Why You Should Go Out To Eat Alone

The prospect of purposefully eating alone in public might seem daunting to some, but an increasing number of Americans are reserving tables for one.

According to a recent analysis by OpenTable, single table reservations have gone up 62 percent in the last two years. Maybe it’s the plethora of must-Instagram food available in every city around the country, maybe its a craving for some alone time in this hyperconnected age, or maybe it’s a little bit of both. Whatever it is, the practice is worth toasting. Alone).  

Vice’s Nell Frizell has gone so far as to argue that eating alone makes you a better human:

[…] to concentrate on what you’re consuming, to be able to take in your eating environment alone, is one of the cornerstones of self-sufficiency. You are free from bullshit food shame, from other people’s boring diet restrictions, from small talk, from having to meet someone so late you’ve eaten the napkins before the starters arrive and, most importantly, from compromise. You are an island.

Yes, dining solo can be a great pleasure, and it can be good for you, too. Below, we’ve rounded up five reasons to eat alone:

1. You’ll get to experience some solitude.

Alone doesn’t mean lonely, and going solo has some major benefits. Spending time with number one (that’s you, friend) can boost your creativity and make you like yourself more. Plus, a table for one means you don’t have to fake-offer the last fry to anyone. It’s all yours.

2. No small talk necessary. 

Small talk is inevitable when meeting up with a friend for a meal. How was your day, what’s up with your cat, blah, blah, blah. It’s a ritual that is even more exhausting after a long day of feigning interest in other people’s affairs at work. A break from surface-level chitchat will give your brain a chance to contemplate other issues worth talking about. And it’s the substantive talk that makes people happier in the long run.

3. Your brain will have a moment to unwind and focus on Just. One. Thing.

We are a multi-tasking race, to a fault. Much research confers that multi-tasking isn’t possible, that when we try to do two things at once we’re actually just slowing down the process of completing either of the two tasks. Eating alone allows you to focus on the deliciousness of your meal and savor it — no need to prevent awkward silences in between messy, mindless bites of kale salad.

4. You can turn that savoring into a meditation. 

The exception to the no multi-tasking rule above is meditating while dining out alone. Give yourself the gift of fully tasting the flavors you’re paying for. You can meditate with any kind of food (check out this coffee meditation for the play-by-play) by focusing on the taste of the dish, the sound of your chewing and the smell steaming off your plate. You’ll be better for it.

5. You’ll make healthier choices.

You won’t have to worry about being a Negative Nancy when someone suggests dessert and you’re either not hungry for it or don’t feel like paying for a spoonful of creme brûlée. Your dinner = your rules. Better yet, studies show that people mimic the eating patterns of their dining companions, meaning if they eat more (or less), so will you. Eating alone means eating at your own pace and claiming fullness when you feel it.

Also on HuffPost:

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Mike Huckabee: ‘I Haven’t Disparaged People’ On Gay Marriage, Rights

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is talking out of the corner of his mouth once again, saying he hasn’t “disparaged,” people when it comes to gay rights and marriage reports CNBC.

Huckabee issued his statements in an interview with Chief Washington CNBC correspondent John Harwood, after the journalist questioned Huckabee about the Duggar family, with Huckabee stating he doesn’t disparage the entire family because of Josh Duggar’s abuse scandal. Harwood followed up Huckabee’s disparagement comment asking if he’s disparaged against anyone, with Huckabee boldly proclaiming he hasn’t:

“I don’t think I have disparaged people John, I feel like it…I’ve held to a very consistent, biblical standard of marriage.”

Huckabee appears to forget that he once signed a disparaging pledge branding same-sex parents as “destructive,” and a “threat to security,” and promised a three-point plan to sign “religious liberty” executive orders to protect “traditional” marriage and prosecute as hate crimes any attacks on the right of religious people to discriminate against LGBT people should he become president.  

Watch Huckabee’s hypocritical remarks below:

The post Mike Huckabee: ‘I Haven’t Disparaged People’ On Gay Marriage, Rights appeared first on Towleroad.

Anthony Costello

Mike Huckabee: ‘I Haven’t Disparaged People’ On Gay Marriage, Rights

Model Rain Dove Is the Girl (or Boy, Whatever) Next Door

Rain Dove, the 6-foot 2-inch androgynous model, walks into The Advocate‘s offices in Los Angeles wearing an In-N-Out white paper hat, denim jeans, high-top sneakers, a pink printed button-up shirt, and a designer leather jacket that was given to her by designer Loris Diran when she walked in his show back in July for Men’s New York Fashion Week.

Sitting at the end of a conference room table, Dove laughs, holding her cap, and says, “I’m determined that In-N-Out is going to have something of theirs in a gay publication, and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

Dove was joking about the West Coast burger chain’s homespun, Christian (and rumored antigay) values, an esoteric fact one might not assume a model — who has helped sell both men and women’s clothing for designers including Calvin Klein — would be privy to. As a student of genetic engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dove didn’t come into the modeling world through any traditional routes. She lost a bet on a Cleveland Browns football game to a friend of hers, who was trying to encourage her to become a model. Dove didn’t believe in herself at the time, but since she lost the bet, she had no choice but to go to an open casting call. This casting opened the door for Dove to model menswear for Calvin Klein, and she continues to straddle both worlds as a gender-fluid model for both mens and women’s wear. 

On that day in L.A., Dove was tired after a two-hour drive from San Diego, where she was volunteering for various nonprofit organizations, including Feed America, which provides food and support for families in need. Dove commits herself to volunteering whenever she can, but it’s not something that she views as separate from the world of high fashion. For Dove, presenting as a gender-nonconforming person in the fashion world is a form of activism.

Dove has a phrase she likes to repeat about her generation’s obsession with and reliance on social media: “We are a selfie nation, not a selfless nation.” Dove actively posts photos of herself from fashion shoots on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and gets good engagement, but when she chooses to post photos of herself doing volunteer work, she notices that she always loses around 30-80 followers on Facebook, and at least 200 followers on Instagram.

Dove speaks without hesitation when she reveals that she’s not in the fashion world to “preach to the choir.” She doesn’t want to attract only those who follow her work after seeing headlines online about how she’s “breaking gender norms.” She wants to reach the corporate gatekeepers of the commercial fashion world.

The most sought after brand that she would like to model for is not one that people generally associate with gender fluidity or gender queerness. “I am a 100 percent determined to be a Victoria’s Secret model. I have the tits and I have the height and I can walk in high heels.” Dove is self-aware enough to know that her gender presentation isn’t exactly what people associate with either “male” or “female,” the outdated binary that still defines how most people think of themselves.

The challenge for Dove is that her “masculine of center” appearance could potentially ward off commercial brands because, “I look like what we have taught society a lesbian looks like. I just do. I have the short hair, I got the muscles.” It’s difficult for Dove to book commercial shoots because she comes with “sociopolitical associations … that a company might not be ready to endorse.”

On the rooftop of a parking garage in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, Dove stands in front of the photographer, waiting for the shutter to click at the right moment, and her face takes on an intensity that you don’t see when you talk with her. She is no longer the friendly, welcoming, easygoing person you were having a conversation with five minutes ago. For someone who only a few years ago was working as a firefighter and so penniless she slept at a gym, Dove is almost an old pro at modeling.  

At the camera clicks, she coordinates in her mind how to properly position her body, and the way she positions her face, pouts her mouth, and intensifies her eyes is different when she’s modeling for menswear versus women’s wear. She explains that when she models menswear, she must show an “angry face,” whereas for women, she goes for a softer look in her eyes.

Although Dove has received attention from major news sites, she has yet to receive the commercial success she would like to. She speaks confidently when she says that she knows her time is coming soon. Although the industry she works in is known for being heteronormative, Dove understands that advertising agencies “aren’t some evil illuminati trying to dupe the people into living heteronormative white lifestyles.” They are simply “trying to make money in the safest way possible.” These agencies will eventually want to capitalize off the trend of androgyny, says Dove, as cultural and political shifts are made, it will show those agencies that a “larger group of people are backing LGBT movements and sociopolitical movements.”

Dove isn’t waiting around for Marc Jacobs or Donatella Versace to discover her. Instead they might come looking for her. “I am female genitalia’d and I don’t look like that classic girl next door that you see in the movies, but why can’t I be?”

It’s 2015. Who even is the classic girl next door anymore? 

Photography by Yannick Delva

Yezmin Villarreal

www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2015/10/19/model-rain-dove-girl-or-boy-whatever-next-door

How Roberta Kaplan Met Edie Windsor and Changed History

In the fall of 1959, at age 17, I told my Jewish mother that I was a lesbian. Mrs. Chernick (my mother) had sent me to the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada to become a thespian. When I got on the train to Alberta, I immediately fell in love with another young woman from Winnipeg. Obviously, I had not heard my mother correctly. But that summer I read a magazine called The Ladder. In it was an article by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who said there was nothing wrong with being a lesbian (but think about moving to a big city immediately!). My mother and I were in the kitchen when I came out to her and she grabbed a knife and said “Here, stab me in the heart, pour salt in the wound!” Obviously, she did not take it well. But I believed what Del and Phyllis had written, that there was nothing wrong with me. So, in 1962 I moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to meet other out and proud women. I hit the clubs and was immediately arrested for female impersonation, but that is different story.

Thirty-two years later, in 1991, another lesbian came out to her Jewish mother (had I known her at the time, I would have warned her not to do it in the kitchen). When Roberta Kaplan told her mother she was gay, her mother kept banging her head against the wall. Needless to say, Mrs. Kaplan took it as well as Mrs. Chernick.

Roberta was so closeted that while attending Harvard, she got the reputation of being a neoconservative, reactionary homophobe because she yelled at a woman she was secretly in love with for falling for another woman! She enrolled in law school at Columbia and after graduating at age 24, she finally “kissed a girl.” But Roberta was petrified of coming out publicly. She did not know that closets were vertical coffins that suffocated those inside to death. So, in 1991, Roberta Kaplan, who was just coming out and was seriously depressed and anxious, saw a therapist for two sessions to try to get help. And that therapists name was Thea Spyer.

Roberta was scared of not being able to have a relationship, a family, and a normal life. But Thea said “it was possible to have a fulfilling relationship and happy life even if you are a lesbian.” And then she told Roberta about her 25-year relationship with a beautiful and brilliant IBM math wiz named Edie Windsor. 

Eighteen years later, 81-year-old Edie Windsor sought legal help. Thea had died of MS and although Edie and Thea had been married in Canada in May 2007, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, their marriage was not recognized and Edie had to pay $363,053 in estate taxes. Edie went to Lambda Legal, because she and Thea had contributed to them, but a junior attorney there told her it was the “wrong time” for the movement. HRC gave her the “cold shoulder” and ACLU agreed with Mary Bonauto of GLAAD that a federal lawsuit would be moving too fast, and could set bad legal precedents that would be damaging going forward. (We heard the same scripted response when my wife and I were the first to sue for marriage rights in CA in 2004. “The time is not right! We have a plan,” said major LGBT attorneys. Of course, after, they jumped in with their own clients, and we won.)

Besides, the LGBT legal cabal felt that the issue of a widow having to pay estate taxes was not the issue that would defeat DOMA because Edie was “just a bit too wealthy and privileged to be the face of gay rights.” Really?

When Robbie Kaplan was called by an activist trying to help Edie get an attorney, Robbie walked four blocks over to Edie’s apartment, excited to know that she was going to meet the woman whom Thea Spyer, her former therapist, had told her about all those years ago. She showed Edie a video of her 2006 oral arguments in the New York marriage case, which she had argued brilliantly, but had lost (yet several law school professors have used her arguments in their classes).

Edie Windsor immediately wanted Robbie to represent her. After the movement’s organizations refused to represent her, here was a major law firm willing to take the case pro bono.

What made Edie’s case so unique was that it went to counter to the gay legal organizations who represented multiple plaintiffs. Also, these organizations didn’t want to focus on the lack of legal protections and incurred penalties same-sex couples experienced because of a lack of federal recognition; they wanted to focus on smiling couples, holding hands and talking all about love, because that is what their focus groups told them people wanted to see.

Robbie, this brilliant, experienced attorney did not listen to the organizations. She was an experienced litigator, and was going to win by focusing on two things.

l.  Unfair taxation, which is something she felt even conservatives understood. 2.  Edie Windsor, Edie Windsor, Edie Windsor.

Robbie’s new book, Then Comes Marriage; United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA, goes into the drama, the behind the scenes struggles, fights, attacks, and competition Robbie had to endure. And that was just from our side! 

This book tells all. Two great love stories (Robbie and Rachel, Thea and Edie), the trial, and all the internal struggles. It was so interesting and well-written that I could not stop reading it.

In March, 2013, my wife and I flew to Washington to go to the U.S. Supreme Court  to see the arguments in the Prop. 8 case. We had filed a lawsuit against Prop. 8 through our attorney, Gloria Allred (whose firm had won our marriage case), but we had lost the Prop. 8 case in the California Supreme Court. So we went to D.C. to watch the legal conservative mega star Ted Olson argue in the U.S. Supreme Court. 

I can’t tell you how disappointed I was. One justice referred to our movement as “an experiment,” and Olson didn’t respond. Another justice referred to incorrect  negative information about children raised by same-sex couples, and Olson didn’t answer. I  had thought of him as “the $6 million Wizard of Odds.” But I was livid when I walked out of the courtroom. Because of the huge press buildup around this famous Republican attorney who had won case after case at this court (including Bush v. Gore), I had expected more.

The next day, the Windsor case made up for everything. I had read about Roberta Kaplan, but because Robbie wanted Edie and Theas’ great love story very public, most of the articles, as planned, were about her client. So when I watched her oral arguments, this now-out, proud, lesbian partner of  Rachel and mother of Jacob pleaded the case with such brilliance that there was not one thing they could get her on. Her arguments came not only from her brain, but deep down; from her soul. She painted the story of Edie Winsor and Thea Kaplan with such passionate strokes, that many of us in the courtroom, who already knew the story, sat there mesmerized and crying.

A lot of attorneys had helped Robbie prepare, but when she stood up in the Supreme Court for the first time in her career, she hit it out of the ballpark.

We knew this was it. We knew that this would go down in history as the case that not only brought down DOMA, but paved the way for marriage equality, which in turn will be the Trojan horse in which all of our equal rights will finally arrive.

Decades from now, when we think of winning marriage equality, the picture that will indelibly be etched into all of our memories is the one of Edie Winsor, almost running down the Supreme Court Steps, pink scarf flying in the wind, beside her unstoppable attorney, Roberta Kaplan, waving to the thousands of supporters, cheering them on to what became our greatest victory. And this is the picture that will go down in history. Mazel tov!

Roberta Kaplan will be taking her new book on the road with readings around the country, with the first date at the Los Angeles Public Library on Monday. Click here for information on dates in Seattle, New York, and the Bay Area.

ROBIN TYLER has been a marriage activist since 1987, when she produced The Wedding at the 1987 March on Washington. She and her wife Diane Olson were the first lesbian plaintiffs to file in the case that eventually brought marriage to California (Tyler v. State of California). 

 

 

 

Robin Tyler

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/10/19/how-roberta-kaplan-met-edie-windsor-and-changed-history

Open Question: How to deal with my church's views on homosexuality?
I’m 13 (soon to be 14) year old girl and my parents have been making me go to church for over 2 years now. We all used to be atheists and my mom and dad converted to Christianity. I’m still an atheist. Every now and then, they try to get me to pray and read the Bible but they don’t try to force the religion down my throat like they used to.
The church we go to is Spanish and I am SO thankful that I can’t understand the stuff they say in there, because I would go all out. I love the people at my church but I can’t stand what they say about homosexuality and transgendered people. I’m straight, but I support LGBT completely.
Although it is Spanish, my parents like to go over with me what they heard in church. They said homosexuality is wrong and those who are gay will not ‘enter the gates of heaven’. When I disagree with this statement or get upset, they say “why does that upset you? Are YOU gay?”. Its all just very upsetting.
How would you deal with something like this?

answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20151018185734AAUDhIA

Things are changing
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Things are changing
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Open Question: Why are Gay men always get bullied, but lesbians have it easier?
Its pretty obvious gay bullying is a problem in this country and always had, but ive noticed that the victims of it always happen to be the Male homosexuals. theyve put up many times with getting teased, being called the ‘F” word, beat up by gangs, pushed into commiting suicide, hell there was even a case where a guy got BATTERIES rammed down his throat for being gay!
But for Lesbians, they never seem to have any backlash from society. if a girls a lesbian at school then classmates will just see her differenttly, respect it & move on. nothing wrong with it of course but mostly likely if a man even LOOKS like hes gay in that situation everyone will think hes Weird & call him names. the worst lesbians probably had was stereotyping but thats about it. they even get praise when they have a video of themselves making out with each other.
and please note this is not a LGBT support post in general, just something ive noticed in society.

answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20151018170323AADnPrS