Will all Americans recognize and love the LGBTQIA+ community?
Experts in sexual relationships are observing males and females, males and males, females and females and groups hugging, kissing and having forms of intercourse and performing other sex acts — and are taking lots of pictures, films and notes. Perhaps it is more interesting to them than other animals because they are examining the exciting love life of huge humpbacked whales.
Years ago, Norwegian sex experts discovered, after extensive observation, that the top 1,500 species on earth had members of the LGBT community. They quit researching after 1,500. Most of the information in this column comes from Philip Hoare’s article titled “Gay, Lesbian, and Intersex Whales: our queer sea has much to teach us.” He has written several books on the subject of animal sex and uses material from the Wageningen Marine Research Institute of the Netherlands and from the Scottish Association for Marine Science.
His first paragraph might get a reader interested in the subject. “Whales are extraordinarily sensuous creatures. Those blubbery bodies are highly sensitive and sensitized. At social meetings, pods of sperm, humpback, and right whales will roll around one another’s bodies for hours at a time. I’ve seen a group of right whales engaged in foreplay and penetration lasting an entire morning.” Maybe you will read more.
Perhaps in high school English class you read Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “Moby-Dick” about Captain Ahab’s pursuit of a white whale. The novel’s chief narrator, Ishmael, opens it with, “Call me Ishmael. I am a schoolmaster, and whenever life got me down, I would leave my job and head for one special place.” He would go whale hunting with Captain Ahab, where he is so happy with Queequeg, a multi-tattooed native Maori warrior, they are “married” by the captain. It may be the first same-sex marriage in history.
Ahab suffers from what Melville calls “monomania” and what we call narcissism today. He has previously lost a leg to a big white whale in an encounter, but he does not have malignant narcissism like our Lyin’ King Donald Trump. He still has empathy for certain acquaintances. But he is on a crusade, a pathological fixation, to destroy the white whale. Today, he would be appointed Secretary of Health and Human Resources in Trump’s cabinet. It’s a good read because there are other possible LGBT members aboard the whaler Pequod.
Captain Ahab can be cruel and a complex character, but he is described by a book reviewer as “An intense and dictatorial leader who uses a volatile mix of cruel manipulation, fiery speeches and shared hatred to bind the crew to his mad mission, convincing them to forgo profitable whaling for vengeance.” He is a little different from our king. Trump would never forgo profits.
Ten percent of the world’s population are LGBTQIA+
I have kept a list of prominent LGBT people for more than a half century when they have been named by reputable sources or “outed” themselves. I’m going to pair them to show homosexuality, gender dysphoria, or pleasure did not just happen yesterday.
They include: Alexander the Great and Bette Davis; Lawrence of Arabia and Mary Cheney; St. Augustine and Greta Garbo; Catherine the Great and Roy Cohn; Michelangelo and Joan Crawford; Baron Fredrich William von Steuben and Tallulah Bankhead; Pope Benedict IX and Majorie Main; Walt Whitman and Susan B. Anthony; Aristotle and Billie Jean King; J. Edgar Hoover and Barbara Stanwyck; Marie Antoinette and Rock Hudson; Ludwig van Beethoven and Florence Nightingale.
This is just a start. And remember, two male penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo fell in love, moved into the same nest and then raised an orphan chick named Tango abandoned by its mother.
Written records indicate members of the LGBTQ community have been around for many thousands of years. Surveys indicate that about ten percent of the world’s population are members of the LGBTQIA+ community, with one percent being transgender people. There also is no doubt homosexuality is both a religious as well as an economic issue today.
Politics have become very ugly and being transgender has dominated the scene lately. In the last decade, thousands of bills involving trans people have been proposed in more than 40 states in the Divided States of America. The independent research organization Trans Legislative Tracker is tracking 750 anti-transgender bills proposed in just the first three months of 2026. It appears as if 2026 will easily break the record of 1,022 proposed in 2025. Only about two dozen bills have been passed into law.
This is what proposed bills are about: bathrooms used by trans people, puberty pills and health treatment, trans women in sports, trans care for young children, pediatric transition care involving Medicaid and Medicare, transition surgery, civil rights of trans children and adults, trans parental rights, gay IVF issues and rights. And the list goes on and on.
After 2,000 years the Vatican has responded to LGBTQIA+
Pope Francis had wanted the Vatican and his Synod on Synodality by bishops from around the world to study the issue of homosexuality and its ages old position that gays were “intrinsically disordered.” But conservative bishops torpedoed the request and only supported an outside study group that they could control. Pope Francis had ministered to LBGT members before he died.
Pope Leo has authorized the release of the study group document that contained interviews and discussions on the subject. The study did include the study of gender, sexuality and LGBTQIA+ inclusion which surprised a lot of gay Catholics.
“ It’s a big deal because they included testimonies and published testimonies from two LGBTQ people, both of them married, which is also unusual for the Vatican to do,” Father Martin, a priest and founder of LGBTQ Outreach, a Catholic ministry, said of the study. “As far as I know, it’s the first time that in any official publication of the Vatican, they’ve included witnesses and testimonies and stories from LGBTQ Catholics in any kind of detailed way.”
Maybe the finger in the dam finally broke the dam.
Executive director of Dignity USA, Marianne Duddy-Budge, a married lesbian Catholic, called the study “a paradigm shift.” She added that it proves that “trying to dictate behavior and morality on the basis of dogma isn’t working.’”
Another gay Catholic, Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry (which serves gay Catholics), was blunt. He shares “a life of faith, service, and love” with his husband.
“ I was expecting a rather bland report,” said DeBernardo. “And this was not that.”
“I cannot ignore the scars I carry,” said one gay Catholic. “I have witnessed the devastating effects of conversion therapies and the breakup of families, which felt like an attack on God’s sensitive and blameless creation. These experiences deeply hurt, because they target the inherent dignity of a person who simply loves another of the same gender.”
The first Pride march publicly announced that the LGBTQIA+ community existed in the world — and was here to stay — took place in June of 1970. It was the one-year anniversary of the now famous New York City police raid on a constantly harassed gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Many battles took place between gays and police in the following years.
In 2026, hundreds of cities and communities in the Divided States of America and in many countries around the world will have Pride Months, Days, and other LGBT celebrations. The queer community, as it is called, faces many attacks from the Lyin’ King Trump and his Trumplicans today, particularly the 3.4 million transgender people in this country. Everyone should read Courtney Blackmer-Raynolds’ article “Our Kids are Not Free” which centers on laws across the country targeting transgender people which are driving families to relocate to states that do not have laws against transgender people.
The short opening paragraph begins to tell the story of Fiona and her parents: “Mark and Jenny were living in Boise, Idaho, when their four-year-old daughter Fiona came out as transgender. When Fiona’s teachers announced her new name and pronouns to the preschool, the social fallout was swift and severe. Jenny said: ‘When they found out our child transitioned, they (other parents and teachers) no longer wanted to speak to us. They would kind of sidle away from us.’ They decided to relocate to a more trans-friendly environment and state.”
Was France’s favorite saint a transgender person?
If the short life of Joan of Arc was the substance of a novelist’s themes and plots in a thick book with the title “Joan of Arc, Heroic Man and Woman of France” — and was a young, illiterate peasant in the 15th Century who led a French army to victory dressed in armor — one might be enthralled. The trouble today is that it’s real history. A century of science has discovered a lot about the protean nature of sex, gender, and desire.
Liberation movements, advances in medical care and legislative reform, medical advances allow people to enjoy more freedom and agency in their bodies. Women and transgender people are among the biggest beneficiaries. Surveys indicate 95% of transgender people are happy they transitioned.
In real life, Joan disguised herself as a man in a number of military campaigns against enemies in the Hundred Year’s War and was finally captured, sold to the English, tried as a witch and burned at the stake in Rouen when she was 19 years old. According to custom and religious belief, a black cat was thrown into her fire as a message to the devil. Joan always dressed in men’s clothing in her court trial as a witch. Her judges tried to force her to wear dresses, but Joan replied, “It pleases God that I wear it.”
She told the court angels often talked to her about her role in life during battles with her at the front line. She never claimed to be a man, but she clearly occupied a gendered place that 15th Century religious leaders and judges were unable to either comprehend or accept. The evidence is quite strong that she may have been a transgender Roman Catholic. Joan was declared a saint in 1920 and both Vichy France and the French resistance forces claimed her as a national symbol against Nazi Germany.
If Joan were alive today, this is what King Donald and his Trumplicans would do against the LGBTQIA+ community as expressed by Christian nationalist preacher Joel Webbon: “The Texas Department of Public Safety should go through downtown Austin, find churches flying Pride flags, depose their ministers — that is, defrock them, remove them from the pulpit — take the property and auction it off to faithful churches.”
Note: If you want to know more about transgender people, read about Lina Haaga who transitioned at four years old and was “outed” to the public when she was six. She became a California track star in high school.
