When Allyship Looks Different: 9 People Showing Up for the LGBTQ+ Community
From Michigan to Hollywood, these allies aren't staying quiet
Allyship doesn't always look the way we expect. It's not always the loudest voice in the room, or the most predictable place. Sometimes it's an Army veteran couple tending a Pride arch in Detroit. Sometimes it's a parent with a TikTok following, sharing what it means to raise a nonbinary child. Sometimes it's a politician who shows up year after year at Pride, not for the photo op, but because a beloved uncle taught them long ago what unconditional love means. And sometimes it's the big brother of a trans woman, using his platform of 1.5 million followers to understand something fundamental about the work.
What follows are nine people who've chosen to do exactly that — to step up for the LGBTQ+ community right now, when the Trump administration has made it clear that LGBTQ+ rights are under siege.
1. Sander Jennings, Stand With Trans Communications Director and Best Big Brother Around
Big brother to trans activist Jazz Jennings, Jennings brings more than 1.5 million followers into conversations about trans rights and acceptance. As communications director for Stand with Trans, the Michigan-based nonprofit founded in 2015 to support transgender youth, he translates lived experience into advocacy. His family's journey played out over eight seasons of TLC's "I Am Jazz," giving him a platform he's used ever since to make the case for unconditional love.
"One accepting adult can decrease an LGBTQ+ young person's risk of suicide by 40 percent," Sander told Pride Source. "I have devoted my life to allyship because if I can be that ally to a young person, or inspire someone else to be that ally, then I'm able to save lives. Especially at a time when our government is telling so many LGBTQ+ young people they don't belong through legislation and verbal attacks, the LGBTQ+ community needs allies to step up."
2. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Leaving Office With Her Legacy Codified in Law
Gov. Whitmer is leaving office in January 2027, but what she's left behind is built to last. She expanded the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act after a 50-year fight, signed a conversion therapy ban and created Michigan's hate crime law with protections for trans people. Her allyship has been personal from the start, rooted in raising a gay daughter and in decades of relationships with the LGBTQ+ people who shaped her understanding of the stakes.
She described the moment she signed Elliott-Larsen with her daughter Sherry by her side, in a Pride Source interview earlier this year, as "really a powerful moment. I'd fought for that for many years and then to be able to sign it into law with my daughter standing there." On what comes next, she was equally direct, telling us, "While I'm not going to be serving as governor after the end of this calendar year, I ain't going anywhere and I'm not leaving the fight. And I've got a lot of gas in the tank."
3. Kris and Dave Hutton, Army Veterans Turning Hate Into Hope
On a quiet street in Detroit's Indian Village, a two million-follower Instagram account grew from a single act of defiance. When a man approached their home during a neighborhood garden tour and demanded they remove their Pride flag, Kris's response went viral, and their annual Pride arch, an explosion of rainbow foam flowers, has since become a beacon for LGBTQ+ people across the country. Some have relocated to Michigan specifically for the community Kris and Dave represent.
In a 2025 Pride Source interview, Kris reflected on why the confrontation lit a fire rather than extinguishing one. "The audacity to pull up in front of someone's house and tell them what to do, especially in regards to that flag, I was shocked. Shocked and angry." That anger translated into something she didn't expect. "It feels so personal when people share that part of their lives with us or tell us parts of their personal experiences, or if they've been abandoned by their families," she said. "It feels like that shouldn't happen anymore. I feel like we should have grown past that by now."
4. Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, The Ally Rooted in Love
Lt. Gov. Gilchrist has shown up at Motor City Pride for 10 consecutive years, his allyship rooted in his relationship with his Uncle Glen, a fashion designer in Los Angeles who died of HIV complications and who shaped Gilchrist's understanding of love without conditions. As president of the state senate, he handed the gavel to openly gay state Sen. Jeremy Moss to preside over the historic ELCRA expansion vote.
Now running for secretary of state, he's been clear about where he stands regardless of political climate. "There's not a version of public service that should be OK with discriminating against people," he told Pride Source last year. "I don't care whether you live in a district that's considered a swing district or not." His message to other allies is equally plain: "Don't run away. Don't turn your back. Allies have to be allies on a consistent basis. It means being willing to show up, willing to listen, willing to use the space that you occupy to make sure that someone else has space."
5. Jay Kaplan, A Gay Man Who Shows Up for Trans Women
Allyship exists within the LGBTQ+ community too, and Jay Kaplan, staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan's LGBT Project for more than two decades, is a powerful example. As a gay man, he's devoted much of his career to the legal protection of trans Michiganders, including landmark work on the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act expansion and his representation of the late Aimee Stephens in the federal employment discrimination case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.
That commitment is felt deeply by those who've worked alongside him. "Jay has been there for me personally outside of work in ways that I would not think many white men would be for me as a Black trans woman," Jeynce Poindexter, executive director of Trans Sistas of Color Project, told Pride Source in 2025. Kaplan's own resolve hasn't wavered with the political tide. "No election can change what I think is right, what I think is fair," he told us in the same article. "Nothing's going to stop me from fighting back and standing up for what's right."
6. Jess Craven, Using Her Platform to Protect Other People's Kids
With 637,000 TikTok followers, Jess Craven is a California-based activist and political organizer whose LGBTQ+ advocacy intensified after her child came out as nonbinary. Through her "Chop Wood Carry Water" newsletter and across social media, she pushes for the Equality Act, fights book bans and takes aim at federal attacks on trans youth, turning her platform into a daily resource for people who want to take action but aren't sure where to start.
She's spoken candidly about how her child's coming out changed things. "When it's your own family and your own kid, it's a really different situation. It suddenly is very visceral." Her advice to other parents navigating the same territory is simple but powerful — trademark Jess Craven. "I think we never go wrong when we just allow our kids to go on their journey and just walk next to them,” she wrote in her newsletter. “My job is not to say you need to be this or you need to be that. It's just, I am here with you. I see you. I celebrate you."
7. Madonna, Bay City's Favorite Daughter
Born in Bay City, raised in Pontiac and a University of Michigan dropout who left for New York to become arguably the most influential pop artist of the 20th century, Madonna has been a vocal LGBTQ+ ally since the early days of the AIDS crisis, one of the first celebrities to speak out when others stayed quiet. She received GLAAD's Advocate for Change Award in 2019, and her Celebration Tour (2023-2024) was a sustained tribute to queer fans and to the lives lost to AIDS. In March 2025, she posted about the pain of anti-trans discrimination, writing that it "breaks my heart to witness the pain of trans people who are not accepted by a society that fears them because they are different."
When she brought the tour to Little Caesars Arena in Detroit in 2024, Pride Source editor Chris Azzopardi was there, and what he witnessed moved him to write about what her allyship has meant on a deeply personal level. "She introduced me to queer culture before the internet could," he wrote in 2024, describing how he clung to her music as a suicidal kid in the hard-to-be-gay 1990s, surviving "anti-queer Catholic dogma and all-consuming, AIDS-influenced fear that almost took me out. But not without Madonna's help as someone who showed me that I could survive — that I deserved to."
8. Ariana Grande, Putting Real Money Behind Her Allyship
Grande has been an outspoken LGBTQ+ ally for years, including a 2022 Transgender Day of Visibility campaign in which she matched $1.5 million in donations and helped raise more than $3 million for nonprofits serving trans youth. This June, she launched the Brighter Days Ahead Foundation to fund organizations working on LGBTQ+ rights, civil rights and reproductive justice. The foundation supports 15 organizations, including Trans Lifeline and Lambda Legal.
"It has been my privilege to be able to support these causes on my own over the years," Grande wrote in her foundation announcement. "I'm grateful to now be able to expand that reach and amplify the life-saving work that these organizations do." Her allyship is personal as well as political — her brother, musician Frankie Grande, spoke with Pride Source in 2025 about his debut album and his life as a queer man, describing Ariana's enthusiastic support every step of the way.
9. Daniel Radcliffe, The Wizard Who Chose the Trans Community Over His Own Franchise
When J.K. Rowling began making public statements widely condemned as trans-exclusionary, her most famous collaborator didn't stay silent or hedge. Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, publicly and repeatedly stated that trans women are women, writing for The Trevor Project that he was "deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused" to trans people and affirming that their identities are valid. The position put him in direct conflict with the woman whose books made him a household name, a risk he's taken consistently and without apparent regret.
Who else should be on our list? Join the conversation on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky!
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