Don Lemon is one of the most well-known journalists in America. He became a household name during his 17 years working for CNN before breaking out on his own in 2023 and starting Lemon Media Network the year after. That project has grown into one of the most successful independent news outlets in the U.S. The Don Lemon show, for example, boasts 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, and Lemon has 2.9 million followers on Instagram.

In the midst of this success, Lemon has been one of the biggest targets of the Trump administration. In January, he was arrested by federal agents for his coverage of an anti-ICE protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. Officials from the Trump administration, of which Lemon has been a longstanding critic, charged him with obstruction and conspiracy against rights of religious freedom—charges to which he has pled not guilty and is fighting in court. Outside of this legal battle, Trump has been cracking down on press freedom more broadly, attempting to ban multiple news outlets from the White House. In the meantime, billionaire Paramount CEO David Ellison has installed Trump-friendly leadership at CBS News and is quickly moving forward on a merger with Warner Bros., which owns CNN.

In this episode of “UNCLOSETED with Spencer Macnaughton,” we speak with Lemon about the all-out assault on the First Amendment, as well as his place in it as a high-profile Black, gay, independent journalist with a target on his back. We also talk about his advice for American journalists moving forward as well as the likelihood that he’ll run for president, which he pegged at about 65 to 70%.

>As a professional lesbian and Massachusetts native, I’ve recently been asked by a lot of folks what I think about the saga unfolding at Last Ditch. The now-viral story, first reported by The Boston Globe, centers on a Western Massachusetts lesbian bar that lifted its mask requirement for one night a week to help drum up business.

>The decision ignited an intra-queer controversy that has been feasted on by media outlets across the political spectrum—from the New York Post to LGBTQ Nation—and is even reportedly being eyed for a Hollywood adaptation. Apparently nothing is more entertaining than a bunch of lesbians and queers fighting with each other over KN-95s.

>What has been lost in all of the chatter and media coverage is the very real possibility that Last Ditch, which just opened in April 2025, will have to close its doors. The venue’s one remaining founder, Jackie Matellian, revealed in a community Zoom meeting that she’s working four jobs, is now solely responsible for the bar’s $50,000 business loan and is struggling to keep up with the bills. So as we laugh about the controversy’s similarity to a “Portlandia” skit and how one of the bar’s founders left to enroll in clown school, we forget that yet another lesbian bar is facing an existential crisis—and this time the call is coming from inside the house.

>In 2020, my friend Elina Street and I created The Lesbian Bar Project, an Emmy-, Webby- and GLAAD Media Award-winning docuseries and initiative that tells the stories of lesbian queer bars around the world. We were moved to act because at the time there were only an estimated 16 lesbian bars in the United States, and the pandemic threatened to bring that number down even further.

>There are now more sapphic bars than there were just before the pandemic—about 36 of them in total—but this is down from approximately 200 in 1980. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to you, but for the millions of sapphics living in the U.S., this number is calamitous.

>As the world laughs at lesbians and sapphics, I want to take a second and tell you what I feel when I walk into one of these bars, which are all unique and irreplaceable in their own way: I feel seen.

>Jesse Watters of Fox News fame has been in front of the camera for more than 20 years, making his TV debut as a correspondent on “The O’Reilly Factor” in 2003. He was given his own Saturday evening show, “Watters’ World,” in 2017 and also began co-hosting “The Five” along with other Fox News personalities.

>In 2023, Watters received a big promotion, taking over Tucker Carlson’s coveted 8PM ET weeknight slot with “Jesse Watters Primetime.” Watters has become infamous for his bombastic sarcasm and controversial remarks. “The Five” and “Jesse Watters Primetime” are the first and second most-viewed cable news programs in the country, respectively. Watters has used his national cable platform to make bigoted, insensitive and flippant comments about the LGBTQ community. Here’s a timeline of just some of those remarks.

As an aside, I don't know why anyone would watch a bully like this. Like, regardless of your politics, he's a shock jock. Nothing he says is interesting, funny or remotely newsworthy. But he's still the most watched cable news host in the country, he has the #1 and #2 shows. So its worth talking about why bullies like this get to have careers based around, well, bullying people and doing little else.

Trump is known for a lot of things, and one of them is bullying. He has mocked trans athletes by crudely imitating them. He has snapped at a Bloomberg White House correspondent, telling her “quiet, piggy.” And he has referred to openly gay CNN anchor Anderson Cooper as “Allison Cooper.”

But the irony to all of this is that Trump’s own ability to withstand criticism in any form is incredibly weak. That weakness has fueled his decade-long war against journalists who report on him. Through this time, Trump has been astonishingly bad at handling negative news coverage of his administration. Instead, he’s relentlessly called the free press the “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” in an effort to point the finger at anyone other than himself.

All of this reached a boiling point last Friday when he took to Truth Social to announce that he’d banned three news outlets from the White House:

>“Effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW … and Politico … from the White House as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

The ban wound up backfiring. In a show of solidarity on Monday, the five TV pool networks decided not to cover Trump or the White House at all. This led to no clean audio at a ribbon cutting for the White House helipad. That same day, the three banned outlets filed a First Amendment lawsuit to restore their access. And early this morning, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore credentials to the news organizations

While the idea of Trump lacking any ability to handle scrutiny is ironic, it’s unsurprising if you look at the psychology of bullies.

>On July 4, 2025, a protest outside of the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility near Dallas, Texas, escalated as some protestors broke off and committed acts of vandalism. The protest had started hours earlier as a noise demonstration where activists set off fireworks and used other noise makers to alert detainees in the facility that they supported them.

>But when law enforcement arrived to respond to the vandals, a police officer was shot nonfatally in the neck area. Authorities later charged protester Champagne Song for the shooting.

>Meagan Morris, who says she was a half-mile away playing Pokémon in her car when she heard the gunshots, was soon after stopped by police and taken into custody.

>Three months later, the Trump administration accused her and eight other defendants—three of whom, including Morris, are trans—of being “Antifa terrorists” and “Antifa Cell operatives.”

>Morris and her codefendants were eventually sentenced in part for providing material support for terrorists in what the Department of Justice called “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa,” a name which refers to a decentralized movement based on militant opposition to fascism.

>The sentencing comes after Trump signed an executive order declaring antifa, short for anti-fascism, as a terrorist organization, despite no such unified organization existing. And in May, the administration’s counterterrorism strategy listed “radically pro-transgender” groups as a national security threat.

>Morris was sentenced to 50 years in prison, which has caused legal experts concern. They noted that her sentence is unusually harsh, more than double the longest sentence for a Jan. 6 rioter, and that it could set a precedent for strict crackdowns on freedom of speech and assembly.

>After speaking to Morris’ codefendant and girlfriend, Autumn Hill, we wanted to hear from Morris. In this episode of “UNCLOSETED with Spencer Macnaughton,” she’s calling in from Johnson County Jail in Texas, where she is currently serving her sentence.

>At 17 years old, Sami Tacher remembers standing atop a parking garage outside Seattle and staring down at the pavement.

>They had been trying for five years to suppress their attraction to men. At 15, Tacher had found Strength in Weakness, a Christian ministry that purported to teach people experiencing “same-sex attraction” how to resist those desires. To Tacher, who had grown up believing that being gay would destroy their relationship with God and devastate their family, SIW felt like an answer.

>Two years later, Tacher says, they could no longer imagine how they were supposed to live the rest of their life.

>“I just stood up there and waited,” Tacher told Uncloseted Media. “I went there several times.” What stopped them, they say, was thinking about the burden their death would place on their family.

>“So I’ll just sacrifice everything and stay in the program,” they remember deciding.

>They would remain in SIW for years as a teenager and young adult, becoming friends with the organization’s founder, Guy Hammond, and helping promote the very teachings Tacher now believes were destroying them.

>“I just didn’t see my way out,” Tacher says. “I was miserable and shrinking inside [and] constantly denying myself … but I was holding on. And in the eyes of Strength in Weakness, I was succeeding.”

I work part-time at a movie theater to make ends meet. Recently we've had a coworker on a hateful tear and management has been extremely hesitant to do anything about it. For months people have danced around this employees behavior because he makes us all feel unsafe.

Let me say first off that I understand whiteness is often used to define what you aren't rather than what you are. I have a very Italian first and last name. I'm 4th generation with very loose connections to my heritage.

A coworker told me at my part-time recently that I'm not white because I'm Italian and that information "is biologically important to an honest discussion." He told me I'm not a "heritage American." What the fuck??

I didn't just stand there and take it. I told him he sounds like an 1800s racist and he doubled down. I thought he was fucking with me but it was really clear he wasn't.

It has made future shifts with him awkward as hell because now he refuses to speak to me at all. It's very unprofessional and weird. I've reported him, as have others for similar racist shit (saying the n word on the clock, calling other coworkers the r slur, talking out of pocket about how sexy he thinks Eastern European women are, being a creep to highschool seniors we work with even though he's in his late 40s) but I really needed to get this off my chest here because it's weird.

>Dr. Demetre Daskalakis is one of the foremost LGBTQ health professionals in the U.S. In November 2020, the waning months of Trump’s first term, he was appointed director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Through part of his tenure with the Biden administration, he also served as the deputy response coordinator for mpox at the White House as well as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

>While he continued a lot of this work after Biden left office, he didn’t last long under Trump 2.0. In August 2025, Daskalakis resigned from the CDC over the direction that health policy had taken under Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

>In his resignation letter, which garnered widespread attention, he said he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” He cited changes to the CDC’s immunization schedule, a lack of scientific communication from HHS leadership and the growing influence of anti-vaccine sentiments in the department.

>A year after his resignation, we wanted to hear from Daskalakis, who is now serving as chief medical officer of the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an LGBTQ health clinic in New York City. In this episode of “UNCLOSETED with Spencer Macnaughton,” Daskalakis speaks about his time working for the Trump administration, the erosion of scientific rigor under RFK Jr. and the troubling future for HIV and LGBTQ healthcare in the U.S.

>Since 2020, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has made headlines for a series of sweeping decisions that have rolled back rights for women and LGBTQ people. They’ve ruled to allow abortion bans in 13 states and bans on trans athletes in 27 states. And this year, Colorado overturned its ban on conversion therapy for minors.

>What headlines tend to miss, though, is that all of these decisions were won by the same legal group: Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Labeled as an anti-LGBTQ hate group and active in over 80 countries, ADF is a conservative Christian legal powerhouse, having fought relentlessly against abortion, gay marriage and trans healthcare since its inception in 1994.

>Boasting alumni and affiliates such as Mike Johnson, Amy Coney Barrett, Josh Hawley and Ken Starr, the group has been involved in at least 80 SCOTUS victories and directly represented parties in 20 of them, including the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

"I topped Lindsey Graham down, and I’m sorry if that sounds vulgar. But like, it just is what it is."

Lindsey Graham, who passed away on July 11 at 71 years old, served in the Senate for 23 years and garnered a reputation for his hawkish views and hardline anti-LGBTQ beliefs.

Years before his death, rumors swirled as allegations surfaced about the Republican senator engaging with male sex workers. The public and the media underscored the hypocrisy of the senator publicly working to roll back LGBTQ rights while allegedly engaging in queer sex behind closed doors.

Taylor Snider, a trans woman and former sex worker, says Graham was a former client. She says Graham’s team threatened her to prevent her from going public in 2020 and calls him the “leader of the circus” when it comes to hypocritical homophobia and transphobia coming from the government. She talks in detail about the sexual exchange between her and Graham, reveals that she’s had other “sitting members of Congress” as clients, and speaks about the broader issue of down-low conservative men in American politics who are “actively working to push anti-LGBT legislation.”

>Reid Rasner, an openly gay Republican running for Wyoming’s lone House of Representatives seat, is suing members of his own party for defamation stemming from homophobia.

>Semafor reports that Rasner is pursuing a case against former Wyoming State Senator Austin “Kit” Jennings, who allegedly pushed rumors that Rasner committed sexual misconduct. The rumors began after Rasner garnered national attention in 2025 for making a personal $47 billion bid to buy the social media site TikTok, and got worse from there.

>Rasner, who came out when he was 20, is also settling a case against an Iowa man who repeatedly called him a “pedophile” under his campaign’s Facebook posts. The man claims that his accusation was based on “multiple social media posts and news articles accusing Reid Rasner of serious sexual misconduct,” but didn’t specify any specific posts.

>Meanwhile, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who is running against Rasner in the Republican primary, piled on and issued a poll telling respondents that Rasner “married his gay husband in New York.” That poll showed Rasner initially behind Gray by single digits, but losing support after voters were told about his sexuality.

>On July 4, 2025, over a dozen people held a protest outside of the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, around 40 miles away from Dallas. It was a noise demonstration, a type of protest that uses loud noisemakers—which in this case included fireworks—as a form of civil disruption. As the night went on, tensions escalated as some protestors broke off and committed several acts of vandalism, eventually leading police officers to arrive on the scene. Soon after that, unknown assailants fired several shots at the officers, with the Justice Department reporting that one of them was struck non-fatally in the neck area. Authorities later argued that the shot that hit the officer was fired by a protester named Champagne Song.

>Autumn Hill attended the protest but says she left hours before shots were fired. But that didn’t stop the police from raiding her home and arresting her for alleged involvement with the protest, identifying her as a suspect on the charges of terrorism.

>Then, in October, the Trump administration got involved, accusing Hill and eight other defendants—three of whom, including Hill, are trans—of being “Antifa terrorists” and “Antifa Cell operatives.”

>Hill and her co-defendants were charged with providing material support for terrorists. In a press release, the DOJ wrote that “This is the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa.” This comes after Trump signed an executive order in September 2025 declaring antifa as a terrorist organization.

>Despite the administration’s claims, there is no unified organization called antifa, a name which refers to a decentralized movement based on militant opposition to fascism. And despite no evidence suggesting trans people are disproportionately likely to commit acts of terrorism, the Trump administration in May unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy to highlight “radically pro-transgender” people as a threat.

>Hill was convicted for riot, providing material support to terrorists and conspiracy to use and carry an explosive—namely the fireworks used at the protest. She has been sentenced to 50 years in prison. That’s more than double the sentences of former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes, who were key leaders in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. While Hill and her co-defendants are appealing the case, legal experts are sounding the alarm that these unusually harsh sentences could set a precedent for strict crackdowns on freedom of speech and assembly.

>Since her arrest, Hill has been incarcerated in men’s facilities. Now, staring down half a century in prison, she gives her first on-camera interview from the Johnson County Jail in Texas, where she maintains that the federal government’s narrative about her is false and that she believes she is a “political prisoner.”

Initial reporting by Uncloseted Media:

>On July 4, 2025, over a dozen people held a protest outside of the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, around 40 miles away from Dallas. It was a noise demonstration, a type of protest that uses loud noisemakers—which in this case included fireworks—as a form of civil disruption. As the night went on, tensions escalated as some protestors broke off and committed several acts of vandalism, eventually leading police officers to arrive on the scene. Soon after that, unknown assailants fired several shots at the officers, with the Justice Department reporting that one of them was struck non-fatally in the neck area. Authorities later argued that the shot that hit the officer was fired by a protester named Champagne Song.

>Autumn Hill attended the protest but says she left hours before shots were fired. But that didn’t stop the police from raiding her home and arresting her for alleged involvement with the protest, identifying her as a suspect on the charges of terrorism.

>Then, in October, the Trump administration got involved, accusing Hill and eight other defendants—three of whom, including Hill, are trans—of being “Antifa terrorists” and “Antifa Cell operatives.”

>Hill and her co-defendants were charged with providing material support for terrorists. In a press release, the DOJ wrote that “This is the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa.” This comes after Trump signed an executive order in September 2025 declaring antifa as a terrorist organization.

>Despite the administration’s claims, there is no unified organization called antifa, a name which refers to a decentralized movement based on militant opposition to fascism. And despite no evidence suggesting trans people are disproportionately likely to commit acts of terrorism, the Trump administration in May unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy to highlight “radically pro-transgender” people as a threat.

>Hill was convicted for riot, providing material support to terrorists and conspiracy to use and carry an explosive—namely the fireworks used at the protest. She has been sentenced to 50 years in prison. That’s more than double the sentences of former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes, who were key leaders in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. While Hill and her co-defendants are appealing the case, legal experts are sounding the alarm that these unusually harsh sentences could set a precedent for strict crackdowns on freedom of speech and assembly.

>Since her arrest, Hill has been incarcerated in men’s facilities. Now, staring down half a century in prison, she gives her first on-camera interview from the Johnson County Jail in Texas, where she maintains that the federal government’s narrative about her is false and that she believes she is a “political prisoner.”

>In October 2025, Amanda Hunt remembers watching as countless books at Oak Run Middle School in New Braunfels, Texas, were removed from her library. Students walked in and saw more empty shelves and fewer stories they had once been able to check out.

>“Every day, they’re like, ‘More boxes? More books to get rid of? More books to pull?’” Hunt, who was the lead librarian at the time, told Uncloseted Media.

>That month, Hunt says the New Braunfels Independent School District (ISD) had temporarily closed all four of its secondary-school libraries to audit its collections and assess whether they were in accordance with Senate Bill 13 (SB13), a Texas censorship law that took effect in September 2025. Thousands of books were moved, restricted or removed.

>For Hunt, who had spent more than 14 years helping students find books, the assignment felt like a betrayal of everything a librarian was supposed to do. “What kind of librarian takes books out of kids’ hands?” says Hunt, who attended Oak Run Middle School as a student and whose dad worked there as a sixth-grade reading teacher.

>SB13 prohibits “indecent content” and content that portrays “sexual or excretory organs or activities in a way that is patently offensive.” But the vagueness of the bill’s language, according to advocates, has led to the banning of many LGBTQ books, including “Boy Erased,” which is about a gay man’s challenges in conversion therapy, “Juneteenth” and “The Art of Drag,” a picture book about the history of drag. As of February 2026, New Braunfels ISD has removed over 600 books from its high schools and aged up over 800 books from middle schools, according to public information requests obtained from the Texas Freedom to Read Project.

That's it. Why does it keep popping up in conversations surrounding the Rochester case? Why can't you racist idiots keep that shit to yourself? And don't say you're not racist if you use that word, you are.

Why should anyone show you respect if you use that sort of language and why would you expect any? Everyone wants to defend her first amendment right to free speech (which I see as entirely harassment in this case) but nobody wants to say what she did was still wrong and bad. It's gross.