As a gay man, a Filipino American, and someone born in Hawai‘i with indigenous roots, I know firsthand how rare it is to feel fully seen in mainstream media.

When those sitting at the table come from similar backgrounds and hold similar assumptions, we risk falling back into old patterns.

I don’t write these things to shame anyone. I write them to name something that is often hidden but very real. Microaggressions may seem small, but over time, they pile up.

Standing behind him, in spirit if not on stage, were his warped “faith advisers”—Evangelical extremists who treat the Book of Revelation like a war manual.

This patch of land—between water and chapel, between movement and stillness—is where I find alignment again.

That is not Christianity. That is oppression dressed up in religious language.

As the Declaration of Faith reminds us, “We do not know when or how the final redemption of creation will be achieved. But we know that God will win.”

It is a political stunt meant to erase LGBTQ people from public life—starting with our most vulnerable: those in crisis, those on the edge, those who just need someone to tell them their life matters.

What the hell kind of country does that?

In 1946, “El Pendón Estrellado” became the official Spanish version of the U.S. national anthem.

Isn’t it heavy? Carrying that much rage around all day?

Our founding fathers insisted on displays of civilian rule rather than the pomp of kings and their soldiers.

They blame immigrants and LGBTQ for loss of individual and family wealth, and the failure of small businesses.

We haven’t seen the same unfold in Chicago because of the power of already deep-rooted grassroots networks that mobilized.

When the people rise up, when they “Storm the Bastille,” it’s because they’ve been pushed to the wall with no more choices left.

In 2017, Father Greg came out publicly as a gay man. It was a moment that reverberated far beyond his parish walls.

It means your data, your life, could be filtered through an opaque algorithm, then passed to law enforcement without you ever knowing why.

It was a deeply personal—and deeply political—decision rooted in the lived reality that people like me are facing in this moment in America.

We’ve entered a nightmare realm—one where U.S. citizens of color have already been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), stripped of their rights, denied due process, and held without cause.