Virtually Every Demographic Group Now Supports Gay Marriage
With the Supreme Court nearing its historic ruling on same-sex marriage, recent Gallup polling shows a remarkably broad-based public shift toward support of such unions.

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www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/virtually-every-demograph_n_7473438.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Maxwell Caulfield Helped Andrew Rannells Realize He’s Gay

Actor Maxwell Caulfield’s legacy just keeps getting richer. When the ridiculously handsome British actor starred in the 1982 cult musical Grease 2 as the love interest of Michelle Pfeiffer, he did more that just win her character’s heart by the end of the film. He also ignited a fire in a multitude of gay males of all ages, including a very young Andrew Rannells.

In a video for the It Gets Better series, Rannells, who stars in HBO’s zeitgeist-y comedy Girls and won a Tony Award nod for his work in Broadway’s clever The Book of Mormon, chats about his how his childhood passion for Caulfield helped him realize he’s gay.

“It was just a very basic childlike attraction to certain people,” Rannells recalls now.

‘The earliest memory I have of that was watching Grease 2 and being strangely drawn to Maxwell Caulfield. It was a realization that came very, very early for me and I would assume was also quickly understood by my parents at that time.”

Preach, brother.

Related: 10 Guys Who Made Us Realize We’re Gay, ’80s Edition

Watch Andrew’s video below and scroll down further to see Maxwell being beautiful and sensitive in Grease 2.

Jeremy Kinser

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Remembering Our LGBT Heroes as One World Trade Center Opens

The tallest building in the western hemisphere is now open on the site where 2,753 people died, two dozen of them members of the LGBT community.

read more

Dawn Ennis

www.advocate.com/lgbt/2015/05/29/remembering-our-lgbt-heroes-one-world-trade-center-opens

Towleroad Guide to the Tube #1744

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2015/05/towleroad-guide-to-the-tube-1744.html

One Ally's Story in Celebration of Pride Month
Holden Caulfield was my best friend the summer that I stopped eating. It was 1982, I was 12, and I was at overnight camp. I wanted nothing to do with the girls in my bunk. They were all about boobs, make up and boy talk. It felt so foreign to me. I just wasn’t interested, and they wanted nothing to do with me either. I sat on my bunk and read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye over and over again. Along with reading, starving myself was something I could do to gain control of a lonely summer. It nearly killed me. I was hospitalized for three months with anorexia, a secret shadow that has followed me around for the past 30 years. It was also a sort of self-imposed puberty blocker, I think. No part of me wanted to become the young women I saw around me. (I haven’t read anything about this as a strategy among transgender kids, even in the amazing recent resource book, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves. But, it resonates with me.)

When I was even younger — seven or eight, I’d guess — I wanted to be a boy. That’s how I think of it: it was aspirational more than anything else. I remember standing on a baseball diamond at day camp, playing terribly as always. A girl on the opposing team ran past me as she rounded the bases and growled, “Are you a boy or a girl?” She was intending to bully me, but I was thrilled that I was confusing her. I wore boy’s clothes, bought in the actual boys’ section of clothing stores, whenever I could. After a long fight about my outfit for a family wedding, I persuaded my mom to let me forgo a dress and wear a suit, a hideous green ’70s number with unfortunate flowers on it. I was convinced that my body was becoming a “boy’s body.” I wanted people to call me Leonard, the only boy’s name I could think of that started with an L.

I don’t remember when or how I stopped being or actively wanting to be Leonard. My memory is murky. For many years, I had no language or venue in which to talk about this. I know that I was always an extreme rule follower and people pleaser. I wasn’t going to get to be Leonard. I was being socialized to be a girl. So, I became one. I know that’s not something everyone can do. It’s certainly not something young people should do: fall in line with the gender they are being socialized into.

As I grew up, I faced — and continue to face — the structural forms of inequality and the daily microaggressions that come with presenting as a woman every day. These experiences have made me who I have become, and I would not take them back. I became an ardent and proud feminist, sociologist, teacher and mom. I married the boy who was my chess and White Sox buddy and my first crush in elementary school. And when I found gender, queer and LGBTQ studies, they filled my head and heart and I felt like I was home.

Leonard is still part of me. He wasn’t just some passing phase. I will never be fully comfortable having the physical traits that get me called a woman every day. There are so many things about “womanhood” that I feel I don’t do naturally at all. When I talk with trans guys about their stories or read memoirs and testimonials by trans men or transmasculine writers, I think, with a little jealousy and a lot of admiration: I might have been these guys. I also know in my bones that gender is a spectrum and not a binary. The binary is too restrictive, for me and, I’d argue, for everyone. Everyone.

But I am in quite a conventional package. There is no denying that I benefit from cisgender privilege and straight privilege every minute of my life. These intersect with my race and class privilege. I know this, and I try to pay as much attention to it in as many ways as I can, in my work and in my life. No need to be sanctimonious about it, I’m making it up as I go along. There is so much I don’t know, and everyday I try to put myself in situations where I’m learning. I have learned from many mentors — and hopefully one of the things they have taught me is when to lead, teach and speak, and when to follow, listen and just shut up.

This lifelong privilege is what determines that the letter that most accurately defines me in the alphabet soup that is current queer identity and politics is A — for ally — rather than LGBT or Q (though I’d like to think I can be both an A and at least a little bit Q). My allyship for LGBTQ social justice comes from my political commitments. It comes from loving and caring about so many amazing LGBT and queer people and feeling that my wellbeing is inextricably tied to their wellbeing. It also comes from my own story: a story I’ll continue to work to understand for the rest of my life.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-stulberg/one-allys-story-in-celebration-of-pride-month_b_7465888.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Illinois Bill Protecting LGBT Youth from Dangerous Conversion Therapy Moves to Governor

Moments ago, the Illinois State Senate voted 34 -19 to pass House Bill 217, the Illinois Youth Mental Health Protection Act that will protect LGBTQ youth from the dangerous and discredited practices of conversion therapy.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/illinois-bill-protecting-lgbt-youth-from-dangerous-conversion-therapy-moves?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Lesbian Posing As Gay Man Killed Closeted Married Lawyer During Fake Hookup

David Messerschmitt

When 30-year-old lawyer David Messerschmitt got a response to his Craigslist ad seeking some male affections outside his heterosexual marriage, he never could have expected the danger he’d be walking into.

Here are the details that show just how bizarre the case is: Messerschmitt went to meet “Chris Sanchez” at a hotel in Washington, D.C. in February, but little did he know that Sanchez was actually Jamyra Gallmon, 21, and her 19-year-old girlfriend Dominique Johnson posing as the fictitious gay man. The women used a photo of a male torso to seal the deal.

Related: Married D.C. Lawyer May Have Been Murdered During Secret Gay Hookup

Gallmon entered Messerschmitt’s room at the unnamed hotel and attempted to rob him. We’d say “that’s when things went wrong,” but this whole mess was clearly wrong from the very beginning.

The young woman claims that Messerschmitt trapped her in the room, triggering a previous trauma from a past assault.

At least that’s the argument she’s using in court to try and explain how she came to stab Messerschmitt seven times in the abdomen, groin and heart, killing him.

She made it out of the room with $40 cash and Messerschmitt’s metro card, and walked hand-in-hand with Johnson to a bus stop. Housekeeping found Messerschmitt’s body the next day, his arms bound in rainbow-colored zip ties.

We have to wonder how Messerschmitt could have trapped Gallmon while his arms were bound, unless of course her story is completely made up.

And it would appear that it is, as she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder while armed in court on Thursday.

Gallmon faces 18 to 25 years in prison and Wilson up to five.

Dan Tracer

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