Friday marks the closing weekend of WorldPride, an international festival that is being held this year in Washington, D.C. There are many events taking place, including concerts, a human rights conference and D.C.’s annual Pride Parade.

The last time WorldPride was in the U.S., in 2019, it was held in New York City, and attendance was estimated at more than 5 million. Corporate sponsors included T-Mobile, L’Oréal, Delta Air Lines, JPMorganChase, Starbucks, the NBA and WNBA.

But this year, festival organizers say attendance and funding have been affected by the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric toward trans people and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

In his first week in office, President Trump issued executive orders targeting DEI. One such order called for the termination of “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” He also signed an order banning transgender people from the military.

Then, in February, President Trump announced he would be taking over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Capital Pride Alliance, the organizers of WorldPride DC, proactively moved WorldPride events scheduled to take place at the Kennedy Center to other locations.

Additionally, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., was told a May concert scheduled for WorldPride with the National Symphony Orchestra would not go on as planned.

The orchestra told NPR the decision was made before the leadership changes because of financial and scheduling reasons, but it drew the attention of those in the LGBTQ community.

Attendance is down

People typically travel to WorldPride from around the globe. Past festivals have taken place in Copenhagen, London and Sydney. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Washington, D.C.’s local Pride festival but it’s the first time the city is hosting the international event.

The organizers, Capital Pride Alliance, planned more than 300 events over the course of three weeks beginning in mid-May, including dance parties, films, Drag Story Hour, events for LGBTQ military personnel and, one of the key features of past WorldPrides, a human rights conference. The big closing ceremony this weekend includes a parade and a concert with a massive lineup of performers that includes a “Global Dance Party” with Jennifer Lopez, plus another concert featuring Cynthia Erivo and Doechii.

“We anticipated bookings to be much higher at this time for WorldPride and do know that the climate, the concern for folks internationally to travel to the United States is real,” said Ryan Bos, executive director of Capital Pride Alliance.

The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C., said some choirs from abroad opted to stay home instead of participate in its international choral festival, organized for WorldPride.

The Trump Administration’s “anti-trans and anti queer policies made a lot of people, especially those in foreign countries, feel like they weren’t welcome here,” said singer Zac, who requested that NPR only use his first name since he works for the federal government and feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s policies.

Some local attendees might also stay away.

As a city with a high number of military personnel, D.C.’s Pride always includes events for LGBTQ service members. But Bos fears some of them might be afraid to celebrate publicly.

“A lot of our service members are being forced back in the closet because they’re afraid of being who they are at their work. And that is just extremely disheartening,” he said.

Companies are in a ‘tough spot’

Past D.C. Pride sponsors including Booz Allen Hamilton, Comcast and Deloitte declined to support the international version of the festival this year. The companies did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.

A recent survey by Gravity Research found that more than a third of roughly 200 Fortune 1000 companies planned to decrease their support of Pride events this year.

“Companies overall are in a very tough spot,” said the firm’s president Luke Hartig.

Hartig said companies that do business with the government are especially wary, now that Trump has signed an executive order banning what he calls “illegal DEI” initiatives.

“Federal contractors are in a particularly precarious place when it comes to Pride, because Pride is so closely integrated into broader DEI efforts,” said Hartig. “And I think for a lot of companies celebrating Pride just comes a little too close to the danger zone where the administration might be targeting them on DEI more broadly.”

Pride began as a protest march and Pride festivals continue to be political. They’re also celebratory. This weekend in D.C., there’s a parade on Saturday and a march and rally on Sunday. Baptiste Fruchart has attended a number of Pride festivals. He says this year, he’s in a “fighting mode.”

“I think for the first time in many, many years, I’m not parading, I’m marching,” he said. “It’s a very different approach for the first time in a long time. Everything’s under threat right now.”

Jennifer Vanasco edited the audio and digital versions of this story.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Greetings from Mexico City, where these dogs ride a bus to and from school

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Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international correspondents share snapshots of moments from their lives and work around the world.

Mexico City is dog-crazy. Ladies push their poodles in strollers across the parks; one of the Chinese restaurants by our house has a full menu for your pooch — not just a bowl of whipped cream, we’re talking a chicken breast dinner! And just like there are street vendors who cater to humans, there’s one guy who runs a food truck offering doggie delectables. (His most popular item seems to be dried chicken feet).

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So, as you might expect, Mexico City is also home to many doggie schools that that teach basic obedience and how to get by in a rambunctious megacity. And, well, that means you also need canine transportation. I took this picture just by Parque España, one of the big parks in central Mexico City. It’s a kind of dog bus, powered by a motorcycle. The driver told me the pooches were headed back home after a long day of learning. The vehicles don’t go very far or very fast, but I asked, “And they never jump off?” He said, “The ones that do, go in the cage.”

See more photos from around the world:

As chief of staff, Travis Tamasese guides collaboration and coordination within cross-departmental projects at KPBS and builds relationships with community leaders and groups.

He has spent more than 10 years working in public education and served most recently as the deputy chief of staff and director of strategy and policy at San Jose State University. Prior to his time at SJSU, Travis served as the chief of staff in student affairs at Long Beach State University. He has led multiple functional areas and initiatives focused on expanding access to resources, internal and external communications, diversity, equity, and inclusion, budget allocation, and strategic planning.

He is currently completing his master’s degree in human rights practice at the University of Arizona.

Anyone concerned about the numbers of people in the U.S. living in shelters, on the street, or doubled-up with relatives should read Maria Foscarinis’ And Housing for All: The Fight to End Homelessness in America.

A long-time policy advocate and founding director of the National Homelessness Law Center, Foscarinis makes a clear and compelling case for why housing must be recognized as a human right if we are to meaningfully address the homelessness crisis in the United States.

At just over 250 pages minus the endnotes, And Housing for All is impressively comprehensive. Foscarinis examines the origins of the crisis, explores how it has been perpetuated through inadequate response, and finally explains how we solve it. Woven throughout are details from her personal life and a legal career that spanned more than 35 years in homelessness advocacy. Importantly, she also incorporates the stories of families and individuals who have found themselves unhoused.

We meet people like Danny, who lost all the toes on his left foot and his right leg below the knee from frostbite after being forced to sleep outside — because his job stocking shelves ended at midnight, after the shelter curfew — and Dominique, a working mother of two who held both a full-time and part-time job, yet still couldn’t afford rent. Foscarinis includes stories from rural, urban, and suburban areas alike, pushing back on the misconception that homelessness primarily affects people with mental illness in big cities.

That isn’t the only myth she dismantles. One of the book’s strengths is its sustained attack on “the false narrative that homelessness is driven by personal, not systemic, failures.” With the backing of nearly 100 pages of endnotes, Foscarinis lays out the hard facts: homelessness is a policy failure, not a personal one.

It is also a bipartisan one. While Republican President Ronald Reagan infamously claimed that homelessness was a “lifestyle choice,” Foscarinis notes that the next Democratic president, Bill Clinton, “fully intended to institute harmful policies and continue the racist, punitive narratives of Reagan.” Time and again, both parties have reinforced systemic inequality through cuts to housing assistance, erosion of the social safety net, and a growing trend to treat housing as a commodity rather than a public good, the book argues.

Foscarinis helpfully grounds these policy decisions in their historical context. Beginning with the New Deal, which dramatically expanded the white middle class while explicitly excluding Black Americans, she shows how federal policy has consistently penalized people for the crime of poverty. Most devastating were Reagan’s cuts in the 1980s, which slashed federal housing funding by half. Although some reinvestments have been made since, “the Reagan cuts have never been restored to their original numbers — while the affordable housing crisis has deepened,” Foscarinis writes.

Rather than provide meaningful help, many governments have opted to criminalize homelessness instead. In 2006, Las Vegas passed a law (which was eventually struck down) “that made it a crime to offer food to anyone who looked like they might be eligible for public assistance,” she writes. Between 2006 and 2019, the National Homeless Law Center found that “laws banning sleeping in vehicles” rose by 213%, citywide bans on loitering and vagrancy increased by 103%, and camping bans went up 92%. A 2024 Kentucky law “allows property owners to shoot an unhoused trespasser — fatally” as part of its unlawful camping ban, Foscarinis’ research finds.

Foscarinis devotes her final chapters to outlining possible solutions, and chief among them is the “Housing First” model. This approach prioritizes stable housing as the first intervention, followed by support services, as needed. Finland, which uses this model, is on track to eliminate homelessness by 2027.

Though Housing First is an official U.S. policy, implementation has been limited not just due to inadequate funding, but because of the shrinking supply of affordable housing. This is particularly frustrating, given that “numerous studies have shown that Housing First not only helps people exit homelessness, stabilizes their health, and improves their lives, it also saves government money,” the book notes. Meanwhile, Los Angeles spent roughly $30 million in 2019 alone just to sweep homeless encampments — an expensive and ineffective tactic.

Central to the book’s thesis is the assertion that acknowledging housing as a fundamental human right is essential to lasting change. Foscarinis contends that only when this right is legally enshrined can effective interventions be implemented at scale. This is, she says, because “embedding the human right to housing in a country’s constitution makes its centrality clear and provides legal grounding for the right.”

Ultimately, Foscarinis argues that the biggest barrier to ending homelessness isn’t a lack of solutions. It’s a lack of political will. While “attacks on the fundamental idea of housing as a solution to homelessness,” gained momentum during the first Trump administration (and are likely to continue), And Housing for All remains hopeful. Its stories of legal victories against all odds, bipartisan collaboration on landmark legislation, and alternative models like social housing and community land trusts help plot a path forward.

As Foscarinis writes, “homelessness is indeed a choice. … It’s a choice our society makes.” And it is time we choose to be a society in which homelessness no longer exists.

Ericka Taylor is the co-executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. Her freelance writing has appeared in Bloom, The Millions, Willow Springs and Yes! Magazine.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Updated June 4, 2025 at 8:36 AM PDT

Pioneering writer Edmund White has died. He was one of the most important authors of his era, whose work, including A Boy’s Own Story in 1982, made an indelible impression on gay culture and how LGBTQ experiences were more broadly understood during the dawning of the AIDS crisis and beyond. He was also one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982, the long-running HIV/Aids service organization in New York City.

White died Tuesday at his home in New York City of natural causes, according to his agent Bill Clegg. He was 85 years old.

“Ed was a groundbreaking writer whose candid depictions of gay life reshaped American literature. As a novelist, critic, memoirist and biographer, he expanded the boundaries of identity and desire on the page and in the culture,” Clegg shared in a statement. “He was also a wickedly funny, deeply generous, brilliant man who was beloved by many. He will be much missed.”

Growing up in Evanston, Ill., White was sent to see psychologists by his mother, who was a child psychologist herself.

“It was because I was gay,” he told WHYY’s Fresh Air in 2006. “On the one hand, I was lusting after boys my own age and even older men. And that’s what I really wanted, and I was obsessed with that idea of having some sort of sex with older people. But, on the other hand, I knew that it was a bad thing. And I also knew that it would limit me as a writer because that was very much the idea in the air that a writer could only be successful if he could touch on universal topics.”

White attended the University of Michigan, where he studied Chinese, and ended up following a boyfriend to New York, where he was present, he told NPR, for the Stonewall Riots in 1969.

“I was actually just walking by with a friend, and we saw the disturbance. And then pretty soon, we had mixed in with the melee,” he told Scott Simon on Weekend Edition in 2022.

“And then all of a sudden, the police raided the bar. So we resisted. Everybody remembers it as being terribly solemn because it was sort of like our Bastille Day. But the truth is, everybody was laughing. And even saying slogans like ‘gay is good,’ which was meant to echo ‘Black is beautiful,’ struck us as funny because we’d been so oppressed for so long that the idea of claiming our rights seemed vaguely humorous to us.”

White became an editor for mainstream publications: Time-Life Books, Newsweek, and the Saturday Review. He published his first novel, Forgetting Elena, in 1973.

But White will be primarily remembered for a series of autobiographical novels that broke ground in gay representation. They include A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, from 1988, and The Farewell Symphony, from 1997. He was part of an early generation of openly gay writers that also included Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer and Felice Picano.

“They were the first people to come out publicly and to risk their careers doing it,” editor Michael Denneny, a lauded editor and LGBTQ activist, told Fresh Air in 1987. Denneny was an early champion of White’s work.

White wrote more than 30 novels over the course of his career.

Copyright 2025 NPR