A new report that Outright International released on Thursday notes 90 percent of LGBTQ and intersex rights groups around the world have lost funding since January 2025.

The New York-based global advocacy group surveyed 229 LGBTQ and intersex rights groups in 94 countries.

Forty-nine percent of the organizations that responded said they have lost more than half of their total budget since January 2025 — 75 percent of the groups said they lost more than a quarter of their total funding.

“For nearly half of the respondents, the cuts removed most of the resources that sustained the organization,” reads the report.

When asked which funders “had reduced, suspended, or withdrawn support,” more than half of the responding groups “pointed to a source tied to the United States government, including USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the Department of State.”

“No other funder came close,” notes the report.

‘What was initially framed as a temporary freeze has become a structural disruption’

The Trump-Vance administration froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid shortly after it took office on Jan. 20, 2025.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March 2025 announced 83 percent of USAID contacts had been cancelled, and the State Department would administer the remaining programs. USAID officially shut down on July 1, 2025.

Rubio issued a waiver that allowed PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the funding freeze. The Washington Blade has previously reported PEPFAR-funded programs in Kenya and other African countries have been forced to suspend services and even shut down because of gaps in U.S. funding.

https://youtu.be/EYPzSD3ZLAY?si=RGBLN92ZItaIAxnG

(Washington Blade video by Michael K. Lavers)

The Outright International report notes the State Department under the Trump-Vance administration “terminated the programs of the Global Equality Fund, the public-private partnership it launched in 2011 with allied governments, companies, and foundations, which distributed more than $100 million in its first decade to LGBTIQ organizations and human rights defenders in over 100 countries.” The Trump-Vance administration, among other things, has withdrawn the U.S. from the U.N. LGBTI Core Group, a group of U.N. member states that have pledged to support LGBTQ and intersex rights.

Outright International Executive Director Maria Sjödin in an op-ed the Blade published on Jan. 28, 2026, wrote the global LGBTQ and intersex rights movement since January 2025 lost more than $125 million — or 30 percent of its total annual funding.

“What was initially framed as a temporary freeze has become a structural disruption,” notes the Outright International report. “The effects have cascaded far beyond U.S. government funding: corporate, institutional, and philanthropic donors have also shifted, stalled, or quietly withdrawn, often without public scrutiny.”

“The broader environment in which LGBTIQ movements operate has continued to deteriorate — with democratic backsliding, anti-NGO legislation, rising violence, coordinated legislative attacks on trans and intersex people’s rights, and emboldened anti-rights actors filling the space left by the retreat of U.S. global leadership.”

The report contains specific examples that include:

• Iraqi lawmakers in 2024 passed a law that criminalized consensual same-sex sexual relations and transgender people. Funding cuts forced IraQueer, an Iraqi advocacy group, to stop offering safety and security trainings and workshops to activists and LGBTQ rights organizations in the country.

• An intersex-led organization in West Africa can no longer maintain office space or pay its staff.

• An Ecuadorian group that operated a community center for a decade was “forced to close” it on Feb. 1, 2026. “It has been a true loss for the LGBTIQ+ communities in our city and the country as a whole, as we were a model of self-management and resistance in one of Ecuador’s most conservative cities,” said the group in the report.

• An “LGBTIQ-led refugee organization” in Uganda “has lost the emergency relocation support that once moved people facing immediate violence to safer locations.”

• An advocacy group in Ukraine that lost funding said it was “forced to stop paying some of our specialists and reduce our hours for handling inquiries … We used to be able to respond promptly to requests and support people throughout the entire process of resolving their issues, whereas now we are forced to limit ourselves to one-time consultations or refuse assistance altogether due to a lack of resources.”

• The Tonga Leitis Association in the report said a lack of funding has forced it to reduce “the number of activities the organization can run and erodes the prevention infrastructure behind” the country’s low HIV rate.

The Outright International report notes “global LGBTIQ funding had begun to fall even before the current U.S. administration took office.”

It further cites statistics from the Human Rights Funders Network that project “rights-focused development assistance will fall by between” $1.4-$1.9 billion a year by 2026, “with movements for LGBTIQ people’s rights and gender equality among the hardest it.”

“At the same time, LGBTIQ organizations have not stood still,” reads the Outright International report. “They have continued to resist, adapt, and serve their communities under extraordinary pressure, often absorbing the costs of these funding shocks in ways that remain largely invisible.”

“This report is an effort to make those costs — and that resilience — visible,” it adds.

The annual CAMP Rehoboth fundraiser, SUNFESTIVAL, was held over Labor Day weekend in Rehoboth Beach, Del. The festival included a massive dance party at the Rehoboth Beach Convention Center on Sunday.

(Washington Blade photos by Daniel Truitt)

Gloria Steinem was an icon, a feminist, a woman of substance and consequence. A rare person who made a difference her entire life; sometimes quietly, sometimes by making noise. She was an incredibly beautiful woman, inside and out. 

I heard of Gloria Steinem and admired her for all she was doing. But that was from a distance. I read about her, and saw her on TV. It was 1963 when Steinem wrote and published her undercover Playboy Bunny exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” about her going undercover at New York’s Playboy Club. Her account revealed the physical toll, exploitative conditions, and pervasive sexism faced by the women employed there, challenging the magazine’s image of empowerment.

It was 1972 when I first met her in person. That first meeting happened while I was campaigning for Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.) at a street rally. I said “Hello, Ms. Steinem,” and she said “It’s OK to call me Gloria.” I was honored to do so. 

Gloria was there to support her friend. Bella had been through a grueling primary against Bill Ryan, after being redistricted out of her seat. She lost, but then Bill died of cancer before the election, and Bella was named the Democratic candidate in the general election for New York’s 20^th congressional district. When Bella won that race, I went to work for her full time. It gave me the chance to meet Gloria again a number of times after that, once even with Bella at her apartment. While she was one of the many famous people I met while working for Bella, she was different. She wasn’t Hollywood. She began her career as a reporter, and worked hard for all she believed in. She was a true activist. That was what she saw herself as. She could say she came by the activism gene from her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem who Wikipedia reported, “chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association and was a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women. Also, the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education and a leader in the movement for vocational education. She helped rescue many members of her family from the Holocaust.” 

So yes, in many ways, activism was in Gloria’s genes. She was the one who told me it was OK to call myself a ‘feminist’. That it isn’t only women who can call themselves that, but also men who believed and fought for full social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. She helped me to understand I was brought up by a feminist. My mom, though she never called herself that, was one by dint of how she lived her life, and fought for others.  

Gloria never stopped working to make life better for women, and to make sure other women joined her in her activism. In 1969, she co-founded Ms. Magazine. Then in 1971, with Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which provided training and support for women seeking elected and appointed office. Then in the same year she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, which until 1997 supported a network of feminist activists and worked to advance feminist causes and legislation. 

Gloria would hold other women to task if they didn’t speak out, even at difficult times, but always with love. In 1986, Bella’s husband Martin died at the young age of 69. We were at the funeral home the night before the funeral, and Bella was sitting with some of us, and saying she didn’t know what she would do without Martin. It had been a true love affair. She was saying things like she didn’t even know where the checkbook was, what their rent was, etc., because Martin handled all that. Well Gloria overheard this and came over and said to Bella, “Don’t you dare say that in public, women look up to you as a feminist, as independent, you can’t say that.”  And we all laughed, even Bella, as did Gloria, but she was serious. 

Then in the 1990s Gloria helped to establish what she called ‘Take Our Daughters to Work Day.’ She did this to try to have young girls learn about future career opportunities. But her work wasn’t done and in 2005, along with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, she co-founded the Women’s Media Center. It is an organization that “works to make women visible and powerful in the media.”

The last time I saw Gloria was at the opening night of “Gloria: A Life,” at Theatre J in D.C. She was 88, as beautiful, and sharp as ever, having just come back from a speaking engagement in some far-off country. 

Gloria, the world will miss you, RIP.

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.