Florida's fundraising explosion
The Sunshine State is a gold mine for more than just Jeb and Marco.

www.politico.com/story/2015/04/floridas-2016-fundraising-jeb-bush-marco-rubio-116682.html

Tim Cook's Apple and Mike Pence's Indiana: One's the Future, the Other the Past

Mike Pence is supposed to be a fiscally minded conservative, but he nearly screwed his state over royally. He should take some cues from Apple’s out CEO.

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Thom Senzee

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/04/06/tim-cooks-apple-and-mike-pences-indiana-ones-future-other-past

Hoosier Hostility: Not the American Way

After Indiana Republicans passed a license to discriminate law, a restaurant called Memories Pizza in the Hoosier town of Walkerton stepped up last week to make sure potential customers knew its religious rules: “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Certification of Heterosexuality, No Service.”

Indiana GOP Gov. Mike Pence provided official sanction for such acts of oppression when he signed a gay-bashing version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It enabled individuals and businesses to legally claim their faith required hateful acts of intolerance. Pence got all huffy when human rights groups accused him of seeking to change the state’s slogan from Hoosier Hospitality to Hoosier Hostility.

Marriage-equality-hating Indiana Republicans were joined by counterparts in Arkansas, North Carolina and Georgia in advancing government-sanctioned discrimination. This is not the way Americans treat each other. Well, not in 2015 anyway. America traveled down the path of intolerance for too many centuries. Now, Americans look back at all-white lunch counters with shame. Despite anxiety about ISIS, they disapprove of blaming terrorism on all Muslims. Americans aren’t perfect inclusive egalitarians. But they’re trying. On a deeply spiritual level, they hate institutionalization of minority hate. 

 Indiana Gov. Mike Pence by DonkeyHotey on Flickr

And that’s what was going on in Indiana, Arkansas, North Carolina and Georgia. Bans on marriage equality have failed. So these states tried to crash those ceremonies by denying the couples wedding flowers and cakes, then cloaking that vicious discrimination in a sheepskin of religiosity.

The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993, was intended to protect religious practices from unnecessary government intrusion. For example, it prevented a Louisiana school district from requiring that a Rastafari student cut his hair because a tenet of his religion is that men should grow long dreadlocks.   

The new-fangled versions of this law pushed and passed by Republicans this year, however, added clauses to provide individuals and businesses that unlawfully discriminate with protection from lawsuits alleging unlawful discrimination. These laws would, for example, enable a pizza shop owner to assert that his religion requires him to deny service to long-haired Rastafarians or to same-sex couples holding hands while waiting in line.

Gay rights activists, human rights advocates and righteous Americans protested. They didn’t want to face government-sanctioned discrimination. They didn’t want their friends or family or even strangers to face government-sanctioned discrimination.

Gov. Pence and the Republicans in the Arkansas, North Carolina and Georgia legislatures ignored these protests. And virtually every Republican seeking the party’s presidential nomination – Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson and Rick Santorum – voiced support for the governors and their license to discriminate laws.

The Republican governors backpedaled only when they heard the giant sucking sound of business and convention dollars draining from their states. Similarly, former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, also a Republican, rejected a license to discriminate law last year only after the National Football League and corporations threatened negative consequences she’d not anticipated.

Companies including Apple, Angie’s List, NASCAR, Gap Inc., Levi Strauss & Co., Eli Lilly, Marriott, Subaru and Salesforce condemned Indiana’s anti-gay law or threatened to cancel expansion planned for Indiana. The NCAA, headquartered in Indianapolis, expressed concern about government-sanctioned Hoosier Hostility to players, coaches and fans. In the countdown to the Final Four games in Indianapolis, basketball coaches, professional athletes and former Olympians censured Indiana, threatened to boycott the state and demanded repeal of the law. Cities and states from Connecticut to Washington that protect the rights of LGBT Americans forbid taxpayer-funded to travel to Indiana. Celebrities, bands and comedians canceled visits and concerts.

In Arkansas, Walmart, based in Bentonville, told Gov. Asa Hutchinson the anti-gay bill “does not reflect the values we uphold.” After the state’s largest employers urged a veto, Hutchinson reversed his earlier promise to sign and sought removal of the discriminatory language. Pence, who’d arranged for three anti-gay activists – Micah Clark, Eric Miller, and Curt Smith –  to stand behind him as he signed Indiana’s bill, supported amendments to prevent the likes of Memories Pizza from demanding certification of heterosexuality before service.

This sudden change of heart – and the revisions to the Indiana and Arkansas legislation – created some awkward moments for the Republican presidential candidates who’d already supported the anti-gay laws. Bush flip-flopped just like the governors did. One day he was for discrimination, the next he wasn’t.

Apparently recognition of LGBT rights by the majority of Americans – and American businesses – occurred much too quickly for Republicans.

Admittedly, the labor movement hasn’t always honored equal rights as quickly as it should have. But AFSCME was among those that pulled a convention out of Indiana in protest of the anti-gay law, and the labor movement has made a concerted effort in recent years to establish true solidarity among all its diverse members.

My own union has failed at times to meet standards to which it aspires. But last summer, at the USW convention, the membership voted to make it an offense under the union constitution to harass a member on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The USW will not tolerate any form of discrimination against anyone in its ranks for any reason. It has no place in our union.

Like the USW, the United States is a union. It is a collection of diverse states and diverse people. Standing together, they are stronger.

Republicans who supported codifying intolerance need to experience a conversion. Such hostility has no place in the land of Hoosiers. It should find no home in the land of the free. 

www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/hoosier-hostility-not-the_b_7004324.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

10 Spring Recommendations For All You Sexy Book Nerds

Spring break is just around the corner, which means you’re going to need a good book to devour while dallying by the poolside. (Just don’t forget to wear your sunscreen, fellas!) Not only is reading a fun way to pass the time and exercise the imagination, but it’s also an excellent way to attract the attention of cute guys, since everyone agrees that reading is totally sexy.

So without any further ado, here are our 10 spring reading recommendations…

The American People: Volume 1: Search For My Heart: A Novel by Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer‘s epic 800-page novel took 40 years to write and follows a middle-class family living outside Washington, D.C. and trying to get along in the darkest of times. Volume 1 of the novel spans several decades, depicting prehistoric monkeys that spread a peculiar virus, a Native American shaman whose sexual explorations mutate into occult visions, and early English settlers who live as loving same-sex couples only to fall victim to the forces of bigotry. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton also make appearances, as well as John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln. The book also depicts a religious sect conspiring with eugenicists, McCarthyites, and Ivy Leaguers to exterminate homosexuals, and offers a haunting depiction of the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

Bettyville: A Memoir by George Hodgman

When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri to look after his aging mother, Betty, he finds himself confronted with a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who is both outspoken yet cannot quite reveal her heart, has never truly accepted the fact that her son is gay. As the pair struggle to find a way of uniting their vastly different worlds, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggles with self-respect and self-acceptance in a bittersweet tale that is as humorous as it is heartbreaking.

Follies Of God: Tennessee William And The Women Of The Fog by James Grissom

Theater geeks take note: James Grissom’s absorbing new biography delves into the artistic inspirations and creative processes of one of America’s greatest playwrights, examining just how Tennessee Williams wrote, how he created characters like Amanda Wingfield, Blanche DuBois, and Stella Kowalski, and how his plays transformed the landscape of American theater. The book also profiles many of the original leading ladies in Williams’ plays, including Lillian Gish, Katharine Hepburn, Maureen Stapleton, Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley and others.

Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

While we’re on the subject of great American writers, Michael Mewshaw gossipy new biography of Gore Vidal offers an intimate glimpse at the man who prided himself on being difficult to know. The book documents forty years of friendship between the Mewshaw and Vidal, peeling back layer after layer of Vidal’s unflappable public persona to reveal the inner life and painful traumas of a man few people ever truly got to see.

Time On Two Crosses: The Collected Writing Of Bayard Rustin by Bayard Rustin

Widely considered one of the founding fathers of the modern civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin taught Martin Luther King Jr. strategies for nonviolent protesting and reached international notoriety in 1963 when he became known as the openly gay organizer of the March on Washington. Time on Two Crosses offers an insider’s look at many of the defining political moments of our time — from Gandhi’s impact on African-Americans, white supremacists in Congress, and the assassination of Malcolm X, to Rustin’s never-before-published essays on Louis Farrakhan, affirmative action, and the call for gay rights.

The Prince Of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood by Richard Blanco

A finalist for the 2015 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, Richard Blanco’s new memoir of growing up in a family of Cuban exiles in Miami during the 1970s and ’80s, The Prince of Los Cocuyos, is a rich account of how Blanco, the first Latino and openly gay inaugural poet of the United States, came to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning cultural, artistic, and sexual identities.

Blue, Too: More Writing By (For Or About) Working-Class Queers edited by Wendell Ricketts 

If you’re in the mood for an engrossing anthology, check out Blue, Too. It includes short fiction, memoir, performance pieces, and prose poems by twenty different writers that illuminate the struggles, resistance to assimilation, and mental gentrification of working class people from the LGBT community. Lambda Literary Review called Blue, Too “the authority on working-class queer writing in the English language.”

Out At Home: The True Story Of Glenn Burke, Baseball’s First Openly Gay Player by Glenn Burke and Erik Sherman

Glenn Burke was a wildly popular Major League outfielder who managed to keep his sexuality a secret for two seasons. But when the Los Angeles Dodgers management discovered his homosexuality, it tried to talk him into a sham marriage. When Burke refused, he was traded to Oakland, where he received a less-than-warm welcome from incoming drunken manager Billy Martin. The prejudice, coupled with an injured knee, forced Burke into retirement at just 27. First published in 1995, the year Burke died from AIDS-related complications, Out At Home is being re-released in paperback with a new foreword by the great Billy Bean with a new afterword by co-author Erik Sherman reflecting on the two decades that have passed since Burke’s death.

Nobody Is Supposed To Know: Black Sexuality On The Down Low by C. Riley Snorton

Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of black men who have sex with men as well as women but do not identify as gay or bisexual has exploded in news media and popular culture, from the Oprah Winfrey Show to R&B singer R. Kelly’s hip hopera Trapped in the Closet. In Nobody Is Supposed to Know, C. Riley Snorton examines the “down low” culture by looking closely at how contemporary media and popular culture encourage unhealthy ideals of black sexuality and masculinity.

The Upstairs Lounge Arson: Thirty-Two Deaths In A New Orleans Gay Bar, June 24, 1973 by Clayton Delery-Edwards

On June 24, 1973, a fire ripped through a New Orleans gay bar, killing 32 people. Though arson was suspected, no arrests were ever made. Local government and religious leaders also remained either silent or were openly disdainful of the dead, most of whom were gay men. Based upon hundreds of primary and secondary sources, including contemporary news accounts, interviews with former patrons of the lounge, and crime reports, The Up Stairs Lounge Arson tells the tragic tale of the men who used to frequent this bar, what happened on the day of the fire, and the lasting effects.

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Graham Gremore

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/UnWM62Xd8U4/10-spring-reading-recommendations-for-all-you-sexy-gay-book-nerds-20150406

Top Indiana businesses promise LGBT advocacy efforts
Some of the top business names in Indiana have a collective message about the amendment to Indiana’s embattled “religious freedom” law: This is only the first step toward achieving a more far-reaching goal of statewide civil rights protections for gays and lesbians.                

www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/06/top-indiana-businesses-promise-lgbt-advocacy-efforts/25287913/

18 Must-Read LGBT Books We Missed Last Year

Whether it’s a closeted lesbian senator, bisexual professors, transgender steelworkers, or a sweet gay couple making ice cream in the Midwest, there’s something for everyone on this list.

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Diane Anderson-Minshall

www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2015/04/06/18-must-read-lgbt-books-we-missed-last-year