Jaymes Black is building a lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth
Jaymes Black offers LGBTQ+ youth across the country a needed lifeline.
Mark
For LGBTQ+ young people, a crisis line can be the difference between feeling completely alone and hearing someone say, in real time, that their life is worth staying for.
That’s the reality Jaymes Black stepped into in 2024 when they became CEO of The Trevor Project, the nation’s leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for young LGBTQ+ people.
How about we take this to the next level?
Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
Black, who uses they/she/he pronouns, made history as the organization’s first Black and first nonbinary leader. They say it’s a role that directly connects to their own life, harkening back to their time growing up in conservative South Texas.
“This is an organization I desperately needed myself,” she said.
Since becoming CEO, Black’s leadership has met a brutal moment with real urgency. In 2026, they were named to the TIME100 Philanthropy list after The Trevor Project rallied supporters in the wake of the 988 LGBTQ+ specialized lifeline’s termination. Nearly 30,000 donors contributed more than $20 million to the organization’s Emergency Lifeline Campaign, turning a major funding gap into a show of community force.
For Black, the work is rooted in lived experience. In a personal essay for The Advocate, they wrote about being outed at school at 17 after a classmate found a note to their girlfriend. “My world shattered,” Black wrote. “The shame and fear was so suffocating that I saw no way out of the situation.”
Years later, after moving to Texas, Black found the kind of queer community he had once needed. “It was in Dallas where I was finally able to live my true, authentic self,” he said. “And not just survive, but thrive. I found an electric queer community that embraced, accepted, and affirmed me.”
That experience shapes the way Black talks about support for LGBTQ+ young people, especially Black LGBTQ+ youth. They’ve carried it throughout their incredible career, first at Family Equality, where they fought for LGBTQ+ families to be recognized, protected, and treated as real and worthy of protection.
“Family is so integral to our existence as humans,” Black told LGBTQ Nation. “Whether that’s a chosen family, whatever way you can make families—it’s so inherent to humans.”
Black’s ongoing efforts keep returning to the same idea that LGBTQ+ people should not have to wait until adulthood to feel safe, seen, or loved. Their story includes pain, but by no means does it have to end there.
Related
Activists push back on state bans and repaint rainbow crosswalks in Florida and Texas
This year, LGBTQ+ activists in Florida and Texas showed they would not be silenced.Robert Garcia goes after Tr*mp on the thorniest issues, and is only getting more powerful
Robert Garcia is a rising star in Congress.
Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.
