The Welsh singer, who died this week at 75, never set out to be a gay icon. She became one anyway, by doing the thing queer audiences have always recognised and rewarded: feeling everything, at full volume, without a flicker of apology. Somewhere tonight, in a basement bar in Soho
If your dating life has suddenly imploded, your situationship has started replying after six months of silence, your phone has decided now is the perfect time to stop working and every group chat seems to be on the verge of civil war, there is only one explanation according to queer
A new gay dating app promised something better than Grindr. Within a week of launch it stood accused of luring men onto the platform with AI-generated boyfriends who never existed. To understand how we got here, you have to go back to the beginnings for online dating. There is
Almost five years after a nineteen-year-old gay student was found dead in a King's Cross hotel basement, the Metropolitan Police has reopened its investigation and apologised to his family. For Ed Cornes's mother, and for a community that has heard the Met apologise before,
Labour has finally published its draft bill to ban conversion practices, eight years after a Conservative prime minister first promised one. It is the right thing to do, and it arrives from a government that has spent its time in office entrenching almost every Tory position on trans people it
Wayne Briggs, the cabinet member responsible for children's services in Warwickshire, has refused to apologise after a leaked email branded the Pride movement a dangerous ideology and worse. He is refusing to step down, and his party leader is standing behind him. The man who oversees children'
The Queen of Pop has finally confirmed that her long-gestating Universal film, once titled Who's That Girl and set to star Julia Garner, is dead. For the men who grew up worshipping her in the clubs, the consolation could hardly be sweeter. For the better part of
The Moloko singer has reopened a three-year argument about dissent and belonging by telling her followers that trans activists are not wanted at her shows. There is a grim familiarity to the way a Róisín Murphy controversy now unfolds, a rhythm of post, uproar, clarification and consequence that has
There are two Andy Burnhams, and the distance between them tells you almost everything about the kind of leader he would be. The first is the man who stood up at Manchester Pride and said, without hedging, that he supports trans rights and wants that on the record. The second
The morning after Makerfield, it was hard not to feel the old flutter. A working-class town that the entire commentariat had quietly written off to Reform looked the hard right in the eye and chose the man from Leigh instead, and for a few hours the British left permitted
Paul Mescal Speaks Out On Trans Rights For The First Time Ahead Of London Trans+ Pride Irish actor Paul Mescal has publicly spoken out in support of trans rights for the first time, joining a growing list of artists, activists and public figures backing this year's London Trans+
London is preparing to turn rainbow once again as Pride in London returns on Saturday 4 July 2026, bringing together activists, performers, community groups and hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ people and allies from across the UK and beyond. Organisers expect another huge turnout, with around 1.5 to 1.
There is a moment in the first episode of Tip Toe, Russell T Davies' new drama for Channel 4, where the Bolton Seven get a mention. Alan Cumming's character, Leo, the owner of a gay bar on Canal Street in Manchester, reels off a list of injustices.
When Lord Grade, who ran Channel 4 across two of its defining decades and went on to chair Ofcom, was asked about Married at First Sight this week, he did not reach for the diplomatic language you might expect of a man who has spent half a century deciding what
Topher's Slag Bag: your questions, answered without flinching Something we have learned fairly quickly at Outcast World is that the moment you create a space for queer people to ask questions without embarrassment, they take you up on it immediately and with considerable enthusiasm. The DMs have been
The Tip Toe speech thats had Outcast followers crying There is a particular kind of television moment that stops being television. It leaves the screen and travels out into the world through group chats and voice notes and screenshots, until it arrives in your inbox at one in the morning
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
