This story originally appeared on Out.
Break out the bubbly, it's time to celebrate, Carlos and Seb fans!
Frankie A. Rodriguez and Joe Serafini, the actors who met on Disney+'s mockumentary TV drama High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, announced on Instagram that their on-screen romance has led to their real-life engagement.
Their three-photo-post from Saturday shows the couple in an urban park, Rodriguez playfully riding piggyback on Serafini, each of them beaming with joy and holding up their left hands to show off their engagement rings. Rodriguez's caption says, simply, "engaged!" with a diamond ring, a heart, and a pair of toasting champagne glasses emojis.
Serafini replied using several smiling-face-with-hearts emojis.
Their Wildcats costars, the series creator, and fans alike commented with congratulatory messages.
"YES YES YES YES YES. GREATEST COUPLE OF ALL TIME,” wrote actor Matt Cornett, who played E.J. Caswell in the Disney+ series. “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” wrote their former costar, out actor Joshua Bassett, who played "Ricky," the male lead on the series.
Out gay showrunner and creator Tim Federle's comment was "nature is healing" with a red heart emoji. In 2022, Bassett credited Federle with helping him come out, as Out reported.
Actress Dara Reneé, who played Kourtney Greene on the series, added her all-caps congrats: "I’VE BEEN PRAYING FOR THIS MOMENT!! LOVE YALL SO MUCH!!!!" with several celebratory emojis. Costar Julia Lester, who played Ashlyn Caswell, joined the conversation with this comment: "THOSE ARE LITERALLY MY FAVORITE PPL ON THE PLANET REALLY TRULY."
There were congratulatory comments from other "Wildcast" actors Sofia Wylie, Larry Saperstein, Samuel Adrian, Liamani Segura, Olivia Rose Keegan, Jason Earles, Alexis Chang Nellis, and even the official Disney+ Instagram account: "We couldn’t be happier for you two!"
Fan comments included "The HSMTMTS fandom is SCREAMING (I’m the HSMTMTS fandom)" and "the absolute power of hsmtmts to bring upon queer love."
When Bassett, Serafini, and Rodriguez were interviewed by Hollywire in 2021, the couple confirmed they were dating. As Out reported in 2024, Rodriguez is gay, Serafini is bisexual, and Bassett prefers to identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
In 2021, Out told the story of Serafini and Rodriguez's performance of Disney's first-ever same-sex love song: "East High's favorite assistant-director-turned-talking-candlestick sang a swoon-worthy song to his boyfriend Seb."
As reporter Mey Rude wrote, it's "a perfect song for queer youth, especially those in places where there may not be a lot of other queer people. With a message of choosing your partner for who they are, instead of because they're just there, 'In a Heartbeat' is the latest classic Disney love song."
The Disney+ series ran from 2019 to 2023 as one of the streamer's first shows and went on to win a GLAAD Media Award and Kids Choice Award. As Out reported, the show's fourth and final season focused on the Wildcats' return to East High for senior year, and how their plans for a production of High School Musical 3: Senior Year were disrupted when Disney announced the long-awaited High School Musical 4: The Reunion, to be shot at their school.
Pride reported on how Rodriguez and Serafini reacted to the end of the series. “It’s hard to wrap your heads around, even four years into these characters, just the power of their existence on the screen to people watching at home,” said Serafini, adding that the show never made a big deal out of Seb and Joe’s relationship.
“Yeah, it’s just been so incredible and to have them exist in this natural, not pushed or forced way. I mean, Seb and Carlos are just in a relationship," he said. "That’s all it really is.”
Rodriguez revealed he and Sarafini took home a huge and iconic piece from their time on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.
“I turned to Joe and said, ‘you should ask for the piano” and he was like, ‘no, no, no they’ll never do it,” recalled Rodriguez. “I said ‘just ask for it’ and he asked Tim Ferderle, our showrunner, for the piano and two weeks after we wrapped the piano showed up at our door.”
Joe Serafini and Frankie Rodriguez at the piano on High School Musical: The Musical: The SeriesCourtesy Disney
That famous rehearsal-room piano is in the apartment that the couple share together. “We hope to have it in a house someday where we can have the cast over and like everyone can play it,” Serafini said.
The piano was especially meaningful to the pair because Serafini often gathered the cast together for sing-alongs while on set.
“Joe was always like 'The Piano Man,'” Rodriguez said. “So I think anytime cameras went down and there was a piano in the room and Joe was able to bring everybody together for, like, a big ‘ol singing moment. Those were always the best because everybody is so amazing, so the fact that they were just willing to do it for free — it was great.”
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.