This Gay Week 26: Pride Backlash and LGBTQ Solidarity

Karel Bouley is a trailblazing LGBTQ broadcaster, entertainer, and activist. As half of the first openly gay duo in U.S. drive-time radio, he made history while shaping California law on LGBTQ wrongful death cases. Karel rose to prominence as the #1 talk show host on KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles and KGO AM 810 in San Francisco, and later expanded into Free Speech TV and the Karel Cast podcast. His work spans journalism (HuffPost, The Advocate, Billboard), television (CNN, MSNBC), and the music industry. A voting member of NARAS, GALECA, and SAG-AFTRA, Karel now lives and creates in Las Vegas.

Karel Bouley and Scott Douglas Jacobsen discuss Pride Month amid renewed backlash, including baseball players refusing Pride jerseys, Türkiye’s anti-LGBTQ proposals, South Korea’s contested Seoul Pride, Japan’s awareness plan, and U.S. efforts to restore 988 LGBTQ youth crisis support. Bouley argues for solidarity across the LGBTQ spectrum, critiques religiously driven politics, and frames Pride as both celebration and protest, while Jacobsen urgently situates these issues within authoritarian governance and human rights struggles worldwide today.

Karel Bouley: It is time for a special half-hour edition of This Gay Week. Professional baseball teams are cancelling games. Why? What is going on in Turkey? We will talk about that.

Will Margaret Thatcher’s policy finally come under review? Yes, and so much more. Now, it is showtime!

Alright, it is This Gay Week on The Karel Show, with Scott Jacobsen for The Good Men Project, normally in Canada but now in Ukraine. We do this every week to entertain you and tell you what is going on in the world of gayness, with one of us being gay and the other being gay-adjacent. I will let you figure out which one is which, but he would be a cuter gay than me. He would be a bigger hit in the gay community than I am.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Correct.

Bouley: No, believe me, I know. I am gay; I know these things. Alright, let us get right into it. There are a couple of things going on. I will let you lead, and I’ll share my comments on the stories, but I want to start with this.

We have touched upon this for a couple of weeks now, and I am starting to see an alarming trend on social media among gays and lesbians, mostly gay men, who are saying, “I do not want to be part of the alphabet anymore. I do not have anything in common with trans people. I do not have anything in common with queer people. I do not even know what intersex is.” I want to go on record here with you and everyone else saying, “Shut the fuck up.”

The reason we have all banded together, which escapes your young, warped Gen X, Gen Z, Gen Y, and millennial minds, is that there is power in numbers.

If gay people are a small percentage of the population, we need a group to have a voice, a voting bloc, and economic power. That means we need allies. When gays became gay, and lesbians became lesbians, I had nothing in common with lesbians.

I do not have plaid, and I do not have cats. Yet we were a larger voting bloc with lesbians on our side. The same thing applies to the trans community.

We are a voting bloc. We are an economic bloc. We are stronger together, which is why the marginalized communities of sexuality have banded together. That is because we are all in the same boat, and we need a larger voice in politics and corporate America. We are not going to get that if all the letters are fractioned off on their own.

So, for those of you who do not think we need the T in LGBT, you do not know crap about your history.

For those of you who think you do not have anything in common with trans people, lesbians, or bi people, you have never met any. That is an infuriating argument. It is an infuriating group of stories, and I say any gay person out there talking this shit needs to shut up and take some history lessons.

But that is just me. Alright, now to the stories at hand. Play roulette. Pick one. Let us talk.

Jacobsen: I think we should go with yours first. It’s a perfectly fine story. This is from SFGATE by Alex Simon, the sports editor. He notes that, as the San Francisco Giants Pride Night saga lingers, the York Revolution, an independent Atlantic League team, forfeited its Pride Night game against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs after several players refused to wear Pride-themed jerseys. The headline reads, “As SF Giants saga lingers, Indy team forfeits Pride game over player protest.”

Bouley: Yes. Now, the saga with the Giants is that they held a Pride Night, and several of their players either objected or altered their Pride-themed caps with Bible verses. There was drama, and Major League Baseball issued warnings over the uniform alterations.

Then another team, the York Revolution, an independent Atlantic League team, was going to have a Pride Night. They were scheduled to wear rainbow-themed jerseys. Several players refused to wear them. Instead of playing without Pride Night, the team forfeited.

I say good for the franchise, because instead of compromising, they said, “No. Our values include supporting the LGBTQ community. If your players do not want to support the community, we will not let you play. We will not have the game.”

So, I support what they did. Several players refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jerseys, and the club decided that hosting the event was more important than forcing players to wear jerseys they were not comfortable with while still playing the game.

As a result, out of respect for the Pride community and the York community as a whole, the York Revolution decided that the game on Thursday, June 18, 2026, against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs would be forfeited, and that Pride Night would continue as the featured element of the evening at WellSpan Park.

They still had Pride Night at the park. I say good for this team. They said to the players, “You do not want to play? Then you are not going to play. We will forfeit the game. You will lose the game.”

Now, the Revolution and the Blue Crabs play in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, which is independent and not affiliated with Major League Baseball clubs. Also, if your name is the Blue Crabs, how can you be anti-gay?

But this is some of the drama. The Giants had a Pride Night. Some of their players objected to the Pride-themed caps or altered them with Bible verses. Major League Baseball warned players about the uniform alterations, and some conservative and Christian voices criticized the league’s response.

Congratulations to the Revolution. At least they still had Pride Night, even though they did not have the game. The players lost out, but not the LGBTQ community. Good for them. I do not know. In Canada, do your sports teams celebrate Pride at all?

Jacobsen: I do not think much fuss is made about it one way or the other. I do a weekly series with a colleague from New York who is currently travelling, and we have done it for at least half a year now. Every time, there seem to be more prominent stories around antisemitic violence than anti-gay rhetoric or activity. In sports, in particular, that does not come up as often.

Bouley: Look, I have never understood Pride Nights in baseball. I am not a sports fan. While I know there are gay and lesbian sports fans, I do not know many.

However, for some reason, softball and baseball seem to be sports that many gay people play. There are tons of gay softball teams, so I can see gay people going to a baseball event. I thought we would be more attracted to things like WWE or something: half-naked men in Speedos. But there is a large group of gay men and women who like baseball.

A high-ranking communications person with the Dodgers is a friend of mine. He used to be the program director at KABC Radio. He is gay, and he and his husband got married on the field at Dodger Stadium because of his role with the team. So I know many pro-gay people are working with the Dodgers, and I know the Dodgers try to be pro-gay. But their history with Pride has been complicated.

They had controversy over the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence a few years back. The Dodgers initially removed the group from their Pride Night event, then later re-invited and honoured them after backlash.

So the Dodgers have been complicated on gay rights. The Giants, you would think, are the San Francisco Giants. Hello, you are in San Francisco, and you are called the Giants. That attracts gay people right there. You would think there would not be players who are homophobic, but obviously there are.

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I am religion-phobic when religion is used to attack civil rights. If players want to spread their religion, keep it off the field.

But this is happening. Pride Month is under attack from politicians who are promoting things like Family Month or Nuclear Family Month, and from sports teams whose players are now rebelling against Pride events. It is directly related to Donald Trump and the anti-trans, anti-gay rhetoric that Trump and his movement are putting out there.

This month, we need Pride more than ever, and it appears to be challenged more than ever, including by some gay people. I just read an editorial at Salon by a gay man who thinks Pride does not include him because he is not, quote, a typical gay man. I thought, does this young queen even know what he is talking about? He does not.

He wrote a 2,000-word essay. I read the entire thing, and I thought, this man is blowing it out of his ass. He does not know a thing. Yes, Pride has become commercial, but that does not mean it is no longer a protest, nor that it is not needed. Anyway, next story.

Jacobsen: He is focusing on the exterior rather than the principle.

Bouley: Exactly. Ideological motivation. Alright, next.

Jacobsen: Next one. Human Rights Watch has warned that Türkiye has revived proposals to criminalize LGBT expression, restrict gender-affirming care, raise the age of eligibility for gender-affirming surgery to 25, require sterilization, and penalize medical providers. Human Rights Watch says these measures would violate the rights to privacy, health, legal recognition, and equality, as well as Türkiye’s international human rights obligations. Türkiye is one of those in-between countries, and we are seeing significant repression coming from them. What are your thoughts on this, and does it buck any trend?

Bouley: Well, as Hungary is being pushed in the opposite direction by European courts and public pressure over its anti-LGBTQ laws, Türkiye is moving in the opposite direction. It is a kind of yin-yang. There are gains in one place and losses in another.

First of all, Turkish prisons are practically synonymous with gay sex because of Midnight Express, so I do not know what they are all up in arms about over in Türkiye. Your country is called Türkiye, for the love of God. Gobble, gobble. Hello.

But it is religion, and it is religion entrenched in politics. Türkiye has a long and complex history. If we go back to Istanbul, Constantinople, and earlier imperial periods, they have not always fit this current conservative mould. But in recent years, Türkiye has moved in a more authoritarian and religiously conservative direction, and that is affecting LGBTQ rights.

It is not only what is happening inside Türkiye. It is also what leaders think they can gain geopolitically by being anti-gay. If being anti-LGBTQ helps Türkiye gain political allies or appeal to conservative domestic constituencies, it will do so.

It is sad. If you are gay and live in Türkiye, I would seriously consider whether you can leave. But I also know that it is easy to say. We always talk about this, and I sometimes flippantly say, “Why do they not get out?” As you know, I am trapped in America. I cannot leave. I do not have the money to start a new life somewhere else. If I sold my house, I might have a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but that is not necessarily enough to begin again in another country.

So, I understand that if you are gay in Türkiye, leaving may not be possible. The sad reality is that LGBTQ people there may suffer until enough people organize, or until there is a political advantage for the government to change course.

Right now, Türkiye is headed in a very conservative direction. Its leaders seem happy to move that way, and they are getting support from other conservative and authoritarian forces. When the political or economic pendulum swings and it becomes more profitable or advantageous for Türkiye to welcome LGBTQ people, they may change. Until then, they are likely to keep pushing anti-LGBTQ measures.

Jacobsen: Another factor in this analysis is that many of these countries do not share the same ideological governance system. North Korea is dynastic and totalitarian. Russia is authoritarian. China is communist and authoritarian. Iran is an Islamic republic. Türkiye is formally a republic, but under Erdoğan it has become increasingly authoritarian and religiously conservative.

A key factor uniting many of these systems is rule by powerful men who either face no meaningful term limits or find ways to extend their time in power. That allows them to impose policies over a longer period. The second point is that domination-based systems often come with rigid gender identities. Any deviation is then punished, which is ridiculous.

Bouley: I have never understood why governments concern themselves with sexuality or sexual orientation. I will never understand that. Look, Türkiye has bigger fish to fry than who is sleeping with whom.

The economy is under serious strain. Türkiye is the world’s largest producer of hazelnuts, and the hazelnut sector has faced crop problems, labour concerns, and documented child-labour issues in seasonal agriculture. That is an actual public-policy issue. Who adults love is not.

Türkiye has many issues it could address to help its people. This is not one of them.

In May 2026, Turkish singer Mabel Matiz was acquitted in an obscenity case over song lyrics after prosecutors argued that one of his songs contained explicit sexual content. During the trial, he was reportedly asked whether the song was written for a man. They put a singer on trial over lyrics. That tells you where things are right now.

So, right now, it is bad to be gay in Türkiye. I hope some people there can seek asylum in other countries and get out any way they can until it gets better.

Jacobsen: Do you want to pick the next one, or should I?

Bouley: You go. It is technically your segment.

Jacobsen: I like this one. I think it is news. There is a petition seeking a public inquiry into Section 28.

Bouley: Yes.

Jacobsen: Margaret Thatcher’s anti-LGBT law. We are going way back.

Bouley: Watch it, dude. I remember when they put that in place. I was in my 20s.

Jacobsen: You are still in your 20s.

Bouley: Yes. Boy George had a lot to say about Section 28 back then. He was in his 20s as well. Part of the point of figures like Boy George and Leigh Bowery was to push back against Thatcher-era conservatism through gender-bending performance, fashion, and public defiance.

The roots of punk music predate Thatcher and Section 28, but punk, post-punk, and queer club culture all fed into the broader youth rebellion against Thatcherism. So we owe a lot to the anger that came after laws like Section 28. It was a ridiculous law, and we report here on similar laws in other countries.

Section 28 said local authorities could not “promote homosexuality” or teach the acceptability of same-sex relationships as a “pretended family relationship.” In practice, it chilled discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools, encouraged the removal or avoidance of LGBTQ materials, and helped create a culture of silence. It was basically a gay gag order.

The backlash to Section 28 helped galvanize the LGBTQ rights movement in the U.K. I do not want to say LGBTQ people owe that to Margaret Thatcher being such an ass, but because she pushed so far to the right, the pendulum eventually swung hard in the other direction. The U.K. later made major gains on LGBTQ rights. Again, she swung it this way, and then it swung back that way.

I think it is good that there is a petition calling for a public inquiry into it, because Section 28 really damaged people. Kids were harmed. Staff were forced into silence. Violence and bullying were enabled. Support was denied. Bad things happened under Section 28, and there should be some public reckoning for that. Thatcher is long gone, but others are not.

Jacobsen: Sure. That is part of the Thatcher route.

Bouley: Remember, it went from 1988, when I was 26 years old, until 2003 in England and Wales. It was only repealed there 23 years ago.

Jacobsen: Was that the Tony Blair era?

Bouley: Yes, I believe it was under Tony Blair. Students were unable to receive support at school. Staff were forced to hide their identities, fearing they could be disciplined or fired. It was bad. It was a witch hunt.

Next story? Oh, by the way, Scotland repealed it in 2000, before England and Wales. Go Scotland.

Jacobsen: I have always held that Scottish people, with their accent, are the best storytellers.

Bouley: I will tell you right now, there is a Scottish guy on Apple Fitness+ named Dan. Oh, my God. I would move to Scotland to marry him.

Jacobsen: The Guardian reported on Seoul Pride, where tens of thousands gathered despite the lack of comprehensive LGBTQ protections, religious opposition, and continued exclusion from Seoul Plaza. Participants celebrated visibility, mutual support, and recent legal progress while urging lawmakers and companies to stop publicly ignoring queer Koreans.

Bouley: The mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, has said he cannot support homosexuality and that holding Pride at the city’s main square is not desirable. But the organizers and participants are saying, “Stop pretending we do not exist.” We are here, we are queer, get used to it.

They turned out in droves. Tens of thousands of people poured into central Seoul to celebrate. I do not see why the mayor does not like that. That is a lot of money going into Seoul: tourist dollars, hotels, food, and everything else.

So they could not have it in Seoul Plaza, but they did have it at a festival site elsewhere. They had university clubs, civil-society groups, and diplomatic missions there, including the British Embassy.

Days earlier, a Seoul court had offered a rare step forward for LGBTQ people, ruling that a same-sex couple who had shared their lives and finances constituted a protected legal union, even though same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in South Korea. That is odd because South Korea has a very modern, globally influential culture, but on LGBTQ rights, it remains socially conservative in important ways.

Jacobsen: It is.

Bouley: Oddly, this is still happening. Of course, in parts of Asia, it can still be very tough to be gay. The same is true in many Muslim-majority countries, though those are not the same category and should not be treated as one bloc. There are Asian countries that are not Muslim-majority, and there are Muslim-majority countries outside Asia.

In South Korea, the main organized opposition to Pride has often come from conservative Protestant groups, not Muslims. And even some Buddhist-majority or Buddhist-influenced societies have not always been accepting of gay people, despite the image of Buddhism as all peace, chanting, robes, and enlightenment.

The Dalai Lama has evolved on some of these issues, but he was not always as pro-gay as people might assume. It is odd for people in orange robes to be that worried about other people’s outfits and relationships, but here we are.

So, in parts of Southeast Asia, Korea, and other places, it is still rough. It is rough everywhere, but in South Korea it is rough in ways that surprise people, given how advanced the country is in other respects.

Jacobsen: I should add that we do not necessarily have the strength-of-numbers argument with religion in South Korea, because it has one of the largest atheist and non-religiously affiliated populations in the world.

Bouley: Yes, but it is still the Protestants there, who are only about one-fifth of the population, who are among the most vocal in their opposition to Pride. Interesting. So the conservative Protestants are the ones causing much of the problem. Even though they are only a minority, they are loud, organized, and politicians listen to them.

Jacobsen: Sure.

Bouley: Next slide.

Jacobsen: They report that the Trump administration says it is working to restore 988’s specialized LGBTQ+ youth crisis support option by the end of the year, after eliminating it in July 2025. Officials cite congressional direction, but advocates remain skeptical because implementation clashes with federal policies denying transgender recognition and inclusion. So, as you were noting with international pendulum swings, we are also seeing domestic pendulum swings.

Bouley: No. If they are allowing this, it is either because they are afraid of being sued or because Congress or a court is compelling them to do so. They would not do it out of the goodness of their hearts or because it is the right thing to do. The Trump administration would not know the right thing to do if it jumped up and bit them in the ass.

Jacobsen: It is not Christian love for us that prevents them from burning us at the stake. It is the impotence of their ‘love.’

Bouley: Right. This appears to be based on congressional direction and possibly fear of legal pressure. Instead of fighting it, they decided, “Let us go ahead and do it.” Also, a lot of them are running for office, and dead kids are not a good platform to run on. Truly.

An HHS spokesperson said the department is working with the 988 network administrator, Vibrant Emotional Health, to reactivate Press 3 operations by the end of the year. So, press 3 if you are LGBTQ.

The spokesperson described the effort as part of Congress’s fiscal year 2026 directive to restore the service. In other words, Congress had to tell them to do it. Congress had already allocated the money, so they said, “Do it.” This was not something the administration wanted to do.

According to reporting obtained by The Advocate, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, on behalf of HHS under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said it was evaluating how to restore the 988 Lifeline’s specialized services for LGBTQ youth, commonly known as Press 3, following Congress’s direction.

Congress may have tied other funding to this; I’ll double-check the specific language. The point is that Congress forced them, and it was over money and statutory direction. But they did it.

However, do not get too happy, because the agency said that restoration would need to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order requiring federal agencies to recognize only two sexes and rejecting federal recognition of transgender identities.

So how are you going to set up a Press 3 option for people who are trans or questioning if you cannot talk to them honestly about being trans or questioning? This will likely end up in court. We will see.

But good for Congress.

Jacobsen: Well, yes.

Bouley: Congress is pretty useless at this point, but at least Congress could not have been clearer. The Trump administration must restore the 988 Lifeline. It must.

Congress did not leave this ambiguous. Executive orders cannot override federal law, and Congress already settled this question. Congress already set up this hotline. Congress already said it was for LGBTQ youth, including trans, gay, and bi youth. His executive order cannot override that, which I am sure makes him furious.

Jacobsen: Next.

Bouley: Next.

Jacobsen: Good news from UCA News. Faith leaders have welcomed Japan’s first national basic plan to raise LGBT awareness. The cabinet-approved framework calls for awareness training, academic research, public education, improved consultation systems, and national guidance across businesses, governments, schools, local communities, and workplaces.

The plan also affirms that unjust discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity is unacceptable. It is important to note, though, that this is an awareness and understanding plan under Japan’s 2023 LGBT Understanding Promotion Act. It is not yet a full national anti-discrimination law or same-sex marriage law.

Bouley: Did you see that the Buddhist monk interviewed in the story declined to give his name? The Buddhist leader cautioned that changing social attitudes would take time.

I applaud Japan for this. I do. It is just insulting, as a gay man, that you actually have to counsel people and tell them how not to discriminate against gay people.

It seems pretty simple: treat everybody the way you want to be treated. Fairly. Period. End of story.

So it is kind of odd to me that the national cabinet had to adopt a plan aimed at promoting public understanding of gay people and other sexual minorities. What is there to understand? We are human. Instead of being attracted to people of the opposite sex, we are attracted to people of the same sex. That is not hard to understand.

So I get it, and good for them, but I think all across the globe, we make far too much of the supposedly complex issue of being gay. It is not hard. Treat us like you would treat anyone else.

There you go. That is it. Treat us like you would treat anybody else.

Jacobsen: Also, footnote: you do not have to understand something to accept it, or at least leave people alone.

Bouley: We will end with that, because that says it all. You do not have to understand me. Just do not discriminate.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 1,900 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 fellowships, and currently serves on several 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.