The National Endowment for the Humanities announced that it canceled a Florida professor’s grant to write about LGBT cartoonists and a California professor’s grant to explore “multiethnic graphic literature.”
But the NEH website still lists a $60,000 grant, beginning on January 1 of this year, to English Professor Margaret Alice Galvan. The grant funds Galvan’s writings about “how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s.”
“Each chapter focuses on different grassroots publishing formats and shows how cartoonists wielded these neglected forms to develop their comics and build community,” the grant summary declares.
Galvin’s goal is to disseminate “stories of vibrant queer communities to inspire a new generation at a time when LGBTQ+ people face renewed threats.” She wrote a book titled “In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s.”
But the NEH says it canceled Galvin’s grant and another grant. “Both grants were awarded at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration, and terminated in April 2025,” an agency official said, tying the NEH’s decision to updated funding priorities under the Trump administration.
It is unclear why the grants have not been removed from the NEH’s webpage. The College Fix notes that the grants were both still listed as of yesterday.
The College Fix notes that Galvan writes about “how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s.” In addition to terminating Galvan’s grant, the NEH also terminated a grant to
San Jose State University graduate student Maite Urcaregui. She is a doctoral student…with connections to the department of black studies and the department of feminist studies. Her research “uses a queer formalist approach to investigate how multiethnic American authors strategically employ visual elements in their literature to navigate and critique the visual politics of race, gender, and sexuality”…
These are not the only identity-focused grants cancelled by the Trump Administration….the humanities agency canceled over 1,200 grants in April that leadership judged to “promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”
Among these is a grant to study “carceral disruptions”…“The NEH grant to Catherine Besteman at Colby College for ‘The Praxis of Care: Carceral Disruptions and Community Resistance’ was terminated by NEH in April 2025”…[It] planned to use “feminist ethics [and] restorative practice,” according to the grant description.
Besteman’s research background includes “carcerality and abolition” and “border crossing.”
An online database lists 1,435 canceled grants, totaling $427,666,781. A federal judge paused some of the cancellations in July.
In 2024, the Daily Caller reported that under the Biden administration, “The State Department” had “bankrolled a program to create 2,500 ‘LGBTQI+ Allies,’ given taxpayer dollars to “queer” Muslim writers in India and funded a Portuguese film festival depicting incestuous and pedophilic content since Biden took office in 2021.”
Under the Obama administration, the State Department funded repulsive “modern art” displays in Afghanistan (depicting things like toilets) that offended ordinary Afghans. The U.S. did things in Afghanistan that backfired and made many Afghans even more opposed to women’s rights, in a society where women’s status is very low. “Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’” “According to a USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting.” U.S. obsessions with things like imposing parliamentary gender quotas distracted Afghan attention from more popular and useful goals like teaching girls to read and write, which the Taliban opposed but ordinary Afghans tended to support. (Ordinary Afghans are less repressive toward women than the Taliban. In the 1970s, women in Afghanistan’s cities usually did not wear Burkas and enjoyed substantial freedom, unlike today under the Taliban.).
The Biden administration used taxpayer funds to subsidize controversial foreign LGBT activities that annoyed foreign countries and made America less popular overseas. Under Biden, USAID and the State Department funded LGBT messaging such as $25,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia through the State Department, “to raise awareness and increase the transgender representation“, and also:
$3,315,446 for “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean” through USAID.
$1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ individuals in Serbia through USAID.
$32,000 for a comic book “featuring an LGBTQ+ hero” in Peru through the State Department.
$55,750 for a climate change presentation warning about the impact of climate change in Argentina to be led by female and LGBT journalists through the State Department.
$80,000 for an LGBTQ community center in Bratislava, Slovakia through the State Department.
$16,500 to foster a “united and equal queer-feminist discourse in Albanian society” through the State Department.
$8,000 to promote DEI among LGBTQ groups in Cyprus through the State Department.
A preschool teacher claimed that the “only thing” she teaches kids is to “be gay,” not practical skills.
