For her solo cross-country skate, 26-year-old Calleigh Little packed everything from camping cookware to toilet paper to a stack of energy bars. Among the winter survival supplies, she also brought one vanity item: waterproof liquid eyeliner.

In October, Calleigh left Bend, Oregon, for Boston, Massachusetts, in an ambitious attempt to be the first woman to solo skateboard from coast to coast. But by the end of the first day, she was already exhausted. Though an experienced distance skater, Calleigh wasn’t used to pushing herself for miles with so much extra weight on her back. She had started “on a bad foot, in the most literal way,” she said, with an ankle injury that had left her bedridden for two months before she kicked off the trip.

"I get to be me — I’m Calleigh, I’m trans, I’m feminine, I’m a woman.”

She made it 25 miles on her first day, weaving on and off the shoulder of Oregon’s highways, trying to find the least choppy path for her board. By the time it was dark out, Calleigh dumped most of her supplies, including the toilet paper, the stack of energy bars, and her cookware, on the side of the road. She wrapped everything in a bright orange rain jacket that would also be abandoned and wrote “FREE” in eyeliner on its nylon shell.

“I left anything that was nonessential,” Calleigh reflected a few weeks later. “My rule was, if I’m not using it tonight, I don’t need it.”

Supplies dropped, her pack weighed a total of 35 pounds. But she kept the eyeliner, which was its own kind of survival item.

“I do wear eyeliner every day,” she said on a call from a motel in Idaho, about a week into her skate, where she’d taken a rest day after a particularly rough week of camping. “I think it’s important because as a transgender person, a lot of people call me ‘man.’ Or they’re like ‘he’ and all that. Because I sound like a dude and I’m wearing layers and I probably don’t appear as feminine as I want to, and I put on the makeup. And even if it’s confusing, it’s still good for me because then it opens up a discussion about it. I get to be me — I’m Calleigh, I’m trans, I’m feminine, I’m a woman.”

Calleigh Little

Anne Rearick for BuzzFeed News

When she was younger, Calleigh didn’t understand why she was drawn to femininity: “It was a time when the internet wasn’t so accessible,” she said. “You know, teens now can log into Tumblr at age 10 and they can search ‘transgender’ and they can find out exactly what it means and say, ‘Oh, I am that way.”

Calleigh started drinking heavily in high school. When she went to college near her hometown in Massachusetts, her drinking got worse. “Trying to fulfill that male role,” she started a fraternity chapter. She couldn’t hold down a job or a relationship, lashed out at her family and fraternity brothers, and “didn’t give a shit about anything.”

While trying to project the model of stereotypical masculinity — building the beer pong table for the fraternity house and leading the brothers during parties — Calleigh was also bringing girls back to her room not to hook up, but to try on their clothes.

“It was just this nagging thought in my head all the time,” Calleigh remembered. “Like I wasn’t living my life, I was living somebody else’s life. And it was, like, this horrible feeling and I never really got a grip on it.”

"I just put all my focus into skateboarding and just kind of let my gender be what it was.”

Overwhelmed by dysphoria, she left the fraternity house without telling any of her roommates and moved back in with her parents. While she was living at home, the horrible feeling “reached its climax,” so she came out to her parents. They didn’t take it well; after she eventually moved out, they didn’t speak to her for two years.

Calleigh began living a “double life,” presenting as a man during the day and sneaking out as a woman to bar hop with close friends at night.

She found a house on Craigslist with an open room and decided that her first day living there would be her first day living fully as a woman. “I wanted to be Lee, because Lee was this girl in college who I was infatuated with. But I can’t be Lee Little, that is the stupidest fucking name ever,” Calleigh laughed. “Then I decided to go with Cali — Calleigh — because California was my dream place to live.”

Calleigh’s drinking didn’t stop. After leaving her friends and breaking off from her family, she lost most of her support network during her transition. “I always felt like a woman,” she said, “but I never had any experiences or influences to help me be accepted as one. And all I had was work and home and work and home and it was so stressful.”

Then she crashed her car into a snowbank and was charged with a DUI. She lost her license, so the only way for her to commute to her restaurant job was to skate the 8 miles there and back.

“It gave me something to focus on that wasn’t my gender and it wasn’t my lack of friends ... so I just put all my focus into skateboarding and just kind of let my gender be what it was.”

Anne Rearick for BuzzFeed News

Calleigh moved to Oceanside after she graduated and worked as a social media manager. Living in Southern California was her dream, but she realized she was being pushed out of her company in March 2017. After weeks of locking her out of critical accounts and assigning her duties to outside businesses, the company laid off Calleigh in early May.

She had a bachelor’s degree in communications and searched for careers in her field for the whole summer, but in September had to settle for a position at a burger joint to make ends meet.

Calleigh had been dreaming of a cross-country trip, but it was her fast food job and a recent break up that made her want to do something more with her life.

“I’m not destined to work at a burger place,” she said. “I’m not destined to come home tired every day. I need to do more.”

Calleigh Little / Via Instagram: @supergirlldp

After a only week of sitting behind the cash register, she decided to leave Oceanside. She planned to quit her job at the end of the month, and began saving every penny she earned until then. In the meantime, she mapped out her route. Within a few weeks she was at her starting point in Oregon, most of her belongings sold or in storage.

“I was on top of the world,” she said. “My body started adjusting, saying, ‘Hey Calleigh, you’re doing this.’”

Though she has an impressive record — she ranked second in the women’s contest at Miami Ultraskate 2017, logging 215 miles, and placed first at Central Mass Skate Festival 8 — her cross-country trip would be tougher than anything she’d ever competed in, taking her through 15 states and about 100,000 feet in elevation. Her route would take her from Oregon to Massachusetts, through the United States’ brutal northern winter. Calleigh would face the possibility of trudging through severe blizzards and sleeping outdoors with only the protection of a tent and her own body heat.

But it was something she needed to do. For her whole life, Calleigh had felt a sense of restlessness and yearned for a nomadic existence. Without a job tying her to one place, she finally had a chance to achieve that dream.

Once she started her trip, “I was on top of the world,” she said. “My body started adjusting, saying, ‘Hey Calleigh, you’re doing this.’”

Anne Rearick for BuzzFeed News

Calleigh’s skate was far from easy. She often camped long nights in below-freezing temperatures and went days without food. When she got to the border of Wyoming, she ran out of drinking water. Although she had found a public campground near the Hoback River to settle down in for the night, its amenities, like water taps and bathrooms, were shut down for the winter. The campground was completely empty, and Calleigh was alone. She called it “a freakin’ nightmare.”

“I wanted to be by the river,” she said, “because there’s nothing worse than being in your tent and hearing something rustling around you. But I could hardly hear the river. I kept hearing noises, and I kept thinking it was a moose or a bear, which are a few things that are going to kill me out here.”

Calleigh was restless. Too scared to sleep, she kept waking up drenched in sweat and “ended up sleeping butt naked in 20-degree weather” because her clothing was so damp. She tossed and turned all night, jolting awake whenever a gust of icy mountain air rushed into her tent.

She made it to daylight without encountering a moose or bear, but a few weeks later she would face another harrowing experience that would nearly kill her: giardia.

Miles from any town and too dehydrated to even hold herself up on her board, Calleigh filled up her bottles with river water. However, she had neglected to familiarize herself with her LifeStraw filter before leaving Oregon, and had no idea how to use it.

“And you know, I was so thirsty,” Calleigh recounted over the phone a few days later, from her rest day in Pinedale, Wyoming, where she finally had a hot meal and befriended a group of game hunters. “The river water was ice cold. It was like a dream come true. It was the clearest, most beautiful water up in Wyoming.”

LifeStraws should be easy to use — the user just needs to hold it vertically in water, let it sit for about 30 seconds, and then sip from the mouthpiece. But Calleigh was exhausted from a night fraught with worrying, and couldn’t figure it out.

“I got really freakin’ pissed,” Calleigh laughed. “And I just, like, smashed it on a rock, screaming my head off.”

She drank the river water without using her LifeStraw, “and oh my god, I can’t even put into words the feeling of having water after not having water for hours and hours and hours. It was like my whole body was rejuvenated.”

Though refreshed, Calleigh couldn’t help but think of the bacteria and parasites she may have ingested. She had a penchant for taking selfies with roadkill “because it’s funny” and considered how close the animals’ bodies were to the water she just drank.

Calleigh Little / Via Instagram: @supergirlldp

She filled up the rest of her bottles with the river water and continued on her trip, but weeks later came down with a giardia infection that left her with a fever, diarrhea, and excruciating cramps. Crashing at friend’s in Chicago, Calleigh spent two days writhing in bed, self-medicating with Tylenol and vitamin C supplements. She knew she had contracted giardia from the river water, but didn’t have health insurance and couldn’t afford an urgent care visit. She was determined to let the intestinal infection, caused by waterborne parasites, pass without expensive antibiotics.

“How shitty would that be to die in the middle of a pretty populated city when there’s adequate medical care available that I can’t afford?”

“I thought I was going to have to quit and go home. Take a Greyhound or fly home or something. I’ve never given up on anything before, so it wasn’t really an option for me, but I was just worried,” Calleigh said. “How shitty would that be to die in the middle of a pretty populated city when there’s adequate medical care available that I can’t afford?”

Soon after starting her trip, she gave up on trying to beat the world record; starting out with an ankle injury, camping during the quickly approaching winter, and contracting giardia held her back from skating the entirety of the United States by herself. During heavy blizzards when piling snow jammed her board, Calleigh caught rides with truckers. When she realized that skating through the mountains of Pennsylvania would take another two weeks, while still recovering from the infection, she bought a bus ticket.

But not skating the entire route had its benefits. She thought if she had rushed through the trip, she would have had a lonelier experience. She posted on her GoFundMe page, “It was preposterous to think I could skate with my head down and ignore the amazing people I ran into along the way.” Getting to Boston became less about breaking records and more about stepping out of her comfort zone as a transgender woman.

Anne Rearick for BuzzFeed News

During her cross-country skate, Calleigh encountered many people who were confused by her appearance or misgendered her, but she managed to brush most of it off. In some cases, however, Calleigh retaliated.

During an open mic in Indiana, a man made a joke about how he’d slept with a 67-year-old transgender woman, but “it was okay because her vagina was new, so it was like having sex with a 6-year-old.”

“It was not a funny joke,” Calleigh told me. “So I went up and pushed him, and basically got him into a headlock.” A brawl broke out, with the whole bar joining in on the fight. Calleigh managed to slip out before catching any serious punches.

It wasn’t first time Calleigh had dealt with insensitivity or discrimination, and it wouldn’t be her last.

Finding a place to stay as a trans woman was also a challenge — it was so cold that camping was usually unbearable and motels were a luxury Calleigh couldn’t afford, so she couch surfed. In Nebraska, she swiped right on everyone on Tinder until a match offered her a warm bed. “He was also really hot,” Calleigh said. “And it kind of just went from there.”

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BuzzFeed News / Via Facebook: video.php

She had less luck in Indiana; a stranger rescinded her offer of a couch and hot shower after Calleigh said she was trans. “I was just reminded that I have an obligation tonight,” the stranger texted Calleigh. “I won’t be able to host you.”

“Lol,” Calleigh wrote back. “Hopefully ill freeze my boobs and dick off thanks.”

But other parts of America welcomed Calleigh. Truckers picked her up and bought her meals. Rowdy bar patrons befriended her, fascinated by her cross-country stories. A girl in Chicago gave up her own bed so Calleigh could rest and recover from giardia. On Thanksgiving Day, she skated through Greenfield, New York, a town about 40 miles north of Albany. She expected to spend the night camping alone, but a woman driving past Calleigh pulled over and insisted on bringing her to the town-wide dinner, where everyone seemed to be related.

"I crossed the finish line and I didn’t even know I was over it. And I was like, oh my god, I did it!”

Calleigh caught a ride to New York City and, from there, a bus to Providence, Rhode Island. She skated the last 50 miles to Boston, where she crossed the Boston Marathon finish line, 48 days after leaving Bend.

“I was just so focused,” she said. “I just kept thinking, One more push, one more push. If I make it to the end I don’t have to anymore ... I crossed the finish line and I didn’t even know I was over it. And I was like, oh my god, I did it!”

Exhilarated, Calleigh stopped just after the finish line and football-spiked her board in the middle of Boylston Street. Her backpack was so heavy that she fell over, and her waiting friends dumped a bottle of champagne over her head. “It felt good, you know,” she said, calling from her parents’ house in Massachusetts.

Calleigh Little / Via Instagram: @supergirlldp

Kacey Musgraves performs at the Country to Country festival on March 10, 2018, in London.

Burak Cingi / Redferns

Growing up queer in flyover country, much of the world around me felt alien and unsafe. I spent the first two decades of my life in Minnesota, “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” each one teeming with fish I never felt heterosexual enough to catch. During adolescence I mowed farm grass on a John Deere and rode down flat highways on my mom’s Harley Davidson, and one of the first guys I dated took me out for a theoretically romantic evening on the back of an ATV — but I so often felt like I was playing someone else’s role. By the time I was out as queer in high school, I had to spend weekends in rural Wisconsin, just down the road from a dusty speedway. Any time I heard the yeehaw-ed exclamations from one its rousing drag races echo out into the silent countryside, I tensed up.

Country music usually accompanied those races, and it exemplified the parts of Midwestern culture that I had the hardest time connecting with. That music was always part of the soundtrack to my childhood — Faith Hill and Toby Keith on the radio as my mom drove me around, playing during school and sporting events, advertised on the roadside billboards that towered over cornfields. But like those billboards, it felt out of my reach. As a queer kid, it wasn’t for me. In fact, like so much of the culture around me, the genre’s conservative politics and gender norms — which you could hear in songs like Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”(“‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way”) or Trace Adkins’ “Rough & Ready”(“Gun rack, ball cap, don’t take no crap / Ain't a pretty boy-toy”) — have made it seem openly hostile.

But Kacey Musgraves, whose new album Golden Hour arrives on March 30, is a horse of a different color. And listening to her music — which is indisputably country, whether country DJs play her singles or not — I feel as if she’s finally inviting me to a party I’ve stood at the margins of for so long. This is truer than ever on Golden Hour, her most fully realized record yet, and easily her most boundary-defying. It proves that Musgraves is here to stay, and that she’s not going to stop being weird and welcoming.

The cover artwork for Golden Hour, Musgraves' fourth studio album.

MCA Nashville

Musgraves grew up in Texas and launched her career from Nashville in 2013, with her major-label debut Same Trailer Different Park, which won a Grammy for Best Country Album. It also featured the single “Follow Your Arrow,” which made it clear from the beginning that Musgraves wasn’t trying to sneak her embrace of queerness in the back door of subtext; she placed it front and center. That frankness is the leading explanation for why she has never been (and may never be) a darling of country music’s radio gatekeepers. But she is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed country artists in the wider pop music universe right now, and notable for being one of the few who’s vocally supportive of queer people in both her public statements and her music.

Musgraves has never identified as queer herself, but has spoken often about the importance of being an ally. Writing a letter to the LGTB community for Billboard in 2017, Musgraves explained that she “wasn’t always so open-minded,” but after people close to her came out, things shifted: “It started to enrage me that I’d had some previous misunderstanding about a group of people that I now love so much and have so much in common with.”

Last week Musgraves joked on Twitter, “I want a gay, collective ‘you’re doing amazing sweetie’” — and in the lead-up to her new album, she’s already getting it: Fader’s Myles Tanzer reflected on her “vocal queer fanbase” in a glowing profile, and BuzzFeed’s Matt Stopera proclaimed her “the best thing to happen to music since Britney Spears.”

Part of what sets Musgraves apart in the world of country and endears her to queer fans is her playfulness and tongue-in-cheek flamboyance, exemplified in songs like “Biscuits,” a single from her second album Pageant Material (2015), for which she’s dolled up like a beauty queen on the cover. She gleefully sends up visual trademarks of her genre — her hair is huge in the “Biscuits” video, which opens with her in a bonnet, churning butter.

Musgraves plays guitar with a bedazzled band in the music video for "Biscuits" (2015).

Mercury Records / Via youtube.com

But it’s more than camp; after all, queer people are accustomed to engaging in the aesthetic when we do not find ourselves in the explicit. More than anything, it’s Musgraves’s direct approach to celebrating nonconformity — rather than romanticizing tradition.

“Say what you feel / love who you love,” Musgraves sings on the CMA-winning song “Follow Your Arrow,” which she cowrote with queer musicians Brandy Clarke and Shane McAnally. “Kiss lots of boys / or kiss lots of girls, if that’s what you’re into.”

This simultaneously radical and casual embrace of queerness is part of how Musgraves makes the old seem new again. In her music, it’s the values of country that have been given the update, not just the sound. Her themes draw deep from Americana, trailer parks, and small towns — familiar country music imagery — and yet the lyrics take the genre somewhere necessary and new. As the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica wrote in 2016, she is “both the keeper of the genre’s old rules and also its leading internal dissenter.”

Much of mainstream country music signals or valorizes the virtues of rigid gender roles; Brad Paisley’s late-2000s country smash “I’m Still A Guy” is one of the more ridiculous examples — “Yeah, with all of these men lining up to get neutered / It’s hip now to be feminized / But I don’t highlight my hair / I’ve still got a pair / Yeah, honey, I'm still a guy” — but even recent hits like Blake Shelton’s country radio chart-topper “I’ll Name The Dogs” include lines like “you be the pretty and I’ll be the funny.” Musgraves, on the other hand, makes it amply clear she is not here to tell other people how to live their lives.

While she’s more overt than just about anyone who has come before her, Musgraves joins a lineage of country artists who have offered estranged queer people a channel back into the genre. Most have been heterosexual women, whose music is less likely to employ chest-beating masculine tropes — singers like Wynonna Judd, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride, and of course Dolly Parton (whom Musgraves called “a huge icon for me” in a recent GQ interview, noting Parton’s affection for her own drag imitators and her experiments with musical genre crossover).

From left: Kacey Musgraves, Reba McEntire, Jennifer Nettles, and Dolly Parton at the 50th annual CMA Awards, honoring Parton with the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award, on Nov. 2, 2016, in Nashville.

Taylor Hill / Getty Images

Musgraves’s friend Willie Nelson has also been outspoken, and by releasing a cover of a relatively unknown song called “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” in 2006, he effectively offered the first explicitly LGBT-affirming song by a major country artist. Some of Musgraves’ peers in the realm of more experimental or pop-friendly contemporary country, like Sturgill Simpson and Maren Morris, have also been vocal about supporting gay rights.

Of course, in addition to allies, there have long been important queer figures in the genre. All the way back in 1973, Patrick Haggerty, a gay man, released Lavender Country, which has since come to be regarded as the first gay country album. It barely sold 1,000 copies at the time, but in 2014 it was reissued, and he continues to tour. In 2010, Chely Wright became one of the first openly LGBTQ country stars when she came out in an interview with People magazine. And today country is perhaps queerer than it’s ever been, with artists like Trixie Mattel — a popular drag queen, whom Musgraves adores — offering earnest submissions to the genre. Meanwhile, queerly beloved pop stars like Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue, and Kesha are drawing on the sounds and style of country music, often as a way to reinvent themselves and adopt a more “authentic” approach to their music. Among queer people and many of our favorite musicians, country is hot right now.

Album artwork for Trixie Mattel's Two Birds (2017).

Trixie Mattel

But up until the past several years, moments that made country fandom feel more accessible to me were few and far between. One of the most memorable was the public political awakening of the Dixie Chicks in 2003. While introducing their song “Travelin’ Soldier” during a concert in London, lead singer Natalie Maines said, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The backlash from country radio and fans was instantaneous and intense, inspiring CD-destroying parties and death threats. The week the controversy broke, “Travelin’ Soldier” was the No. 1 song on country radio; two weeks later it had dropped off the chart completely. Despite going on to win numerous Grammys, including Song and Record of the Year, with later releases, the Dixie Chicks haven’t had a top 20 song on country radio since. They paid a huge price, but their willingness to defy country music’s deeply ingrained nationalism and tradition gave me hope that the genre’s norms might someday be more widely subverted.

Their blacklisting still speaks to the reactionary, narrow-minded tendencies that have made so many queer people, people of color, and women feel unwelcome in the world of country. The genre needs explicitly queer-affirming artists because it has been explicitly anti-queer in the recent past, and much of it continues to be anti-queer today. And that’s why Musgraves plays such an unusual and necessary role as an entry point and advocate for the kinds of people who have often felt unwelcome in country fandom, differently from anyone who came before her.

Kacey Musgraves and her nana pose backstage with Joey Taranto (center), star of the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, on Feb. 25, 2018, in New York City.

Bruce Glikas / Bruce Glikas / FilmMagic

The dating app also offers free ads for HIV-testing sites.

The world's largest dating app for gay and bisexual men now offers users the option to get reminders when they're due for an HIV test.

Grindr boasts 3.6 million daily users, and now they'll all have the option to be reminded to get tested every three or six months.

"We felt this update would be a great way to make an immediate impact within the community on a broad scale and encourage more regular HIV testing," said Jack Harrison-Quintana, director of Grindr for equality, in a statement.

Leon Neal / Getty Images

Once activated, a pink reminder will pop up telling users they're due for an HIV test.

It will also help them find a local clinic to get the test done.

Grindr

The app already gives users the option to share their HIV status and date they were last tested. The testing reminders can be turned on in the profile edit screen.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 6 gay and bisexual men living with HIV are unaware they have it.

Grindr

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner welcomed the move because it targets men where they're actually meeting each other.

Klausner, a professor and former director of STD Prevention and Control Services at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, has used Grindr in research that distributed HIV testing kits to gay and bisexual men.

"Those kinds of projects aren’t really sustainable, so to see [Grindr] do something themselves and change the platform in a way that can really lead to sustained increase in HIV-testing reminders … is really a breakthrough," he told BuzzFeed News.

"Grindr is a leader in the field, so I’m hoping as Grindr paves the way, other sites will follow," said Klausner, who is now at the UCLA Medical Center.

Klausner said the way men meet each other has changed over the years — from bathhouses to chatrooms and now to apps like Grindr. So it only makes sense that HIV prevention strategies change too.

Grindr

Grindr also announced that it now offers free advertising for HIV-testing sites in the US. They have been testing the ads for a year in 15 underserved areas.

The founder of an LGBT center in one of those places — Allentown, Pennsylvania — said they've seen a "dramatic increase" in HIV testing over the last two years.

"With free ads for our services running on Grindr, we've been able to target users in our community and raise awareness for our center and HIV-testing services," said Adrian Shanker, founder of the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, in a statement.

The hope is that the free ads will reach gay and bisexual men of color and people living in the South, who are overrepresented in HIV diagnosis stats. According to the CDC, black gay and bisexual men accounted for the largest number of new HIV diagnoses in 2016, followed by Hispanic and Latino men, then white men.

Although marginalized men may have trouble seeking HIV services, due to factors like location and stigma, they're still using apps like Grindr, said Klausner. Which means this is a way to reach them in ways other campaigns can't.

"Testing promotion and access to Grindr only works if people actually get tested, so it’s obviously important that men who have sex with men, particularly if they have more than one partner, get tested every three to six months," he said.

Grindr

What did we just do?

So, as three internet gays with very bad opinions, we set about on creating the most fantastic (but also controversial) bracket yet. To paraphrase RuPaul, we gays get to choose our own March Madness.

LOGO

Ladies and gays of the internet, we present to you: THE ULTIMATE POP QUEEN BRACKET.

We chose 31 iconic living pop queens for our bracket, and YOU get to choose a 32nd for a write-in spot to square off against Adele in the first round.

Ben Haist / BuzzFeed

Also, here a vertical one to share on your Instagram Story!

Ben Haist / BuzzFeed

Making it was truly one of the hardest things we've ever done. Some true legends were left off the list, but only 31 queens could make the cut.

Sam: I will never forgive Stephen and Ben for making me take Stevie Nicks, Marina + The Diamonds, and Dolly Parton off the bracket. Homophobia AT ITS FINEST!!!

Stephen And I STILL can't get over the fact that Sam tried to take Selena Gomez off the list.

Sam: I said what I said.

Ben: BRING BACK MY GIRLS.

LOGO

And it doesn't get any easier from there. There are some insanely difficult choices you will have to make in the first round ALONE.

LOGO

Carlos Alvarez / Getty Images

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

Scott Gries / Scott Gries/ImageDirect

Sam:

Why Sam made his picks: Ultimately I decided to pick from the heart (yes, Kylie Minogue just DID upset Rihanna) rather than the head (I can't believe I picked Ariana Grande over Beyoncé but when I'm elected the first openly gay president, my first order of business will be making "Into You" the national anthem). Is my bracket for everyone? NOPE. But it's called March MADNESS for a reason.

Ben Haist / BuzzFeed

Stephen:

Why Stephen made his picks: Okay, let me start by saying I KNOW some of you are gonna give me shit for ranking Taylor Swift so high — but what can I say? I stan, and I stan without fear. Beyoncé took my #1 spot, because Beyoncé, but filling this out was a lot harder than I thought. Rihanna is one of my all-time favs and I wish she’d made it to my top four. Also my write-in was Lily Allen, because America has slept on her for far too long. #BuySheezusOniTunes!!!

Ben Haist / BuzzFeed

Ben:

Why Ben made his picks: It was always going to be Bey, no question. Honestly, I was offended when Sam railroaded us to exclude dead icons from the bracket (WE LOVE YOU SELENA), so I broke rank and wrote in Whitney knowing she’d probably end up as my #2. Outside of that, my bracket pretty much mirrors the queens’ respective representation in my workout playlist. In MY house, we stan Carly Rae and Nicki, which meant I had to make some alienating decisions — no Britney, Katy, Taylor. I feel like Ariana would have made it to my Final Four if she hadn’t been placed in the same quadrant as my *queen*, but choices had to be made.

Ben Haist / BuzzFeed

Iconic friendships on and off screen.

When Alexandra Shipp (Abby) posted this pic and described Katherine Langford (Leah) as "an incredible friend" and "an insanely talented actress".

Instagram: @alexandrashipppp

And when she shared this hilarious behind-the-scenes shot, and said, "We love you, Simon, you’ve changed our lives".

Instagram: @alexandrashipppp

When director Greg Berlanti snapped this cute photo.

Instagram: @gberlanti

When Alexandra made sure Nick Robinson (Simon) was looking his best.

When Nick shared the most romantic thing he's ever done and Katherine loved it.

And then when he told the same story again and Katherine and Alexandra low-key dragged him.

When Alexandra and Katherine fanned the flames of the Leah x Abby ship.

When Keiynan Lonsdale (Bram) revealed his biggest celeb crush.

And Katherine shared these polaroids of their time down under.

Instagram: @katherinelangford

When Nick paused in the middle of an interview to exchange compliments with Keiynan.

And when he revealed a letter to his younger self would say, "Don't take it all so seriously. Love, Nick."

nickrobinsondaily.gq

When Nick gave credit to Ellen for everything she's done for LGBT representation.

clarafarleybarrow.tumblr.com

And when he talked about why representation matters.

jacquesspier.tumblr.com

When Keiynan talked about how much he related to the script of Love, Simon.

lovesimondaily.tumblr.com

And shared his own journey of coming out.

jacquesspier.tumblr.com

And had this lovely message for others.

When Nick was asked what he wanted teens watching Love, Simon to know, and he said this:

youtube.com

When Nick told this very relatable story of his mum coming to visit him.

jacquesspier.tumblr.com

When the cast tried to make each other smile in the compliment challenge.

And then when they posed like this and were too adorable for words.

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Courtesy of Diana Flynn

One of the government’s top civil rights lawyers since the Reagan administration told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday she will leave to become the litigation director for Lambda Legal, a high-profile exit that will put her at the vanguard of LGBT rights and likely place her in conflict with former colleagues at the Justice Department.

The departure of Diana Flynn, who has been chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division Appellate Section since the ’80s, is the most recent example of legal veterans abandoning their posts since Jeff Sessions became attorney general.

“I never really expected to leave,” Flynn, a transgender woman, said Wednesday in an interview about her role as head of the influential office that seeks to sway circuit courts by asserting the government’s agenda.

She reflected on a three-decade tenure under four Republican presidents and two Democratic presidents, saying, “There have been some good times in the Civil Rights Division, regardless of the party.”

“But it appears to me — at this crucial time for LGBT rights — to make the arguments I want to make and take positions I want to take, I would be much better situated at Lambda Legal than I am at Justice,” she said.

Some turnover among lawyers is typical at the Justice Department, particularly among political appointees, but it’s less common for a high-ranking career servant who had long planned to stay on the job until retirement, especially for one to depart for a role where she could be at odds with the attorney general.

Sessions, who leads the department, has used the Trump administration’s weight to argue anti-LGBT discrimination is legal under federal law in workplaces and by businesses open to the public. He has rolled back policies that Flynn helped establish for transgender workers during the Obama administration.

Flynn declined to comment specifically on activity under the current administration — or whether the department has become politicized under Sessions — but she warned of a general push to curtail civil rights.

“I see a danger to some of the principles that have been established in the civil rights arena generally,” she said. “I see attempts to roll back specifically LGBT rights in the courts and society, and I want to be in the position where I can aggressively resist that and make the arguments that I think will be most effective.”

“I see attempts to roll back specifically LGBT rights in the courts and society, and I want to be in the position where I can aggressively resist that."

Lambda Legal, founded in 1973, is the country’s largest LGBT litigation organization and a frequent adversary to the Trump administration. The group has sued to block Trump from banning transgender people from the military, presenting one of the cases in which Flynn and Sessions could face off.

“If I find myself on the opposite side of the courtroom from someone I had worked with, it would be something different,” said Flynn, who began as a career lawyer for the Justice Department in 1984 after graduating from Yale Law School. “It would be strange, but it’s something we could deal with.”

The Justice Department has reversed course on several LGBT issues under Sessions’ watch. In a memo to his lawyers last fall, Sessions said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex, does not protect transgender workers — thereby reversing a position that the Justice Department adopted, in part to Flynn’s work.

Sessions also took the unusual step of arguing at the Supreme Court that a baker in Colorado could turn away a same-sex couple who wanted a wedding cake, even though the Justice Department wasn’t a party to the case and the state’s law forbids businesses from anti-gay discrimination.

Sharon McGowan, the strategy director of Lambda Legal and a former principal deputy chief of the Appellate Section at DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said the attrition of civil rights lawyers at DOJ is unusual under Sessions.

“You are seeing a brain drain out of the DOJ that is not normal, and it is a reflection of how aberrant this attorney general has been, with not only reversal of positions but targeting of communities,” McGowan said. “From the first day Sessions came to the DOJ, he has been dismantling decades of work that Diana Flynn had been doing.”

Sessions also argued at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that Title VII did not protect a gay worker — again, even though the Justice Department wasn’t named in the lawsuit and the department doesn’t normally handle private workplace matters.

Despite Sessions’ advocacy, some courts have ruled in the last year that Title VII does protect gay and transgender workers, and likewise, that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 protect transgender students.

Vanita Gupta, the former head of DOJ’s civil rights division under Obama, added that Flynn played a key role in turning the department into an advocate for LGBT civil rights.

“With this administration devolving further into chaos,” Gupta said, “it comes as no surprise that the administration continues to lose incredibly talented attorneys like Diana.”

Flynn will start her new job in May.

My ears can’t handle this!

Everyone knows the core tenets of The Gay Agenda are banning cargo shorts, tweeting too much, and causing cataclysmic weather events.

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But supporting good pop music might be the most important item on our to-do list of all. So I'm here to share with you an INSANE amount of incredible music from queer and queer-friendly artists that all happened to drop on a random Friday in March.

Bravo

Lady Gaga could sneeze and some gay in West Hollywood would immediately scream, "iconic!"* So you know whenever she releases new music...it's a BIG FRICKIN' DEAL.

*That gay very well might be me.

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Not only did she drop new music this week, but it's a COVER of Hall of Fame homosexual Elton John's, "Your Song." If her vocals don't bring a tear to your eye...you might be a robot. Or heterosexual. I don't know what is worse!

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Next up we've got a new single from Cardi B (who is also pretty popular with the heteros). Her highly anticipated debut album drops next week, but she decided to grace us with new music a week early, OKRRRRRR?

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"Be Careful" is the sort of raunchy bop we've come to expect from Cardi. She does't disappoint! We're officially shook, as they say.

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But it gets better, and gayer! If there was a gay icons Mount Rushmore, Kylie Minogue would be a first-ballot candidate. She's currently in her country music yee-haw era, and all the gays are putting back on their pink Joanne cowboy hats for one more rodeo.

BMG

So we're pretty damn excited that not only does she have a rootin', tootin' new music video out for "Stop Me From Falling"...

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...she's also got a new track out, "Raining Glitter," and it's as gay and glamorous as the title indicates. Please listen NOW.

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But we're really just getting started. Country queen Kacey Musgraves continues the long tradition of incredibly talented artists that it seems like only the gays "get." Her new album Golden Hour is out now, and yes kids, we are listening to country music in 2018.

Read more about how Kacey is the rare artist who is both a gay icon and country music star here.

MCA Nashville

"High Horse" mixes electronic pop with country and pulls it off with flying colors. Every queen who has tried to cross over into country in the past few years (Bey, Gaga, Miley, Kesha, Kylie to name a few) IS SHAKING. Kacey...did that.

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Really though, you should just listen to Golden Hour in its entirety.

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But I've saved the best for last, and by the "best" I mean Lesbian Jesus aka pop star Hayley Kiyoko. Because in her words it's 20GAYTEEN. And that means gays aren't just out here stanning pop stars, they can be pop stars TOO. Her album Expectations is out now and I cannot stop listening.

And definitely check out BuzzFeed News' profile of Kiyoko here.

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Start with "Curious" and its already iconic, girl-meets-girl video.

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STAY for "What I Need" which features fellow queer artist Kehlani and goes in HARD.

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So to wrap things up, Expectations better be on HEAVY rotation this weekend or you're homophobic!

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We love new music. The end!

LOGO

Some of our recent favorites, as reviewed in the BuzzFeed Books newsletter.

If you want more book reviews delivered straight to your inbox every week, sign up for the BuzzFeed books newsletter below!

If you can't see the sign-up box, sign up here!

Miss Vanjie.

"MissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMiss VaaaaaaaaaanjieMissVanjieMissVanjieMissVanjie."

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Two Democratic senators sent letters to the popular gay dating app Grindr on Tuesday, asking for detailed information about how they handle sensitive user data. Letters also went to Apptimize and Localytics, the two analytics companies that Grindr sent its users' HIV status data to.

“Simply using an app should not give companies a license to carelessly handle, use, or share this type of sensitive information,” the letter, written by Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, stated. “Grindr and those with whom it shares its users’ sensitive information has an obligation to both protect this data and ensure users have meaningful control over it.”

BuzzFeed News reported on Monday that Grindr was sharing user-submitted information about HIV status with Apptimize and Localytics as part of routine operations of their app. The HIV information is sent together with users’ GPS data, phone ID, and email, causing concern that it could potentially identify specific users and their HIV status.

Late on Monday evening, Grindr responded to public outrage by saying it would stop sending this sensitive information when the new version of its app is released. But the company also said it was being unfairly targeted.

"It's being conflated with Cambridge Analytica," Grindr's chief security officer Bryce Case told BuzzFeed News, stressing that the HIV data was shared securely, was never sold, and met industry standards. "I will not admit fault in the regard that the data was used."

Grindr also shares its users’ precise GPS position, “tribe” (meaning what gay subculture they identify with), sexuality, relationship status, ethnicity, and phone ID to other third-party advertising companies. Unlike the HIV data, this information is sometimes shared via “plain text,” which has raised alarm among some security experts.

Grindr's promise to stop sharing HIV data was not enough to assuage concerns from the senators, both members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

“Grindr’s actions don’t negate past behaviors," Senator Markey's office told BuzzFeed News. "The oversight of this egregious privacy violation includes full details of what occurred and for how long. The only way to stop this type of privacy violation from occurring again is to know how it was exploited in the first place."

The letter to Grindr sent Tuesday was addressed to Yahui Zhou, who has been Grindr's interim CEO ever since the China-based gaming company Kunlun Group fully acquired the gay dating app in January.

The Senators asked Grindr to clarify the company's privacy policies, including whether it gets users' "affirmative opt-in consent" to use, share, or sell sensitive profile information, what security requirements they impose on third parties, and how they work to de-identify user information that's shared outside the company.

"We welcome the questions about our policies and always look for opportunities to improve," Grindr said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "As always, the trust of our users is the foundation of the Grindr network, and we are committed to maintaining that trust that we have established since Grindr started in 2009."

Letters sent to the CEOs of Apptimize and Localytics asked them to clarify their data security practices. Those companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LINK: Grindr Is Letting Other Companies See User HIV Status And Location Data

LINK: Grindr Will Stop Sharing Users' HIV Data With Other Companies

Leon Neal / Getty Images

The popular gay hookup app Grindr said late on Monday that it would stop sharing information about its users' HIV status with third-party analytics companies.

The announcement came after BuzzFeed News revealed that Grindr had been securely providing two companies — Apptimize and Localytics, commonly used services to help optimize apps — with some of the information that Grindr users include in their profiles, including HIV status and "last tested date."

The company decided to stop sharing the information with Localytics "based on the reaction — a misunderstanding of technology — to allay people's fears," chief security officer Bryce Case told BuzzFeed News. It will happen when the app's next update is released, he said.

Still, Case defended Grindr's decision to share the data, arguing that Apptimize and Localytics are simply tools to help apps like Grindr function better, and that the information was not shared to make money or for other nefarious purposes.

Case stressed that the HIV data had only been shared with Apptimize as part of Grindr's standard rollout procedure for new features on the app. In this case, it was part of a new opt-in feature that would allow users to be reminded to get tested for HIV. The company stopped sharing the information with the third party when the feature was rolled out last week, Case said.

The second company, Localytics, is "a software program that we use to analyze our own behavior," Case said. "It's being conflated with Cambridge Analytica. This is just something we use for internal tooling," he said. "I will not admit fault in the regard that the data was used."

As to whether the company would retroactively delete the data that was being shared with Localytics, Case said, "I don't have an answer for you at this time. It is something we can look into."

But some security experts say that this argument about whether the data was being sold to a third party for nefarious purposes or not misses the point: that HIV data is highly sensitive, and that sharing it with any outside companies is a move away from the security of its users.

"There was no reason for them to be storing that data with these analytics companies in the first place," Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist and security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News. "Grindr should be taking extra steps to secure this sort of very personal data."

The company came under fire after a Norwegian nonprofit called SINTEF first revealed that the HIV information is sent together with users’ GPS data, phone ID, and email. (SINTEF was commissioned to produce the report by Swedish public broadcaster SVT, which first publicized the findings.) BuzzFeed News later replicated its results and verified the information with outside cybersecurity experts.

The company first released a statement early Monday afternoon defending its decision to share the information with the third parties, stating that "the inclusion of HIV status information within our platform is always regarded carefully with our users’ privacy in mind," and that the company, like any other mobile app company, "must operate with industry standard practices."

Hours later, Case said that it would stop sharing the information with third parties. The news was first reported by Axios.

LINK: Grindr Is Letting Other Companies See User HIV Status And Location Data

LINK: Grindr Will Now Remind You To Get Tested For HIV

And yes, she also performed a song at the wedding.

I think we can all agree that Adele is one of the coolest celebs around.

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Not only is she queen of a good bargain and fangirling legends...

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...but, apparently, she is also queen of planning and throwing weddings for her friends!!!

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Earlier today, British comedian Alan Carr revealed in an interview with ITV’s This Morning, that Adele (a longtime friend of his and his now husband, Paul Drayton) married them back in January at her LA home:

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According to Alan, not only did Adele get ordained specifically to perform their ceremony, but she also planned out their entire ceremony and reception, and sang the song* to their first dance.

*Alan said he wants to keep the song Adele sang private.

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And, to top it all off, flew Alan and his husband to Las Vegas for their honeymoon to see Céline Dion.

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Adele confirmed Alan's story earlier today by posting this Insta of herself at the wedding along with a sweet caption.

Instagram: @adele

Well, it sounds like if this whole singing thing doesn't work out, she has a second career as a wedding planner!!!

XL Records

Is it hot in here or is it just me?

I'm a card-carrying gay man. I like screaming "MISS VANJIE!" at random moments, shamelessly supporting Carly Rae Jepsen's career, and drinking iced coffee regardless of the weather outside.

E!

But I just watched a video on the internet that made me clutch my pearls, sweat profusely, and question where I'd place myself on the Kinsey Scale.

E!

Monday night was the last show of the US leg of Demi Lovato's tour. And let's say she closed the tour out with a BANG. Here's a picture of me looking at video from the concert, about to have my world rocked.

E!

Kehlani shared this Instagram following the concert and told Demi, "I love you and appreciate you, beautiful," and suddenly I'm trying to figure out what their couple name would be. Kemi? Dehlani?

Instagram: @kehlani

Anyway, I'm off to question my homosexuality and everything I thought I knew about myself, all thanks to these two talented ladies! Have a great rest of your week!

E!

You can actually email Simon and Blue.

20th Century Fox

1. Love, Simon is the first rom-com produced by a major Hollywood studio to feature a gay teen protagonist. But director Greg Berlanti is also responsible for another significant milestone – the first romantic gay kiss on network TV. As showrunner of Dawson's Creek, he threatened to quit if the network didn't allow Jack to kiss his male love interest on screen.
2. Berlanti took inspiration from classic John Hughes movies on everything from the framing of scenes to the soundtrack and score. He wanted to give the movie a nostalgic feel while still keeping it contemporary.
3. Nick Robinson's role in The Kings of Summer convinced Berlanti that he'd be perfect for the lead role of Simon.
4. Robinson didn't want to do any more high school movies, but he was so keen to do Love, Simon, he broke his own rule.

20th Century Fox

5. Katherine Langford, who plays Leah, read the script for Love, Simon while filming the first season of 13 Reasons Why and was drawn to the love story. She went straight into working on Love, Simon off the back of her 13 Reasons Why press tour.
6. Berlanti made Robinson watch Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway to help him prepare for the role of Simon, because he saw a lot of similarities between each story.
7. The main cast spent nearly two weeks in rehearsal before filming began to experiment and bond. Berlanti wanted them to get close off screen so that their friendship would feel more natural and authentic on screen.
8. During filming, Langford and Robinson would go out to dinner to connect more as friends, and the whole cast also went away together for the Easter long weekend.
9. The cast had a group chat with Berlanti, and then their own separate one that he wasn't allowed in.

20th Century Fox

10. Becky Albertalli, the author of the book the movie is based on, worked with the screenwriters to make sure moments from the book that were important to fans were included in the movie – such as the significance of Oreos in Simon and Blue's relationship.
11. The character of Ethan doesn't exist in the book, but Albertalli said he is like an "adopted child" to her, because she loves him and what he adds to the story so much.
12. The big scene between Simon and his mother, which made everyone cry, wasn't in the original script. It was Jennifer Garner's idea to add the special mother/son moment, which was also partially inspired by Berlanti's own experiences.

20th Century Fox

13. The art department took a lot of inspiration for the design of the film – and Simon's bedroom in particular – from music. You can listen to their playlist here.
14. Some of the messages on Simon's chalkboard walls were written by Becky Albertalli. (You can spot "hour to hour, note to note" amongst the scribbles, which is an Elliott Smith lyric that Simon uses as his email address in the book. In the movie, he uses a lyric from The Kinks' song "Waterloo Sunset" for his email.)
15. The art department built the carnival featured at the end from scratch, and it was fully functioning. The cast went on the rides when they weren’t filming.

20th Century Fox

16. Keiynan Lonsdale, who plays Bram, came out to the cast on the last day of filming Love, Simon. He came out publicly a few weeks later.
17. Lonsdale cried the first time he watched the movie because he'd never felt so represented on screen before.
18. An eight minute-long scene was cut from the movie which features Nick taking Simon to a gay bar, where he meets a character played by Colton Haynes. It takes place after Simon is outed, but before he goes back to school. It was cut because it slowed the movie down too much.

20th Century Fox

19. There were more than 20 takes of the big kissing scene at the end, to make sure it was "magical".
20. Langford has said she'd be open to starring in a sequel to Love, Simon based on Albertalli's upcoming Leah-focused book, Leah on the Offbeat.
21. You can email Simon and Blue and get a response. Try it: frommywindow1@gmail.com and blugreen118@gmail.com.

• Which Love, Simon Character Are You Actually?
• 24 Times The Love, Simon Cast Were Completely Adorable IRL
• 29 Tweets And Tumblr Posts About Love, Simon That Are A Real Mood
• 4 Things You Need To Know About Love, Simon
• The Queer Actor At The Heart Of Love, Simon

At some point last year, Leola Lula, a 32-year-old living in Seattle who organizes a monthly queer party called Night Crush, concluded that Tinder was a barren wasteland.

“It was really bleak,” she says. “I’d already met or matched with everyone, or everyone I saw was already a friend.”

So she decided to try something different: a personal ad on @herstorypersonals, an Instagram matchmaking experiment for the lesbian, queer, trans, and nonbinary community. She’d already been following the account just for fun; she enjoyed reading what people wrote about themselves (e.g., “local scammer, pretty boi femme & intermittent wig wearer”) and what they were looking for in a relationship (“sexy, thoughtful extroverts to deep dive into romance,” or, alternatively, “just looking for queer friends willing to talk about experimental music, anti-capitalist ideas, Greek food & cute dogs”).

That clarity appealed to her, especially after a recent streak of underwhelming dates. “I wanted to say exactly what I want. I’m in my early thirties,” she says. “I’ve been trying to figure this stuff out for a minute.” And she liked the idea that anyone in the world might see it and write back, like sending a message in a bottle.

With the help of some close friends, Lula came up with her own ad (a snippet: “31 y/o watery & sassy black femme looking to be spoiled, spanked & appreciated like I deserve”). The day after it went up in late January 2017, she woke up to “like, a billion follow requests.” After a week or so of exchanging messages with a few people (including someone in Copenhagen, with whom she’s still pen pals), she heard from Dot, a 33-year-old woman in Los Angeles: “Not in Seattle but love your profile! Def gonna check out Nightcrush next time I’m up there.”

The queer community has been suffering from a lack of a clubhouse to replace the rapidly shrinking physical territory we can claim as our own.

From that point on, Dot waged a low-key but persistent wooing campaign, responding to Lula’s Instagram stories, liking her photos, and sending her pictures of flowers and sunsets. One day, she asked for Lula’s address so she could mail her a book of poetry; a few months later, in June, Dot sent Lula 32 long-stemmed red roses for her birthday, along with two records and tickets to see her favorite band. At that point, they hadn’t even spoken on the phone. “It was the first time in my life that I was ever courted,” says Lula.

The two began talking and texting nonstop. In August, Dot bought a plane ticket to Seattle. They’ve been dating ever since, and they’re starting to talk about relocating to each other’s cities.

Lula and Dot aren’t the only happily-ever-afters who met through @herstorypersonals: A little more than a year into its existence, the Instagram throwback to the days of lonely hearts ads has successfully matched dozens, if not hundreds, in romantic relationships, and connected countless others in various forms of simpatico queerness — from long-distance pen pals to mutual photo-likers to real-life friends and hookups.

The whole thing began as a lesson in lesbian history for Kelly Rakowski, 38, a photo editor at Metropolis. In 2014, she started the Instagram account @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, a hit reel of iconic queer imagery featuring portraits of Audre Lorde, candids from early Pride marches, and probably every photo in existence of Jodie Foster as a baby gay.

A couple years later, Rakowski stumbled across a digital collection of On Our Backs, the first erotica magazine for a lesbian audience in the US, which ran from 1984 to 2006. As she scrolled through the xeroxed back pages, she discovered the women-seeking-women ads that would become the inspiration for @herstorypersonals.

Kelly Rakowski

Courtesy Cait Oppermann

Rakowski, who has an eagle eye for queer social media catnip, began posting some of the vintage ads on @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y. “I was fascinated by how people wrote about themselves and what they desired in such a direct way,” she says. “And then I was like, ‘We have to start doing this today.’”

She put out a call for @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y followers to write their own ads; soon, she was overwhelmed. In early 2017, she created @herstorypersonals, and the response has only grown since then: Over the two-day open-call period each month, Rakowski often gets upward of 200 submissions. After she culls through them, nixing the ones containing hate speech or needlessly graphic solicitations of sex, she still ends up with enough to post a few at a time until the next call.

“I’m kind of shocked that people are willing to be so vulnerable and present themselves in such a public way,” she says. “But it’s sort of refreshing for both the people writing the ads and the people reading them.”

With more than 23,000 followers to date, the account has proven that there’s a real audience for this type of content — a little risqué, a little self-indulgent, and very to the point — and a growing contingent of the queer population in search of an alternative to the soul-suck of dating apps. (Rakowski herself ditched the app scene a couple years ago and met her current partner in real life, or what she likes to call “slow dating.”)

In many ways, dating apps have made finding romance easier than ever for the modern queer woman — we don’t have to leave our couches to find a whole party bus of lesbians within a 10-mile radius who might want to go on a date with us. But that increased online visibility, along with greater societal acceptance in some parts of the country (not to mention gentrification, which prices out both queer people and queer businesses) have all contributed to the decline of LGBT-specific spaces — witness, for example, the disappearance of lesbian bars from every major city.

Therein lies the problem: Finding a queer date or even a relationship might be less complicated now than it was in the days of On Our Backs, but in the age of dating apps, the search for love and sex has been downgraded from a bar-going, club-hopping, social-energy-requiring activity to a mostly solitary pursuit. Meanwhile, our need for a deeper sense of belonging hasn’t gone away. For past generations, lesbian bars filled the dual role of romantic fishbowl and community center — a place where you could find unequivocal acceptance, a bathroom makeout, or maybe just a drink and a knowing look from the bartender. But those moments of connection have vanished as these spaces shut their doors, and not much has emerged to replace them.

The queer community, and the lesbian community in particular, has been suffering from a lack of a clubhouse — a gathering space, real or virtual, to replace the rapidly shrinking physical territory we can claim as our own. That’s where @herstorypersonals comes in: Just as On Our Backs opened a door for queer women to own their sexuality, @herstorypersonals is becoming the de facto lesbian bar of the internet, restoring a sense of community to a faction of 21st-century queerdom.

Instagram: @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y

The inspiration for @herstorypersonals, On Our Backs, whose name was a suggestive play on the “off our backs” mantra of ’80s feminism, was first and foremost an erotica magazine. But it wasn’t all photos of whip-wielding dykes and handcuffed femmes; it also published groundbreaking stories about queer life and culture, including some of the first reporting on the AIDS epidemic within the lesbian community. At its peak, the magazine had a full-time staff of 10 and a circulation of 20,000 — not insignificant for a publication that basically existed on the fringes of the fringe.

Over the course of its 12-year run, On Our Backs became a beacon of sexual liberation at a time when the mainstream women’s rights movement, largely dominated by the anti-porn brigade, was still squeamish about the pursuit of sex for pleasure.

In fact, helping landlocked lesbians get laid was partly the point of On Our Backs: In the words of former editor Susie Bright, “we wanted everyone to be having the best damn sex of their lives.”

At the time, there were a handful of small papers with a personals section specifically for women in search of women, but their raunchiness was curtailed by pressure from advertisers and printers, who would pull their business from a publication that smacked too much of homoeroticism. On top of that were the more puritanical strains of the feminist movement: Among a subset of radical queer feminists, including some lesbians, porn was viewed as an instrument of the patriarchy, an evil beyond redemption.

Into that sex-starved void, On Our Backs cast its net. “We were trying to capture an openness, wittiness, and grooviness that we couldn’t find anywhere else,” says Bright, 60, now a widely published writer and columnist, mainly on the topic of sex.

“We wanted everyone to be having the best damn sex of their lives.”

From the beginning, the magazine ran personal ads from readers all over the country, many of whom lived far from the gay meccas of San Francisco, where On Our Backs was headquartered, and New York City. In an era when being openly queer was dangerous, even illegal, the On Our Backs personals provided a safe, anonymous space for women to express their desires — the weirder, the better. Some of the ads were blatantly horny (“Wanted: Frenetic Mons Grinder … lusting for sweaty dyke athletes, pumped-up bodybuilders, and handsome, hot women in uniform to quell the ache in my loins”); others were more cerebral (“Thinking Lesbians … I like everything from Vixen to Wagner”).

“We thought they were so clever,” says Bright. “We loved the way people put themselves out there — sometimes it was, you know, ‘I walk with a cane and watch Star Trek all day.’ People were unapologetic about disability, about living in a strange place, having a weird hobby. But the ads also had this innocence and vulnerability, and we treated them with complete confidence.”

Bright wasn’t aware of @herstorypersonals before we spoke, but she was practically giddy at the news that On Our Backs had inspired a new generation of lesbians.

“I’m so touched by this,” she says. “We always loved getting the personal ads. They were proof that we weren’t alone. We were these extremely out-there, on-the-edge dykes, so to get some completely crazed sex ad from some dyke in Cincinnati, or wherever, just made us feel so uplifted.”

In the same way, @herstorypersonals has allowed modern queer women to say what they want and how they want it, distilling their quirks and sexual fantasies into a cute virtual square for the entire world to see.

Kelly and Lincoln Marx

Courtesy Marx Family

His name, according to the Instagram post, was Punkrock Woodsy Hipster-Jack, but that’s not what caught Hedvig’s eye. Rather, it was his astute use of the Oxford comma: “37 y/o transitioning FTM seeking a tent buddy who’s not afraid of the rain … You enjoy telling stories, laughing, & having my mouth all over you.” Intrigued, Hedvig sent him a direct message, expecting nothing to come of it, since she lived in Stockholm, and he was 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles: “This is probably inconsequential, but your ad made me swoon. I’m far away, but good luck finding love locally.”

Hedvig, 39, a grad student, had been following @herstorypersonals for reading pleasure and never had any intention of meeting anyone — in fact, she says, had she not been recovering from a back injury, scrolling through her phone for amusement, she probably wouldn’t have thought to message Lincoln, aka Punkrock Woodsy Hipster-Jack, at all. And Lincoln, weary of the swipe-date-repeat cycle of Tinder, had submitted his ad just for the hell of it.

“I didn’t recall seeing anyone else post that they were trans,” he says. “It was an interesting change from a dating app, which is very focused on meeting someone with the intention to date. With this, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for — just to be fun and creative and potentially meet pen pals. There’s no context or pressure, no reason to say, ‘What are we doing?’ or ‘When are we going to meet?’”

That lack of expectation, plus the sheer improbability of a Los Angeles—Stockholm courtship, was precisely what allowed their relationship to develop. “I am a painfully shy person,” Hedvig admits. “Part of what gave me the nerve to write at all was the distance. His ad spoke to me in a way that none of the others had. A lot of the personals mention astrology and cats, and Linc’s ad was absent those things. And then I looked at his picture and thought he was really hot.”

Soon, they were writing back and forth about trees and sunsets. When their Instagram DMs began approaching novella lengths, they graduated to Skyping and FaceTiming every day for at least as many hours as most people spend sleeping. “It was the deepest connection I’d ever felt in my life,” Hedvig says. “From the start, it was never a question of how we would meet in person, but when.” To assuage any doubts, they even provided each other with references who could vouch for the fact that they weren’t serial killers, though neither of them followed up.

A month and a half after they started talking, Lincoln bought a plane ticket to Sweden. They spent a week together in Stockholm, which they both describe as feeling more like a reunion than a first encounter (it helped that Lincoln had sent Hedvig a T-shirt before he arrived, so she could get acquainted with his scent). A couple months later, in July, Hedvig flew to Los Angeles. During that visit, Lincoln proposed. In September, they tied the knot in a small ceremony at the LA County Clerk’s office, followed by Korean barbecue, karaoke, and a party at a strip club. The two are now living in Los Angeles, stupidly in love and slowly figuring out each other’s preferences vis-à-vis, among other things, steak rareness.

Lincoln proposes to Hedvig, July 2017.

Jen Valkana

Not everyone in the queer community vibes with the @herstorypersonals crowd, however. Some people echo Hedvig’s observation about the glut of cat and astrology references in the ads, complaining that this feeds into some of the more frivolous stereotypes about a certain stripe of lesbian. An example: “Soft 20 y/o triple-water creature with sometimes-fierce claws. All heart & no chill. Professional feeler. Writer & multidimensional witch. Obsessed w cats, plants & space.” As sole curator of the ads, Rakowski says this has nothing to do with her personal tastes. “I don't like cats, unless they’re outdoor cats, and I’m clueless about astrology,” she says. “So it's not me! It's all them!” But the cumulative effect is that the ads on @herstorypersonals can seem like an endless in-joke, and some people feel shut out. (“Where are all the former softball players who work for health care startups and enjoy normal stuff, like walks on the beach?” lamented one public defender in Oakland who occasionally browses the ads, mainly to admire the prose.)

Others, like Sophie, 24, from Los Angeles, critique the self-consciously performative nature of personal ads. “It’s just a little square on Instagram, so you have to present yourself in a way that’s memorable and funny and cute. It’s kind of like showmanship. I know I pinpointed specific things about what I was looking for in my ad that I wouldn’t be as picky about in real life,” she says.

So there’s some artifice, an element of framing yourself and your desires in a way that reflects well on you — not unlike creating a dating profile on an app. Except most users on a photo-centric platform like Tinder don’t really articulate what they’re looking for beyond indicating whether they want something casual or more serious; the swipe factor strongly discourages people from saying anything that can’t be digested at a glance.

@Herstorypersonals seems to have succeeded at captivating a queer female market where other apps haven’t managed to sink in their hooks — like HER, a hybrid social-dating app with a news feed that shows you who’s liked your profile and what other queer women in your area are doing for fun. According to founder and CEO Robyn Exton, HER users care as much about the social aspect of the app — like the branded events and the networking potential — as the pursuit of romance. So while HER might work for queer women in search of a specific type of community experience, it doesn’t necessarily have the immediate, turn-me-on quality of @herstorypersonals ads.

“The scale of focus for @herstorypersonals is so different from an app,” says Exton. “Instagram allows for this dedicated attention to an individual ad, so it’s like you’re putting a spotlight on someone. It’s a dating agency kind of model, sort of an old-school approach.”

“Where are all the former softball players who work for health care startups and enjoy normal stuff, like walks on the beach?”

20th Century Fox

The queerest part of Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon — the first major studio release to feature a gay teenage protagonist, which has been warmly received since its premiere last month — isn’t that titular gay teen. Instead, it’s Ethan (Clark Moore), femme and black with a Michelle Obama blowout and a sanguine rejoinder for every bully he encounters, who embodies the familiar high school figure of the kid everyone knew was gay.

The contrast between the two is sharpest following a bullying incident in the school cafeteria, when two jocks dressed like Simon and Ethan jump on a table and pantomime anal sex. Simon runs over, ready to fight them, while Ethan more or less rolls his eyes: To him, this is merely a change in flavor from the usual menu of ridicule. Before Simon can get to them, the drama teacher, Ms. Albright (Natasha Rothwell), marches in and, after a flurry of well-deserved shaming, sends the jocks to the vice principal’s office, along with Simon and Ethan, who wait to receive a forced apology nearly as humiliating as the incident itself.

Waiting with Ethan outside the office, Simon apologizes to Ethan, saying, “Nothing like this ever happened when just you were out.” But by this point in the film, Simon has personally witnessed Ethan getting bullied on at least one other occasion, so we have to suppose what Simon means is, This only used to happen to you. Ethan delivers a brief, moving monologue about his mother’s reaction to his gayness, and her obvious disappointment in who he is — an experience common to queer teens, but seemingly inconceivable to Simon.

In his few minutes of screentime, Ethan is exactly as sidelined in a film about a teen who is gay (but not that gay) as he would be in the hundreds of thousands of high school cafeterias that Ethans must move through. Ethan can’t hide or code-switch the way Simon (Nick Robinson) — white, masculine, conventionally handsome — is able to. Simon spends so much energy on preserving the secrecy of his own homosexuality that he fails to see the pain and danger for queer people who don’t have the luxury of keeping such a secret.

Ethan in Love, Simon.

20th Century Fox

In an op-ed for the New York Times last week, one of a number of pieces to criticize the movie’s love affair with normalcy, activist and writer Jacob Tobia wrote a stirring critique of Ethan’s treatment in Love, Simon. “He is a sideshow, a subtle foil to show how palatable and masculine Simon is.”

Normalcy pervades Love, Simon, from the landscaped, Stepford-y suburb through which its protagonists drive to school to Simon’s parents’ cookie-cutter high school love story. In the film’s opening voiceover, Simon calls himself “normal” more than once, as if in a prima facie defense of his secret homosexuality. I’m gay, but I’m still normal! Even though, obviously, if he truly were like everyone else — that is, straight — there would be no movie to be made.

In a review for Time, critic Daniel D’Addario asks, “Can a love story centered around a gay teen who is very carefully built to seem as straight as possible appeal to a generation that’s boldly reinventing gender and sexuality on its own terms?”

Apparently, it can. Simon’s normalcy is one of the reasons why everyone from grown-up critics to teenagers themselves has loved the movie — it’s following in the footsteps of so many teen rom-coms before it about the lives of conventionally attractive straight kids; shouldn’t queer kids get a “normal” aspirational rom-com too?

Normalcy, after all, doesn’t only feel good — it also has political power. “Gays are just like everyone else” has been the rallying cry of a certain strain of gay liberation, a tactic that succeeded in ending policies like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, toppling the Defense of Marriage Act, and achieving federal marriage equality. And yet these efforts have been criticized from more radical corners of the LGBT community for their focus on issues concerning only the most privileged of Americans. The double-edged sword of normalcy-as-value is that it is always including and excluding with the same stroke.

Ultimately, Simon offers no more queer representation than hyper-mainstream antecedents like Will Truman (Eric McCormack) in Will & Grace, upstanding gay lawyer, or Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) in Philadelphia (1993), upstanding gay lawyer: a poster boy for well-behaved deviance, never forcing straight people to look directly at the boundaries of their world. Simon Spier is basically Wally Cleaver with an iPhone.

“I’m just like you” as an argument for equal treatment suggests that Simon Spier, or any other gay person, deserves respect and understanding by virtue of our similarities with straight people, rather than despite our differences — a construction we’re still being fed in queer media that sets the limits of acceptable queerness at the border of heterosexual comfort. Simon’s opening voice-over leans on his “totally normal” surroundings to excuse his deviation from them, rather than to question the boundaries “normal” builds.

Of course, all teenagers deserve to hear that they aren’t deviants and that they’re worthy of love — but what queer teens may need to hear more than anything is that popular notions of what’s “normal” are what make you feel wrong, or weird, in the first place.

Love, Simon was released on the heels of Netflix’s reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (now shortened to just Queer Eye), which invoked a similar “we’re just like you!” message in order to hold the attention of the widest (read: straightest) possible audience.

The clearest success of the reboot is an episode titled “To Gay or Not Too Gay,” the subject of which is a semi-closeted gay man, in a relationship and out to his close friends but not to his stepmother. His week with the Fab Five seems to be the first significant amount of time he’s spent with other gay men outside his immediate circle, talking openly about femininity, masculinity, queerness, and the challenge of living authentically, however that may look. For as eyeroll-inducing as much of the rest of the season is (what, truly, is the point of teaching a 36-year-old man not to wear gym shorts to a restaurant?), this episode is a touching example of the power of queer community and gay role models in the process of coming out, to others and to oneself.

What queer teens may need to hear more than anything is that popular notions of what’s “normal” are what make you feel wrong, or weird, in the first place.

But the queer guy’s queer eye begins and ends with this episode, the rest having the tone of an alien abduction: five gay men descending on an unsuspecting, middle-aged hetero to change the way he sees the world forever. This ambush is some of the fun of the show, which leans into it — the Fab Five gently ransacking every room in the house for missteps to be corrected in the ensuing half hour. The show’s reception has been fervid across the demographic board, earning glowing reviews from my queer contemporaries as well as their parents and straight roommates. It was announced that the show will have a second season, and though Netflix notably does not make its ratings information public, the volume of coverage Queer Eye has received speaks to its cultural impact.

An interesting change from the show’s original run, in addition to dropping “for the Straight Guy” from its title, is that the Fab Five are no longer based in New York City, but Atlanta, a locale perhaps more in need of changed hearts and minds in 2018 than New York. Makeover recipients ranged, controversially, from a cop to a Trump voter. And like Love, Simon, the new Queer Eye often takes pains to highlight the similarity of its Fab Five hosts to their mostly straight subjects, by demonstrating, as interior designer Bobby puts it, that “it doesn’t matter if it’s gay or straight — the common thread that holds every human together is that we just wanna be loved.”

Bryan Lowder at Slate notes this line from Bobby, as well as one from “culinary maven” Antoni: “The mission here is to ‘figure out how we’re similar, as opposed to how different we are.’” But in fact, Lowder, argues, Queer Eye “shows exactly the opposite: that these gays are very different from their patients, and that it is precisely that difference that’s so valuable to the show’s project.”

The Fab 5 on Queer Eye.

Netflix

Like Queer Eye, Love, Simon is ultimately too focused on straight people’s relationship to queerness, rather than queer people’s relationship to their own experience of being queer.

Coming out has two sides: telling the people around you, and coming to terms with yourself as a queer person. Love, Simon portrays the latter experience in a brief montage in which Simon googles “how to dress like a gay guy” and tries on a few new outfits from what I imagine is Gap, if my own gay suburban experience is any indication. The former stage, talking to straight people about it, makes up much of the film’s third act, in which each of Simon’s family members and close friends takes center stage to deliver a monologue of their own thoughts on his gayness, and how okay they are with it.

Jennifer Garner’s speech is the most touching of the sequence; she says she could tell he’d been living with a secret, and tells him, “You get to exhale now.” It’s a beautiful moment between mother and son, and one that’s been compared to the speech Michael Stuhlbarg gives to Timothée Chalamet toward the end of Call Me by Your Name. But it’s also ultimately a straight person giving a queer person permission to be queer. Despite the gay figurehead of Love, Simon, the film’s heroes are the straight people in Simon’s life who accept him and celebrate the opportunity to demonstrate their generosity and open-mindedness.

Compare the straight vacuum of Love, Simon to something like Fun Home. Writer and artist Alison Bechdel recalls the first time she saw an adult lesbian when she was just a child, and feeling ineffably drawn to her presence — the way the other woman carried herself in dungarees and lace-up boots, with a large ring of keys at her waist. “It was like I was a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home,” adult Alison intones in a narration. “Someone they’ve never met before but somehow just recognizes.” The detail and private shock of “Ring of Keys” gives me chills, and reveals the deep darkness of the closet as not merely sexual, or on the level of romantic involvement, but in the way one seems to oneself, as compared to others. The fear that prevents people from coming out is not as simple as wondering whether one's family or friends will treat one differently, or will understand. That’s all part of the process, certainly. But the deeper cut of acceptance is self-acceptance and self-identification: What does it mean to be a gay person?

Popular queer media of the past few years has been unusually recursive, from the return of Will & Grace, which originally ran from 1998 to 2006, to the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye, which originally ran for four years beginning in 2003, the year the American Dialect Society declared “metrosexual” its word of the year. The intervening decade-plus has presented an increasingly textured landscape of queer-centric media, from Transparent to Moonlight to RuPaul’s Drag Race, which only makes the glassy agreeability of Love, Simon feel somehow antique, a product that might have felt like a sensible stair-step a decade ago but now seems like passed hors d’oeuvres after the entree course.

The notion that audiences, queer, teenage, or otherwise, might benefit from what amounts to a media reenactment of the year 2005 is bizarre, and dispiriting to the progress that seems to have been made since then. Products like Will & Grace and Queer Eye were boundary-pushing in their time, and achieved, in their own ways, the kind of mainstream eye-opening that their re-creations now claim to want to push for anew. It was less of a risk in 2017 than it was in 1998 for NBC to greenlight a sitcom about a gay lawyer and his only gay friend — particularly if it’s the exact same sitcom, now with a built-in audience, hungry for nostalgia. Compare the level of risk in a Will & Grace reboot with the risk Fox has taken in the story of a white, straight-passing, conventionally attractive bro type like Simon, and the big-hearted studio heroics seem to shrivel a bit.

The love and acceptance Simon receives is inconceivable still for many queer teens without the buffers of whiteness, wealth, or traditional masculinity.

There is something snobbish, perhaps, in asking more of Love, Simon from a longer view of queer culture, when there’s such uncomplicated joy to be had in accessing something that never existed previously, however flawed. For a generation that didn’t see Brokeback Mountain in theaters, and never had to suffer Brüno (2009), why should the banal tenderness of Love, Simon be something worthy of criticism?

I have to believe criticism is a worthwhile endeavor — one that leads to pushed boundaries and calls for broader representation in queer media — but it is also exhausting to qualify enjoyment so thoroughly. For a generation of queer people, the nostalgia of Will & Grace or a new Queer Eye may be the memory of not having to think so hard about what’s in the media you consume, and whether it’s Good or Bad for the cause. It seems a shameful wish to cop to in 2018, when there is so much still to fight for. But simplicity for its own sake, appreciated for its lack of challenging complexity, is empty cultural calories. Love, Simon may be a fine snack, but must we call it a meal?

Like Simon’s dressed-down hunkiness, lazy nostalgia is a privilege afforded those for whom it has indeed gotten better, like YouTube promised it would. More Will & Grace will not likely broaden queer acceptance more than Will & Grace already has. The same more or less goes for Queer Eye, even though the reboot is conquering new ground, at least geographically. Love, Simon is aimed at a younger audience than either show, and much of its positive coverage has focused on what it will mean for queer teens to see an approximation of their experience on a movie screen. By all accounts it seems to mean a great deal to a great many. But the love and acceptance Simon receives, from his family, his friends, and dozens of high school extras, is inconceivable still for many queer teens without the buffers of whiteness, wealth, or traditional masculinity — a fact that makes Love, Simon either an empowering aspirational fantasy or a gross oversimplification of young queer experience in America. Or, likelier, both. ●

It took just three months for Denholm Spurr’s life to plummet, for the newly graduated straight-A student to find himself exchanging sex for somewhere to live. He did not know what he would lose, that what awaited him was a succession of men who would drug and abuse him, that he would be infected with HIV, and, on several occasions, raped.

Sometimes the men – some of the landlords – had no need to use force. “I didn’t have the strength to say no,” he said. “I became what I felt people wanted. I branded myself as this ‘sexual being’ that other people fed off… I felt that’s what I needed to do.”

Spurr’s eyes flickered as he cast his mind back over everything. “The last five years of my life would have been extremely different had I just had somewhere to stay.”

He wants people to know what happens when young men so desperate to avoid sleeping on the streets will do anything for shelter – and what lies in wait. He wants to raise the alarm.

In a multipart investigation, BuzzFeed News exposes a dimension to the housing crisis that has so far been concealed: men having to exchange sex for a place to stay.

Over the last few months, numerous stories have highlighted how landlords are exploiting young women unable to afford accommodation by offering them “sex-for-rent” arrangements. But the reports, including an entire BBC documentary, have omitted a demographic: gay men, lured into these arrangements, sometimes for different reasons, often with devastating consequences.

Today, in the first instalment of this series, we uncover some of the damage done to these young men – the sexual violence – by landlords, and reveal how they are being enabled by two major internet companies, one of which is Facebook. The world’s largest social media platform, BuzzFeed News can reveal, is hosting explicit posts from landlords promising housing in return for gay sex.

In multiple interviews with the men exchanging sex for rent and groups trying to deal with the crisis, BuzzFeed News also uncovered a spectrum of experiences that goes far beyond what has so far been documented, with social media, hook-up apps, and chemsex parties facilitating everything.

At best, impoverished young men are seeking refuge in places where they are at risk of sexual exploitation. At worst, teenagers are being kept in domestic prisons where all personal boundaries are breached, where their lives are in danger.

The investigation began in early February, replying to the landlords' adverts – the surface. Within days, it swerved into strange and unexpected quarters. By the end, it led to the darkest of places: young men raped, strangled, enslaved, and hospitalised – one with knife wounds to the neck.

The head of a major homelessness charity described the irony that underpins the gay sex-for-rent phenomenon: Vulnerable young men enter into these agreements thinking the street would be the most dangerous place to sleep, or that traditional sex work would be the most perilous.

They are wrong.

The Facebook group is called “Gay Houseboy’s and those who hire them” and describes itself as a “group for gay men seeking gay boys to work for them as houseboys, and for gay houseboys seeking employment”. Despite adding “No nude pics" and "no 'hookup' posts” its members post adverts enticing young men to exchange sex for a place to stay.

BuzzFeed News discovered the group last month as concerns peaked over Facebook’s handling of the data breaches of millions of users and as Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and CEO, told Congress his company “didn’t do enough” to prevent it.

Zuckerberg also took credit, in his prepared statement, for the #MeToo anti-sexual violence movement, as it was “organized, at least in part, on Facebook”. He did so while his site continued to provide a platform – as it has done for the last four years – for landlords who detail the kind of sex and men they require as payment for the accommodation they are offering.

In British law, inciting someone into sex work is a crime, according to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, whether you pay them with money or with goods or services such as accommodation. As such, last year the then-justice secretary David Lidington said “an offence is committed when a person offers accommodation in return for sex”.

Facebook / BuzzFeed

The posts, and the group itself, operate under one of several disguises that conceal gay sex-for-rent arrangements, keeping such setups hidden from those who should be looking. In this instance, the disguise is simply a word: houseboy.

For many, particularly outside the West, houseboy simply means male domestic worker: cleaning, cooking. Among many gay men, however, there is another assumed, expected duty: sex. But unlike some adverts on mainstream websites that rely on innuendo, most on Facebook are explicit in the terms of the agreement: gay sex in return for accommodation.

“Looking for a white male 18-25 to come and join our household for a live in position,” reads one post on the Facebook group. “General duties will include cleaning, walking dog, shopping, cooking and general house projects… This position would ideally include sex and lots of affection from our boy.”

Another is simply a photograph of a young naked man, with his penis exposed, standing by a Christmas tree with the words: “ISO [in search of] True HouseBoy 18-25 White Slim Clean.”

“Live in the heart of Hollywood” is the promise in a further post, from a landlord seeking a “houseboy/personal assistant”. The landlord boasts, “My company deals with a lot of high profile clientele”, asks that respondents send photographs, and specifies, “Prefer young (but legal age) and very uninhibited types. Boy-next-door but with a wild side.”

Others insist on respondents replying with “face and body photos”, or have strict age limits, seek houseboys “with benefits”, or are suggestive of controlling dynamics. “Married couple here 40 and 46 seeking our forever boy for total and complete ownership,” says one.

Young gay men in the group post on its page, too, asking for live-in positions. One 24-year-old wanting somewhere to stay says he is ”willing to [go] where ever I’m needed”, explaining that although he is from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he has “no where to go down there any more”.

Another member of the group told BuzzFeed News by private message that he has only once been a houseboy but said that the landlords “tend to assume that every houseboy is a whore… I was the opposite. I just wanted stability.” People he knows who have also taken up houseboy positions “have been kicked out…it’s really not a safe way to live…the men really think they own you.”

Not all young men are so concerned. Another houseboy replied to a private message suggesting that there can be two-way enjoyment to the arrangement, which it would seem for some fulfils a master/slave fantasy. “It really just depends on luck,” he said, “finding the right person who would take you in and basically just use you as a sex toy… I was in underwear all day doing laundry and house chores.” When his landlord returned home he would “use me as he pleased”.

The group administrator also replied. He said he has worked as a chef for a gay couple with a houseboy who “slept with them” along with a range of domestic chores. In general, he said, “the employer is usually searching for one of three things.” Among these is “a person that does the housework, is a companion and engages in physical interaction”. Another is a “couple looking for triads [threesomes]”. He added, “Most of the applicants have no prior experience but are willing to do anything to be kept.”

Despite the explicit nature of the postings on the group’s site, the administrator told BuzzFeed News that Facebook has not intervened. “We have never had an incident from Facebook,” he said. “If they [members] want to post something that will not fly with Facebook I write them, and tell them what needs to be changed.”

This has not stopped explicit notices being posted.

When approached by BuzzFeed News to respond to issues relating to this group, Facebook initially replied promising that a representative would comment. That response, however, did not materialise, despite several attempts by BuzzFeed News, over several days, to invite Facebook to do so. A week after first contacting the social media company, the group remains on its site.

Meanwhile, online adverts for gay sex-for-rent arrangements proliferate in other mainstream websites – either unnoticed or misunderstood by the companies hosting them. BuzzFeed News found dozens on Craigslist's UK site and one on Room Buddies within just two months.

During this time, Craigslist in the US removed its entire personal classified ads, after Congress passed a new law against sex trafficking ads, but its UK ads, among which all the following were found, remain.

Some use the word “houseboy”; others specify their requirements in graphic terms, while others are more opaque. Craigslist removed only a portion of the most overt ads, but not before BuzzFeed News was able to respond to them. Craiglist did not respond when approached by BuzzFeed News for comment about the adverts.

This one, for example, wasn't taken down for several days:

“Looking for slim houseboy for live-in position in South-East London (very near tube). You will clean and provide sexual services in return for free accommodation and board… I’m a mature (mid sixties) white English male…”

Other adverts use more coded language or terms, some offering reduced rent or suggesting that it is “negotiable” based on “mutual understanding”, or if you can come to an “agreement”. Further subtle terms refer implicitly to a sexual dimension: “open-minded”, “relaxed” – or less implicit: “exhibitionist”, “naturist”. Most demand a photo.

This advert offers a room for £70 a week – about half the going rate: “Looking for someone under 35 or so. Open minded, easy going. Preference for gay/bi….Please reply back with a clear recent photo.” Another, which is still on the site, makes no mention of sex but the rent is zero “in exchange for assistance with a variety of tasks”. The landlord seeks a “fit young gay male up to about age 25”.

Some landlords entice not only gay men, but also bisexual or straight men. This ad is entitled “£10 room/bed share for bi/naturist male” in Whitechapel, east London: “Open-minded bi male naturist in early 30s, looking for a well hung bi or bi curious naturist/nudist male or even a straight guy who would be open to experimenting and doing sexual favours in exchange for renting in my flat… I will be holding couch interviews next week.”

Other landlords offer deals in which only a fraction of the rent is reduced in exchange for very specific sexual demands. One advert explained that the room had previously gone for £600 a month but was now only £400. But in return, the successful applicant “must be ok with receiving anal… a few times a week” and must be “bi or str8” or a “really masculine gay person”. He also expects the respondent to not be skinny and to be “disease free”. This would be “tested” to ensure it.

BuzzFeed News replied to several – posing as a young gay man needing accommodation – particularly to the less explicit adverts.

“Free lodging” offered in one advert in the Brighton area, suitable for a “gay male student….wanting a supportive safe home”, for example, made no mention of sex. But following a request for further details, the “supportive safe home” turned out, in the landlord’s email reply, to mean: “you letting me suck you off and enjoy your nipples and armpits”. This advert remains on Craigslist.

Another Craigslist advert appears entirely benevolent, even caring, offering a “sofa for the cold nights” for “any guys that are homeless and need a place for a couple of nights”. It adds, “Come get showered and warm and get a good nights sleep.” The mention of showering and specifying men prompted BuzzFeed News to respond, asking what he expects in return. “Nothing,” the landlord replied. “Just looking to help people out.” But then he sent another email: “You got a picture of yourself?”

Facebook / BuzzFeed

Another landlord telephoned after BuzzFeed News asked for more details. The advert on Craigslist was clear. He wanted a man “willing to serve for accommodation… Full details can be given if you leave a phone number.”

His voice was raspy – so gravelly that at times it cut out over the phone. What he said – what he wanted – however, was clear: “sucking, fucking and role play”, as well as a “bit of bondage”. He wanted this to happen regularly. He liked wrist and ankle restraints, too.

But it wasn’t only sex. “You’d be sharing my bed,” he explained. “I would expect you to keep the house tidy.”

He lives in Basingstoke, a commuter town 50 miles from London, is an HGV driver and “slightly heavier than I should be”. He explained why he advertised: “I just want to stop having to go online all the time for sex," and said he has “a huge sportswear fetish,” before asserting: “I take it you obviously like cum”. He suggested a visit.

Instead, BuzzFeed News responded to an advert on RoomBuddies, an extensive mainstream site carrying classified roomshare ads, offering a room to a young gay man: “No rent is expected if we can agree an arrangement.” (When approached for comment RoomBuddies told BuzzFeed News: "We rely on the support of our customers as we like other individuals can miss things. Should the user and or advert be reported we could deal with the user appropriately.")

This landlord replied by email saying he was “open-minded” and “naturist” but “not into silly sub-dom [sadomasochism] games”. He expected help around the house but did not explicitly say he expected sex – it appeared to be implied. BuzzFeed News arranged to visit him at his flat in south London. Rent in a flat-share like this would normally be approximately £600 per month.

He opened the door. Short, Northern, and 70, with grey, thinning hair, he led the way first into the dark, somewhat shabby room he was offering – a sofa-bed awaited – before walking through a kitchen and out into an unkempt garden. Rats were burrowing under the greenhouse, he explained.

As well as the chores, he wanted someone with whom to play board games or go to concerts. But when asked about his penchant for naturism, as expressed in his email, he dismissed it as merely something that “seems to get mentioned in a lot of ads, but it’s not a requirement”. Regarding what would be expected beyond the chores he simply restated his dislike of sadomasochism but specified only that he was “easy going” regarding sex and liked “normal relationships”.

It was unclear whether he genuinely did not expect sex from a lodger or whether he was shy or simply hoped it would happen organically, without demanding it upfront.

All of which raised two questions: What happens to someone who moves in to a place where no rent is required but where what is really expected remains unsaid? And is that better or worse than an arrangement in which the terms – the kind of sex, the frequency – are explicit?

The answer was provided a few days later by a young man who wishes he didn’t know.

Denholm Spurr sits at a kitchen table in Brixton, south London, tapping his fingernails against the cup next to him. He makes sudden gestures and movements – getting up, looking away – as if gripped by energy surges. His accent is middle-class Home Counties, almost plummy; not perhaps what you might expect.

Soon after finishing his drama degree, aged 22, he came out. The stress gestating in preparation to it, coupled with the response – his parents, he felt, did not react well – led to a breakdown. He had no money; he had debts from university.

“I didn’t feel I could go home and it just snowballed from there,” he says. “I went out one night and the first guy that showed me interest I went home with.” With nowhere else to go he stayed with this man for several weeks.

“I was really vulnerable,” says Spurr. “I didn’t have the capacity to make decisions that were in my own interest.” The man would buy him drugs and take him to chemsex parties – group sex mostly fuelled by the class-A drugs crystal methamphetamine (meth), GHB/GBL (G) and mephedrone, all of which can drastically reduce inhibitions.

Laura Gallant / BuzzFeed

Gareth Fuller / PA Wire / PA images

There were 10 victims. Half contracted the virus. Half did not. But Daryll Rowe intended to infect all of them.

On Wednesday, six months after being found guilty of five counts of causing grievous bodily harm with intent and another five of attempted GBH with intent, Rowe, 27, was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 12 years.

Given the time he has already spent on remand, that means he will have to serve a minimum of 10 years and 253 days from now before being eligible for parole.

Shortly after the sentence, one of Rowe's victims – the youngest of the 10 men who gave evidence against him – spoke to BuzzFeed News.

"I'm overwhelmed knowing he's in jail. I'm just so glad that I can finally put all of this behind me," he said. As one of the five men who did not contract the virus, he added, "Maybe the people who weren't as lucky as me can move on knowing he's got what he's deserved."

Handing down her sentence at Brighton magistrates court, Judge Christine Henson QC told Rowe that he posed a "significant risk to the public" and she could not see how or when he would no longer do so.

The judge told Rowe he had embarked upon a "deliberate campaign" to infect other men with HIV and was the first person in England to be sentenced for this offence.

Her sentencing remarks were extensive and damning, detailing his crimes, his pattern of behaviour and his repeated attempts to escape detection and justice.

"You deceived all of the men into thinking you were HIV-negative," she said. When he did use a condom, he "deliberately sabotaged it". Furthermore, she added, "You sent many abusive and mocking messages. You knew exactly what you were doing."

Judge Henson quoted some of the assessments conducted by psychiatrists examining Rowe.

"Dr Saoud noted in his report... that your offending is associated with a ‘significant degree of rage, control, sadism and
violence that requires further exploration’... She describes your behaviour during the commission of these offences as
highly predatory, controlling and manipulative. She assesses your risk of serious harm to gay men as high and
a risk that is considered imminent."

One psychiatrist, said the judge, believed there were sufficient indication of "borderline personality disorder", which is characterised by extreme and sometimes swift mood changes. Another did not believe there were enough evidence to confirm that Rowe has a personality disorder.

However, said Henson, "Both consultant forensic psychiatrists agree that the seriousness of your case is directly linked into deceiving men into high risk anal intercourse
when you had not taken antiretroviral medication...Both agree that your motivation behind your offending is
complex, particularly given your denial and rationalisation of your
offending."

Given the complexity of the case, its unique characteristics and the international attention it will provoke, the judge in summing up her remarks made clear that, "this sentencing exercise is not about stigmatising those with an HIV diagnosis, nor should it detract from that medical progress that has been made since the 1980s regarding the treatment of those with HIV."

In conclusion, she said, "I have reminded myself of recent authorities regarding discretionary life sentences which remains a sentence of last resort reserved for offending
of the upmost gravity – this is such a case. The sentence I impose therefore is a sentence of life imprisonment."

Ahead of sentencing, the court heard from Rowe's victims in a series of impact statements revealing how his actions had affected them. One spoke of now often contemplating suicide. Another man said he suffers regular panic attacks.

"When I told myself and those closest to me that I was gay it was the most terrifying and liberating experience of my life," said another victim in his impact statement. "But having my vulnerability used against me will stay with me forever." He added, "I never thought I'd be someone to think about suicide," but that following his experiences with Rowe that is exactly what he contemplated.

Rowe, dressed in a grey suit, remained impassive throughout. His expression was blank. It remained so through all the victim statements. One said that what Rowe had done to him had had a "shattering effect" on his life. "I felt like a walking, talking disease. I lost my place in this world. I fell into a very dark place."

The oldest of his victims, who is in his forties, said in his victim statement how much he worries about the impact of the virus in his later life and the limiting effect the diagnosis has on one's ability to travel and work in certain countries. Compounding everything, his statement said, was that, "Mr Rowe has never shown any sympathy of compassion. He has shown only arrogance, selfishness and an utter lack of humanity."

Brighton Magistrates' Court

Alamy

Many of the victims said they had needed therapy. One had been admitted to a residential mental health centre.

Judge Henson said the victims had described "living with a life sentence".

The Daryll Rowe case was unique in legal history. Never before in English law had anyone been found guilty of deliberately intending to infect others with HIV – only recklessly. But never before had the police had such a vast trove of evidence necessary to prove intent. That evidence was hundreds of messages that Rowe had sent and exchanged with the men he met through messaging and hook-up apps like Grindr and Whatsapp.

During the trial in October and November 2017, through the testimony of witnesses and the messages that were read out, the court heard repeated abusive comments so multitudinous as to both form a clear pattern of behaviour and to express clearly his intention: to infect the men he had sex with.

One of the men who testified, and who had previously given an exclusive interview to BuzzFeed News, told how Rowe said to him following sex, which he believed had been protected, that in fact it was not. "Haha I hope you enjoyed my cum inside you," Rowe told him, before describing his method: "I ripped the condom so burn."

To another man, the court heard, Rowe said: "I have HIV LOL. Oops!" followed by, "I'm riddled." To his youngest victim he exchanged hundreds of messages toying with him, admitting he had put him at risk, and then denying it. The prosecution read many of these messages aloud in one of the most dramatic scenes in court.

Some of the men Rowe told he was using a condom but wasn't, or removed it during sex. With others, he wore a condom that he had tampered with. When police arrested him for the final time – after absconding – they found several condoms with the tips cut off.

Deborah Gold, chief executive of the National AIDS Trust (NAT) said: "This is an exceptional case – the only ever prosecution in the UK of intentional transmission of HIV. Such intentional transmission is serious and deplorable, but this one off case must seen in context.

"People living with HIV are at the forefront of campaigns and work to prevent HIV, and the vast majority are on treatment and therefore cannot pass HIV on. It is vital that this case is not used as an excuse to add to the unacceptable stigma that people living with HIV experience."

The court also heard that Rowe refused to take HIV medication. Antiretrovirals when adhered to properly make it impossible to pass the virus on. But shortly after being diagnosed, Rowe had become what some refer to as an "Aids denialist", refusing to believe HIV causes Aids and that the treatment, which has been proven by millions to work, is a fabricated conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry.

Instead, Rowe drank his own urine, believing this would cure his HIV. It did not.

LINK: This Is What It's Like To Be One Of The Men Infected By HIV In Britain's First Case Of Deliberate Transmission

I’m Russian to see this!

Two years after wreaking revenge on a high school in Hurricane Bianca, Bianca Del Rio is invading our movie screens once again in the upcoming sequel Hurricane Bianca: From Russia With Hate. Luckily for you gays, BuzzFeed has the exclusive trailer premiere:

youtube.com

In case you forgot how Hurricane Bianca ended, our favorite comedy queen sent Vice Principal Debbie Ward (Rachel Dratch) to jail for her hate crimes. But unfortunately for Bianca (and fortunately for us), the movie picks up with Debbie's release from jail.

Wolfe Video

And if you think Debbie changed in jail, you're VERY wrong! This time around, she has cooked up a new plan to lure Bianca to Russia to accept a teaching award and a cash prize. DRAMA.

Wolfe Video

...and obviously, everyone's favorite Russian queen, Katya.

Wolfe Video

Hurricane Bianca: From Russia With Hate will be available worldwide on May 18 on digital platforms along with screenings in select theaters across the country.

Final tickets on sale for the New York and San Francisco premiere screenings are available here.

Wolfe Video

I don't know about you, but I'll be RUSSIAN to see it!

Wolfe Video

Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield) gives his closing speech in Angels in America. Behind him: Louis (James McArdle), Hannah (Susan Brown), and Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett).

Brinkhoff & Mögenburg

When President Trump reportedly asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” during a rant last March about his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, chances are he wasn’t thinking about the character in Angels in America.

It’s true that Roy Cohn is one of the most memorable figures in Tony Kushner’s plays Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, performed together as Angels in America and currently enjoying a widely praised revival on Broadway. But before Kushner’s version of the character debuted in 1991, Roy Cohn was a very real person — a lawyer who rose to prominence during the McCarthy era, was eventually disbarred for unethical conduct, and died of AIDS in 1986. He was also the one-time mentor to a young Donald Trump.

Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn.

Brinkhoff & Mögenburg

The social media accounts for the current Broadway production, which stars Nathan Lane as Cohn alongside Andrew Garfield as the reluctant prophet, Prior Walter, latched on to Trump’s offhand question, incorporating “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” into an ad campaign. The tenuous connection between Angels in America and Trump — which was there, however subtextually, from the beginning — was suddenly overt. If you want to comprehend Trump, the ad might have been saying, see this nearly 30-year-old play.

There might be some truth to that: Although Trump’s name is never mentioned in the play, Angels in America’s dissection of the Republican Party — its isolationist, individualist policies and strong personalities — provides a sort of road map toward our current political moment. But while Kushner concedes the associations, he’s wary of how some audience members might conflate Trump and Cohn. Cohn, he argues, was deeply loyal, forming a lifelong attachment to Joe McCarthy, the notorious anti-communist senator. Trump, he counters, is loyal only as long as the other person is useful. By Kushner’s account, he dumped Cohn as soon as he learned that Cohn had AIDS.

“I found myself in an odd place of wanting to defend [Roy], because I don't think that they're the same person, and I was nervous going in. Are people gonna read the play through that kind of Trumpian mirror?” Kushner told BuzzFeed News. “Are they gonna try to turn the Roy in my play into a borderline psychotic narcissist like Donald Trump?”

“I think there’s really very little that’s worse than Donald Trump.”

“Not all villains are equal,” he continued. “Some really bad people are worse than other really bad people. I think there’s really very little that’s worse than Donald Trump.”

Get Kushner going on Trump and he will hold nothing back — he speaks in thoughtful, impassioned monologues that reflect a deep engagement with US political culture. At times, he sounds like a gentler, more self-aware version of Angels in America’s Louis, Prior’s neurotic, diatribe-loving boyfriend, played in this production by James McArdle. That current runs throughout the plays, which serve, among other things, as a searing indictment of Reaganism. (Though first performed in 1991, the plays take place in 1985 and 1986.)

Of course, there’s much more to Angels in America than that — how else to account for the seven and a half hour runtime of the combined plays? The “gay fantasia on national themes,” as it’s subtitled, follows a series of characters, including Prior, who begins to receive celestial messages as he’s battling AIDS; Roy Cohn, who tries to mask his AIDS as liver cancer; Louis, who abandons Prior when he needs him most; Roy’s closeted Mormon protégé, Joe Pitt (Lee Pace); and Joe’s pill-addled wife Harper (Denise Gough). The characters converge and fight for survival as the play asks grand questions: How do we become the people we are meant to be? And what is the responsibility we owe to ourselves — and to each other?

“It’s about being true to yourself and, once you are true to yourself, how to be true to the people around you and find a community,” said Marianne Elliott, the director who first took on Angels in America at London’s National Theatre last year and has now transferred the production to Broadway. “It has a political statement to make about [the 1980s] but it’s very similar to now, I would say.”

Harper (Denise Gough) and Joe (Lee Pace).

Brinkhoff & Mögenburg

Change — and how difficult that is to achieve — is perhaps the play’s most prominent theme. The epic arcs of Kushner’s characters reflect a conception of change as an arduous, at times unbearably time-consuming process, but one that is ultimately achievable. That notion — that real change doesn’t happen overnight but rather through sometimes tedious work — runs in contrast to the quick fixes championed by politicians, like Trump, who promise to shake things up.

Sounding eerily like the character he plays in Angels in America, McArdle spoke candidly about the current state of affairs in these terms. He’s not American — his Scottish accent is particularly striking after you’ve heard him employ Louis’s nebbishy New York voice — but he’s studied his history. And he believes that, along with racism and xenophobia, the rise of Trump and of people like him in the past is tied to a disenfranchised working class eager for change.

“At any point in history where fascism takes flight is when people’s backs are put against the wall and that’s what I feel has happened here,” he said. “But the actual truth is, if we do want change for the future, it’s gonna be hard. [Trump is] giving them the sort of easy way out, and I think that’s what the play talks about — there’s no easy way out for change. If you want proper change, you’re gonna have to go into the storm.”

“If you want proper change, you’re gonna have to go into the storm.”

The themes of change, progress, and how we connect to one another are certainly not linked to any singular political phenomenon, and the timeless quality of Angels in America underscores that. At the same time, there is an uncomfortable prescience to so much of the play in terms of where we are now. It’s not just the age-old debate over the role of government in taking care of its citizens — one could read Kushner’s heaven, with its absent god, through that lens — or of how much personal responsibility those citizens bear when it comes to taking care of one another. The play also references climate change (Harper’s concern over the hole in the ozone layer is treated as a symptom of her mental illness by Joe) and immigration (America, a country built by immigrants — among other groups — refuses to embrace them).

That relevance to the current conversation is especially impressive when you consider the specificity with which Kushner infused his work: The characters talk at length about their contemporary politics. Kushner admitted that he was nervous about writing such detailed references, fearing they would one day be archaic, but he now considers their inclusion “one of the only genuine innovations of the play.”

“There’s a tendency to sort of want to avoid making a play dated by being not precise about the historical moment, but politics has a lot to do with specificity and you can’t really talk much about politics if you only deal with abstractions,” he said.

As Elliott put it, “If you’ve got really great writing, the more specific it is, weirdly the more universal it becomes.”

The titular angel (Amanda Lawrence).

Brinkhoff & Mögenburg

But while it’s hard to imagine a time in which Angels in America wouldn’t feel relevant, it’s impossible to ignore the unique timeliness of doing this production under the Trump administration. It’s not just the Roy Cohn of it all, but also that so much of what the play warns about — the estrangement between people across stark political divides and what Kushner calls “anti-government incoherence” — hasn’t gone away. “He kind of saw what was going to happen with the Republican Party,” Gough said. “It just feels like the politics of the play are more prevalent now than they were then.”

“I do think that there’s an obligation to hope.”

Despite the progress that has come to pass, for many people things feel worse than ever — or at least worse than anything they remember. That makes the play, by Elliott’s estimation, “very, very alive.” “The problem about period pieces [is] you look at them through a kind of haze of Vaseline and think, That was then, but it’s OK; we don’t have to worry about it because it’s not now,” she said. “Whereas actually what’s horrifying, electrifying, and inspiring about this is that that was then — it was in living memory — but it’s the same if not more extreme now. Because of that situation then, it only created a world that’s even more like it was then.”

Framed that way, Angels in America sounds awfully depressing. Yes, there is something semi-tragic about viewing it from a modern perspective: The characters sometimes sound painfully naive, their fears for the future both accurate and, in retrospect, restrained. When Joe tells Harper, in so many words, that Reagan will make the country great again, it’s difficult not to cringe. When Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) says he hates America, he sounds like the only sane person onstage. And then there are these prophetic words from a homeless woman (Amanda Lawrence): “In the new century, I think we will all be insane.”

Harper delivers her final monologue.

Brinkhoff & Mögenburg

And yet, there is an optimism to Angels in America that provides some relief to the audience after hours of watching these characters go through hell. It’s encapsulated in the final two monologues of the play. First, there is Harper, who has left Joe and is traveling to San Francisco. “Nothing’s lost forever,” she says. “In this life, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” Then there’s Prior, who ends the show with a speech that includes his vision of a brighter future: “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.”

When Prior’s speech was first delivered on Broadway in the early '90s, there was reason for hope for those who felt beaten down by the past decade: New protocols for treating AIDS were extending lives, and the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House seemed to signal the end of Reaganism and with it, the government’s refusal to respond to or even acknowledge the AIDS crisis. But hope was still a tenuous concept, and fear persisted. “It was the moment after the worst of the thing had happened,” Kushner recalled. “The play was talking to an audience of people who were still very raw from the war.”

So much has changed since then, but many of the audience members who see this production of Angels in America may again feel that optimism is in short supply. Kushner, however, isn’t concerned about the message falling flat. After all, Prior’s speech isn’t just a cheerful reminder that things will improve — it’s a call to arms. “I do think that there’s an obligation to hope,” Kushner said. “And to hope is not to just wish that it would get better, but to look for the plausible occasions whence hope might be anticipated, something positive might be anticipated, and then work for those.”

Louis and Belize.

Brinkhoff & Mögenburg

This is the message that the cast and creative team behind Angels in America kept returning to. It’s the message of the play itself. Yes, change is possible, but it requires constant persistence. Kushner cited the gun control activism of the Parkland students, while Pace pointed to the #MeToo movement and the decades of progress made by the LGBTQ community. In Angels in America, Prior has to literally wrestle an angel who demands he stand still instead of moving forward. The angels, Elliott noted, are “quite right-wing”: “They’re the enemies of progress.”

It’s not just about fighting back, however — it’s also about standing together. The play concludes with Prior alongside his chosen family: Louis, Belize, and Joe’s mother, Hannah (Susan Brown). “You look after the group,” McArdle said. “They’re creating a system of being together.”

“The process works. It works. It might take longer than we wish, but the thing actually works.”

That was by intention. “When [Prior] blesses us at the end of the play, what he’s acknowledging is the immense power of human community, and that’s what the enemies of life are most interested in assaulting and destroying,” Kushner said. “It’s all about atomizing, splintering, denying the connections between people and responsibilities that we have for one another.”

While he referenced Trump often, Kushner’s beliefs about the power of community — and the need for resilience in the face of those who would tear it apart — existed long before the current president. So, too, his conception of progress as something that necessitates tremendous effort. The play is not, then, a protest against the current administration: These big ideas had value when he first expressed them, and they will have value long after Trump is out of office.

At the same time, anyone struggling through our current reality will have a hard time not clinging to that brighter perspective on where we go from here, and the message Angels in America imparts might provide a meaningful way forward. Not to mention the fact that the distance from when the play was first performed to now offers something equally useful: perspective. The light at the end of the tunnel seems impossibly far away, Kushner realizes, but then, it did when he was first writing Angels in America. And it does to all his characters — who manage, over the course of an epic emotional and sometimes physical battle, to come out the other side.

“The process works,” Pace said. “It works. It might take longer than we wish, but the thing actually works. It’s frustrating and painful. It rips your guts out and forces you to confront things that you don’t want to confront, as an individual and as a community, but it works. That, I think, is the truth of the play.”