The Daily Queer
July 22, 2026
18 old Hollywood stars you probably didn’t know were LGBTQ+
Out
From Cesar Romero and Barbara Stanwyck to Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and the gloriously unbothered Patsy Kelly — who told the press she was a “dyke” in the 1930s and never looked back — Out rounds up the queer stars the studio system kept carefully closeted. It’s a reminder that queer Hollywood is as old as Hollywood itself; the closet was a job requirement, not an absence.
Anyone who wanted Lindsey Graham’s career had to appear straight. And the closet persists.
Los Angeles Times
In the wake of Lindsey Graham’s death at 71, the Los Angeles Times examines how a political culture that demanded the appearance of heterosexuality shaped the late senator’s career — and the lives of everyone around him. The closet, the piece argues, remains a load-bearing wall of American politics, long after marriage equality supposedly rendered it obsolete.
Florida Republican lawmaker found liable for sexually harassing male staffers, faces resignation calls
The Advocate
A Tallahassee jury ordered Florida Rep. Fabian Basabe — who once called himself a “gay Republican” while campaigning as a conservative family man — to pay $450,000 to a former legislative aide and an intern who accused him of sexual harassment and battery. Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried is demanding his immediate resignation, while Basabe, who represented himself at trial, insists he’s innocent and says his only mistake was acting as his own lawyer.
Ted Cruz says Supreme Court was ‘clearly wrong’ about 2015 same-sex marriage ruling
CNN, via WRAL
In remarks that continue to resonate, Sen. Ted Cruz declared the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision “clearly wrong,” arguing marriage should have been left to the states — echoing Justice Clarence Thomas’s explicit call to revisit the ruling. With conservatives openly gunning for Obergefell, Cruz’s words read less like a legal opinion and more like a to-do list.
LGBTQ ‘human rights crisis is unfolding in Puerto Rico’
Washington Blade
At a Congressional Hispanic Caucus briefing in D.C., True Self Foundation Executive Director Miguel Vázquez-Rivera warned that a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ laws under Gov. Jenniffer González — including a ban on gender-affirming care for anyone under 21 and a prohibition on gender-neutral restrooms in government facilities — has left the island’s queer community, especially trans and nonbinary Puerto Ricans, dangerously vulnerable. He urged the mainland LGBTQ+ movement to do more to support and fund advocacy on the island, noting the crisis compounds existing poverty, disaster recovery, and healthcare struggles.
Trump’s FCC wants to put warning labels on LGBTQ+ TV shows, but the public is against it
Out
The FCC is floating a new “warning label” for family programming that includes what it calls “transgender and gender non-binary programming” — but a GLAAD analysis of the 33,739 public comments filed found 80 percent opposed the idea, a 5-to-1 ratio, with most supportive comments copied from a template. A companion Morning Consult survey found roughly two in three Americans, including 69 percent of parents, believe parents — not the government — should decide what their kids watch.
Lima billboard message draws criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates
13 Action News (WTVG)
A rainbow-colored billboard in Lima, Ohio reading “No child has two dads” and “No child has two moms” — paid for by the Seattle-based group Them Before Us — is drawing fire from local advocates, including Lima Pride Alliance co-founder and Ohio House candidate Jeff Givan, who called it a hate-stirring stunt timed to election season. Givan noted LGBTQ+ families have stepped up to adopt harder-to-place children, and offered the group a succinct message: “Please stop.”
Neighbors are trying to shut down a queer nude beach, but a judge just stopped them
LGBTQ Nation
A Seattle judge declined wealthy neighbors’ demand to permanently close Denny Blaine Park, the city’s beloved queer nude beach, ruling that nudity itself isn’t the problem — though he ordered the city to curb lewd conduct with a code of conduct, staffing, and signage. Both sides claimed victory, but the LGBTQ+-led Friends of Denny Blaine had the last word: “Denny Blaine is open. We’ll see you at the beach.”
Polish president vetoes same-sex relationship recognition bills
Washington Blade
Poland’s president has vetoed legislation that would have granted legal recognition to same-sex relationships, claiming recognition of any kind would erode “the special status of marriage.” The veto dashes hopes that one of the EU’s most recalcitrant members on LGBTQ+ rights was finally ready to move.
Amid queer book censorship and attacks on drag, Kyle Chu will not be silenced
Autostraddle
Four years after Proud Boys stormed her Drag Story Hour at a San Lorenzo library — and after being wrung out as a symbol by media and politicians on all sides — Bay Area drag queen, author, and filmmaker Kyle Chu (aka Panda Dulce) is reclaiming her story through an award-winning short film, children’s books, and a forthcoming middle-grade novel. Against a backdrop of record book bans, she’s betting on drag, literature, and community as the antidote to erasure.
Remembering Victoria Cruz, Stonewall veteran and beloved trans activist
Washington Blade
The Blade pays tribute to Victoria Cruz, the Stonewall veteran and pioneering transgender activist whose decades of advocacy — including her years fighting anti-LGBTQ+ violence with the New York City Anti-Violence Project — made her a beloved elder of the movement. Her passing is a loss felt across generations of queer and trans New Yorkers she mentored and protected.
Commonwealth Games put countries with anti-gay laws on blast
Outsports
As the Glasgow Games open, the Zero Flags Commonwealth exhibition in Merchant City — centerpiece of Pride House Glasgow 2026 — flies the flags of the 28 Commonwealth nations that still criminalize same-sex intimacy, each draped with a black mourning ribbon. Organizer Hugh Torrance of LEAP Sports Scotland put it best: “This is an exhibition that should ultimately cease to exist.”
Women’s Tennis Association bans trans women, will require mandatory sex testing to compete
LGBTQ Nation
The WTA — founded by gay tennis legend and trans-inclusion advocate Billie Jean King — has banned transgender women from competition and will require mandatory sex testing of players. The move adds tennis to the growing list of sports bodies shutting out trans athletes amid mounting political pressure.
In I Want Your Sex, Gregg Araki diagnoses straight malaise
Artforum
Artforum hails Gregg Araki’s first film in twelve years — a darkly funny erotic satire starring Cooper Hoffman, a manic Olivia Wilde, and a cast-against-type Charli xcx — as “a mirthful masterpiece” in which the New Queer Cinema doyen turns his gaze on 2026’s most sexually stymied population: straight people. The review reads it as Araki at his most optimistic, a manifesto for moral ambiguity that lands in U.S. theaters July 31.
Film review: Heartstopper Forever
Film Review Daily
James Cameron-Wilson gives Wash Westmoreland’s feature-length farewell to Nick and Charlie three and a half stars, finding the Netflix film “just what everybody needs” amid the backlash against inclusivity — with a scene-stealing Anna Maxwell Martin and a delightful cameo from Derek Jacobi and his real-life partner Richard Clifford. It may not rival Moonlight or Call Me by Your Name, but it leaves the world a little better than it found it.
Lilly Wachowski talks Bound, LGBTQ representation in Hollywood, and Anarchists United
GLAAD
Thirty years after Bound, Lilly Wachowski tells GLAAD how the film noir’s opening shot of a closet now reads as a signpost from her own subconscious — and why the honest answer to “why two lesbians?” was always “we’re two queers who wanted to make a queer movie.” She also details Anarchists United, her new foundation-owned production collective designed to fund underrepresented artists outside a hyper-consolidated studio system she says has changed for the worse.
Dos de Patos, Expansiva Cine board Luis Diego Pérez’s Desde El Centro winner The Beast Is Not to Blame
Variety
Costa Rica’s Dos de Patos and Panama’s Expansiva Cine have boarded Luis Diego Pérez’s queer coming-of-age tale about nine-year-old Iván, an introverted boy preparing for his First Communion whose secret bond with his best friend is upended when the boy moves away. Producers praised the project’s “magic, tenderness and raw honesty” about growing up different in a religious Latin American household — and its bid to make space for queer childhood stories in Central American cinema.
Review: Midnight at the Never Get, starring Ben Platt, Menier Chocolate Factory
BroadwayWorld
Clementine Scott gives four stars to Mark Sonnenblick’s cabaret-inspired musical, in which Ben Platt plays an aging singer honoring his late lover — a fictional Great American Songbook composer — at a mafia-run Greenwich Village gay bar, folding decades of queer history into one late-night set. The metatheatrical conceit fits Platt like a tux, though Scott suggests the show’s ambitions could use a structural rebalancing before its next life. It runs through September 12.
The Daily Queer is compiled and edited by Rob for QulturVultur.com. Story summaries were prepared with AI assistance.