This Gay Week 39: LGBTQ Rights, Queer Media and Ukraine

Karel Bouley is an LGBTQ broadcaster, entertainer, author, singer, and activist. With his late partner Andrew Howard, he formed what contemporary press described as the first openly gay couple to host a general-interest talk show on a mainstream U.S. radio station. They joined Los Angeles station KFI AM 640 in 1998, with Karel and Andrew entering regular afternoon drive in 1999. After Howard’s death, Bouley prevailed in Bouley v. Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, 127 Cal. App. 4th 601 (2005), where the California Court of Appeal held that wrongful-death standing for registered domestic partners applied retroactively. Bouley later worked at KGO AM 810, hosted the syndicated Karel Show, and created Free Speech TV’s Karel’s Life in Segments. His journalism and commentary have appeared in The Advocate, Billboard, HuffPost, and CNN. He was nominated for Best Debut Artist at the inaugural 1996 Gay/Lesbian American Music Awards, released Dance…Or Else, and recorded with Steve Bronski and John “Jellybean” Benitez. He wrote You Can’t Say That! and Shouting at Windmills: BS From Bush to Obama, and helped produce and present three GALECA Dorian Awards streaming specials. He is a GALECA member, has held a leadership role in SAG-AFTRA’s Nevada Local, has been a Recording Academy voting member, and lives and works in Las Vegas.

Karel Bouley and Scott Douglas Jacobsen discuss global LGBTQ rights, colonial legacies, authoritarian politics, inclusive education, and threats to queer media. Speaking while Jacobsen is in Ukraine, they connect discrimination and censorship with broader human rights concerns, emphasizing community solidarity, civilian protection, and the people affected by political decisions worldwide.

Bouley: Scott, you got a haircut. Hi, nice to meet you.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for noticing. I appreciate that. Yeah, nice to meet you.

Bouley: We’ve met before, honey.

Jacobsen: I know.

Bouley: Every week, you’re in a new architecturally interesting building. Now, do you just move from building to building because the others are blown up, or do you just have a bevy of interesting buildings to be in?

Jacobsen: Well, I have a bevy of interesting buildings to be in. I have a bevy of interesting buildings to visit and also stay in. But I really just came back from a desk week. Last week, I was doing some fieldwork, visiting some places, with some interviews and articles upcoming around that.

Bouley: So you’re in a place where there seems to be a never-ending war going on. And yesterday, October 7th, was the anniversary of the attack in Israel, which everybody condemns. Even if you don’t support the genocide, you don’t support what Hamas did on October 7th.

How did Jews and others in Ukraine, in their own war zone, commemorate the October 7th start of the war three years ago yesterday? Or did they? Are they able to pay attention to that because they have so much going on already? Was it on anyone’s mind? How was that acknowledged there in Ukraine?

Jacobsen: So, if you follow the chief rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Asman, who was elected in 2005, or the chief rabbi of Kyiv, Yonatan Markovitch, they all have large families, and many of those kids are becoming rabbis themselves.

One of them runs a thing called JCC Beit Menachem. From some of what I’ve seen on that, they did a commemoration of Babi Yar. And then October 7th, I think, was also commemorated today. So they do have time for it.

You can see the commemoration of Babi Yar. I think Mr. Zelensky was there. Budanov was there. Yonatan Markovitch was there, et cetera. So these are people of prominence and relevance, not only to the country but to the city, too. They do various commemorations and remembrances in a formal capacity.

Bouley: What about the Free Palestine movement? Is there anyone in Ukraine saying that Israel is committing genocide and should stop it? Or is everyone there basically just on the side of, I don’t want to say “on the side of Israel,” but is everyone there really just saying, “Israel was attacked, and they have every right to do this”?

Because they are an attacked people themselves. The Russians attacked Ukraine, so they know how it feels.

Before we get to the gay issues, it’s interesting to get perspectives from other parts of the world. Here in the United States, there is a split. There are those who support Israel unequivocally and don’t want to hear any of this Free Palestine mess. They’re like, “No, Israel was attacked. We support what Netanyahu is doing. He has every right to do it.”

And then there are those who say, “I’m not antisemitic. I love Jews and Jewish people, but I do not support what the state of Israel is doing. Their response was disproportionate to the attack of October 7th, and they have now committed genocide.”

Ed Sheeran got into trouble because of Macklemore getting fired from the tour. And there have been lots of ways that this has worked its way into pop culture.

So I wanted to ask Scott over there if there is the same rift. Is there a group of people who support Israel and Netanyahu and what he is doing, and think this is all fair game because they were attacked? Or are there some who are saying there needed to be restraint, and that what’s happened now is a genocide?

It’s interesting because they are at war. They were attacked by Russia.

Putin is trying to commit a genocide against the Ukrainians and wipe them out, wipe out their culture and just absorb it. So what is the mood over there? Is there a sort of, I don’t want to say a Free Palestine movement, but are there people sympathetic to the Palestinians or to the fact that there is perhaps what the world is calling a genocide going on?

Jacobsen: There has been, I had to look it up, a Ukraine-Palestine solidarity group. A letter was published in 2023 supporting Palestine’s self-determination, a ceasefire, humanitarian access, and an end to the occupation. It had 469 names by May 2024. So, of note, but not major.

They have more immediate concerns around aggression by a state, a more autocratic state. So it comes up, apparently, but not very much. It’s not a core conversation for a lot of them. I’ve pretty much never heard it talked about here.

Bouley: And I can understand that. I can, given where they are, given their ethnic makeup. I can get it.

On my show yesterday, I kind of just melted down because I’ve made a few comments under Boy George’s posts. I think he is exploiting this for his own publicity, to stay relevant. I mean, he’s an Irish kid. He’s not Jewish. And to put himself in the middle of the argument, which he has, seems a bit odd to me.

And they have come for me with hatred like you wouldn’t believe, just because I’ve said, “Look, I don’t condone what Hamas did, but I also do not condone what Netanyahu is doing.”

Two wrongs do not make a right. And I think it’s time for both sides to step back and get some peaceful solution. Or Israel needs to move. And I did not say that flippantly.

It was created in 1918 by the British. That came to completion in 1949. It’s not even 100 years old, and nobody in the region likes it. It’s like me moving into the middle of a MAGA community. You know, it would not… Should I be able to? Yes. Should they not attack me? Yes. Would they attack me? Yes.

So I know there’s no easy solution. And, Scott, I’m older than you, and I’ve seen this from the time I was a kid. Israel, its right to exist, its sovereignty, and then being attacked: every president has had to deal with it. I went through them yesterday, every president since I was born.

I was born with JFK. He had to deal with it. He got assassinated. Johnson had to deal with it. Nixon had to deal with it. Ford had to deal with it. Reagan had to deal with it. George Senior had to deal with it. Carter had to deal with it. And Carter has the only remaining peace deal still on the table.

So Carter had to deal with it. Then George Senior had to deal with it. Then Obama had to deal with it. And Trump hasn’t dealt with it, but he was supposed to have, twice. And Biden had to deal with it. So every president since my birth, and those are all the presidents I’ve had, has had to deal with this problem.

And I just kind of don’t want it to be our problem anymore. I want it to be their problem. I’m tired of spending billions of dollars and not getting any results. But that’s me.

Let’s get to the gayness in the world. And, of course, a lot of the stories are not positive ones. A lot of it is mimicking what we are going through here in this country.

I will say there are a few things that have surprised me. Last week, there was a story that surprised me. Basically, the founder of a gay rights coalition decided not to be in the coalition anymore.

And now, you know, Australia has always been pretty receptive to LGBTQ people and LGBTQ rights. And now it appears they’ve missed the boat because they rejected all recommendations for improving LGBTQ rights made via the United Nations process.

I don’t know why. I don’t know what’s going on in Australia in terms of politics. Have they swung to the right, too? You know, it just seems like they’re a very open country.

The UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review enables countries to review each other’s human rights records and provide recommendations for improvement. Of 332 recommendations overall, the government accepted 128, none of which were for LGBTQI people. You’ve got to wonder why.

Jacobsen: So, I mean, it’s not a good look to be rejecting well over half of the recommendations from the UN. The Universal Periodic Review, UPR, is a very standardized procedure. Every country has to go through it. So this is a very fair procedure that the UN conducts.

The fact that they are rejecting so many is probably not shocking, because I haven’t done a systematic study of how common it is to reject that many. But the fact that so many recommendations were made and so many were rejected, and none of those accepted had to do with LGBTI+ people, using the language of the LGBTI Core Group in the UN, is pretty remarkable, especially from a wealthy society.

They can’t use the excuses of being theocratic, autocratic, poor, or uneducated. They’re a wealthy, open, democratic, and educated society. So this is a very—

Bouley: They’re the fucking home of koalas. Let’s be real. The gayest little animal. Come on. It’s the gayest little animal in the world. Gayer than a kangaroo. It’s true.

The sad part is, in The Interpreter, which is the publication that printed this, there’s a very telling next line after it gives the statistics. The line is, “This matters particularly in the current political moment involving a backlash against LGBTQIA identities and a regression on gay rights around the world.”

The United Kingdom, for example, was ranked first in Europe on LGBTQI rights in 2013. By 2026, it’s fallen to number 22. The deteriorating rights situation is so severe that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued a red flag alert on anti-trans and intersex rights. The institute also put out an alert for the United States on anti-trans rights.

So the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued a red flag alert for the United States on anti-trans rights. That is mind-boggling to me. I mean, Scott, I know that I should be prepared for something like that, but it’s amazing how quickly my rights worldwide have gone backwards. More than any other group of people, more than immigrants, more than anybody.

It’s amazing how my rights and the rights of people like me have gone backwards so fast, meaning that the do-gooders who advanced them weren’t doing it out of a deeply felt need for equality. They were doing it for political gain or expediency. And now that that political gain or expediency is gone, they have no problem going backwards.

Jacobsen: It’s interesting. The political moves backwards were slower than the corporate moves backwards. We’ve commented a little bit on this.

Bouley: Yes. In some ways, yes. Corporations have stuck by us more than governments, which is odd because corporations run governments. So that’s really interesting.

Now, in The Interpreter’s research on the backlash against gay rights and the prevention of mass atrocity crimes, they found significant gaps in both research and policy practice, where LGBTQIA people haven’t been factored into risk indicators for atrocities. The underlying assumption is that the communities served by people working on atrocity prevention are all heterosexual and cisgender.

Which is not the case for any large group of people. “We argue that researchers and practitioners need to remove the cis-heteronormative blindfold and consider the specific needs of gay people.”

And that brings up a really interesting point. You know, here’s something you probably know because you’re really super smart. You’re a superintelligence. You’re not an AI. You’re a superintelligence.

Yeah, you’re an SI. Did you hear? Maybe you didn’t hear over there.

Jacobsen: I read about that. I did. I’m sad that I had enough time out of my exhausting schedule to even read that part. But it was a nice little break of amusement in spite of the—

Bouley: He just said Iran could take out Los Angeles and San Diego, and it would be a small project.

Jacobsen: Yeah. There was a joke I heard today: imagine being Canada. It’s like living on the floor above the apartment where the car alarm or the fire alarm has been going off for three years. Then the comment that followed that one was, “Yeah, imagine being trapped in the apartment or the car for three years.”

Bouley: I read an interesting article in The Guardian yesterday that said it’s not so much that Donald Trump said that about Los Angeles and San Diego. It’s everyone’s reaction to it.

A, it was the audience applauding for it. That speaks volumes. B, it’s that, and let me paraphrase for you, he’s so fucking crazy that it’s accepted. You know what I’m saying?

Jacobsen: Yeah, he’s normal. We have normalized our response to him. Remember, he was with Zelensky, and he referred to the Islamic Republic of Japan.

Bouley: Yeah. Yeah, right. So maybe the Islamic Republic of Japan will be the one launching the rockets to bomb Los Angeles.

Jacobsen: Yeah.

Bouley: So, anyway, where was I going about the fact that they’re not gay, these people doing this? What I was going to say is, here in America, I don’t know if it’s the same in other places, and you probably know this, most of the medical research for drugs is done on men. Men, not women.

And then they still give the drugs to women, but there’s been no research on women. So now there’s a push that when a drug manufacturer develops a drug, they test it on women, too. And it’s the same thing. In other words, how on earth do you address gay issues if you’re not gay?

Look, Scott, I can totally read the rest of these stories this week. Do you need to go? You just got an alert. There are ballistic missiles incoming. Do you need to go to a shelter?

Jacobsen: No, that’s fine. Let’s go.

Bouley: It’s not fine. I don’t want my video to go viral because it shows a reporter being blown up.

Jacobsen: These things land within a couple of minutes, so it’s too late at this point.

Bouley: You have me really worried now. It just seems so stupid to be sitting here talking about these issues when there are bombs falling around you. I mean, it just—

Jacobsen: I did have something I wanted to add. So, when I used to be in psychology labs, not medical laboratories, this came up. When men are typically considered the normative body for a sample of human beings, it skews the research. So you’d want more women in samples to get a more balanced picture of their specific concerns, in gynecology and other areas.

In psychology, they used to talk about WEIRD. I pulled it up. It was from Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. Ara, I think, is at the University of British Columbia as a prominent researcher.

WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. WEIRD subjects.

Bouley: Yes.

Jacobsen: So 96% of behavioural science subjects at that time in psychology were of the WEIRD type: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But that 96% came from populations accounting for only 12% of the global population. So it’s skewed in that way.

That’s a very common factor, not only in medicine but also in psychology. I remember that being quite a big thing.

Bouley: I saw a wonderful documentary on the Vikings, which interests me because the Vikings didn’t keep written records. So I think it’s very interesting to watch a history of the Vikings when we really don’t know.

What the person brought up in this BBC documentary, probably Richard Attenborough, was that Viking history was written by people who hated them, basically, the French and others.

And I maintain that, up until very recently, I would say up until the sixties or seventies, which is in my lifetime, LGBTQIA history and issues pertaining to LGBTQIA people were written about and interpreted, all of it, by people who were not LGBTQIA. Very much like having men write history on behalf of women, which, as we know, they have.

So it was very interesting to me that this article says the same thing: the UN and all these other organizations that delve into LGBTQ rights are run by cisgender heterosexual people. So maybe it would be different if we got some gays involved. Just maybe.

That brings us to a story from Geneva Solutions: the UN Rights Council can’t address anti-gay laws without condemning their colonial roots.

I brought this up on the show previously because I saw this Black activist preaching to Black people, saying, “You all don’t hate gays.” Because Black people are seen as very anti-LGBTQIA, so much so that if they are gay, they’re called “on the down low.”

What this guy was saying was, “You have taken on the morals and values of your colonial overlords, of the people who brought you into slavery.” You took on the morals of the white man, basically.

If you went by your own morals, in Africa, LGBTQ people, prior to the new regimes in Africa, they were talking way back, they were not concerned with gays. In fact, they had a word for them. They had a word for two-spirit people. They were in their culture. They accepted them as part of the culture. Maybe they didn’t welcome them with open arms, but they accepted them. Then, when they were colonized, suddenly they were [unclear].

Fifty-two of the 65 countries that criminalize consensual same-sex intimacy inherited these laws from colonial rule. Yet a proposed UN resolution on decriminalization omits that history. How very Trump. Risking the false impression that gay rights are a Western imposition.

Isn’t that interesting? I mean, that’s pretty interesting. France has proposed a resolution, although right now they’re busy with riots in their streets.

France has proposed a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council calling for the universal decriminalization of consensual same-sex conduct between adults. While the spirit is commendable, 141 LGBTQIA civil society organizations, including the one from Geneva Solutions, working in over 40 criminalizing countries, have raised concerns about its risks.

They warn that the initiative is the wrong strategy and risks fueling misinformation that gay people’s rights are a foreign agenda imposed by the West on Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.

That is very interesting. They don’t want gay rights to be seen as a Western export because of people’s disdain for the West.

Jacobsen: Right. So there is an anti-Western wave, and the current West, more aligned with universal standards of human rights, endorses LGBTQI rights, et cetera.

Older colonial versions of it, particularly under the hand of Christianity, various versions, primarily Catholicism, were not like that. And that’s the kind they inherited.

So that report is speaking to older forms of colonial Christian European heritage, as opposed to the contemporary form, which is more aligned with international standards. And it shows up in the rankings of those societies, too.

Bouley: What I find very interesting is that even here in the article, it just flat out says, “Homophobia is a colonial legacy.” It just is.

And we can thank Great Britain for that. We can thank France, Germany, and all of them for homophobia. They basically invented it. And they invented it out of their staunch Christian and Lutheran—

It’s funny, but we were talking about colonialism in Muslim countries. Donald Trump very famously this week said, “Gays for Palestine, who knew? Gays for…” I can’t imitate him, and I won’t.

“Gays for Palestine,” he goes. “Well, why don’t we send them over there to negotiate and see how far that goes?” Let them get killed, basically.

Not only did he want Los Angeles and San Diego to be wiped out, he wanted gay people to go to Palestine so they could be killed.

And, of course, I maintain, as a gay man, that a society’s ability to survive is not linked to its acceptance of my sexuality. I don’t want to wipe out every society on the planet that does not approve of gay people because, if so, it would be a very lonely planet, which is a sad statement, but true.

But I bring this up because homophobia in Muslim countries only increased and reached a fever pitch when colonial homophobia went into overdrive.

Prior to all of it, back in days of old, 500, 600, 700, 800, who cared from gay? They had other things to worry about, like plague, which we now have to worry about again, thanks to Russia. But they didn’t really care. Then colonialism happened, and they cared.

So we can really attribute modern-day homophobia to the religious-based colonizers. We’ve got to remember that the religious-based colonizers were a group of zealots so extreme they were kicked out of their own country.

So I do think it’s time that the colonial role in homophobia be addressed. I’m glad those people are addressing it.

All right, where should we go next? Do you want to pick the next story?

Jacobsen: Yes. So, Timothy Patrick McCarthy at Harvard Kennedy School, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. I’ve interviewed Timothy, I think, at least a couple of times.

Robert Coles, someone I was familiar with before, was a transformative teacher and mentor whose literature course connected intellectual inquiry with compassion and service. McCarthy recalled Coles’s storytelling, support, engagement, and personal influence. He urged readers and listeners to carry forward his legacy through moral reflection and meaningful responsibility toward other people.

So I just thought it was a nice, positive story to… Someone who had a great impact on someone who has been very important, at least at Harvard, to some of the equality movements.

Bouley: And the nice thing about Bob Coles was that he would inspire people to make their own judgments by reading, heaven forbid. But he always insisted that his classes read a wide variety of things on both sides, from evangelical all the way down the line, so they could get a fuller, more meaningful grasp.

He wasn’t just a pro-gay evangelist. He challenged people to go out and look at all the points of view and then form their own opinions from what they read. He was of the mind that the more you read and the more you knew, the less homophobia you would have. And, of course, he’s right. Very, very educated people are not bigots, for the most part. There are exceptions, but for the most part.

And, you know, we all have our mentors as gay people. We all have our mentors. While this author remembered Mr. Coles, Dr. Coles, I’m sorry, reading this story reminded me of when I was in high school and went to cover Harvey Milk speaking at a local school about the Briggs Initiative and doing a debate.

I saw Harvey onstage, being out and proud and articulate and holding his own. And I thought to myself, “Well, that’s me. That’s what I have to be right there. That’s me.” And from that moment on, this is what you got because of Harvey Milk, basically.

All right, we are back. Scott, you’ve got 20 more minutes before you can go run into the bathroom and hide.

We’re talking about Professor Coles and this article from Harvard by Timothy Patrick McCarthy, the faculty chair of the Global LGBTQIA Human Rights Program. He says something really interesting that I just… It’s not even about being gay. He said, “Dr. Coles became an ancestor on June 4th, 2026.”

That is a very interesting way of saying he died. He became an ancestor. And I think we might live a little more responsibly if we realized we, too, will one day be the ancestors they talk about, that they look back upon.

You know, one day, with all of your writings, you’ll be an ancestor. Someone people read, look up to, emulate, get inspired by, or hate, depending on who they are.

Jacobsen: Or all of the above. That was a very interesting… The wrong people hate me, which means I did the right thing.

Bouley: That’s exactly right. I always say that. It’s the haters who let me know I’m doing my job properly.

That was a great story, and he is a great person. If you don’t know who Dr. Coles is, please go look him up. He wasn’t a superhero. He was just a teacher. But as just a teacher, he inspired so many people to expand their minds and read the works of people like Baldwin and everybody, just everybody.

Yeah, and I’ll never forget when I read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, or, as Truman said it, “Truman Capote.” His only…

Bestselling novel, by the way. And he’s thought of as such a great writer, but that was his biggest and brightest novel.

Jacobsen: All these writers were unknown until they were dead.

Bouley: Well, what did Bette Davis say? The famous line. There are so many famous lines in All About Eve. She said, “Well, most composers are dead.”

And he said something about playwrights, and she said, “All playwrights should be dead for a hundred years before their work is performed.” Fabulous line.

If you’ve never seen All About Eve, do yourself a favour. It’s gay classic 101. It’s Bette Davis. It’s Marilyn Monroe. It’s the movie that gave us, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

And I could quote so many lines. Marilyn Monroe comes up to her and asks for honey for her daiquiri. Bette Davis looks at her, because she’s jealous of her, because she’s so beautiful, and says, “We’re all little bees, full of sting, making honey, aren’t we, honey?”

Then she turns to the theatre critic, Addison DeWitt, who looks at her and says, “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent.”

In high school, I wrote plays and was in theatre.

Jacobsen: That’s really good.

Bouley: Oh, and there’s a great scene where Addison makes Eve, who is Bette Davis’s understudy, a star. Suddenly, she becomes the star because Bette Davis’s character magically can’t make a performance that all the theatre critics are at, because Addison told them to be there.

He goes backstage to get his pound of flesh from Eve for making her famous, and she senses it. Of course, Addison is gay. You could tell he’s gay, but in the movie, he’s supposed to be a womanizer.

So Eve gets up to throw him out of the room. She opens the door and says, “Get out.”

He walks up, closes the door, and says, “You’re far too short for that gesture.”

Jacobsen: It sounds like it’s a movie of quips.

Bouley: That’s what it is. Every single line in the movie is repeatable.

And it’s funny that we’re talking about this on This Gay Week, because there was a time in culture, even in my youth, when people wondered, “Why do gay men glom onto so many movies like The Wizard of Oz and All About Eve?”

Back in the forties, fifties, and sixties, you couldn’t just come out and say, “I’m gay.” You tried to be as closeted as you could. So the only way you could let someone know you were gay was to quote movie lines from movies that were steeped in gay culture.

That’s where the term “friend of Dorothy” comes from. Gay people used to be called friends of Dorothy. And why do you suppose that is?

The Wizard of Oz, because gays loved The Wizard of Oz. Well, Judy Garland, you know, they loved Judy Garland. She was our Barbra Streisand. Today, Taylor Swift, Christina, whatever. She was our gay icon.

So if you quoted Judy Garland, you were a friend of Dorothy, which meant you were letting people know you were gay. Famous movie lines from Bette Davis, “Fasten your seatbelts.” These movie lines were a way of letting others know you were gay without coming out and saying, “I’m gay.”

So if they heard you quote The Wizard of Oz, if they heard you quote All About Eve, and I could go down the list of other famous movies that gays glommed onto, then they knew you were a friend of Dorothy.

Like Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire. “You want to marry him for my money,” or, “You want to marry him for his money.” And Marilyn looks at the father and goes, “No, I want to marry him for your money.”

And he goes, “How dare you?”

And she says, “Why? Marrying a man who’s rich is like marrying a woman who’s pretty. You wouldn’t marry a woman just because she’s pretty, but it certainly does help. And you wouldn’t marry a man just because he’s rich, but it certainly does help.”

I know that line because people in my community repeated those lines over and over again in the gay bars. That’s where I grew up hearing them. You know, it was in the gay bars. Then I would go out and watch the films.

So there’s a very big history of gay men and movies and how we identified ourselves to each other. That was one of the ways we identified ourselves to each other, saying quotes from movies that gay men loved and adored, and from stars like Judy Garland.

You know, Judy Garland’s funeral was the night before the morning of the Stonewall riots. Many credit that as part of the reason the riots happened: the queers were there at the Stonewall watching Judy’s funeral on TV, and they were distraught. Their icon was dead way too early.

Later that night, when the raid happened, the queens had just had enough. Judy was dead. The Vietnam War was raging. There was all this homophobia. And then the police, who normally gave them a heads-up…

I don’t know if you know the whole story of Stonewall, which wasn’t a gay bar, by the way, because there were no gay bars. But the Stonewall Inn was protected by the mob. It was a mob-run bar, and it was for derelicts and degenerates, meaning gays, heroin addicts, hookers, all of that.

The Stonewall Inn was often called prior to a raid by a cop on the payroll, who said, “Hey, get all the gays out the back door because there’s going to be a raid.” Well, that night, the cops didn’t make the call.

And so the bar didn’t know the raid was happening. It got ugly, and they were already on edge from Judy Garland’s funeral. I’m not saying her funeral was the reason for the riot, but it was one of the things weighing heavily on the community’s mind that night, because it happened the next morning. June 28th was the funeral, and the morning of June 29th was the riot, just in case you didn’t know.

Now, this is something you and I have talked about a lot, and we came to our own conclusion without this Geneva Solutions article. I believe you said this very thing: authoritarian populists are fueling the tide of anti-gay laws for votes.

You made that point very succinctly on a few shows. They want to win elections. It’s easy to pander to people who hate, and one of the biggest and easiest groups to hate is gay people. So they do it not because they really believe it, but for votes.

The article goes on to explain why, but I think you explained it perfectly on this show.

Jacobsen: You want an easy scapegoat? Find those who have fewer protections in society and are less likely to have equal status under law or policy. Target them, demonize them, simply for who they make love to and who they love, and then get some votes. You know, cash it in.

I mean, the debt and the interest on that debt are paid in the livelihoods of those in the queer community, the gay community. But if you’ve already won the vote, then you’re in charge anyway, and who gives a shit? Generally.

Bouley: In our country, we talk about the inequality in our justice system for Black people, and how there are more Black people in jail than in college. That is no longer a true statistic, but it was at one point in the last decade.

They asked this gentleman, “What are the main risks that the LGBTQ population faces in detention, and what are the underlying factors?”

He said there are two elements. The first is, why are gay people disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system? One example is barriers to education. Very often, experiences at school, bullying, lead to poor results or even dropping out.

Stigma and discrimination mean that gay people, for a range of reasons, are excluded from certain forms of employment and find themselves on the margins socially and economically. Then, very often, they’re pushed into a grey area of informal, quasi-legal employment because they cannot get regular employment.

Jacobsen: Employment refugees within their own country.

Bouley: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. They can’t legally work in some jobs. They’re literally restricted by law. So what are they? It’s like immigration in this country.

Jacobsen: I’d be even less concerned about that if I were in that condition. I would be more concerned about the cultural and normative pressure against someone even being there, and then working there.

Bouley: In this article, they go back to Africa. They say there’s been a rise in criminalizing laws, particularly in African countries. Why do you think that is?

This author says colonialism, that these laws are left over from colonialism. And, again, the authoritarian leaders in these countries use those colonial laws to get votes now.

Jacobsen: Colonial history is on colonial history. The active use of those laws by certain leaders is on those leaders.

The encouragement and financial backing of those regimes, policymakers, and legislators by foreign “investors,” let’s call them, come primarily, as we noted earlier, from a lot of evangelical groups, maybe some hardline Catholic groups in the United States.

There are other areas, obviously, because it’s an international hard-right religious movement. But the wealthy societies are the ones with the money to actually send it abroad. And the United States is still the biggest economy.

Bouley: No matter how Trump tries to destroy it.

Jacobsen: Because even though you’ve scared away a lot of brilliant people who create whole industries, there are still some people who stay in the country and create whole industries. Or there are the industries that are already established.

Bouley: Right.

Jacobsen: SpaceX, et cetera.

Bouley: Yeah, we do have some techies here. But, of course, Ireland is trying to steal our tech culture, which I love. And we have a story out of Ireland, where they had a conference to talk about the challenges faced by LGBTQ people in education and queer youth in Ireland.

I applaud Ireland. I may move there. I’ve seriously been looking at Ireland as a place to go.

I love one of the quotes. Sinan Askey, a member of the DCU Anti-Bullying Centre, stated, “The spaces where students pause between lessons, the relationships they build, and those small moments when a young person feels that they are seen and that they matter.”

I cannot tell you, as someone who was a gay youth, out and open in 1976, ’77, ’78, ’79, and ’80, especially in high school, how true that is.

No matter how safe they tried to make me in the classroom, and they did, it was the late seventies, but they tried, it wasn’t the classroom I worried about. It was the hallways. It was the gym locker room. It was the spaces in between. That’s what I worried about the most.

So I think it’s great that Ireland is addressing and focusing on that. It’s not just about what teachers do in the classroom or how safe or included they make students feel there, but also out in the corridors and everywhere else.

Anyway, back to Ireland. They said their goal was to drive positive, empathetic, and inspiring conversations about how everyone in a school community, from students and teachers to parents, can play a role in shaping LGBTQIA-inclusive schools.

They touch on the biggest thing. It doesn’t matter what teachers do. It doesn’t matter what students do in the hallway. The most important way you can make an LGBTQIA-friendly school is to make sure that the fucking parents are LGBTQIA-inclusive.

Because homophobic children come from homophobic parents. They learn it at home. They don’t learn it on their own. It doesn’t just come out of a vacuum. Hateful students have hateful parents. It’s just that simple.

Jacobsen: Yeah, because they spend more time with their parents or around them. So it’s going to be learned in the home. It’s going to be reinforced in communities and schools.

Bouley: Yes, but it starts at home. It starts at home.

By the way, what are the students rallying about in France? Do you know? I don’t know. One kid just got his hand blown off.

Jacobsen: Dilapidated schools, poor standards, not enough teachers. And now they’ve expanded to Belgium as well, so it’s a big problem.

Bouley: Good for them. See, I love students who are willing to shut down the schools and go out into the streets. I don’t like that one of their hands got blown off. You know, I really—

Jacobsen: Yeah, that was a stun grenade.

Bouley: That was a stun grenade, yeah. And now they’re not going to use them. Isn’t that great? The police saw what happened.

Jacobsen: Fifteen years old.

Bouley: Yeah, and the police saw what happened and felt so badly about it that they’ve said, “Stop using them altogether.” Here in America, we’d double down on it. We’d be like, “Hell, fuck them. They shouldn’t be out there.”

Jacobsen: But there are larger problems. They’re more pervasive than just that.

Bouley: Let’s go back to Turkey, where they are cracking down on gays because of chicken.

Jacobsen: I’m a vegan, so neither.

Bouley: Yeah, there you go. That’s right.

The Turkish court has shut down the independent news agency T24 simply because it was reporting on the gay crackdown. They say that’s LGBTQIA propaganda, reporting on how badly gays are being treated.

Jacobsen: T24, yeah.

Bouley: Yes, we have heard that language before. An Istanbul court has shut down an independent news website and its social media accounts over content prosecutors described as gay propaganda, marking a significant escalation in a week-long crackdown on gay rights activists, journalists, and online platforms across Turkey.

I think we can end with this because it goes right back to that story we talked about: how authoritarian leaders are using antiquated laws to get votes and curry favour. That’s all this is.

There’s no reason for Turkey to be doing this to its gay community. It’s not that big, first of all. And second, it poses no threat to them whatsoever. In fact, it’s good for tourism. Gays used to love to go to Turkey, but now it’s hurting their tourism.

They’re persecuting people who are Turkish, who were born there. They’re Turkish. It’s persecuting their own people over nothing.

Jacobsen: And how independent is a news agency if it gets shut down by the state for something they don’t like? Then it’s not an independent news agency, is it?

Bouley: Well, it’s not an independent or dependent news agency. They shut it down. It’s not a news agency anymore. It doesn’t exist.

Jacobsen: Right.

Bouley: Simply because they reported to their two million followers on X, their YouTube channel, which has 280,000 subscribers, and their Instagram account, with 238,000.

They said they did not get any outside funding to promote gay people. They say repeated government tax audits have found no evidence that they got outside funding funnelled to them through gay people, gay organizations, or gay-friendly organizations.

And yet that’s why they were shut down. The judge said he agreed with the prosecutors that they were getting funding specifically earmarked to promote gay issues, and they were not, in fact, getting that funding.

But the truth doesn’t matter because they’re trying to crack down on gays.

Jacobsen: No, they are engaged in an active cultural information war.

Bouley: Yeah.

Jacobsen: Part of that comes under the guise of “LGBT propaganda.”

Bouley: They see it as against family.

Look, they’re going after ABC for Jimmy Kimmel. A judge this morning just smacked the FCC and said he tends to agree with the defence that what they’re doing to ABC is unjust. Wanting to renew their licences early and everything because of what Jimmy Kimmel said about the president.

Jacobsen: CNN just got purchased, too.

Bouley: Yeah, they just got purchased by Larry and David Ellison, best friends of the president, who own everything now. Skydance, which is European, but Skydance now owns CNN, and HBO is going to be folded into Paramount.

HBO, which is very gay-friendly in terms of its programming, will probably see that vanish.

So, I mean, I’d like to say that media is in great shape here, but it’s not. We’re not as bad as Turkey yet. But I will say that I don’t see very many pro-gay stories in our news.

Jacobsen: Well, I can turn that current sentiment you’re expressing around a little bit. The French protests expanding into Belgian protests are examples of very young people, teenagers, being sick of old people’s bullshit. They’re really not tolerating all this. So a lot of change, I think, is going to come from the bottom up.

Bouley: Well, there’s a great editorial at LGBTQ Nation that says it’s time to stop fighting each other and remember why queer media exist at all.

I think everyone should read that because we are fighting amongst ourselves now. There are gays who are trying to separate themselves from trans people. There are gays who don’t like the older, effeminate gays, and now they want more butch, younger gays. We’re fracturing, and some of them are condemning gay media.

These queens, these young queers, have no sense of history and don’t realize that it was Julius Caesar who used the divide-and-conquer strategy. That’s exactly what the right is trying to do with the gay community in America, because the more fractured you are, the less power you have.

All right, Scott, take care of yourself over there. Stay away from ballistic missiles, please. One a day will just ruin your whole day. So don’t, you know, don’t encounter one.

Jacobsen: The National Academy of Sciences here.

Bouley: That’s just bad. That’s just bad.

I am Karel. Be who you want to be, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. Everyone, wish Scott well over in Ukraine. You’ll be in my thoughts. Email me throughout the week to let me know you’re alive and well and have made it.

By the way, I just wanted to stop it right there, dead in the middle of the end of the show, because I wanted to give you a piece of good news. LGBTQ media readership in America has gone up.

Jacobsen: There’s a UAV that landed in an apartment complex.

Bouley: Just now?

Jacobsen: It would appear to be an apartment complex. Yep.

Bouley: So people could have died.

Jacobsen: At least been injured.

Bouley: Yeah. There it is. That looks like a residential building to me.

Jacobsen: It does to me, too.

Bouley: Yeah, it absolutely does. This war has to end. It must stop. It’s beginning to… Putin’s beginning to be like Netanyahu. It seems like he will not be happy until Ukraine is in rubble.

Jacobsen: Four were injured. Twenty-two others were rescued as a result of Russian shelling. It was residential, the tenth floor of a twelve-storey building.

Bouley: It’s just got to stop. I don’t know how it’s going to stop. I don’t. You know, we won’t intervene.

Is it Putin’s birthday today or tomorrow?

Jacobsen: Today.

Bouley: Seventy-four years old. So what are you doing for your birthday? “I’m going to bomb Ukraine.”

Jacobsen: True. Several children were killed. That was already pointed out today.

Bouley: Yeah, we’ve got to stop this war. I wish the United States had a leader who was more adamant about stopping the war. Hopefully, after the midterms, our Congress will be more adamant about stopping the war and more supportive of Ukraine.

We just sent Israel $2.8 billion. I’d rather send that money to Ukraine. I’d rather help Ukraine.

I don’t like to spend money on other people’s wars, but I would very much like Ukraine to win this battle. I don’t even know what winning looks like. Do you? You’re there. What does winning look like now? Not giving up the land they’ve taken? I mean, what does winning look like?

Jacobsen: What winning looks like, that is a fundamental question. That’s probably been asked since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, probably earlier, since the beginning of the war in 2014. The answer to that key question is something only the victims of the war can appropriately provide.

Bouley: I think Putin’s not going to budge because he thinks he’ll look weak. And I think Zelensky’s not going to budge because I don’t think he wants to give up the territory they’ve gained. The Donbas region, is that the name of it?

Jacobsen: We have to be very careful. I did an interview with Oleksandra Matviichuk of the Center for Civil Liberties. They won the only Nobel Peace Prize that Ukraine has. We sat down for coffee and did a couple of interviews.

One thing she pointed out that was very important: we talk about territory and giving up territory, concessions around territory, et cetera. It’s not just territory. It’s people.

Bouley: Well, right. I always say that in this country. When I talk about policy, I say policy isn’t just politics. It’s people. Policy is people. When you talk about a policy, you’re talking about people affected by that policy. And it’s the same thing there. You’re right.

I have a large, very large map on the wall here. It takes up the entire wall. It’s an old map, with old borders, but Ukraine and its territory aren’t just a spot on that map. There are people on every square inch of that. So if you’re ceding or giving up territory, you’re not giving up geography. You’re giving up people. So, yeah, it’s rough.

All right. Well, I want the war to end. If it were my world and I were the leader of it, it would end tomorrow. I would tell Putin, “Sit down, shut up, or I’ll blow up St. Petersburg.” But, you know, I’m not—

Jacobsen: Well, you’d probably start your first day of world governance with a marathon of The Wizard of Oz.

Bouley: I’m sure more people could be helped if they just realized—

Jacobsen: Okay, pause it at every great quote.

Bouley: If they just realized the man behind the curtain, read Vladimir Putin, has no power. There are life lessons in The Wizard of Oz.

Jacobsen: Oh, you’d probably have it on the White House lawn. You’d construct a big, giant closet theatre so that every time you finished The Wizard of Oz in your annual marathons, you could officially say, “We’re all coming out of the closet together.”

Bouley: “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

The Munchkins were mean, vicious little things. They were little drunks. No one went by their hotel. They were vicious, mean little drunks. I know everything about that film.

The sulphur used on the set gave Glinda the Good Witch a horrible skin infection. The green paint they used for the Wicked Witch, she suffered terribly because of it.

Judy Garland’s dresses were two sizes too small on purpose to make her look like a youth. They strapped her in and tied down her boobs because she had them at this time.

The Tin Man’s makeup… Later on, I believe, it gave him cancer or something like that, the silver they used on his face. There’s so much. The only ones who came out of it well were the horses. The dye they used for the horses, to make the horse of a different colour and all the other coloured horses, was Jell-O. So that was non-toxic.

But there was so much toxicity on that set. There were drunk little Munchkins. I mean, they used to go and try to get under the Good Witch’s skirt and all this stuff.

Jacobsen: Of course.

Bouley: And there was so much symbolism. The flying monkeys were deemed racist at the time. They equated them to Black people. So The Wizard of Oz has a lot of issues, not just LGBTQ issues, but a lot of issues in it.

Jacobsen: But, of course, let’s remember: you’ve probably not seen that movie more than once, and you still know the phrase, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Even almost a hundred years after that film was made, literally about 80 years ago, we’re still quoting it, which is a testament to the power of film, particularly when it holds—

Bouley: Well, right now at the Sphere, Metallica’s there, but when they leave, it goes back to The Wizard of Oz. They’re charging $125 to see The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere, and 60 minutes have been edited from the movie.

But when you watch it, flying monkeys come across the theatre, apples fall from the trees, snowflakes fall in the Sphere, and it’s on the entire huge screen. So it’s quite a thing.

I am gay, but I have not gone to see it yet. I know, I might have to turn in my gay card, but I used to watch it every year at Easter on television. So why would I pay $125 to see a movie I’ve seen probably 54 times? I won’t.

Anyway, okay. Just a lovely conversation, though. Thank you for sharing those images of decimated apartment complexes. Try not to find yourself in one, okay? Do me that favour. Try not to find yourself in one.

Jacobsen: Yeah. No promises.

Bouley: Yeah.

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer and Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic, media, and research institution fellowships, and currently serves on numerous international boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.