liberals in Western Europe comforted themselves with the idea that Russia’s anti-LGBTQ crackdown belonged to a different political universe entirely, something uniquely post-Soviet and culturally specific, shaped by authoritarian nationalism, Orthodox conservatism and Vladimir Putin’s obsession with rebuilding a wounded imperial identity. It
There is also a wider electoral context here which makes Reform’s rise more serious than many liberals still seem willing to admit. The local elections across England, Scotland and Wales this week were not a minor protest vote or an isolated anti-government wobble. They pointed instead toward a
