Just Us No Kids! Very Emotional Date Night 9/17/2014 LGBT WifeandWife Daily Vlog
Follow us on a date afternoon that turned emotional.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXct2gCyQ_s&feature=youtube_gdata
Daily Archives: September 17, 2014
DSC_4475 Wild Burritos
Despite Facing Backlash, Facebook Refuses To Change Controversial Policy
Despite Facing Backlash, Facebook Refuses To Change Controversial Policy
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco drag queens are sparring with Facebook over its policy requiring people to use their real names, rather than drag names such as Pollo Del Mar and Heklina. But the world’s biggest social network is not budging from its rules.
In recent weeks, Facebook has been deleting the profiles of self-described drag queens and other performers who use stage names because they did not comply with the social networking site’s requirement that users go by their “real names” on the site. On Wednesday, Facebook declined to change its policy after meeting with drag queens and a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors. The company said is usually deletes accounts with fake names after investigating user complaints.
“This policy is wrong and misguided,” said Supervisor David Campos, who was flanked by seven drag queens during a press conference at San Francisco City Hall.
The drag queens and others in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community say many Facebook account holders fear using their real names for a variety of reasons, including threats to their safety and employment.
“I have crazy family members who I don’t want contacting me through Facebook,” said a self-described drag queen who calls herself Heklina.
Facebook said it temporarily restored hundreds of deleted accounts for two weeks. After that they’ll have to either change their name to their real name, or convert their profile to a fan page.
Campos and the drag queens, led by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — a San Francisco group of drag performers and activists that’s been around since 1979 — say they plan another meeting with Facebook and are hopeful that the company will ultimately alter its policy.
If Facebook doesn’t change its policy, the drag queens at San Francisco City Hall Wednesday said they would organize protests and boycotts.
“Abused women, bullied teens, transgender people… (there are) a million different people with a million different reasons to use fake names,” said Sister Roma, a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Facebook says it policy “helps prevent bad behavior, while creating a safer and more accountable environment.”
The company says performers and others have other ways of keeping their stage identities on the site, including creating pages that are meant for businesses and public figures.
Many in the drag queen community are professional performers who rely on Facebook to publicize gigs. They said a fan page isn’t the same as a regular Facebook page.
“Your reach is limited, said Rosa Sifuentes, a San Francisco-based burlesque performer who goes by the name Bunny Pistol.
The company’s policy has been around just about as long as Facebook itself.
This isn’t the first time users have criticized Facebook’s policy.
Political activists have complained, especially those living in countries where they could face danger if their real identities are revealed. In 2011, Chinese blogger and activist Michael Anti, whose legal name is Zhao Jing, had his profile deleted because he was not using his given name — even though his professional identity has been established for more than a decade and is better known. Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, has “merged” her stage name with her birth name on Facebook in an apparent compromise.
It’s not always easy to determine which names are inauthentic. Some people whose real names sound fake have had their accounts deleted, too.
For Facebook, the real names policy is not just meant to keep people accountable. The company and other website operators argue that requiring people to use true identities can reduce online vitriol and bullying. Real names also help Facebook target advertisements to its 1.32 billion users.
Facebook estimates that 6 to 11 percent of its monthly user accounts were duplicate or fake in 2013.
“We believe the percentage of accounts that are duplicate or false is meaningfully lower in developed markets such as the United States or United Kingdom and higher in developing markets such as India and Turkey,” Facebook wrote in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “However, these estimates are based on an internal review of a limited sample of accounts and we apply significant judgment in making this determination, such as identifying names that appear to be fake or other behavior that appears inauthentic to the reviewers.”
PHOTOS: James Franco’s New Series Is A Meta Pop Culture Cinema Mashup
PHOTOS: James Franco’s New Series Is A Meta Pop Culture Cinema Mashup
James Franco’s new AOL original series Making a Scene With James Franco debuts tonight, and it looks odd at best. The basic premise is James Franco plays cinema roulette and combines iconic characters, films and genres into scenes starring James Franco — a sort of intellectual yet playful approach to pop culture that if you take a big enough step back from might, maybe, be making a “big picture” point or two. Sound familiar?
As part of the promotion for the show, Entertainment Weekly ran these cinefile mashup photos. James will also be answering questions live tonight at 8 p.m. eastern, so if you’re as confused as we are about his latest project, feel free to grill him:
Dan Tracer
Shanawaara entrevista Marcos Visnadi #Vote LGBT
Shanawaara entrevista Marcos Visnadi #Vote LGBT
Shanawaara entrevista.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBpc75M-9j0&feature=youtube_gdata
DSC_0018
Chris Kluwe Takes On NFL & Ray Rice Investigation
Chris Kluwe Takes On NFL & Ray Rice Investigation
Chris Kluwe says it’s ironic that a league that is so dependent on instant replays is having a hard time with a different type of video evidence.
Annie Hollenbeck
www.advocate.com/sports/2014/09/17/chris-kluwe-takes-nfl-ray-rice-investigation
Coming Out of the PrEP Closet
Coming Out of the PrEP Closet
Each morning, I take a pill called Truvada to protect me from becoming infected with HIV. This strategy, also known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, reduces the risk of HIV infection by up to 99 percent if the pill is taken once a day. This makes PrEP one of the most effective HIV-prevention measures in existence. After consulting with my physician, I went on PrEP to further protect and take personal responsibility for my health. I’m HIV-negative, and I want to remain that way.
I recently decided to be public about my use of PrEP in order to raise awareness about this relatively new tool for preventing HIV. It’s important to encourage people at risk for HIV to talk to their medical providers about all the tools and methods available for preventing infection, including PrEP, and to choose the methods that are best for them.
As an elected official, disclosing this personal health decision was a hard but necessary choice. After all these years, we still see enormous stigma, shame, and judgment around HIV, and around sexuality in general. That is precisely why I decided to be public about my choice: to contribute to a larger dialogue about our community’s health. I have the honor of representing a district that includes the Castro — ground zero for the HIV epidemic. I represent a community that has been profoundly impacted by HIV, with a large number of HIV-positive people — nearly one in four gay men in San Francisco is HIV-positive — and an even larger number of people at risk of becoming positive. As an elected official in this role, I have an obligation to do everything in my power to support those living with HIV, increase public awareness about effective HIV prevention, and reduce stigma and shame.
My journey to PrEP was a long one. I came to terms with myself as a gay man when I was 17 years old in 1987, at the height of the HIV epidemic. Many gay men were getting sick and dying. Like many in my generation, I came of age associating sex with illness and death. That association — with all the fear, anxiety, guilt, and shame that go along with it — is still very real for many of us.
As time has gone by, I’ve seen people become healthier, and I’m continually in awe of those who have survived the epidemic and thrived. Yet new HIV infections continue — 50,000 annually in the U.S., and over 2 million annually worldwide. Despite all our prevention efforts, I continue to know people who’ve remained HIV-negative for 20 or 30 years, only to become HIV-positive. I regularly meet young men, some barely out of high school, who have the virus.
None of this is preordained. People don’t need to continue to get infected, and we know that PrEP has the potential to help stop the epidemic in its tracks by ending new HIV infections. It’s one pill a day, with few side effects for most people.
Condoms remain critically important for HIV-prevention efforts, but they have their limits, as demonstrated by the continuing new infections after 30 years of robust prevention efforts. Only one in six gay men uses condoms consistently and effectively enough to be fully protected from HIV. For those who do use them consistently, condoms offer significant protection but have a failure rate, and condom usage among gay men reduces HIV risk by 76 percent, not 100 percent.
Given the challenges many gay men have with consistent condom use as well as the continued risk of HIV transmission even for those who use condoms, PrEP provides a powerful additional level of protection. It’s not a question of either condoms or PrEP. It’s about both important tools.
PrEP has broad support in the public-health community. The World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended its use by those at risk for HIV, including gay men. The state of New York and the San Francisco Department of Public Health have adopted PrEP as a core prevention strategy. The HIV advocacy community overwhelmingly supports PrEP. Most insurance companies cover it fully despite its considerable cost, precisely because it is so effective at preventing a serious illness for which there is no cure.
Some aren’t sold on PrEP. Skeptics question whether people will adhere to a daily pill, which is a legitimate concern. Protection decreases if usage is inconsistent. This challenge can be overcome with effective education, and drug adherence is a challenge that isn’t unique to PrEP.
Some critics also view PrEP as a license for people to engage in risky behavior and assert that it will cause non-HIV sexually transmitted infections to increase. No study to date has shown that those using PrEP increase risky behavior — such as reducing condom usage compared with before using PrEP — and there is evidence to the contrary. Indeed, this line of thinking — that promoting an effective prevention method will lead to irresponsible behavior — resembles some of the phony arguments used to attack the HPV vaccine by suggesting that getting vaccinated will lead young girls down a path to promiscuity. And, since PrEP users are regularly screened for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, PrEP use will increase opportunities for prompt detection and treatment of STIs.
PrEP isn’t only about gay men. Women can benefit tremendously from it as well. Many women are using PrEP to conceive a child with an HIV-positive partner, a new approach dubbed “PrEP-ception.” PrEP can also protect women (and men) in abusive relationships. Too many women — and gay men as well — don’t fully control how or when they have sex, whether their partners use condoms, and what risks their partners are taking elsewhere. People facing these challenges can take control of their infection risk — and essentially eliminate that risk — by using PrEP effectively.
In addition to lack of education and stigma, another significant barrier to fully realizing PrEP’s potential benefits is lack of access. PrEP isn’t cheap, and for the many people who are uninsured or underinsured, cost can effectively deny access. PrEP needs to be easily available to all communities and all income levels through public healthcare programs, including Medicaid. Otherwise we risk accentuating health disparities among our diverse communities.
Many people and organizations have gotten us where we are with PrEP. The University of California San Francisco is responsible for some of the earliest clinical studies of PrEP, and organizations like San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Project Inform, and the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition have been working on the front lines to ensure that the promise of PrEP is fully realized, including advocating for FDA approval, helping establish expanded access programs from the drug manufacturer, ensuring PrEP is covered by insurance plans, and disseminating information to consumers and clinicians.
We know how to end HIV infection. We simply need the political will to ensure that the community has accurate information about and access to all prevention methods, including PrEP. I hope my disclosure can play a role in moving us toward these goals.
Scott Wiener is an elected member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. For more information, visit scottwiener.com.
Phone Banking Poolside for Pennsylvania Non-Discrimination
Phone Banking Poolside for Pennsylvania Non-Discrimination
Last week longtime HRC activist Patty Ellis and Rebecca Tillet hosted a volunteer phonebank in Newtown, Pennsylvania to support the state’s non-discrimination act.
HRC.org
The MacArthur Foundation Has A Long History Of Recognizing Queer Geniuses
The MacArthur Foundation Has A Long History Of Recognizing Queer Geniuses
Alison Bechdel
The MacArthur Foundation awarded nearly two dozen genius grants this week, and there are three fabulous queers among the recipients.
Is “genius” too strong of a word for Mary Bonauto, Samuel Hunter and Alison Bechdel? No, we don’t think it is. After all, we have Bonauto to thank for leading a massive component of the crusade for marriage equality since the ’90s; and Bechdel and Hunter are responsible for some major literary works that are basically required reading.
A native Idahoan, Hunter’s plays include A Bright New Boise, A Great Wilderness and The Whale, all of which feature regular folks whose values are tested by pain and loneliness. The settings are plain and stark, and the characters unassuming. His work kind of makes us feel like we’re watching the play that we only catch a glimpse of at the beginning of Barton Fink: the poetry of real working people whose everyday struggles tell the story of contemporary culture.
If that sounds a little too serious, how about some comic books? You probably know Bechdel for her strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which chronicled lesbian life for 25 years. Her work isn’t just a collection of funnies, though: she’s a serious memoirist, working in a graphic form. Bechdel was last on our radar when some idiot politicians in South Carolina freaked out when they learned that colleges were assigning a lesbian’s books. She’s also responsible for the Bechdel Test, which determines whether a film respects women by analyzing whether female characters actually speak to each other about anything other than men for a decent length of time.
Mary Bonauto
As for Mary Bonauto, all we can say is that it’s a shame MacArthur doesn’t have a “hero” grant as well, because that’s what she deserves. For literally decades, she’s been litigating for LGBT equality along with GLAD. We also have her to thank, in large part, for the long multi-decade strategy that gradually brought us civil unions, and from there, full marriage. Wherever there’s been a major lawsuit that’s improved our lives, in most cases Mary Bonauto was somehow involved.
These are not, of course, the first queers to be recognized by the MacArthur Foundation.
Last year, gay recipients included Kyle Abraham (a dancer), Tarell Alvin McCraney (a playwright) and Jeremy Denk (a writer and pianist).
Denk’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, but he’s mostly known for his mastery of the piano. He also looks swell in a bow tie. McCraney’s plays explore growing up poor and black, and how people learn to navigate the worlds into which they are born. And Abraham’s dance is electrifying, such as his show “Pavement,” in which dancers explore the nature of violence.
The same year, they granted $150,000 to Loki Films to produce The Arrivals, a documentary about a gay couple that immigrates from Mexico to the US. This is the same company that produced the outstanding and disturbing documentary Jesus Camp, but as far as we know The Arrivals hasn’t been completed yet.
Junot Díaz
Author Junot Díaz won an award in 2012, and while we are not sure if he’s gay, he did once call noted homophobe Orson Scott Card “a cretinous fool,” so he’s at the very least a good friend.
In 2008, MacArthur awarded $45,000 to the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, a Chicago organization that used the money to train LGBT leaders working in extremely challenging countries like Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Iraq.
They also awarded conductor Marin Alsop in 2005. Alsop’s partner, Kristin Jurkscheit, is a french horn player, and the couple has a son. The family attracted some controversy — most of it, in our opinion, manufactured — since for a time Alsop was conducting the same orchestra in which Jurkscheit played.
And way back in 1996, Michael Bérubé won a grant for his scholarship, activism, and community leadership. You might not recognize his name, but Bérubé book Coming Out Under Fire is the one of the most important queer works of the 20th century, detailing the closeted lives of service members in World War II.
matt baume