PHOTOS: Will & Grace, Golden Girls, Sex And The City, Other Gay Faves Get P.O.C. Makeovers
With contemporary hit series such as Empire, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, it’s easy to forget that television doesn’t have the best record for casting diversity. Artist Julio Salgado has rectified this historical oversight by recasting many of our favorite, queer-inclusive series from years gone by, including Will & Grace, My So-Called Life, Sex and the City and The Golden Girls (just imagine an even sassier Dorothy!). Salgado posted the series of illustrations on his Facebook page and with the following note titled “POC TV Show Takeover,” he explains his inspiration.
Scroll down to see some of Salgado’s TV-inspired art and his thoughts on possible plot developments. We’d watch all of these.
Jordan and Angela are two young Muslim teenagers who must deal with love and Islamophobia in the U.S. Wilson Cruz comes back as Rickie.
This Roseanne is made up of a Mexican family living in Huntington Park.
Xena and Gabrielle are two Native women who must face off white colonizers.
These are the Sex and the Citygirls I’d be friends with!
This version of Golden Girls is all about social justice and it stars Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Angela Davis, Dolores Huerta and Grace Lee Boggs…may she rest in power.
Grace is a Korean-American fashion designer living in San Francisco with her best friend Will, a black gay immigration lawyer.
My version of Friends is set in Oakland. They are mostly college students of color that met at a multicultural center. You’ll see them at protests and rolling deep at First Fridays rolling their eyes at white people taking up too much space.
> Chris Pratt digs into a big pile of Dino poop in Jurassic Parkdeleted scene.
> New study examines the disparity between men who say they want to date a woman smarter than they are but don’t want to meet such a womanwhen given the opportunity.
WATCH: Josh Duggar's Sisters Say They're 'Angry and Hurt'
Members of the conservative Christian and deeply antigay Duggar family are apparently still reeling from the revelations of sexual misconduct by eldest brother Josh Duggar, as indicated by a promo clip for a new show featuring two of his sisters.
Jill and Jessa Duggar — both of whom Josh admitted molesting while in his teens — star in Jill and Jessa: Counting On, a three-part special premiering on TLC in December. In the promo, they don’t specifically mention the sexual abuse, which became public knowledge this year, or the subsequent revelation that Josh had accounts on Ashley Madison, a website that connects people interested in extramarital affairs. But they do note that the family, made famous by the 19 Kids and Counting reality show, has been through some hard times.
“The whole world was shocked,” Jessa says in the clip. “We were devastated. We couldn’t believe it. You have to wonder, How did this happen?”
Jill (pictured above) says, tearfully, “You’re angry and hurt and all those emotions all mixed together. I cry a lot of tears, I still do. I know I’m hurting.”
Josh Duggar resigned from the antigay Family Research Council’s lobbying arm in May, after InTouch Weekly reported on his sexual abuse of underage girls, incidents that occurred in 2002 and 2003. His parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, also have a history of anti-LGBT activism, including participation in a campaign against an antidiscrimination ordinance in Fayetteville, Ark. The family is from the nearby town of Springdale.
Josh is not back in the family’s good graces, Entertainment Tonight reports. “It is going to take a long time before we forgive,” a source told the program. “We are all still hurt. … Nobody is warm and fuzzy to [Josh] yet. It still feels like he is a stranger.”
Local Initiative Makes National Gains: ManDate
In July 2015 the annual OutWrite Book Festival was hosted in Washington, DC. OutWrite provides a space for LGBTQ people from across the country to gather to support diverse books and connect with other writers, panelists and journalists in a public forum. Amongst the attendees were Lisa Moore, Ebone Bell and James Earl Hardy. Upon the conclusion of the OutWrite Book festival, I was struck by the eagerness of the gaymen to wrap up in time for a meeting they called, ManDate. Men from all over the country were not only familiar with Mandate, but had made it a priority to leave OutWrite in enough time to attend the event that evening.
What is ManDate?
ManDate enjoys no fanfare, no budget for advertising and no popular press coverage, however it has been successfully operating and serving the needs of gay Black men since its inception in 2010. In Washington, DC, ManDate has served upwards of 700 gaymale attendees in one session, according to ManDate co-founder Jabari Bruton-Barrett. There is no question that in Washington, DC, ManDate is a staple for gay Black men and the program is quickly gaining national recognition. ManDate is now piloting in Norfolk, VA, Richmond, VA, North Carolina, South Carolina, Atlanta, GA and Jackson, MS.
This year, ManDate will host its 4th annual Health and Wellness Conference for Black gaymen during the weekend of November 6-8, 2015 in Washington, DC at the Human Rights Campaign (1640 Rhode Island Ave. NW, DC). This year’s theme is “I Am, We Are” which celebrates Black gaymen individually and as a community, in all aspects of their identity. The conference will bring together over 200 Black gaymen for a weekend of learning and provocative discussion on topics such as HIV/AIDS, biomedical interventions, sexual health, general health, mental health, spirituality/faith, relationships, finance, community mobilization and integrating generations. Free on-site HIV and STI screenings will also be offered to conference attendees.
Project Healthy Livings “ManDate” Health and Wellness Conference is the only holistic health focused conference in the District of Columbia that is specifically designed for and by Black gaymen, says ManDate co-founder Jabari Bruton-Barrett. This year, some of the conference sponsors include, the District of Columbia Department of Health, Gilead Sciences, Whitman Walker Health and AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
The annual conference is a culmination of the monthly Mandate sessions that happen in Washington, DC and several southern states, throughout the year. According to co-founder Jabari Bruton-Barrett, “In 2010 the National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) charged southern jurisdictional Health Departments with developing initiatives for Black gaymen.” In an effort to address and combat some of the psychosocial and environmental challenges that Black gaymen face, Project Healthy Living (PHL) adopted a holistic approach through the creation of the “ManDate” initiative that aims to improve sexual health outcomes and influence healthy life choices for Black gaymen through interventions that aim for risk reduction.
The year ManDate launched, marks the same year that President Obama first released The National HIV/AIDS Strategy which identified a set of priorities and strategic action steps tied to measurable outcomes for moving the Nation forward in addressing the domestic HIV epidemic. In July 2015, the White House released the National HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States: Updated to 2020. According to The Advocate, we have an administration that has done more to address the domestic HIV epidemic than all previous administrations combined, including a sharp increase in HIV programs, interventions and research targeting gaymen in general and black gaymen in particular. The updated National HIV/AIDS Strategy lays out specific targets for gaymen and Black gaymen, and the White House official presiding over these activities is a Black gayman living with HIV, Douglas Brooks. ManDate is not only an exemplary initiative that parallels the Obama administrations focus on Black gaymen, but also it is an organic enterprise that provides a multidimensional approach and support system for Black gaymen.
In 2010 when the National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) made a concerted effort to address the concerns of the Black gay community, no one would have predicted the success of the ManDate monthly sessions. ManDate fills a void within and across the Black gay community. That void is access to a safe space to share and discuss a myriad of concerns on a consistent basis, whilst allowing for social networking opportunities across a diversity of men. Co-founder, Jabari Bruton-Barrett says,”25 percent of attendees are ages 18-30, 70 percent are ages 31-61 and 5 percent are ages 62+. Our typical attendee is single, college educated and early to mid 30s. Median household income is $25K-$65K annually.”
What makes ManDate monthly sessions so valuable in Washington, DC is not only that it is a grassroots initiative held at the private home of its co-founders, but the focused topics discussed each month are participant driven, staying true to focusing on what the community needs at any given session. Jabari Bruton-Barrett says,”The monthly ManDate meetings are facilitated by our core facilitators. Sessions can be topic driven or open ended discussions. We use data from our evaluation findings to determine topics of interest. Once we agree on the topic, we bring in an expert to lead the discussion with the group. The subject matter expert will co-facilitate the session with our core facilitators.” The session topics are truly multidimensional, ranging from mental health to financial/estate planning to sexual anatomy to police violence and everything in between.
Current ManDate Board Members from left to right, Terrance Payton, Jorge Lander (not a current board member), Darryl Moch, Avery Sunshine, Jabari Bruton-Barrett, Robert Barrett, Kenneth Pettigrew. Brian LaBoard is also a current board member but is not listed in this picture.
ManDate is a phenomenal example of both national focus placed on complex social and health issues and grassroots initiatives maintained and operated by everyday individuals seeking to make a difference.
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Open Question: Will being Gay/Lesbian ever be considered "normal"?
Nothing against LGBT people just asking. I know it’s considered pretty retro to not be straight in the day and age we live in but do you think it will ever be a normal?
Chris Kluwe Rips Houston Texans Owner for $10K Donation Opposing LGBT Rights
Former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe is speaking out against Houstan Texans’ owner Bob McNair’s $10,000 donation to a political group opposing Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).
Kluwe wrote an open letter to McNair, posted online at Sports Illustrated’s The Cauldron, asking, “What should we make of a billionaire homophobe donating money in furtherance of the denigration of an entire class of American citizens?
Kluwe’s other big question for McNair? “WHY?”
“Why does the idea of LBGT individuals enjoying the same rights and protections as everyone else fill you with such hatred, such loathing, that you would voluntarily choose to make their lives even more difficult than the prejudice they’ve faced for decades?”
Kluwe raised the specter of harm that public opposition to HERO by one the NFL’s 32 owners will do for LGBT people across the country:
“Are you not aware that trans individuals are nine times more likely to try and kill themselves due to the odiously corrosive social views like the one you’ve just financially enabled? Have you no knowledge of the fact that LBGT youth are far more likely to experience harassment at school and home, leading to depression and ideations of self-harm — mostly due to the shortsighted wrongheadedness of privileged narcissists like yourself? I can only imagine you never bothered to research any of this, Bob.”
Kluwe pulled no punches in his assault on McNair, writing that McNair’s donation is in essence the equivalent of “spraying a whirlwind of fecal chunks all over the league’s PR efforts [to clean up its image with regards to LBGT issues] like an incontinent water buffalo after an ex-lax smoothie.”
Kluwe also took on the finer points of opposition to HERO, particularly where trans people and bathrooms are concerned:
“I know this is hard for your feeble mind to comprehend, but when trans individuals go into a bathroom, they just want to take care of business and get out, exactly like everyone else. A bladder is not a sex organ, Bob. Gay people poop and pee just like you. Well, maybe not exactly like you, since based on your ability to judge right from wrong, I can only assume you suffer the same difficulties in aiming when it comes to actually making it in the bowl.”
Concluding, Kluwe had a suggestion for what McNair can do to make up for this offense:
“So the next time you have $10K burning a hole in your pocket — which is basically always — why don’t you do something useful with that money and donate it to Trans Lifeline, or an LBGT youth shelter, or hell, light it on fire and flambe the tip of your dick until your tears put out the flames, because all of those would be more beneficial to our world than what you just did.”
Tennessee Trans Woman's Plight Reveals Reality of Rape in Prison
Paula Smith, a 21-year-old transgender woman incarcerated at the Sumner County Jail in Gallatin, Tenn., alleges she was sexually assaulted by her cellmate on August 24, according to The Huffington Post.
But the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says that Smith made a false report of sexual assault to obscure a consensual sex act with her cellmate that a corrections officer discovered before separating the inmates, reports The Tennessean.
Whether Smith’s own testimony or that of prison officers and her cellmate is believed, the grim reality of Smith’s life in prison departs significantly from the popular fantasy represented by out trans actress Laverne Cox’s portrayal of transwomen’s prison inmate Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black, the Emmy-winning Netflix comedy-drama series.
Like Smith, most transwomen in the United States are imprisoned in men’s facilities. They endure high rates of physical and sexual assault and daily acts of dehumanization. It begins with misgendering and deadnaming: transwomen are identified as “men” against their wishes and called by the names that they have repudiated.
As Smith’s case demonstrates, members of law enforcement, prison officials, and the media all join in this dehumanization. Statements from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation that consistently refer to Smith by a male name and with male pronouns, in addition to reports by The Tennessean and local TV news make this harsh reality painfully clear.
Smith has served four months of a possible three-year sentence for two counts of violation of probation and failure to appear in court, stemming from an earlier conviction of arson and vandalism. Standing 5’6″ tall, the 120-pound white woman, originally from Georgia, had already begun her clinical transition when she was incarcerated. Smith’s friends report that she was living in Georgia while serving probation for the initial charges, and was financially unable to travel to Tennessee to meet with her probation officer, which prompted the violation that ultimately saw her extradited and incarcerated in Tennessee.
Speaking to HuffPost, Smith’s fiancé described deplorable conditions, in which Smith is allegedly preyed upon by prison officers in addition to her alleged rape.
Smith is now in “protective custody,” a form of solitary confinement where she is only released for an hour each day for exercise, according to HuffPost, and she has been denied access to study programs that would allow her to obtain her GED.
Furthermore, as research by the federal government into the widespread prevalence of prison rape reveals, vulnerable inmates face an uphill battle when trying to prove the nonconsensual nature of sex in prison while simultaneously contending with complex social hierarchies. Inmates who may be LGBT or smaller in physical stature are often coerced into sexual compliance by dominant offenders in order to survive. Just as importantly, studies have shown that fighting back during an assault may lead to severe maiming or even death, prompting some rape survivors to lower their own levels of resistance to persevere during the ordeal.
How Did A Gay, Married Actor End Up In An Anti-Gay TV Show?
When Dallas-based actor Lloyd Guerrero first auditioned for Recently Straight two years ago, he didn’t fully understand what the television pilot was about. He was offered the lead role, a gay character named Kevin, and he accepted. After reading the full script and realizing it was about individuals who had used harmful, ineffective conversion therapy to de-gay themselves, he felt uneasy about it, but he decided to follow through on his commitment.
The pilot was released in full on YouTube earlier this year, and since then, Guerrero has received pushback from LGBT people about his participation in it. He spoke openly about his experience for the first time with ThinkProgress.
“I’m an actor, and this a role I took on,” he explained. “It was a challenge, because I don’t agree with the view of the project whatsoever. I completely disagree with it, but it was something that I took on as an actor and made a professional choice to take on, and so I completed it.” He reasons that there are actors who play child molesters and murderers, but that doesn’t make them supporters of child molestation and murder.
In hindsight, Guerrero says, it was “a ship I probably should not have sailed.” But it was a journey that impacted the actor on a deep level and created opportunities for him to support LGBT youth. He now debunks the tenets of the show through his own life example as an openly gay, married man.
The premise
Brock and Caelan comfort the heartbroken Kevin.
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Recently Straight is a project of Ben Spratling, who identifies as ex-gay and serves on the advisory board for the ex-gay advocacy organization Voice of the Voiceless. Describing the pilot to the conservative site OneNewsNow recently, Spratling explained, “The plot revolves around a support group and the different men in the support group and what their lives are like as they’re trying to work out what it means to be Christian and same-sex attracted and how to heal from that.”
The story primarily follows Guerrero’s character Kevin, who is based on Spratling’s own life experience. Kevin, who is gay, is just going about his life when his ex, Josh, returns to town after several years away — telling Kevin that he is now straight. Josh has dedicated his life to helping other men overcome their same-sex attraction like he has, and he makes a project out of his former boyfriend.
Josh keeps making the case to Kevin that same-sex relationships are always doomed to fail, and Kevin happens to experience just that. He proposes to his boyfriend Kendrick, who not only rejects the idea of marriage but then proceeds to cheat on him. Kevin then starts seeing another boyfriend, but a date “ends in disaster,” and he turns to his friends Caelan and Brock for support. When he overhears the committed couple having a fight and then sees them both on a Grindr-like app, he loses all hope of ever finding someone in the gay community who will truly love him, and he contemplates suicide.
Fortunately, Josh arrives in time to talk Kevin off the ledge and invite him to ex-gay group therapy.
What could have been
“Straight guys hug too, Kev. There’s nothing gay about a hug.”
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Though Spratling now describes Recently Straight as a film, Guerrero explained that the original intent was a television web series that would have followed Kevin, Josh, and Caelan for a full season. Interest in the pilot faded, however, when networks saw the controversial material and chose not to pick it up. Guerrero also said that he would not continue in the role after he saw how the pilot turned out.
That’s not because he had a particularly bad experience on set. “Everybody on the cast and crew knew that I was gay and they knew that I was dating my husband at the time.” His husband John even visited the set during the production and was welcomed by all. But he was alone in that regard; though most of the characters were gay, Guerrero was the only member of the production who was openly gay.
Filming the suicide scene at the end, however, was particularly intense for Guerrero. “When I was younger, I had attempted, myself, to commit suicide,” he shared with ThinkProgress. He actually related a lot to how Kevin felt; Guerrero describes himself as a “very monogamous person” and he had experienced cheating and heartbreak that really crushed his world. He never contemplated ex-gay therapy, but there were still parallels between his own struggles and the character’s.
“With the whole suicide scene, I didn’t like it at all, for one because it brought up some bad memories of when I had tried it. For two, just because, I don’t want this to be seen by people who might think, ‘This is the way out. Yeah, he’s right; I should do this.’”
Guerrero expressed concerns to the production team about how the scene would turn out. “If somebody sees this, say for example, a youth who is gay, lesbian, transgender, or whatever, you don’t want to send out the wrong message to people. And that’s ultimately why I pulled myself from the series after that initial pilot was shot, and I did tell them that if the pilot was to go any further than that, then they’d have to find somebody else to play the character.”
They kept asking him what would bring him back. He told them it would have to be rewritten in important ways, such as no longer framing ex-gay therapy as the only option. He also suggested it would do better as a comedy, something that wasn’t so extreme in the delivery of the message. “They sent me some drafts of scripts, and it turned out to just not be a character that I any longer wanted to play at that point.”
Laying it on thick
Kevin is a captive audience to Josh’s ex-gay rhetoric.
CREDIT: YouTube/Recently Straight
Writing under the pen name of Jonathan Bogomolov — which is how Guerrero identified him in his interview with ThinkProgress — Spratling inserted his own ideas about ex-gay therapy throughout the plot. On the Recently Straight website, Spratling shares many of these personal beliefs, asserting that the concept of sexual orientation “lacks foundation as an entity in scientific literature” and that “all individuals are inherently heterosexual and that SSA [same-sex attraction] develops as the result of emotional wounds and unmet love needs.”
Josh serves as the surrogate ex-gay counselor in the pilot, spouting ex-gay jargon at Kevin in almost every scene. In one scene, he tells Kevin a story about someone from his Cub Scout troop who often misbehaved and unknowingly hurt other boys. It turned out he had always been deaf and no one knew, but once he and his mom learned sign language and he learned how to read lips, he could “nearly normally participate in life events.” The story, Josh claims, proves that it doesn’t matter if sexuality is biological.
“It’s an example of a biological problem that can be worked around with mental discipline… If it’s biologically caused, that isn’t proof that it’s healthy and that only biological changes can change it. You have to have a theological reason to decide if it’s healthy or good.”
In the following scene, Josh has Kevin trapped as a passenger in the car and delivers an epic monologue about how he disagrees “that there is such a thing as a ‘gay feeling.’” Men have desires for “affirmation and affection” and erotic desires, he explains, and if a boy doesn’t get enough affection from other men as a kid, “he’s at the risk of getting those desires mixed together.”
Josh explains his own problem as such: “It was more about my perception of women as a consequence of my mother’s failure to provide emotional constancy. Instead of seeing women as nurturing, I saw them as wardens with a leash around my neck. Men I felt were nurturing, so I felt safe with them.”
When Kevin (correctly) rejects this all as sounding “more like brainwashing than healing,” Josh checks in over webcam with his real-world ex-gay counselor Jayson Graves, founder of Healing for the Soul ministry. “It seems like all the things that convinced me, they just really don’t matter to him,” he whines.
In the final scene, Kevin is ready to jump off a cliff, telling Josh of his heartbreaks, “You were right about them all. None of them love me.” Josh admits that he almost committed suicide too, but God sent him a message of hope. “Just give Him your broken heart; He will comfort you. He will bring you healing and He will restore all those years that have been lost.” Josh invites Kevin to his ex-gay group meeting, explaining, “When you get to know them, you’ll find out just how similar you really are. These are men who will love you in your sorrow and who will love you out of it.” Kevin accepts, and the pilot ends with a teaser of him knocking on the door to join the meeting.
Leading by example
Josh talks Kevin off the cliff.
Guerrero is torn by his experience working on Recently Straight. “I don’t regret the decision I made; I made a professional decision to play the character,” he told ThinkProgress. “If it was any different, if it was made in the way I think it should’ve been presented, I honestly don’t know if I would’ve went through with it or not. I really have some feelings toward it. I don’t think I should have been a part of it.”
But being part of it has given him the opportunity to support LGBT young people and correct some of the messages of the show. Since the pilot became available on YouTube earlier this year, Guerrero has heard from LGBT youth who have watched it. “I’ve had younger kids tell me that they didn’t know what they should do,” he said. “Some people have been kicked out of their house because their parents found out, some people were thinking of committing suicide because of the fact it just wasn’t going right for them, and at that point I did open up about the time that I attempted to and that’s when I told them, ‘It’s not worth it. Don’t ever think that by committing suicide, that’s the way out. There’s going to be people that are going to not agree with your lifestyle, but there’s also a lot of people there who will accept and embrace who you are without second thought.’”
“There’s no reason to end your life that’s necessary or right. Just embrace who you are, be happy with who you are.”
Guerrero is proud that people can look to his marriage as an example. “At one point, I thought that it wouldn’t be worth going on because of the fact that I didn’t think that that I would find somebody. I hated the way things were going.” But now, he says, “I’m happily married to someone that I love to no end. I would do anything for this man and vice versa.” His friends joke he and John are a “sickening couple,” comparing them to the Brady Bunch because of how well they get along. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
He wants to give young people some of that same hope. Whereas Recently Straight communicates that people should give up on being gay because same-sex relationships don’t work out, Guerrero is proving the opposite. “I’m married. I’m happy. I’m a gayman. I fully embrace who I am,” he said. With regards to Recently Straight, “I can’t personally apologize for the way that it came out, because I wasn’t the one who wrote it, but I do apologize for the way that it presented it.”
“It doesn’t matter that a character in a series portrayed this. Don’t let it make you have a second thought. Be happy with you.”
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“Why does the idea of LBGT individuals enjoying the same rights and protections as everyone else fill you with such hatred, such loathing, that you would voluntarily choose to make their lives even more difficult than the prejudice they’ve faced for decades?”
