Philly Mayoral Candidate Denounces Lesbian Teacher's Firing
Democratic candidate Jim Kenney says Margie Winters, fired by a Catholic school for being in a same-sex marriage, should get her job back.
Trudy Ring
Monthly Archives: July 2015
After Marriage Equality, What Will We Create Next?
After Marriage Equality, What Will We Create Next?
After Obergefell v. Hodges, the first decision from the Supreme Court of the United States that broadly affirms the lives of lesbian and gay people and provides us with vital recognition for our intimate relationships, many national organizations and leaders quickly pivoted from marriage equality to workplace and public accommodation protections. The stark reality that a gay or lesbian person could marry in the morning, be fired in the afternoon and evicted from an apartment or restaurant in the evening, echoed across my screen as people shared these messages on social media.
I support federal legislation to protect LGBT people at work and in public, of course, and I recognize how crucial federal legislation is for people who do not live in states or cities that already provide these protections. At the same time, I want time to take a deep breath and savor marriage equality before moving to the next national issue.
The struggle to recognize loving, committed relationships of same-sex partners has been a long struggle. While Justice Scalia’s words in the Lawrence v. Texas dissent in 2003 portended this victory in 2015, gay men and lesbians have been talking about relationship recognition for decades. Before Genora Dancel and Ninia Baehr in Hawaii, there was Jack Baker and Michael McConnell in Minnesota; before them, there were discussions about marriage in The Ladder and One Magazine, and before that, there were other gay men and lesbians thinking about how their relationships could be recognized in the worlds where they lived. Lesbians and gay men have imagined the day when they could be fully, completely, and legally married for a long time–decades, even centuries. Savoring the decision honors the work and dreams of those who came before us.
Savoring the decision also gives us space and time to recognize the importance of imagination and creativity in our movements for social change. How do we create and promote communities that value imagination and creativity? How do we nurture the minds and spirits of people who help us imagine a different world and defy the conventions of the day to envision this new world and take steps to create it? How do we affirm the significance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender creative production? In particular, how do we carve out space for queer creativity amid increasing mainstreaming of LGBT people and identities? Thinking about and answering these questions is as urgent as workplace and public accommodation protections. Without imagination and creativity, our community cannot envision the changes we want to see. From our creativity, from our imagination, come the visions of the worlds we might create.
Imagination transforms worlds. Nurturing imagination and creativity is crucial. What can we do to nurture LGBTQ imaginations? How can we envision worlds where LGBTQ people can live and thrive? Considering these questions and answering these questions are an important part of our political worlds today. The imagination of a world transformed, the imagination of a world with marriage equality helped to create the world that we have today. How can we ensure that imagination and creativity are a part of the forefront of LGBTQ communities as we move forward?
Yes, attorneys and legal strategists were crucial to marriage equality. Yes, we need political strategies to win new federal, state, and local victories that make the daily lives of lesbians, gay men, bisexual, and transgender people better. We also need transformative imaginative capacities in our community. I want to hold space for creativity and imagination in our new world where organizations and individuals reorganize their priorities after marriage equality.
My greatest hope is that new resources will flow to organizations that build and celebrate LGBT culture in the aftermath of marriage equality. Tending to our culture, building on the rich and vibrant cultural tradition of LGBTQ communities, promoting queer creativity and imagination is for me an opportunity for LGBTQ people in this new world of marriage equality.
— 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.
US Vice President Joe Biden praises gay activists for ‘moral courage’ and ‘physical courage’
US Vice President Joe Biden praises gay activists for ‘moral courage’ and ‘physical courage’
Vice President Joe Biden was praised at a Freedom to Marry event Thursday (9 July) in New York City for speaking out for marriage equality even before the Obama administration was officially ready to do so.
But Biden said in a speech that he is not the one who should be praised for such achievements as last month’s US Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.
‘It hasn’t been simple for a lot of you, especially those of you who are older,’ Biden said. ‘Pursuing this simple proposition for many of you standing in front of me took courage. It took moral courage, but it took physical courage — physical courage.
‘As you came out and stood up and made your case, unlike me, you risked a great deal. I risked nothing holding this position I’ve had for so many years.’
‘It’s hard for me to imagine the sense of accomplishment you must feel,’ he added/ ‘Over the years in their homes, on our staffs, in the front lines of war, in houses of worship, (wife Jill Biden) and I have known, stood with, supported countless gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender Americans who share a love for their partners that up until now was constrained only by social stigma and discriminatory laws.
But the work all of you have done, laying the groundwork for the Supreme Court decision — their love, your love — it has been set free.’
Biden shared an incident early in his life that formed his open-minded view.
He was driving his dad to work one day and while they were stopped at a red light, they saw two men turn and embrace and kiss each other before going their separate ways.
‘I’ll never forget,’ Biden said. ‘I turned and looked at my dad, just looked at him. And I’ll never forget what he said. He said, “Joey, they love each other. It’s simple. (Applause.) They love each other. It’s simple.”‘
H/T: Towleroad
The post US Vice President Joe Biden praises gay activists for ‘moral courage’ and ‘physical courage’ appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
“Shocking” ABC Documentary Reveals The “Secrets” Of A Gay Sauna
“Shocking” ABC Documentary Reveals The “Secrets” Of A Gay Sauna
Set your DV-Rs, fellas, because tonight ABC2 in Australia is taking viewers to a place few mainstream media outlets have ever dared enter: An all-male sauna.
Gasp!
Secrets of the Gay Sauna is a “documentary” that goes inside the “gentlemen’s relaxation zone” of CS2, a popular sauna in Nottingham U.K. Viewers get behind-the-scenes peeks at the management, visitors, and the poor chap whose job it is to clean up.
Related: Bathhouses And Beyond: A Brief History Of Gay Cruising
“On some levels CS2 in Nottingham much like any normal, conventional sauna,” producers say. “It has a power shower, a jacuzzi and some changing rooms. But it’s upstairs that is unique to a gay sauna.”
“Here, over 1000 sq. ft of space is put aside to cater to every sexual need from ‘dark rooms’ to ‘sex swings’.”
Shocking!
“Customers come here at any time of day–during their lunch break or after a night out to have sex with perfect strangers. And at £12 a visit, business is booming.”
And all this time we thought sex clubs were going extinct. Let’s just hope straights don’t get it wrong. These spaces are our own; you can’t invade them like you have gay bars and clubs.
Check out the trailer for Secrets of the Gay Sauna below. Or don’t.
Graham Gremore
Rick Santorum Lays Out How Roe v. Wade ‘Cancer’ Led to SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling: VIDEO
Rick Santorum Lays Out How Roe v. Wade ‘Cancer’ Led to SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling: VIDEO
Apparently jockeying with Mike Huckabee for the title of “Biggest and Loudest Homophobe” at the upcoming first GOP presidential debate, Rick Santorum (once again) flexed his social conservative credentials – linking the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality ruling with that of Roe v. Wade.
Said Santorum at the National Right to Life Committee’s annual convention:
This is a very difficult time in America. We’ve seen some court decisions that I know have pepole very upset about what the future of the family and marriage and our culture is looking like. I just want to remind everybody where that decision came from. That decision came from – I gave many speeches during my presidential and prior to that my Senate career talking about Roe v Wade being the cancer that is infecting the body of America. And you saw Roe and its subsequent decisions bear its ugly head in the case of the gay marriage decision just a few days ago…
The post Rick Santorum Lays Out How Roe v. Wade ‘Cancer’ Led to SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad.
Kyler Geoffroy
Rick Santorum Lays Out How Roe v. Wade ‘Cancer’ Led to SCOTUS Gay Marriage Ruling: VIDEO
Robbie Rogers Will Be 'Extremely Flamboyant' at Future World Cups
Robbie Rogers Will Be 'Extremely Flamboyant' at Future World Cups
Professional soccer’s only out male player refuses to hide who he is, even if he’s playing in a World Cup hosted in countries with harsh anti-LGBT laws.
Sunnivie Brydum
www.advocate.com/sports/2015/07/10/robbie-rogers-will-be-extremely-flamboyant-future-world-cups
Trans-Genre Artist Justin Vivian Bond on Performance and Vulnerability
Trans-Genre Artist Justin Vivian Bond on Performance and Vulnerability
Star of Light, performance at Joe’s Pub, New York, 2014. Photo by Kevin Yatarola. Courtesy of the Public Theater, New York.
In the early 1990s, Justin Vivian Bond lived in San Francisco, and would soon move to New York, where we were both part of the cohort living through the darkest times of the AIDS epidemic, changing all of us forever. This was the time of Kiki and Herb, the legendary cabaret duo act created by Bond and Kenny Mellman.
We first met in person in 2003, after the performance of Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théatre, at the Cherry Lane Theater. The moment was brief, but I felt a sense of kinship, which we have been building upon ever since. It has been a transformative privilege to watch V move on and become the mesmerizing trans-genre artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond — performer, singer-songwriter, visual artist and activist. Viv has the rare ability to make one laugh, cry and be moved all in the turn of a song, a phrase or the exquisite rendering of a watercolor. The looping and interlacing of the personal and the political, the public and the private, in V’s work continually enthrall me. I try to catch Justin Vivian Bond in performance as often as possible. There is a transparency of process happening in the moment and, when the fairy dust settles, I come away feeling elated and inspired.
–Joy Episalla
Joy Episalla: Let’s talk about the songs you choose to sing. I love the way you’re able to envelop me in a song, but at the same time, you are adding layers of meaning to it. There is the interplay between the personal and the political. Even though I’m looking at you, and you’re looking at me, and you’re telling me something, you’re also telling me something else. That’s the catch. That’s the best part.
Justin Vivian Bond: Not everybody has a clue that it’s happening, which is awesome. Sometimes drunk straight people come up to me and want to lecture me about sexuality and gender. Do they really think they’re going to deliver any profound illuminations on that subject? So I just act a little drunker than them and say something ridiculous and scare them off. It’s the kindest way to deal with it. There’s no point in arguing with people when we’re not even talking about the same thing. It can be fun, but it’s also scary. People can have a violent reaction to something because they have no clue what’s going on. It’s out of their psychological realm to actually understand the subject. Which is sad, but it’s also not my responsibility to educate them. A new paradigm is here — it exists and there’re plenty of us seeing it. Obviously, there are a lot of things I myself can’t understand, but I’m not going to start pontificating about them.
Let’s face it, though, part of my job is to charm large groups of people, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to see that particular part of my job as very uninteresting, tedious and energy-consuming. Over the last 20 years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to charm crowds.
JE: Your exhibition My Model / MySelf is a pretty deep journey, also time-wise — holding onto something, your obsession with Karen Graham, for so long and then coming back to it.
JVB: Ironically, it’s about how I, as a young trans person, identified with this ideal of ultimate femininity. As an adult, I realize that she was an icon representative of capitalist society and designed to perpetuate an ideal and to sell things.
JE: But she also gave you an opportunity to hold onto a certain kind of vision.
JVB: Exactly, a vision of who I was or who I wished to be.
JE: That’s a radical repositioning.
JVB: When I was admiring and loving her and desiring to be that idealized creature, I wasn’t thinking critically. She was there to sell me an identity, and so I bought it. An identity that I couldn’t even begin to have.
My interest in her wouldn’t have been rekindled if I hadn’t found out that she went on to become a fly-fishing instructor. I found this interview with her where she talks about being a child and sneaking off into the woods to play with the tadpoles and to sleep naked in the moss.
When I left Kiki and Herb, I went up to the Queeruption festival in Canada with Nath Ann — we literally had just met — and we pitched our tent over this little indentation in the forest that was just moss, and we laid with each other in this bed of moss for a week, and that was a rebirthing for me into who I am now. If I hadn’t read that article about Karen Graham and her relationship to nature–
JE: –you wouldn’t have noticed all the connections. She wanted to be out in nature and be a real person.
Installation view of My Model / MySelf, 2015. Courtesy of VITRINE, London.
JVB: She wasn’t into those guys who would sit with the sun reflectors working on their tans. (laughter)
JE: In your essay on Karen Graham in the 2014 Feminist Press anthology ICON, I read that you were already recontextualizing as a young child without completely being aware of it. For a young person, it’s an important revelation: you can know something about yourself, but not everybody else needs to know.
JVB: I was mentoring four performers recently at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. We created a space with the five of us, wherein they could be as vulnerable as they needed to be, without any judgments whatsoever — with critical thought, but not critical judgment. They got to be incredibly open with their feelings and thoughts, and with their attempts. It was beautiful and moving to watch their experimentation. After about five days of that I said, “It’s good that you can get to that place while we’re here but you don’t need to do that anywhere else. Just because you’re capable of it doesn’t mean you need to share it. You can change it, you can use it in whatever way you need to.”
JE: What a gift that is, what a keepsake.
JVB: I wish someone had told me that when I was young. I wish I’d had a place where I felt safe enough to be vulnerable. But I didn’t — not with my family and not in my acting school.
JE: Seeing you perform and looking at your art, hearing you read, being with you across the table, gives me that serene sense of grace that you have.
JVB: Thank you. I probably got that from my grandmother. She used to tell me stories about the old days. I hardly remember them but in her presence I learned how to be a witness for what she had witnessed and how to tell stories myself. The gift she gave to me was the grace of listening and from that I learned how to just be.
This excerpt appears courtesy of BOMB. Read the full interview here.
— 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.
John Cameron Mitchell happily accepts ‘a mid-life crisis award’ at LA’s Outfest
John Cameron Mitchell happily accepts ‘a mid-life crisis award’ at LA’s Outfest
At 52, John Cameron Mitchell has begun getting special honors for his body of work.
Last year he was honored at the Tony Awards for his stage achievements and Thursday night in Los Angeles, he was presented with the Outfest Achievement Award for his work as the director of such films as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus and Rabbit Hole.
‘I’m having a mid-life crisis award,’ Mitchell joked to the crowd at the Orpheum Theatre during opening night of the 11-day festival of queer film.
‘People who’ve won this are my heroes and people who I was looking up to in the early 90s when I was thinking of becoming a director -Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, John Waters – who were models of how to do things.’
He added: ‘Nowadays the term selling out doesn’t exist anymore because everybody is trying to make a living, that’s the way it is.’
He was acting in TV shows and films and remembers people telling him his die project, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, was ‘career suicide.’ It went on to become a sensation Off-Broadway, a feature film, and is currently a red-hot revival on Broadway.
‘We’ve just got to do something that we love,’ Mitchell told the capacity crowd. ‘Do the other jobs, do the thing you love and by accident, the world changed in the interim and now I can pay my rent from that.’
The audience clapped its approval of Mitchell’s creative career approach.
‘If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that’s less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying,’ he said. ‘It might possibly make more money but that’s a different issue.
‘If you’re stopping yourself by, in effect, selling out, which is thinking about what a billion people want to see as opposed to what you want to see and your friends want to see, you’re short-changing yourself.’
Mitchell also cautioned against seeking approval on the internet before your full vision is realized because trolls might discourage you with the comments. He said if he had shown early Hedwig online, he would have been buried because ‘it wasn’t that good.’
‘Don’t over-document it, do it in the dark. Best things happen in the dark.’
The post John Cameron Mitchell happily accepts ‘a mid-life crisis award’ at LA’s Outfest appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
Not so Fast: Senator Rubio Telegraphs Intent to Overturn Obergefell v. Hodges
Not so Fast: Senator Rubio Telegraphs Intent to Overturn Obergefell v. Hodges
Sen. Marco Rubio has made headlines in recent days for saying he opposes a constitutional amendment that would allow states to re-ban marriage equality.
HRC.org
Heinous Oklahoma “Gun And Run” Club Uses The Rainbow Flag For Target Practice
Heinous Oklahoma “Gun And Run” Club Uses The Rainbow Flag For Target Practice
Heard of The Oklahoma Run n’ Gun? Because the human war crimes responsible for this cultural abortion have certainly heard of you. Last week, two beardy, beery members of the “biathalon combining running and shooting” decided to post a picture on Facebook, which a lot of people — including us — aren’t too happy about.
Clutching automatic rifles and flashing shit-eating grins, two hallucinogenically creepy dudes flank a target done up to resemble the rainbow flag. The caption, which curiously features no misspellings, reads: “New high visibility targets on the 500 yard range.”
Well. It’s certainly setting one’s sights on bigger game than squirrel.
Related: The Virulent Link Between White Supremacy And Homophobia
“People got really offended and really upset and it didn’t take long for the photograph to upset lots of people,” said Freedom Oklahoma Executive Director Troy Stevenson, who (correctly) interpreted the image as a smug insult — if not outright threat — to the gay community.
When asked about the target, the event organizer played dumb, which doubtfully required much in the way of Stanislavskian Method acting. He claims that many people had complained about not being able to see the targets, and this was their response. He also claims it was meant to be funny and that The Oklahoma Run n’ Gun is a “liberty and fitness group.” You only need to examine the physiques on display here to see this statement is a grotesque lie.
Fans of liberty, fitness, and fun ourselves, we hope the boys have a good sense of humor and can handle Queerty’s new line of “Oklahomo” Run n’ Gun-inspired sex toys.
h/t: Kfor: News Channel 4
Derek de Koff
