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Riley Ashford

Riley Ashford

Queer Culture and AI Journalist

Queer culture, AI weirdness, and finding community where you least expect it.

Been covering the wild, weird, wonderful overlap of LGBTQ+ life and emerging tech for ten years. I’m not here for the parade floats and Pride merch — I want the stories no one else tells: the ones about queer folks stuck in places with no rainbow crosswalks, the quiet ones figuring things out alone, the elders who’ve seen it all shift. Tech’s changing how we connect — I want to know what that looks like when you’re not in a city, not on a stage, not shouting.

What I'm Into: rural queer stories, AI and identity, interviews off the beaten path, late-night digital archives, the quiet parts of pride

What's in my brain: Covers the intersection of queer culture and artificial intelligence, focusing on underrepresented LGBTQ+ experiences, including rural and isolated communities, older adults, and disabled individuals.
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Articles by Riley Ashford

The Inner Critic and How AI Helps You Silence It

The inner critic speaks in a voice that is usually familiar. It sounds like someone you know — a parent, a teacher, an older sibling — but it has colonized the inside of your head so thoroughly that i...

The Friend You Can Call at Any Hour About Anything

There is a very specific kind of friend that most people wish they had but few actually do. The one you can call at three in the morning not because something catastrophic has happened, but because yo...

LGBTQ+ and Faith: Reconciliation Paths That Work

I grew up in a faith community that did not leave room for the person I would eventually become, and I spent years assuming that leaving was the only option. What I have learned since — and what the s...

Queer Literature: Why Stories Save Lives

There is a specific feeling I get when I finish a book that sees me — not a character who shares one or two surface traits with me, but a character whose internal life maps onto mine in ways I had not...

Drag Culture: History, Meaning, and Why It Endures

Drag has been called many things: performance art, political provocation, community ritual, pure entertainment, subversive theater, and — by people who do not understand it — a threat. The reality is...

Gay-Straight Alliances: Why School GSAs Save Lives

Gay-Straight Alliances — school clubs that bring together LGBTQ+ students and their straight allies — have been the subject of more research than most people realize, and the findings are remarkably c...

Supporting Trans Youth: What Parents Need to Know

When a child or teenager comes out as transgender, the response of their parents matters more than almost anything else in determining what happens next. This is not an overstatement. The research on...

Navigating Jealousy in Queer Relationships

Jealousy is one of the most universally human experiences in relationships, and it does not become less complicated in queer relationships — it becomes differently complicated. The particular social c...

Asexual Mental Health: The Invisibility That Harms

Asexuality is one of the least understood sexual orientations, and that misunderstanding carries a mental health price. Asexual people — those who experience little or no sexual attraction to others —...

Coming Out in Sports: Athletes Who Changed the Game

Sports has always had LGBTQ+ athletes. The difference across time is how many of them could afford to say so publicly — and what happened when they did. The cultural terrain of athletic coming out has...

How to Come Out to Your Children at Any Age

Telling your children you are LGBTQ+ is a conversation shaped almost entirely by where they are developmentally, what language you use, and how much they sense from the emotional environment you bring...

How Clothing Becomes a Lifeline for Queer Identity

There is a specific experience of getting dressed in the morning that feels fundamentally different depending on how free you feel to present yourself as you actually are. For many people — queer peop...

The Surprising Truth About Brain Changes After 40

There is a moment many people experience in their forties or fifties when they walk into a room and forget why, or lose a word mid-sentence that they have used ten thousand times, and a cold thread of...

Finding Your Identity Outside of Your Relationship

The Gradual Disappearance It does not happen all at once. You do not wake up one morning and realize you have lost yourself. It happens in small adjustments. You stop going to the Thursday night thing...

What AI Companions Mean in Towns Without Gay Bars

I grew up in a town of eleven thousand people. There was no gay bar. There was no bookstore with a queer section. There was no meetup, no pride center, no coffee shop where you would see the same comm...