Here is why Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes, Trump and the Republican Party’s fascist homophobia, the appropriation of Logan Pauls’ Gay for a Month and Nico Tortorella’s claims to Queerness (oddly supported by mainstream gay magazines), matter:

1. Giovani Melton, 14 years old, shot by his father, Wendell Melton, because he could not accept that his son was gay.
2. Anthony Avalos, 10 years old, murdered by his mother’s boyfriend Kareem Leiva, days after the boy stated he “liked boys”.
3. Kyler Prescott, 14 years old trans teen, killed himself while on suicide watch at a San Diego Hospital, after being teased and bullied by staff who insisted on calling him a girl.
4. Jamel Myles, a nine-year-old boy killed himself after being severely bullied when he came out as gay.
5. Hope Eric Peter Verbeek, was struggling to find their place as a trans teen when they killed themselves. In their suicide note Hope wrote, “I would like to be remembered as a transgender pansexual teenage girl named Hope. Being transgender is my gender identity. My sexual orientation, or sexual identity, is being pansexual, meaning that I do not care about what the person is; I care about who they are. Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with and gender identity is who you go to bed as.”

2018 was the deadliest year on record for the LGBTQ community, and those numbers are not decreasing.

Here’s the thing: it all fucking matters. How we talk about ourselves as a community matters. And how we allow others to talk about us matters. It has direct consequences. We are being murdered and raped, we are being bullied until the only option we have left is to take our own lives.

We should be supporting each other. We should be encouraging each other. We should be doing anything we can to help our community succeed.

I’m not going to write a pretty summary, or leave you with a positive spin. Because this really fucking matters. How we vote, how we act, how we talk and how we treat each other carries weight, it is our Power.

We will thrive by it or die by it. It is up to us, as a community.