In a wide-ranging interview with David Hunt, Jessica Stern recounts pivotal moments in her career, from her work as a scholar and global human rights activist to her tenure as the top queer diplomat in the U.S. State Department during the Biden administration.

Stern, now a senior fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard, critiques the Trump administration’s retreat on LGBTQ human rights and offers her optimistic prescription for reasserting progressive ideals in the U.S. and beyond.

Stern gives a behind-the-scenes look at a historic U.N. Security Council meeting she helped organize in August 2015 that focused the council’s attention — for the first time — on LGBTQ human rights. And she discusses the difficult decision to move to Washington, D.C., in 2021 to become the U.S. Special Envoy Advancing the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons. During her three-year tenure at the State Department, Stern worked to raise the profile of LGBTQ rights in U.S. foreign policy and to assist LGBTQ people facing violence and discrimination around the world.

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.

Mainstream news outlets regularly cover LGBTQ stories, reporting on everything from queer culture and the arts to political and legal struggles for equality around the world. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 1990s, most news organizations paid little attention to LGBTQ news beyond coverage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In the decade after Stonewall, most news about the gay and lesbian community was covered by a few local LGBTQ newspapers, such as Gay Community News in Boston and the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco.

But who covered queer news in the bad old days, the pre-Stonewall era, when most LGBTQ people were closeted? It turns out, it all started with a few brave soldiers stationed in the American South during World War II and a young lesbian who worked in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. They published what are believed to be the first gay and lesbian newsletters in the United States — in the 1940s.

David Hunt got the scoop from a pioneering gay historian, Allan Bérubé, at the 1983 convention of the Gay and Lesbian Press Association in San Francisco. 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.

Jennifer Knapp burst onto the Christian music scene in the late 1990s with an energy and honesty that resonated with thousands of young people searching for meaning and connection. Knapp’s first three albums sold over 1 million copies and earned the singer/songwriter two Grammy nominations and a Dove Award for New Artist of the Year in 1999.

But success took its toll. Exhausted by the pace and pressures of the industry, Knapp stopped performing in 2002 and left the United States, moving to Australia to clear her head and nourish her heart.

Seven years later, she returned to the U.S. with unexpected news: she was coming out with a new album, “Letting Go,” and coming out of the closet as a proud lesbian in a long-term relationship.

After a firestorm of controversy in the media, Knapp settled down in Nashville and settled into the work of recreating her career — this time outside of contemporary Christian music.

On the eve of her upcoming U.S. tour, Knapp sat down with David Hunt to recall the early days of her career and to discuss her recent work, which still focuses on the human search for love and meaning.

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.

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.