GAY TIMES Magazine

12 August 2022

As we know, the work never stops and progress is a continual process that can never be taken for granted. This September issue of GAY TIMES Magazine features a handful of LGBTQ+ people who are using their advocacy, art and platform to contribute to that change in a positive way. For the first time ever, we welcome Olympic gold medallist Tom Daley to the cover of GAY TIMES Magazine. This year, the athlete has been traveling the globe speaking with sportspeople and activists about colonial era laws that continue to criminalise homosexuality across the Commonwealth. It’s still illegal to be gay in 35 of the 54 nations that make up the Commonwealth, with punishments ranging from imprisonment to the death sentence. In a new BBC documentary, Illegal To Be Me, Tom shines a light on the challenges LGBTQ+ people face in these nations, and how sporting federations like the Commonwealth Games can do more to help change these anti-LGBTQ+ laws and attitudes. “They're the first sporting body to engage in that way and I think the big thing about this documentary is I didn't want it to be 'here's everything that is terrible and we're not going to do anything about it',” Tom says in the cover story. “There is a campaign element behind it and things will continue and the Commonwealth Games is just the start. If the Commonwealth Games can do it, why can't FIFA? Why can't the Olympics do it? There is a possibility that something like that could be pushed forward.” Elsewhere in the issue we speak to the incomparable Travis Alabanza about their new book None of the Above. “A lot of my work is about thinking beyond the present, I love forecasting and thinking about where we could be,” they tell us. “In my book, I've really pushed what I wrote in that essay further and asked, ‘Why are we sacrificing ourselves to the gender binary?’ and ‘What if it didn't exist in the first place?’ I wonder how we would think and feel and what we would gain.” Travis’s book will challenge the reader to reflect on the ways we treat each other, pushing for a brighter future where gender structures aren’t being weaponised in the ways they currently are. We also speak with Broad City star Abbi Jacobson and the cast of the newly remade A League of their Own series about how they brought a new era of queerness to the classic story; Mark Segal, who was present during the evening of the Stonewall uprising back in June 1969, speaks about what the riots can teach us about the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today; and we speak to four Black queer creatives about what ‘power’ means to them as UK Black Pride makes its long-awaited return as an in-person event this summer.