Over 5 billion people around the world use social media — and each of them spends, on average, about two-and-a-half hours a day texting, watching videos, gossiping, posting cat pictures and getting the latest news. But in an era of A.I. hallucinations and deepfakes, can you really trust what you hear and see online?

 One queer journalist is taking up the challenge of building trust — and an audience — on TikTok and other social media platforms. David Hunt sat down to talk shop with reporter Enrique Anarte, a correspondent at Context, the Thomson Reuters Foundation's journalism platform.

Anarte is an experienced journalist with a master’s in European Union studies and proficiency in five languages. Much of his work for Thomson Reuters involves traditional reporting, which is abundantly sourced and rigorously documented. Less traditional is his presence on social media. Anarte has a large following on TikTok and Instagram, where he posts short, sometimes humorous videos on LGBTQ topics. It’s a new day, he says, and not everyone looks for news and information in traditional formats.

“Social [media] cannot be an afterthought,” he says. “If that happens, you are not serving people with the kind of formats or journalism that they need. We need to understand that social audiences are humans. As Walt Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes.’ When someone opens the newspaper in the morning and then opens TiKTok before bed, they might be seeking the same kind of information, but in slightly different ways.”

Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

The drive for legal equality for LGBTQ people has faced strong headwinds in the Caribbean in recent years. In February 2024, a court in St. Vincent and the Grenadines dismissed a challenge to the nation’s archaic antigay criminal codes, saying the laws were justified on the grounds of public health and morality. And an appeals court in Trinidad and Tabago reinstated that nation’s anti-sodomy laws in March 2025, ruling that the colonial-era statutes were constitutionally untouchable.

But the winds of progress are blowing strong in St. Lucia, where a coalition of community groups just won a stunning court victory, overturning laws that imposed long prison sentences for same-sex intimacy. This was the coalition’s fourth court victory since 2022, when it successfully challenged anti-queer criminal statutes in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Barbados. A similar case in Grenada is pending.

David Hunt talked with Kenita Placide, executive director of the Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality (ECADE), the organization behind the legal tempest sweeping across the islands. Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

In more than three decades as a proud transgender man, Jamison Green has worked to advance the social, legal and civil rights of the trans community. Now he’s moved from making history to writing history as one of the authors and editors of a new book, “A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States.”

The book, eight years in the making, includes the voices of 42 contributing authors. In nearly 800 pages, it spans more than a century and includes profiles of transgender pioneers, a dive into the history of trans-focused psychiatry and psychology, and chapters on research ethics, the biological underpinnings of gender identity, the history of voice and communication interventions, and the treatment of gender-diverse children — among other topics.

Green spoke with David Hunt about the importance of trans history in the face of growing intolerance on the right. Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. "A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States" is published by SUNY Press.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

The Trump administration has Harvard University in its sights, threatening to cut off federal research dollars and bar international students from enrolling. It’s part of a wide-ranging assault on higher education, designed to force schools to abandon their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

While the battle rages in federal court, Harvard is breaking new ground in its efforts to advance LGBTQ Human Rights in the U.S. and around the globe.

In May 2024, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, a think tank in the Harvard Kennedy School, stood up the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program. The program is tasked with increasing the capacity of established and emerging leaders, creating educational curricula for movement building, facilitating research into LGBTQI+ issues, and advancing global collaboration and partnerships among activists, academics, policymakers and the media.

Journalist David Hunt talked with the program’s founding director, Diego Garcia Blum, about the program’s inaugural year and the challenges confronting higher education in the Trump era.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

The global struggle to secure the human rights of LGBTQ people has a powerful advocate at the United Nations: the Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the advocate’s voice could be silenced in July 2025 if the U.N.’s Human Rights Council fails to renew its mandate. 

Behind the scenes, an international coalition of nongovernmental organizations is campaigning for the mandate's renewal.

Journalist David Hunt talks with human rights activist Fabiana Leibl of the International Service for Human Rights in Geneva about the upcoming vote. The program also features audio of human rights experts Jessica Stern and Ignacio Saiz, courtesy of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. 

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

Efforts to restrict the rights of transgender Americans got a boost from the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court June 18, 2025, when justices ruled 6–3 that a law banning gender affirming health care for young people in the Southern state of Tennessee meets the barest standard of constitutional review. 

The ruling imperils the rights of transgender youth across the nation, allowing similar laws in 20 states to remain in force, despite the opposition of every major U.S. medical association.

Journalist David Hunt sat down with legal scholar Brad Sears of the Williams Institute to untangle the Supreme Court's twisted logic and discuss the ruling's ramifications for trans youth and their families.

Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

When Elon Musk and his cadre of juvenile tech bros took a chainsaw to the U.S. federal government this year, they said they were out to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. It just so happens that most of the departments they slashed were either regulatory bodies with statutory authority to regulate Musk’s businesses or agencies that had run afoul of President Donald Trump’s vision for a less inclusive America. At the top of the list: The United States Agency for International Development, which was gutted in March.

Among the 5,000 foreign aid programs shut down in the process: more than a hundred working to advance the health, safety and human rights of LGBTQ people in countries worldwide.

Journalist David Hunt talked with Ari Shaw, Ph.D., senior fellow and director of international programs at the Williams Institute, about the impact of those funding cuts. Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

You are what you eat, says the old adage. For a diverse group like the LGBTQ community, what and where we eat has defined us in myriad ways for generations. Coming out and dining out have long been complementary experiences, helping queer people find love, friendship and fellowship over patty melts, pizza or even lobster thermidor, if you’re in a fancy mood. In his new book, Dining Out, Erik Piepenburg explores the history and influence of America’s gay dining scene.

David Hunt sat down with the author to learn more about his culinary journey and how tastes — and tastebuds — have changed. Dining Out covers a lot of ground, from Walt Whitman’s weekly lunches with his bohemian pals at Pfaff’s Saloon in New York in the mid-nineteenth century, to drag brunch at Hamburger Mary’s in disco-era San Francisco, where regulars included then-mayor Diane Feinstein. From Annie’s Paramount Steakhouse in Washington, D.C., arguably the oldest gay restaurant in the nation, renowned for its hefty steaks and strong cocktails, to Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a feminist salon and bookstore with no cash registers, no wait staff and a seasonal vegetarian menu.

Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

Dining Out is available from Grand Central Publishing.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

The legacy of colonialism weighs heavily on member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, former territories of the British Empire. In the Caribbean Republic of Trinidad and Tobago that legacy is shackled to a 16th century law that bans same-sex intimacy. Efforts to strike down the antigay law were successful in 2018, heralding a new era for Trinidad and Tobago’s 100,000 LGBTQ citizens. But the fight isn’t over. An appeals court reinstated the sodomy law a few weeks ago, setting the stage for the next — and final — round of legal challenges. 

Journalist David Hunt talked with Jason Jones, the biracial, binational queer activist leading the fight to win freedom for LGBTQ people in Trinidad and throughout the Commonwealth. Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.

The Trump administration continues to rewrite history, scrubbing official websites of any mention of transgender, queer and gender nonconforming people and causes. Critics have called its efforts a digital book-burning, reminiscent of the public bonfires staged by the Nazis in the 1930s. The latest target of this growing right-wing cancel culture is Pauli Murray, a pioneering human rights leader whose childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, is a National Historic Landmark.

Journalist David Hunt visited the landmark to learn about Murray’s life and work — and to explore a queer legacy the National Park Service is trying to erase. Listen to Hunt's conversation with historian Angela Thorpe Mason, executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.

Pauli Murray, who died in 1985, was a pioneering Black legal scholar whose ideas laid the foundation for Supreme Court decisions overturning segregation and outlawing discrimination based on sex. Murray was also a writer, poet, labor organizer and the first queer saint in the Episcopal Church.

Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.

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David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.