Kate Brown, First Openly LGBT Governor, Assumes Office With Pointed Inauguration Speech

Kate Brown took office as Oregon’s governor Wednesday, promising to leave behind the political scandal that has plagued the state recently.

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Michelle Garcia

www.advocate.com/politics/2015/02/18/kate-brown-first-openly-lgbt-governor-assumes-office-pointed-inauguration-speech

A Week to Remember in Alabama
I’ve still got chills thinking about the week that began Monday, Feb. 9. When I woke up that Monday at 5 a.m., it finally hit me: I was about to witness same-sex couples say their vows and be legally wed in Birmingham, Alabama.

When I got to the courthouse, gallons of coffee in tow, I paused for a moment in Linn Park where organizers had planned a marriage celebration event complete with wedding arches, officiants galore, and, of course, wedding cupcakes. After soaking it all in, I walked around to the street-facing side of the courthouse where a press conference had just concluded.

I spotted my dear friend, Alicia Roden, dressed to the nines carrying Valentine’s Day balloons and an adorable hand-made sign. “Yes, I will marry you,” the sign said, “for the low, low officiant fee of 2 hugs.” I immediately asked if I could take her picture and share it. “Adorbs,” I wrote on Facebook.

You see, over the weekend, some probate judges, emboldened by Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, had created mass confusion saying they wouldn’t follow the federal district court ruling. Alicia’s sign hit home for me because it pushed back against that narrative, embodying the true spirit of that day: people helping people (often strangers) out of love and community.

That evening someone told us the picture was sitting atop Reddit and had more than 200,000 views on imgur. The following day, it had more than 2 million views.

Alicia and I were talking about what it meant for her image to go viral, and she told me, “I’ve wrestled a lot as a designer, artist, writer — maybe just as a human — with what more I could be doing, how I could have some genuine impact on the people and issues that are meaningful to me. Just wake up every day, make an effort for something you know is right, give someone else love and encouragement and that will eventually be ‘doing enough.'”

That’s my Alabama. I grow wearing of opinion writers and pundits and activists from everywhere but Alabama spewing unhelpful, uninformed drivel about our state. I confess that we’re an easy target due to past transgressions. But much of the critique is hypocritical.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has done very little to fight marriage equality, aside from issuing a couple toothless statements. Yet those statements are offered as proof that Alabama is stuck in the past. Yet when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lost the state’s request for a stay late in 2013, he was heralded as some kind of gift to the GOP. “Governor Christie did the right thing,” the Human Rights Campaign declared.

Meanwhile, just a few months later, HRC said, “the only thing ‘complicating’ the execution of the law in Alabama is the stonewalling of individuals like Justice Moore, Gov. Bentley, and the probate judges who are refusing to follow the binding implications of a federal court ruling.” I think it’s fair to ask how this is helpful. I digress.

Each day, more and more courthouses began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By Friday, the number of counties outright refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples along was six out of 67 — a complete flip from Monday.

The incredible week concluded Sunday, Feb. 15 (the day after Valentine’s Day) with the 17th Annual Vigil for Victims of Hate and Violence. Where the other six days of the week were celebratory, Sunday was somber. The Vigil has been held every year since Billy Jack Gaither was murdered in 1999. Two men beat Gaither with an ax handle, slit his throat, threw his body on a pile of tires and set it on fire in Sylacauga, Ala., because he was gay.

In a way it’s fitting that marriage equality came to the Yellowhammer State the same week as the Vigil. There’s a stark contrast in tone and substance, at the end of the day, both events are about a community bound by love, determined not to give up in spite of odious supreme court justices, ignorant probate judges, or violent hate crimes.

Rep. Patricia Todd, Alabama’s first and only openly gay lawmaker, and Jacob H. Ezell, a student at the University of North Alabama, were honored during the ceremony by Equality Alabama. Todd was elected in 2006, the same year the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment passed with 81 percent support. She’s miraculously managed to keep anti-gay legislation from passing in one of the most conservative states in the union, while less conservative states pass more and more.

Jacob Ezell represents the new generation growing into leadership roles. A social work student at UNA, he has successfully championed gender-neutral restrooms on campus and established a program to raise awareness of sexual assault and rape.

“I am honored to be called an activist,” he told me. “Many of my role models are activists.” He believes the LGBTQ movement needs to focus on transgender rights now that the marriage fight is winding down.

“I believe that the title ‘activist’ is not one to be used lightly; for me, it must be earned. When I first realized that I wanted to be a trans* rights activists, I also realized that I could not call myself one unless I actually put in the work.”

There is plenty of work to be done here, but Alabamians deserve to be proud for once, and to honor those who’ve come before us and who will come after. We’ll never forget this past week, and let’s never fail to put in the work going forward.

www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hansen/a-week-to-remember-in-ala_b_6708562.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Robbie Williams mocks Bruce Jenner in explaining his pink hair

‘Much like Bruce Jenner, it is in transition’

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gregh

www.gaystarnews.com/article/robbie-williams-mocks-bruce-jenner-explaining-his-pink-hair180215

On Ash Wednesday

The beginning of Lenten, Ash Wednesday gives the opportunity to set in motion a time of reflection, atonement and penance.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/on-ash-wednesday?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Jimmy Kimmel Wants To Know If You're Kinky: VIDEO

Sean Mandell

www.towleroad.com/2015/02/jimmy-kimmel-wants-to-know-how-kinky-you-are-video.html

Ad Council Launches Pro-LGBT 'Love Has No Labels' Campaign

Major brands like Coke and Pepsi band together to eliminate bias.

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Raffy Ermac

www.advocate.com/business/2015/02/18/ad-council-launches-pro-lgbt-love-has-no-labels-campaign

FABRICATIONS: Meet Queer Fashion Designers Jessica Lapidos And Tom Barranca Of TILLYandWILLIAM
This is the eighth installment in a miniseries titled “FABRICATIONS” that elevates the work of up-and-coming queer individuals working in the fashion world. Check back at HuffPost Gay Voices regularly to learn more about some of the designers of tomorrow and the way their work in fashion intersects with their queer identity.

Jessica Lapidos and Tom Barranca are a design team operating out of New York City under the joint label TILLYandWILLIAM. The work of this design duo focuses on transformative, comfortable, gender-neutral fashion that can be worn by a variety of body types in a number of different ways. In a way that mirrors queer identity, the clothing produced by TILLYandWILLIAM is malleable and not restricted by a prescribed set of constraints — the user wears and adapts the clothing in the way that they see fit. Additionally, TILLYandWILLIAM is an environmentally conscious brand, ensuring that no material goes to waste and all products can be upcycled. Read the interview below to learn more.

The Huffington Post: What have your journeys as queer artists and fashion designers entailed?
Jessica Lapidos & Tom Barranca: What’s interesting about TILLYandWILLIAM is that we never intended for it to be a queer brand when we started out. To us, the idea to make gender-neutral clothing that could transform with each different wearer just seemed like a logical next step in the evolutionary process of fashion. We had been pushing along with this idea unaware of the fact that we would create such an impact within the queer community. We thought we were making clothing for the masses, and we still are, but now it makes a whole lot more sense when it is put inside the context of queer fashion. It was like all of the sudden it dawned on us that this was our audience, these were the people we had been designing for this whole time. We finally feel we’ve found our place in the world, and it feels good to be home.

Where have your designs appeared?
Our first NYFW runway show appeared on Elle, NuMode, StyleDefined NYC, and a whole host of independent fashion blogs. Our clothes have appeared in the Lactic campaign to support fundraising for Leon Finley’s top surgery. We created a whole collection of recycled materials for the team of the MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival. They’ve also appeared on performers such as Will Sheridan and Boywolf. Paramount to all of that, though, they’ve appeared in people’s everyday lives.

They also appear in independent boutiques like Treehouse Brooklyn in Williamsburg, The Rising States and A. Also, Turen on the Lower East Side, Haus of Love in LA, Sweet Liddle in Nantucket, and online at Runway Passport, Oui Broke, Ecohabitude, and the brand new masculine yet gender fluid ELKEL.nyc.

Where do you draw inspiration for your designs?
There are four major points in the TILLYandWILLIAM philosophy: First, a garment must be gender-neutral. Second, a garment must be able to transform. Third, a garment must always be attentive to comfort. Finally, a garment must allow its wearer full movement of their body.

Everything we design is passed through these standards before it is brought into creation. A lot of times we think about the simplest way to reach these goals. We employ a great deal of mathematics and geometry when creating the patterns. But mostly our inspiration is the human body itself. We think about what the body needs, we think about what a human needs, and then we make it.

We feel like, in many ways, we’ve approached fashion from a functional standpoint. We think, How will this garment function in someone’s day to day life? The fusion of form and function is so rare in fashion at large; one seems to exist at the expense of the other. We work to keep both in tact at all times.

The transformative and malleable nature of your designs speaks to the queerness of your brand. What does this mean to you in terms of self-identification and self-expression?
In regards to self expression, one of our greatest hopes is to help empower individual self-expression through the exploration of a TILLYandWILLIAM garment. Express and be expressed; transform your garment and be transformed by it.

As far as identity goes — which is a tricky topic to begin with — we acknowledge the belief that what you wear holds the power to help express or even create one’s identity. There are brands that engage this aspect of fashion by selling a label as a way to magnify what it means to be you. But our approach is queer, and what we mean when we say queer in this regard is that we are trying to invent a way for people to feel that they aren’t being labeled. Rather, we hope that the transformable nature of our clothing will free them from labels in much the same way identifying oneself as queer does for one’s identity. Yet we all know it’s an oddly double-edged sword. Of course wearing TILLYandWILLIAM will label you in some way (as there will obviously be label sewn into your garment), just as identifying as a queer in some way holds weight over your identity.

TILLYandWILLIAM frees you from a label because there is no one way to embody it, it holds the potential to create your own definition of it, and that is essentially what the queer movement fosters — it’s the idea that you are not a label. You are your own definition. You are queer.

What sets TILLYandWILLIAM apart from other fashion brands?
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the design aspects of our clothing. i.e. it’s gender neutral, it transforms, it’s queer. What we haven’t yet talked about is what we do from a manufacturing standpoint. We feel that something that sets us apart from most other designers is that we are not only concerned with creating new and never-before-seen fashion, but we are concerned with how it is made. Where do our fabrics come from? What impact does it have on the environment?

We felt very conflicted in the beginning of this process because we knew the horrors that lie beneath the make-up on the pretty face of the fashion industry. We know what evils lurk behind factory doors in foreign countries. We’re aware of the effect mass production is having on our planet, and when we started out, we asked ourselves: is this something we want to be a part of?

In addition to all the things we have done to try and further the evolution of fashion, we couldn’t ignore the process as a whole. What sets us apart is that we are very concerned with the environmental and social impacts of our fabrics and manufacturing methods. We are committed to only producing our clothing locally, in factories that we ourselves have visited first-hand. We don’t want to further this idea that the fashion industry has created, that if something is pretty on the outside, it doesn’t matter what it looks like on the inside. We have set out to create a company that is beautiful from the inside out. We want to change not only the way we think about getting dressed, but also the way we think about ourselves. Beauty is on the inside, too, and that is something we as designers cannot ignore.

What’s next for TILLYandWILLIAM?
Well, we’ve been in talks with a modern ballet troupe, and recently our friends at Manufacture NY have opened their brand new space at Liberty View in Sunset Park (the near-future dreamland for made in New York, independent design and production). So we were hoping to put together what we call a Transformance in March. A Transformance is our way of expressing our clothing through performance. We’ve felt that the traditional runway show wasn’t exactly suited to our modes of transformability, so in turn we’ve created our own type of show that allows us to express our clothes and ideas through dance and performance.

We are looking forward to the time when our Reuptake Method matures and customers bring back their old TILLYandWILLIAM, either for experimental repair (overdyeing, mending, etc) and/or exchange for discounts off their next new clothes from us. It is important to us that no material goes to waste; it can all be upcycled. We hope to make that even more of a reality with the Cradle to Cradle way of design, where everything is made of either a biological nutrient or a technical nutrient, and thus endlessly, chemically, safely upcycleable. We’re not there quite yet, but it is part of our growth.

We also want to close the gap between the consumer and the people that actually construct the clothing, by creating stores as community spaces, and localizing production to each store; empowering communities, rather than exploiting them.

Fashion has the power to uplift, and we want to create space for that.

Want to see more from TILLYandWILLIAM? Head here to check out the designer duo’s website. Missed the previous installments in this miniseries? Check out the slideshow below.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/18/fabrications-tillyandwill_n_6707734.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Ryan Phillippe glad audiences will see his kiss with Breckin Meyer in restored cut of 54

‘We did something that was relatively bold for two young male actors, and we took pride in the places that the original story went’

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gregh

www.gaystarnews.com/article/ryan-phillippe-glad-audiences-will-see-his-kiss-breckin-meyer-restored-cut-54180215