ILoveGay Today

ILoveGay Today Showcasing and bringing together some of the amazing LGBTQ+ voices from all over the world

In the LGBTQ community, we're sure you've seen what we've been seeing over the past few months... incredible creativity in how we adapt, stay safe and prepare ourselves for what's on the other side of this post-pandemic world.

Today seeks to simply be a part of this creativity, showcasing and bringing together some of those amazing LGBTQ voices from all over the world. So stay tuned as our next upcoming episodes explore the best in us, the global LGBTQ community, as part of Today.

09/19/2026

Cape Town Hosts WorldPride in 2028 — So Why Doesn't Safari Marketing Ever Show Two Grooms?
Zannon James of Mason & Wild Luxury Safaris asked a question on LinkedIn this week that the travel industry has been avoiding: why is Africa still so absent from the LGBTQ+ travel conversation? His answer points straight at the imagery — safari marketing sells honeymoons and romantic escapes constantly, but almost never shows two men or two women. Meanwhile South Africa hits twenty years of marriage equality this November, has held the world's oldest constitutional protection for s*xual orientation since 1996, was just voted the top LGBTQ+ city destination of 2026 — and Cape Town hosts WorldPride in 2028. That's an underserved destination category with a hard deadline attached, and roughly two years to build an audience before the spotlight arrives. Our full read on what that means for destinations, operators and brands.
https://ilovegay.net/cape-town-hosts-worldpride-in-2028-so-why-doesnt-safari-marketing-ever-show-two-grooms/

09/15/2026

Q***r Adulthood: Why Your Life Doesn't Need a Script

Today meets up with Huck Smith, a 52-year-old gay essayist in Dallas. We chat about his second collection, "The Leaving Gene: Essays on Staying, Going, and the Cost of Both", coming out October 27 from Quick Draw Press.

A lot of q***r storytelling understandably centers the moment of coming out. Huck is interested in the much longer story that follows it: what happens when you’ve been out for decades and are still figuring out relationships, friendship, chosen family, grief, s*x, aging, singlehood, belonging and what kind of life actually fits you.

The Leaving Gene looks at those questions through one recurring pattern in his own life: leaving. He spent years calling his ability to start over resilience. Writing the book forced him to ask when leaving stops being freedom and becomes a reflex — and which of the things we call personality are actually coping mechanisms with excellent publicists.

Our conversation centers around q***r adulthood after the origin story: how identity keeps evolving, what we inherit and what we choose, and why a full q***r life doesn’t have to follow the marriage/kids/career milestones we were handed by somebody else.

His debut collection, Boys, Bars & Becoming: Essays for the Still Reckless, Still Hopeful, looks back at the people, places, mistakes, and small acts of courage that shape who we become. His second collection, The Leaving Gene: Essays on Staying, Going, and the Cost of Both, turns toward the complicated calculus of knowing when to hold on, when to walk away, and what both choices can cost us.

09/13/2026

Jesse Lewis IV Interview: Miss Stu on Tyler Perry’s Route 187
Today meets up with Jesse Lewis IV, where we discuss his new role as Miss Stu in Tyler Perry's upcoming Route 187, premiering September 16th on Paramount+. At the center of Lewis’ story is Miss Stu, a formidable neighborhood matriarch who shelters the broken and the hunted. Part protector, part gatekeeper and part mystery, she provides refuge to people who have nowhere else to go—but in South Winslow, safety comes with rules, history and a price.

Miss Stu carries the recognizable authority of the Black matriarch who protects her community, tells difficult truths and shifts the energy of every room she enters. The character is never simply the helper, the victim or the joke. She is written and performed with humor, instinct, emotional depth and a moral code all her own.

Route 187 is a four-part crime drama miniseries executive produced by Tyler Perry Studios and directed by Mark E. Swinton. The show follows a community demanding answers after a tragic event on a local bus route.

We also chat about the work Lewis has been doing over the past 20 years, emphasizing his authentic representation of LGBTQ+ and Black experiences while using his roles to challenge stigma and promote positive self-image. His performances include character-driven roles that explore fluidity, identity, and human complexity, approached through grounded storytelling rather than genre or archetype.

09/12/2026

The $35,000 didn't produce $1.35 billion. Thirty years of not cancelling the $35,000 produced $1.35 billion.

In 1996, Greater Fort Lauderdale spent $35,000 on its first LGBTQ+ marketing campaign. Today the destination draws roughly 3.4 million LGBTQ+ visitors a year spending an estimated $1.35 billion. Matt Skallerud of Pink Media on why that's not a feel-good statistic but a strategy lesson: a mature destination at capacity can't grow on volume, so Fort Lauderdale changed the composition of its demand instead — trading 350,000 spring breakers for higher-yield, year-round, lower-impact travellers. Richard Gray spent thirty years building it at Visit Lauderdale, including the first research study into transgender travellers and the world's first travel campaign featuring transgender models. The number every DMO board should see: one line item, three decades of consistency, a billion-dollar segment.


https://pinkmedia.lgbt/blog/fort-lauderdale-demand-pivot-2026.html

09/12/2026

"I'd Take a Few Rainbow Logos Right Now" — What Outvertising Built While the Brands Went Quiet
Chris Dunne has handed over "the rainbow reins" at Outvertising, the UK ad industry's LGBTQIA+ advocacy body, and his four-year retrospective became the most-engaged industry post of the week. The tally: a national LGBTQIA+ consumer census with YouGov, the first real inclusion playbook the UK sector has had, 600 people through four years of Outvertising Live, 100+ free mentoring pairs, 30+ conferences — all of it, as he put it, achieved "around demanding day jobs, without being paid a penny for it." The role passes to Tash Beecher, the organisation's first creative leader, who says she'll make it the champion of creative intersectionality with a specific focus on Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ inclusion. The organizations that kept showing up through the pullback are the ones holding the industry's attention now.
https://ilovegay.net/id-take-a-few-rainbow-logos-right-now-what-outvertising-built-while-the-brands-went-quiet/

09/10/2026

King Key: Drag, Life, and Everything In Between
Today meets up in the Costa del Sol region of Spain with King Key ⁨(Chris Kidd), a Scottish drag artist, creator and LGBTQIA+ cultural commentator exploring q***r culture, identity, representation and lived experience through entertainment, education and storytelling. Join us as we chat about what it actually means to represent an LGBTQIA+ “community” made up of millions of people who don’t necessarily agree with, understand or even like one another. This conversation opened up fascinating questions around identity, labels, generational differences, representation, belonging and how social media is changing the way we understand q***rness.

09/10/2026

In May 2026, Destinations International and IGLTA released Why Values Matter: A Destination Guide to LGBTQ+ Travelers — a genuinely strong, research-backed framework built on Valuegraphics work with more than 1,800 LGBTQ+ travelers, organized around three power values: Harmony, Health & Well-Being, and Balance. It's free, it's good, and it just landed in front of 800+ member destinations. Here's the part that keeps me up at night: step one of the five-step framework is "strengthen marketing representation" — which quietly assumes you have somewhere to run that marketing. Most destinations don't. Meta removed s*xual-orientation interest targeting in 2022, and Google's ad policy names "gay travel" as a category where you can't even use your own customer list. So we now have a market where LGBTQ+ travel strategy is abundant and free, while channel access is scarce and getting scarcer. Matt Skallerud of Pink Media on the ex*****on gap between the playbook and the media plan — and the five things a destination has to build to close it.

https://pinkmedia.lgbt/blog/dmo-lgbtq-strategy-ex*****on-gap-2026.html

09/08/2026

Here's the structural problem nobody in LGBTQ+ marketing can plan around any more: the major platforms are getting exceptionally good at automated advertising while getting deliberately worse at letting an advertiser say "I want to reach LGBTQ+ consumers." Meta removed sensitive-interest targeting in January 2022 and has spent the years since consolidating manual controls into AI-driven broad delivery. Google prohibits using your own customer list to promote s*xual-orientation-related content, and names "gay travel" as an example. And when Meta began personalizing ads from AI chat conversations in December 2025, it explicitly excluded s*xual orientation from what it would use. Matt Skallerud of Pink Media on why the targeting parameter is gone but the audience never moved — and the three assets that absorb all of that displaced value: first-party LGBTQ+ audiences, publishers and creators with known audience composition, and contextual LGBTQ+ media environments. If your media plan still assumes a checkbox, it's built on something that stopped existing four years ago.

09/08/2026

Inclusion Just Became Auditable.
Australia folded LGBTQ+ readiness into its national tourism standard. That's a bigger deal than the badge on the window.

For twenty-five years, "are you LGBTQ+ friendly?" has been a question with no checkable answer. Australia just gave it one. The Australian Tourism Industry Council has folded Rainbow Ready Accreditation into its national Quality Tourism Framework — five assessment areas covering policy, operations, physical environment and marketing, guest information and staff training — co-developed with academics from Charles Sturt, the University of Queensland and Monash, and free for operators already holding Sustainable Tourism Accreditation. Matt Skallerud of Pink Media on why the structure matters more than the badge: this isn't a rainbow sticker program, it's LGBTQ+ readiness written into the same standard that governs everything else. Certification tells you who's ready. Networks like GALTA and Visit Gay Australia are how travellers find them. US destinations: this question is coming to your next RFP.

https://pinkmedia.lgbt/blog/rainbow-ready-accreditation-australia-2026.html

Address

1636 N. Cedar Crest Boulevard #217
Allentown, PA
18104

Telephone

+13239633653

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when ILoveGay Today posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category