WATCH: A Daily Diary of One Trans Man's 'Awesome' Transformation

At 21, trans man Jami Raines is already an internet sensation with more than a dozen YouTube videos watched by tens of thousands. But thanks to the attention he’s garnered from BuzzFeed’s UK-based LGBT editor about his FTM Transition Timeline video, which he uploaded 10 months ago, Raines is now a viral star. 

“Hey, my name is Jami,” says Raines at the start of the video and the start of the timeline, and then says it again in a distinctly deeper voice, his face visibly masculinized by testosterone. “I am 2 years, 10 months on T.”

The difference is dramatic, and as Raines himself described it on Day 123, “pretty awesome.”

His slideshow and compilation of nearly three years of side by side and time dissolve comparison photographs has been viewed more than 115,000 times. 

“I initially intended to just do it for the first year,” Raines told BuzzFeed. “But then I didn’t get any facial hair in my first year.” So he kept at it, and chronicled his changes online. 

On Tumblr, Raines maintains a page called Pinnochioboy, and answers questions ranging from does he have an Instagram account (no) to whether he’s considered bottom surgery (same answer). 

Check out his Tumblr page here and watch his transformation video from his Jammidodger YouTube channel, below. 

Dawn Ennis

www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/10/08/watch-daily-diary-one-trans-mans-awesome-transformation

Photo Of Justin Bieber's Penis Is Just One More Thing On The Internet

Justin Bieber has made a career out of insanely catchy pop tunes and obnoxious antics. 

At 21, the singer’s bratty behavior and repeated attempts to convince the world he’s a new man have made it difficult to feel any sort of sympathy for him. 

But no one, not even the Biebs, deserves to have the New York Daily News publish full-frontal photos that some scummy paparazzo took with a crazy-long lens while the singer was vacationing in Bora Bora. 

Believe it or not, even Bieber has the right to privacy and publishing photos of his junk without his permission is pretty crappy and the kind of thing that Jennifer Lawrence would probably classify as a “sex crime.” 

Also on HuffPost:

— 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/2015/10/08/justin-bieber-penis-photos_n_8263240.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

LGBT People of Faith Are Coming Out and Coming Home

As we celebrate National Coming Out Day, more and more LGBT people of faith are coming out as the religious landscape becomes more welcoming and inclusive.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/lgbt-people-of-faith-are-coming-out-and-coming-home?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Barry Diller, Calvin Klein, David Geffen, and Sandy Gallin Power Nap Together: PHOTO

Being a media mogul is exhausting, but at least you have nice places to nap, and gay friends to nap with.

Barry Diller (then at Paramount), Calvin Klein (during the Brooke Shields years), David Geffen (had just launched Geffen Records), and Sandy Gallin (then managing Cher and Dolly Parton) nap together in this 1981 photo from Kelly Klein’s new book Photographs by Kelly Klein, posted online by NY Mag Daily Intelligencer’s Christopher Bonanos.

The post Barry Diller, Calvin Klein, David Geffen, and Sandy Gallin Power Nap Together: PHOTO appeared first on Towleroad.

Andy Towle

Barry Diller, Calvin Klein, David Geffen, and Sandy Gallin Power Nap Together: PHOTO

Brian Sims Is Congress's Great Gay Hope

A stocky former football player with a substantial beard is not what you’d expect a reproductive rights advocate to look like. But it makes sense that Democrat Brian Sims, Pennsylvania’s first out gay legislator, can sympathize with the plight of women, so often judged solely by their appearance. The accomplishments of the 37-year-old Philadelphia-based assemblyman — onetime civil rights lawyer, former board president for Equality Pennsylvania — are often overshadowed on the gay blogosphere by those aforementioned physical traits. But Sims, who recently announced his run for Congress against a scandal-ridden incumbent, is unquestionably a powerhouse.

He’s fought vociferously for numerous pieces of pro-LGBT legislation, such as conversion therapy bans and a statewide nondiscrimination bill, while his work for Planned Parenthood funding and against Harrisburg’s numerous assaults on abortion rights netted him a pro-choice award last year. 

“All those people who talk about small government but support legislation that puts their ideology front and center,” Sims tells The Advocate, “that’s something I find very difficult to understand.”

Sims is still unguarded enough to tell a reporter he abandoned the Catholic Church (“my faith is in humanity”), so it’s not a huge surprise that he wasn’t lining up to meet a certain Argentinian who just swung by Philly. “No, I didn’t see the pope,” he says. “I saw the president in New York.”

The dogma tied to organized religion clearly chafes Sims, who doesn’t miss a beat when asked about Francis’s maybe-buddy Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk briefly jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

“[People like Davis] need to be relieved of their positions,” he says. “We’re not talking about a disability that she has. We’re talking about an inability. If you’re unable to perform your job in a secular government in a secular way, I don’t think an accommodation [for them] is appropriate. Period.”

As Sims gears up for the spring primary fight, his blunt left-wing talk should only do him good. Pennsylvania’s Second Congressional District is overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, and the primary winner will almost certainly head to Washington. While Sims acknowledges he’ll be discussing ethics for the foreseeable future — his opponent, Rep. Chaka Fattah, was indicted in July on charges of misappropriating funds — he’d rather discuss other issues that some politicians would never touch.

“I’m going to be talking about education funding,” he says. “[The election will be] a larger discussion about tax reform, a larger discussion about the safety of neighborhoods and guns.”

Sims often emphasizes the importance of nondiscrimination protections and hate-crimes laws, pointing out just how dangerous life remains for LGBT people. In his district, a male couple was beaten to a bloody pulp last year in an alleged antigay mob attack. The high-profile case attracted national attention — one of the assailants is the daughter of a Pennsylvania police chief — and served as impetus for Philadelphia passing its own hate-crimes legislation (the three defendants are expected to make a plea deal later this month).

Sims is aware that all the bills in the world will not change the frequently frightening experience of walking down the street holding a same-sex partner’s hand or what it’s like for a transgender person to simply operate in society. Kiesha Jenkins, a 22-year-old black trans woman, was beaten by five or six men in North Philadelphia Wednesday before being shot to death.

“The LGBT civil rights movement is moving at full steam, but if you’re a trans woman of color right now, your life right now is not the cover of a magazine,” Sims says, adding that the numerous murders of trans women — 20 reported so far this year — are making some inured to the violence. 

“We have to talk about those real issues [of safety] before we can talk about the intricacies of LGBT civil rights in the future,” he says. “Right now we’ve got to talk about the day-to-day because it’s very real for too many people.” 

Neal Broverman

www.advocate.com/politicians/2015/10/08/brian-sims-congresss-great-gay-hope

This is how smoking really damages your body

The UK government is doing its fair share of campaigning against smoking: banning all adverts, with cigarette packets now hidden behind doors so customers aren’t tempted by the brands’ brightly colored logos.

In theory, we all know that smoking is bad and ruins your body in more ways than one, yet there are 10 million adults in the UK who smoke.

But the damage goes a lot further than your lungs, and the smoking cough is only the first sign of what cigarettes are doing to your body.

October is officially Stoptober, the NHS led campaign where everyone is encouraged to overthink their habit and to stop smoking altogether – saw more than 250,000 Brits quit smoking, last year.

The NHS has turned the month of October into Stoptober.

Stopping smoking might be hard, but if you can go 28 days without a cigarette, chances are it’ll stick (so to say), and giving it up altogether will be a lot easier.

Everyone has seen pictures of smokers’ lungs, or rotting teeth, but those have become so common their effect is debatable – so let’s make this a bit more personal and about you.

In recent years, many stop smoking organizations such as ASH, have stepped up their efforts in a bid to inspire more people to quit smoking, through both innovative and motivating campaigns.

A new interactive smoking tool continues this tradition. Created by online healthcare provider, HealthExpress, the tool allows the user to effectively ‘smoke a cigarette’ by scrolling a cigarette until it burns. As the cigarette burns, the harmful effects on the different areas of the body can be clearly seen on the male and female body.

Health Express’ smoking effects visual shows you what exactly cigarettes do to different parts of your body.

So what does smoking actually do to your body?

As seen in the tool, smoking affects your lungs; it destroys the normal lung structure, making you more susceptible for infections such as pneumonia.

Exercising also becomes ridiculously difficult the longer you smoke, and running a marathon (or just up a flight of stairs, really) will turn into your worst nightmare while sending you into coughing fits.

Not to mention emphysema and lung cancer, both of which often end fatal.

But that’s just the most commonly accepted damage cigarettes do to your body.

Women generally have thinner skin, making them especially susceptible for the ageing effects smoking has, but that doesn’t mean the men are any better off.

Wrinkles, acne and dry skin often set in a lot earlier than usual and will remain permanent, while psoriasis and scarring caused by narrowed blood vessels – not to mention your teeth, which will be discolored and weakened the 4,000 chemicals present in the smoke.

Scroll further through the smoking tool and it only gets worse.

Your stomach suffers and while smoking may block your appetite, it’ll also make you more prone to developing ulcers, bowel disorders like Crohn’s disease and increases the risk for stomach or bowel cancer. That’s out appetite gone.

Women who smoke will also find it much harder to conceive and may even find themselves infertile – not to mention putting their baby at risk during pregnancy, too.

People often don’t believe the last bit, but it’s actually a big risk: my dad worked as a paramedic and to this day tells the story of how they sent an emergency ambulance to a newborn, just a few days old, who showed signs of something being seriously wrong.

The child wouldn’t stop crying, or shaking, until someone (under orders and back in the 80s, I may add) blew smoke into its tiny face. Turns out the child was suffering through withdrawal symptoms – and would you really want to put a small human through that?

Also, while we’re on the subject of fertility, this seems like the ideal time to just throw two words out there to scare nearly every man, no matter how old: Erectile dysfunction.

Nicotine and other chemicals help narrow your arteries and clog them with fatty deposits, blocking the blood flow and making it very difficult to get an erection.

The post This is how smoking really damages your body appeared first on Gay Star News.

Stefanie Gerdes

www.gaystarnews.com/article/this-is-how-smoking-really-damages-your-body/

Chris Burns Comes Out as Gay, First Division 1 Basketball Coach to Do So: WATCH

Chris Burns, the assistant men’s basketball coach at Bryant University, has come out as gay, and is the nation’s first Division 1 coach to do so.

USA Today Sports describes how he told his players:

“There are parts of this business that lead me to believe what I’m about to tell you is not acceptable here,” the assistant coach says. “This is something I struggle with. It’s made me consider giving up coaching. It’s made me think I’m not supposed to be here.”

Players are wide-eyed. Burns takes a deep breath.

“I’m a gay man,” he says, at last.

He goes on to say he hopes none of this will affect the players negatively, that he wants it to unite them. Bryant’s players surround him with hugs. They tell him they love him. He can exhale.

They add: “He opened up to his family first. He told head coach Tim O’Shea more than a year ago. In recent weeks he informed the rest of the coaching staff and key members of the Bryant athletics department. He confided in the team’s three captains and then, days later, stood before the team.”

But Burns has a larger story, and he tells it in a first-person piece over at Outsports:.

Burns describes how Anthony Nicodemo, the Saunders High School basketball coach who came out as gay in 2013, became his boyfriend, while he was living in the “toxic” closet:

Slowly I became more comfortable with myself, and Anthony did as well. I felt both pressure and fear rise in me. All of those early years, just beginning to explore my sexuality, were filled with a bit of denial – As comfort rose I realized someday I would have to embrace and accept that this is who I am, and that I will need to be honest with people about it.

In those secretive years, I had grown accustomed to a lot of lying and deceiving. When you’re lying to everyone about who your are at your core, lying about everything else gets easy. Those habits and behaviors were very toxic for every aspect of my life. Slowly, piece by piece, I became detached from everyone, including Anthony. I ran from everything that was real in my life to try and keep myself hidden.

That’s what the closet does to you, and it did it to me in the worst way: Detaching from my family and my best friend.

Burns attended the Nike LGBT Sports Summit, and says it was that and the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality that finally propelled him to make the decision.

Read his full Outsports piece here and the USA Today piece here.

And here’s a video interview from USA Today:

The post Chris Burns Comes Out as Gay, First Division 1 Basketball Coach to Do So: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.

Andy Towle

Chris Burns is First Division 1 Basketball Coach to Come Out As Gay: WATCH

Here's Why I Claim Bisexuality

When I was 14, I found the word bisexual through a Google search. I did not know you could have crushes on both girls and boys. I thought at a certain age there would be a sorting hat a la Harry Potter to tell me if I landed in the “straight” house or the “gay” house. So, when I found the world bisexual, a word that encompassed my feelings, I was ecstatic.

Ten years later, I still identify as bisexual. And I’m just as ecstatic to proudly claim bisexuality. I write and speak about bisexuality while being an advocate for our community. In my advocacy, I frequently am asked why I identify as bisexual rather than pansexual, queer, or many of the other fluid identities. While I am a queer man, in the sense that I am not cis heteronormative, I most closely identify with the label bisexual.

While claiming bisexuality, I frequently encounter the misnomer that bisexuality is innately binary. Since “b”i in bisexual means two, the two is assumed to mean cisgender male and female. (It’s only because we think in such binary terms that we would attach a binary gender attraction to the bisexual label.) Yet that is not how many bisexuals define our bisexuality.

The most commonly accepted definition of bisexual comes from renowned bisexual activist Robyn Ochs. She says, “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

In simpler terms, I call myself bisexual because I’m attracted to genders like mine and gender that aren’t like mine. My bisexuality isn’t binary. It never was and it will never be.

In the bisexual community, bisexual organizations have begun to use a Bi+ label to encompass all the various identities that land on the bisexual spectrum. Identities like pansexual, queer, omnisexual, and fluid are important parts of the Bi+ community.

There are diverse options for labeling my sexuality. Yet I claim bisexuality.

There are many reasons I call myself bisexual. First, bisexuality makes the most sense to me. Bisexual is the label I’m most comfortable with in describing how I see myself.

I call myself bisexual because it honors our history. Too often, bisexual elders are erased from the forefront of the LGBT rights movement. When I call myself bisexual, I honor the legacy of bisexual activists like Brenda Howard. Known as the Mother of Pride, Howard co-organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, which gave birth to Pride parades.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were trans women of color are Stonewall. Yet they were also bisexual. Their bisexual identities are often forgotten. Others who have been at the forefront of the marriage equality movement, HIV activism, and who have marched for equality have too claimed bisexuality for themselves. It is because of their contributions to our equality that I have the space to freely claim my bisexuality today.

I call myself bisexual to be counted. Still, the majority of individuals who are attracted to more than one gender identify as bisexual. Regardless of our labels — queer, pansexual, omnisexual, or no label at all — our disparities are the same. We, as a Bi+ community, are facing a health crisis. In order for our disparities to be addressed, we must be counted in data collection.

I claim bisexuality for visibility. In calling myself bisexual, I am visible for other bisexual youth who could be Googling in search of answers about their sexuality. I want the 14-year-olds of tomorrow to know they don’t have to deny themselves.

I am out and proud as a bisexual man so that others know they too can claim bisexuality as their own.

ELIEL CRUZ is a contributor to The Advocate on bisexuality. His work has also been found in The Huffington Post, Religion News Service, Mic, Sojourners, The Washington Post, Patheos, Everyday Feminism, Details, Rolling Stone, Vice, and Slate. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

Eliel Cruz

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/10/08/heres-why-i-claim-bisexuality

Transgender Indians appointed judges in Hindu religious festival in Kolkata

Transgender people will be among the judges of Kolkata’s Durga Puja religious festival for the first time this year as Hindus compete to build the best offering displays to the goddess Durga.

The festival’s date is set by the traditional Hindu calendar and so changes from year to year, but in 2015 Durga Puja occurs from 19 October to 23 October.

The Durga Puja festival marks the victory of the goddess Durga over the evil buffalo demon Mahishasura and celebrates the victory of good over evil.

During the festival ritual structures with statues and ceremonial gates celebrating Durga are set up in the city and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation holds an annual competition to select the best of these.

‘There will be two bodies of judges for two tiers of screening — primary and final — and transgenders will be members of both,’ awards panel organizer Debasis Kumar told the Hindustan Times.

‘While people like Anindya Dutta and Ranjita Sinha would represent the transgender community in the primary panel of judges, Manabi Bandopadhyay, the country’s first third gender principal of a government college, would be our celebrity judge.’

Another proposal by West Bengal state Women and Child Development Minister Sashi Panja would see transgender people recruited as traffic police during the festival but it is yet to be decided.

The post Transgender Indians appointed judges in Hindu religious festival in Kolkata appeared first on Gay Star News.

Andrew Potts

www.gaystarnews.com/article/transgender-indians-appointed-judges-in-hindu-religious-festival-in-kolkata/

For Tyler: How One Man Is Taking on Cyberbullies

Tyler Clementi, who died by suicide September 22, 2010, brought national attention to an epidemic of cyberharassment that hurts women and LGBTQ youth most of all. In his honor, I have launched the Tyler Clementi Institute for Internet Safety at New York Law School, which will include, among other things, the first pro bono law school clinic that will represent victims of cyberharassment for free.

Nearly half of all LGBT youth experience incidents of cyberabuse each year. LGBT teens are three times more likely than heterosexual teens to be harassed online and twice as likely to receive threatening or harassing text messages. Adolescent girls are significantly more likely to experience cyberharassment than boys. And over a seven-year period, women accounted for nearly 73 percent of all reported incidents of cyberabuse. Nonconsensual pornography overwhelmingly affects women as well.

Although powerful, numbers alone miss the devastating and discriminatory impact of cyberharassment. Consider, for example, Katie M. (not her real name), who broke up with her then boyfriend when she came out as a lesbian in 2013. Spiteful, her ex posted an intimate picture of her on Craigslist along with her name, address, and a request for a rough role-play “rape” fantasy. Several men tried to break into her home. She approached the police, but they said they couldn’t help her and advised that she stay off the Internet. She approached lawyers, but none of them knew what to do. For her protection, Katie’s family sent her to live with her aunt in New Hampshire.

After Steven (also not his real name) came out as gay when he was 13 years old, most of his friends offered support. But soon demeaning antigay comments started appearing on several social network profiles. It was clear that most of the comments were coming from two 15-year-old students at his school. After three months, Steven and his parents approached the school, where administrators refused to help because “the conduct happened online, not on campus.” The harassment came to a head when the students uploaded a video to YouTube making fun of Steven’s gender nonconformity and posted it to Facebook, tagging 175 of their friends from school. Still, the school did nothing.

Neither Katie nor Steven committed suicide, but they did experience anxiety, depression, and other devastating psychological harm. Katie was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She not only had to disappear from the Internet to protect herself; she had to move nearly 1,000 miles away. Steven missed weeks of school and his grades suffered. He was diagnosed with depression and stopped painting, making music, and playing with his dog, the three things he loved most in the world. Both reported that they felt alone, that they had nowhere to turn.

That sense of hopelessness is amplified by a legal system that, five years after Tyler’s death, still fails to take cyberharassment seriously. There is no federal law banning nonconsensual pornography, yet there is one that prevents victims from suing websites that provide a platform for it.

Too many school administrators erroneously believe that the First Amendment prevents them from punishing cyberbullies, yet too few have LGBTQ-inclusive digital citizenship and anti-cyberharassment curricula in their schools. The barriers to court-ordered unmasking of anonymous online harassers are too high. The walls of online privacy are too low.

Too few lawyers have the tools to represent victims of cyberharassment. Too many victims do not have the money to pay for the counsel they need. The status quo needs to change. That is why I have created the Tyler Clementi Institute for Internet Safety at New York Law School.

The institute is an unprecedented multipronged approach to a multi-faceted problem, with three overlapping approaches: educate, advocate, and litigate.

We will educate young people and their parents by creating LGBTQ-inclusive digital safety curricula that can be integrated into schools. We will educate teachers and administrators by providing model cyberharassment policies that are specific and administrable, and run seminars on the proper scope of the First Amendment. We will educate lawyers on how to represent victims of online harassment by providing in-house legal education programs. We will educate victims by providing user-friendly step-by-step guides on how to respond to cyberharassment. And we will educate the public about the epidemic of cyberharassment through data-based research and a groundbreaking narrative project that will allow victims to tell their stories on various media.

We will advocate for comprehensive antiharassment policies and work with Internet companies to enhance privacy and harassment protections on their platforms. And we will support the passage of reasonable legal reform by providing research, model statutes, and policy white papers.

And we will litigate cyberharassment cases for free. We will represent victims of cyberharassment at all stages of the process, from working to remove or unlink harassing content from the Internet to negotiating with schools to address hostile educational environments. We will represent victims at school disciplinary hearings and file tort, copyright, and other civil claims to help victims obtain justice.

We are sending a message to victims that they are not alone, that many people are looking out for them. Our ultimate goal is to take the incidents of cyberharassment down to zero. To do that, every arm of society, from schools to industry, from parents to those practicing bar, must pay attention to the victims of the Internet’s dark alleys. Only then can we be truly safe, productive, and free online.

ARI EZRA WALDMAN is associate professor of law and director of the Innovation Center for Law and Technology at New York Law School. He is the founder and director of the Tyler Clementi Institute for Internet Safety. He blogs regularly at Towleroad. He can be reached at [email protected], and you can follow him on Twitter at @ariezrawaldman.

Ari Waldman

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/10/08/tyler-how-one-man-taking-cyberbullies