Op-ed: Countries That Criminalize Homosexuality Don't Just Hurt Adults

The social stigma that antigay laws create trickle down to harming our children around the world.

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Abongwa Victor

www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/09/04/op-ed-countries-criminalize-homosexuality-dont-just-hurt-adults

'As One' Opera Brings Husband And Wife Stars Together For Heartfelt Transgender Role
Opera stars Kelly Markgraf and Sasha Cooke are a husband-and-wife team who’ve performed together in venues around the world. Still, they’re set to conquer new territory as the stars of “As One,” a new chamber opera in which they’ll each portray one side of a single transgender character.

The opera, which debuts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York on Sept. 4, depicts the journey of a transgender woman, Hannah, as a stirring rite-of-passage. Markgraf, a baritone, will portray Hannah, who is identified in the early segments of the libretto as “Hannah before,” from her childhood to young adulthood, while mezzo-soprano Cooke gradually takes over as “Hannah after” as the character undergoes her gender confirmation.

Throughout her journey, Hannah struggles with self-acceptance and feelings of personal isolation, and encounters her share of external transphobia, much of which is explored through songs performed simultaneously by Markgraf and Cooke as duets.

“What we’ve really aimed for in crafting the piece is a story which highlights the universally human aspects of being transgender,” Markgraf said. “It’s truly a process of paying attention to one’s heart and coming to grips with who you are, who you want to be and then becoming brave enough to step forward and say, ‘Look, this is who I am.’ Ours is a human perspective.”

Composer Laura Kaminsky began developing the idea for “As One” after reading a 2008 New York Times article about the legal implications of a marriage after one of the parties identified as transgender. Three years later, she met filmmaker Kimberly Reed, who is transgender, and together they began the writing process with librettist Mark Campbell.

Kaminsky, who is a lesbian, says she was struck with “an almost urgent sense” that an opera chronicling the story of a transgender woman would be “emotionally rich” as well as “socially and politically current.” While her opera would be ultimately sympathetic toward its protagonist, Kaminsky hoped that “As One” would also touch on its heroine’s “funny, sad, vulnerable, quirky” sides in a nuanced and non-controversial way, so that all audiences would find the character relatable.

“Perhaps the most important thing for Kim, Mark and me was to find the right tone for Hannah … how to find the right balance of innocence, joy, doubt, fear, courage and humor,” Kaminsky said. The challenges, she added, were ultimately symphonic, as she had to find “the right musical world for Hannah to inhabit so that the full range of her being would be expressed.”

Campbell, whose opera “Silent Night” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music, structured much of his libretto for “As One” on Reed’s personal experiences as a transgender woman. The result, he says, is far from the “issue” drama some may expect from its subject matter.

“My greatest pleasure in writing ‘As One’ is what I learned from Kim,” Campbell, who is openly gay, recalled. In addition to co-writing the libretto with Campbell, Reed further fleshed out the story with film segments created exclusively for the show, strengthening the narrative.

“Because we chose to write a story about one person’s search for contentment — and, really, that’s all it is! — and because we use plain-spoken language that shows occasional flashes of humor and self-effacement, it shouldn’t be seen as controversial at all,” Campbell said.

Embodying “Hannah after” has so far been a joy for Cooke, even if she wasn’t sure of her personal relationship to the character at first. As rehearsals progressed, however, she found herself connecting to Hannah’s journey more and more.

“There’s a beauty and a benefit to being an outcast,” Cooke said. As for the ultimate message of “As One,” she was even more straightforward: “Live your truth.”

“As One” plays the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Fishman Theater in New York on Sept 4, 6 and 7. For more information and tickets, head here.

BELOW: The creative team of “As One,” from left: Kimberly Reed, Mark Campbell and Laura Kaminsky.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/04/as-one-transgender-opera-_n_5763200.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

NYC Superstar Chefs Daniel Boulud and Patrick O’Connell Show the Love for DC & LGBT Equality

Check out Chef Boulud and Chef Patrick O’Connell in their promo video for HRC’s Chefs for Equality
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/nyc-superstar-chefs-daniel-boulud-and-patrick-oconnell-show-the-love-for-dc?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Family Research Council Thinks the Religious Right Should Be More Like the LGBT Equality Movement: AUDIO

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2014/09/family-research-council-thinks-the-religious-right-should-be-more-like-the-lgbt-equality-movement-au.html

Religious Support for Marriage Equality Marches Forward

The legal argument against marriage equality is being upended by the numerous Christian and Jewish bodies that support LGBT rights.

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Trudy Ring

www.advocate.com/politics/religion/2014/09/04/religious-support-marriage-equality-marches-forward

A Navy SEAL Surfaces as Transgender

Lady Valor screening at Time Warner Center in New York, with CNN moderator Miguel Marquez and panelists: psychotherapist Ken Page, Chief Officer (ret.) Kristen Beck, psychiatrist Jack Drescher and Prodigal Sons filmmaker Kimberly Reed

Seals are remarkable creatures. Bewhiskered, toothy and chubby, as avuncular as they may appear, they are powerful predators, mammalian but able to function with precision and speed both above and below the surface of the seas. Their strengths and skills for hunting are only truly made manifest where land-lubbing eyes cannot apprehend them.

Chief Officer (Ret.) Kristin Beck, 47, served for two decades in our Navy as one of the elite SEALs (short for Sea, Air and Land Teams), in 13 deployments, over half of them combat missions, and by all accounts she did so honorably and with intelligent gusto. She worked as part of highly sensitive counterterrorism efforts and received, among many honors, both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.

She also did so as Christopher T. Beck. Last year, following her retirement from the Navy in 2011, she came out publicly as a transgender woman. She announced her transition to the world with a mighty splash (forgive the pun), arising from the publication of Warrior Princess: A U.S. Navy SEAL’s Journey to Coming Out Transgender, co-written with Anne Speckhard, author, psychologist, and Georgetown University adjunct associate professor of psychiatry. Although the collaboration with Dr. Speckhard seems to have soured (Beck makes a careful disavowal of the work on her professional webpage, ladyvalor.com), she has found new bedfellows at CNN, which will air a powerful documentary about her life and transition on Thursday, Sept. 4 at 9 p.m. EDT.

What is now Lady Valor: The Kristen Beck Story was initially told by CNN on Anderson Cooper 360 and then commissioned by CNN Films and directed by Sandrine Orabona and Mark Herzog (who also executive produced CNN’s Emmy-nominated, 10-part documentary series The Sixties) and is being screened to invited audiences at several locations across the country prior to its premiere as the opener of their second season of feature-length documentary subjects. I watched it last week sitting next to Ms. Beck on enveloping, burgundy Barcaloungers at the back of a screening room at the Time Warner offices on Columbus Circle as part of an event co-sponsored with Psychology Today magazine, which organized a Q-and-A panel following the film.

Ms. Beck is golden-skinned, athletic and attractively relaxed, with a disarming and polite intensity, a self-effacing military drawl and a sort-of-Beavis-and-Butthead, sort-of-naughty “heh-heh-heh” laugh. She looks like the sort of woman one might admire as she smashes a tennis ball without mercy over her opponent’s side of the net at the U.S. Open and then crowed in victory with infectious delight. She was wearing a smart version of a classic Manhattan little black dress with several of her military medals pinned at her left clavicle.

We were able to talk for a little while before the screening started, and Ms. Beck spoke with passion about what she referred to as her “mission” for the film: to encourage the military toward incremental analysis and eventual acceptance of an armed forces with openly serving transgender personnel. Conveniently enough, this week the Palm Center, a think tank on sexual minorities in the military that’s housed at San Francisco State University’s Department of Political Science, announced publication of a feasibility report on this subject with a press release trumpeting the opinion of “[t]hree retired US military General Officers, including the former chief medical officer of the US Army” that integration could proceed in a “straightforward manner that is consistent with military readiness and core values.”

Although CNN is a news organization taking the documentary as part of a coordinated effort to impact national military rules and regulations, the narrative presented in Lady Valor will likely be seen by both its staunchest supporters and its most rabid opponents as an enormously adept piece of agitprop in the “hero’s journey,” back-from-the-Trojan-Wars mold. The non-advocating audience will likely be moved by the portrayal of Ms. Beck’s challenges and perseverance as she seeks to distance herself from the brutal internal and external policy of containment she practiced as part of the “war on terror” and her attempts to suppress her own gender identity.

The most affecting scenes are ones that show Ms. Beck and her family and closest friends interacting (skillfully shooting skeet with her pained older brother and her querulous yet proud father, delivering her “special spaghetti” to the dinner table, hanging out with other retired military colleagues and friends over beers), especially as they attempt to grapple with the meaning of this change in someone they’ve known seemingly so intimately for so long, who is now presenting herself to them in a different gender.

Kristen Beck (credit: Jesse McClung, Herzog & Co. for CNN)

The most chilling scenes are of two kinds.

First, those scenes (largely personal footage that Ms. Beck provided to the filmmakers) from her time in active duty where one bears witness to a sensitive young man’s pilgrim’s progress into the calloused priesthood of state-directed killing, and those where she handles memento mori of various campaigns, like an Iraqi soldier’s helmet pressed into duty as a flowerpot, or a red-and-white keffiyeh headscarf that the original wearer “didn’t need anymore.”

The second set of scenes depicts an isolated, remorseful and psychologically scarred Ms. Beck on the road in a small RV between speaking gigs with her dog Bo, lamenting her estrangement from her two adolescent sons from a previous marriage and hoping for a future with a more integrated sense of self and more domestic commitment and happiness, one that her advocacy for transgender people in the military seems to stand for as expiation.

All these scenes foster a strongly visceral sense of sympathy for Ms. Beck’s struggles and wounds, and well as for her profound strength, discipline and humanity, which she shares with thousands upon thousands of military and non-military gender-nonconforming individuals, as well as thousands upon thousands of trans and non-trans veterans traumatized by their service to their country.

In the Q-and-A following the screening, Ms. Beck stated that “we need a fundamental change in compassion in this country.” And so we do. As long as oppressive violence to body, mind, spirit and community is called into service to protect dominating and cherished cultural values, we will all share the responsibility for and risks of that violence as it acts upon ourselves, our loved ones and our world.

www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-murray/a-navy-seal-surfaces-as-t_b_5741174.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Going down in September: LGBTI Prides and parties

Bears on Ice, Gay Oktoberfest and a Portuguese gay film festival are just a few of the September LGBTI events you should know about

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jeanpaulz

www.gaystarnews.com/article/going-down-september-lgbti-prides-and-parties030914