#LoveYourNeighbor: Jamaya and Macy Ask Tupelo to ‘Look Past the Cover’

Born and raised in Tupelo, Mississippi, Jamaya recalls a message she regularly heard as she was growing up — “You’re going to get married one day, you’re going to have kids, you’re going to have a husband.”

Jamaya always knew she would follow that path, but she would instead do it with a wife by her side, rather than a husband.

Jamaya and her girlfriend Macy, also a Tupelo native, have joined HRC’s new #LoveYourNeighbor campaign, a video storytelling series focused on sharing the stories of LGBTQ and allied people in Tupelo, with the hope that their community will change their hearts and minds when it comes to seeing same-sex couples.

Doing something as simple as taking a stroll down the street, the couple turns heads.

“I would love for Tupelo to progress,” Macy said. “When me and Jamaya walk through the mall, we’re holding hands, we get the most awful looks.”

“I just wish people would realize that we’re people too. And we just want to love just like you want to love,” said Jamaya.

Sharing personal experiences and stories is a powerful tool to change hearts and minds, and helps create new advocates for equality. By opening up, Jamaya and Macy are bravely taking steps toward creating a more inclusive climate in their hometown.

“You have to look past the race or the sex or the sexuality; look past the cover and dig deep,” Macy said.

On Tuesday, March 7, the #LoveYourNeighbor campaign will culminate with a town hall discussion in Tupelo featuring all seven videos of the participants. You can learn more about the town hall here.

In 2014, HRC launched Project One America, a comprehensive multi-year effort to dramatically expand LGBTQ equality in the South through permanent campaigns in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.

www.hrc.org/blog/loveyourneighbor-jamaya-and-macy-ask-tupelo-to-look-past-the-cover?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

No More Milo: Yiannopoulos Resigns From Breitbart

The gay alt-right troll quit after backlash to his incendiary remarks about sex between men and boys.

www.advocate.com/media/2017/2/21/no-more-milo-yiannopoulos-resigns-breitbart

Canadian man blocked by US Customs after they read his Scruff profile

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers denied a Vancouver man entrance to the States after investigating his phone and scrutinizing his Scruff account.

The reason? According to Canada’s Daily XTRA, they suspected “looking for loads” meant he was soliciting sex for money.

Related: Scruff Founders Defend App’s Ethnicity Filters — “Personal Preference” Or Casual Racism?

André, a 30-year-old set decorator, called the entire experience “humiliating,” which… understatement.

(He declined to give his last name for “fear of retaliation” from US Customs.)

Officers also allegedly perused his profile on BBRT (a hookup site specializing in bareback sex) and personal emails attached to a Craigslist account.

Reportedly, André then requested that the initial interrogation cease and gave up on entering the states.

He tried again a month later, this time bringing evidence of employment and deleting every app from his phone.

He was denied again, because officers said they found the deletions “suspicious.”

Related: So Model Charles-Laurent Marchand’s Scruff Pics Are No Longer Private

According to Daily XTRA:

There are several websites that offer advice to protect the privacy of your data at the border, but ultimately, if US Customs officers want your data, they will either get it or keep you out of the country. You can limit the risk to your privacy by not traveling with your devices or deleting apps, messages and photos from your devices, and logging out of social media sites before you travel.

Scruff CEO Eric Silverberg has plenty to say on the subject:

“For Scruff members traveling to a country that may demand access to profiles and social media apps before entry, simply deleting the app and reinstalling upon re-entry is always an option.

Scruff synchronizes your profile to the cloud, so after reinstalling you may login to regain access to your messages, favorites, albums, etc.

That said, the best defense against unwarranted searches and seizures by the government is to work to elect leaders who share these ideals and values.”

h/t: Towleroad

www.queerty.com/canadian-man-blocked-us-customs-read-scruff-profile-20170221?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+queerty2+%28Queerty%29

Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns from Breitbart News

Milo Yiannopoulos has resigned from alt-right rag Breitbart News in a press release, after remarks surfaced in which he said he was comfortable with men having sex with boys as young as 13.

Said Yiannopoulos in a press release:

“Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communites that would otherwise never have heard them. They have been a significant factor in my success. I’m grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there. I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, so today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone.”

Break: MILO resigns from Breitbart pic.twitter.com/pSQnJ0b9vA

— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) February 21, 2017

The homocon white supremacist is holding a press conference at 3 pm today in New York City but was likely to be forced out anyway, as reports were circulating that fellow Breitbart staffers were threatening a walkout if the toxic troll was not let go.

Simon & Schuster has canceled publication of homocon white supremacist man-boy love enthusiast Milo Yiannopoulos’s book Dangerous “after careful consideration,” according to the publisher.

Simon & Schuster had been under pressure for some time to cancel the book deal.

RELATED: CPAC Speaker Milo Yiannopoulos Defends Men Having Sex with 13-Year-Old Boys: WATCH

Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, last month pulled her forthcoming book, How To Be Heard, from Simon & Schuster’s TED imprint because of the deal the publisher made with Yiannoupoulos.

Simon & Schuster had defended the deal with Milo in a December 30 statement, claiming it did not condone discrimination or hate speech but says it did not bear responsibility for Milo’s opinions.

Yiannopoulos was disinvited from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) over the weekend.

The post Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns from Breitbart News appeared first on Towleroad.

Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns from Breitbart News

Top Investors Representing $11T in Assets Speak Out Against Texas’ SB 6

Today, HRC hailed a new letter to Texas lawmakers from top global investors speaking out against the discriminatory, anti-transgender Texas bill SB 6. This group represents the first coordinated group of global investors to speak out against the anti-LGBTQ bill.

“As we have seen in states like North Carolina, business leaders are decidedly opposed to anti-LGBTQ discrimination — both as a workplace matter and because it’s simply the right thing to do,” said JoDee Winterhof, HRC Senior Vice President for Policy and Political Affairs. “Discrimination is costly. We are pleased to see this group of investors forcefully telling Texas lawmakers — including bill sponsors Dan Patrick and Sen. Lois Kolkhorst — that SB 6 will negatively affect Texas’ future.”

In the letter, the undersigned write, “As long-term investors in companies doing business in Texas, we are concerned that any form of legislation that allows or facilitates discrimination against LGBT people may make it difficult for our portfolio companies to attract and retain top talent to work in their Texas-based operations.” The signatories include investors in companies that “employ hundreds of thousands of people” across the state of Texas.

SB 6 is a discriminatory, anti-transgender bill, and one of the many egregious anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in Texas this legislative session. The bill would overturn non-discrimination ordinances currently providing critical protections in several major Texas cities; further, it would force state agencies, municipalities, public schools and public universities to discriminate against transgender people. By making it illegal for transgender people in Texas to be afforded access to facilities consistent with their identity, it opens them up to increased discrimination and harassment as they simply live their everyday lives. It also exposes Texas to tremendous risk of the kind of financial, legal, and political blowback that North Carolina has continued to reckon with after the passage of HB2.​

www.hrc.org/blog/top-investors-speak-out-against-texas-sb6?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Resources for immigrants/Recursos para inmigrantes

www.glaad.org/blog/resources-immigrantsrecursos-para-inmigrantes

Reading the Right: Swedish Crime, Pagan Gods, and Milo

We perused the far-right websites so you don’t have to.

www.advocate.com/media/2017/2/21/reading-right-swedish-crime-pagan-gods-and-milo

Suicide rates among LGBTQ teens are at an all-time low. Here’s why.

Scouring for good news these days can feel like a fruitless task, but there are still a few glimmers of hope out there for anyone willing to do a little digging.

Case in point: New research out of John Hopkins University, Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital suggest the legalization of gay marriage may be at the root of a sudden drop in suicide attempts among LGBTQ teens, currently at an all-time low in the U.S.

Related: Straight guys confess their same-sex sexual encounters in candid new study

Dazed and Confused reports:

The study, carried out across 17 years over 47 U.S states, saw the biggest drop among gay, lesbian and bisexual young people, with 14 percent less suicide attempts. It translates to roughly 134,000 fewer teens.

Julia Raifman, who co-authored the research, has plenty to say about her findings:

“I would hope that policymakers and the public would consider the potential health implications of laws and policies affecting LGBT rights.

This study was really motivated by evidence that there are large disparities across domains of health that affect LGBT adolescents. I was interested in whether larger structural issues were potentially leading to those disparities.”

In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. 36 other states followed suit before it ultimately became federal law in 2015.

The research heavily replied upon data collected for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System every two years; date which included over 760,000 students between 1999 and 2015.

Related: Study: Beautiful Women Are Much More Likely To Choose Gay Friends

Researchers compared suicide rates between states that had legalized same-sex marriage and those that hadn’t by January 2015. They found a 0.6 drop in the states that had legalized it, which has interesting implications.

“We found that the effects of legalization persisted two years after legalization, suggesting that social and political backlash does not have the effect of worsening mental health outcomes in this window,” Raifman writes.

“Our results build on prior research indicating that state same-sex marriage bans were associated with increased rates of psychiatric disorders and that health expenditures decreased following implementation of a same-sex marriage policy in Massachusetts.”

Of course, the potential correlation still needs to be examined further.

“There are a number of potential mechanisms,” Raifman says.

Those include whether the policies themselves reduce perceived stigma among adolescents – and that may drive reductions in suicide attempts – but it is also possible that same-sex marriage policies drive social change among parents, teachers and peers of sexual minority adolescents. It is also possible that the campaigns around same-sex marriage policies are responsible for changing the experiences of LGB adolescents.

Learn more about the study here.

www.queerty.com/suicide-rates-among-lgbtq-teens-time-low-heres-20170221?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+queerty2+%28Queerty%29