Active Duty Marines Under Investigation for Threat Against Gay Bars

Two active duty U.S. Marines are under investigation for a post to a Facebook group featuring a photo of a Marine with his finger on the trigger of an assault rifle (above) accompanied by the caption “Coming to a gay bar near you!”

The Marine Times reports:

The picture was posted recently to Camp MENdleton resale, a closed Facebook group for male Marines with more than 25,000 members. The person who purportedly posted it also wrote “Too soon?”

First Lt. Thomas Gray, a spokesman for I MEF, told Marine Corps Times that the command has identified the Marine in the picture and the one who posted it on Facebook.

“We cannot discuss details of an ongoing investigation, but I can tell you the command is taking this incident seriously,” Gray said.

Marine officials have vowed to take “appropriate action” in response to the social media post, according to a statement released by I MEF.

The head of the Facebook group told the Marine Times that the post was deleted soon after it was reported.

This morning Towleroad reported on the threat of an Orlando-style attack on gay bars in San Diego which was posted to Craigslist and which police said they were taking very seriously.

The post read: “Orlando was long overdue. Cleanse your community of the filth that gives decent gay men and women a bad name. Those people were walking diseases, bug chasers, and thank god for AIDS and 9-11 and now Orlando. San Diego you are next …”

According to Gray there are no indications yet that the two threats are linked.

(Photo Facebook via Marine Times)

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Hillary’s Short List, ‘Hamilton’, Hozier, Mars, iPhone 7, Seth Meyers: NEWS

VEEP STAKES. Hillary Clinton’s short list leaks and it includes Elizabeth Warren: “Beyond the Massachusetts senator, other prospective candidates include Labor Secretary Tom Perez; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro; Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey; Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Reps. Xavier Becerra of California and Tim Ryan of Ohio, several Democrats said.”

SHE’S WITH HER. Oprah endorses Hillary Clinton: “Regardless of your politics, it’s a seminal moment for women. What this says is, there is no ceiling, that ceiling just went boom! It says anything is possible when you can be leader of the free world.”

LATE NIGHT. Seth Meyers stands by his Donald Trump ban: “As long as the Washington Post is banned from Donald Trump’s campaign, Donald Trump will be banned from ever coming on this show.”

BROADWAY. Hamilton will be filmed, and a documentary on the musical is coming this fall.

GAY OLD PARTY. Gay conservative activist who called gay liberals the ‘American Taliban’ says LGBT Republicans need to vote for Trump. 

RED PLANET. Mars rover poses for selfies: “The 1-ton robot’s latest self-portraits were snapped May 11 in the foothills of the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) Mount Sharp, at a site dubbed Okoruso. Curiosity had stopped there to drill into the mudstone bedrock and collect samples for analysis, NASA officials said.”

ON NEWSSTANDS. Amy Schumer is Vogue‘s latest cover girl. 

RIP. Gay adult film actor Emanuelk Rosado was among the victims of the Orlando massacre.

DAPPER. Ryan Gosling makes a surprise appearance on a red carpet. 

TRUMP. The big dark truth about The Donald: “Trump doesn’t like criticism, even if it’s constructive. He doesn’t abide disagreement, even if it’s offered in good faith. And he doesn’t like accurate accounts of his words, policies, business, or self that contradict the shameless, self-aggrandizing lies he tells about all of the above.”

TECH. iPhone 7 may not get dual lens camera: “Apple has allegedly decided to scrap plans to include a dual-lens camera sensor on the back of the iPhone 7 Plus, according to the latest rumor from China that claims the tech isn’t quite ready. The Apple rumor mill has been spitting out reports all year that the biggest feature of the Plus-size iPhone will be the addition of a dual-lens camera that brings stellar low-light performance and other tricks to take iPhone photos one step closer to DSLR quality.”

MUSIC. Hoosier debuts new track “Better Love” from the upcoming Tarzan film.

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Think About What It's Like to Be an LGBT Youth Today

Hateful politicians scapegoat them; unhinged men try to kill them. Young queer people need our help during these frightening times, writes Abbe Land of the Trevor Project.

www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/6/16/think-about-what-its-be-lgbt-youth-today

All LGBT Murders Deserve Our Attention, Violence Report Warns

Forty-nine people were killed in Orlando, double the amount of all LGBT homicides reported in 2015. None of these killings are acceptable, a new report reminds us.

www.advocate.com/crime/2016/6/16/all-lgbt-murders-deserve-our-attention-violence-report-warns

5 Positive Things to Remember After Orlando

5 Positive Things to Remember After Orlando

Queer culture has always existed as parade and funeral, from the very first time a smiling boy with a limp wrist was beaten for having a good time.

Although the scale of violence in Orlando is unfathomable, how to cope with extremes is built into our community’s DNA. Our culture is still young and has lived in shadow for so long that it still needs victories and tragedy to shed light on where it stands to others and to itself.

As a gay man whose earliest memories were AIDS vigils, who was a closeted teen in high school during Columbine, who wept angry tears at the God Hates Fags brutality of Matthew Shepard’s funeral, who has a chipped tooth from a gay bashing on a San Francisco bus, this violence is not new. For younger brothers and sisters who have not lived through these kinds of tragedies, and for those of older generations who are so familiar that they may feel numb, here are 5 things to remember that gay history has taught us.

Now is a time to observe and listen.

These tragedies pull back society’s mask, make us face the hypocrisies of others, our own prejudices and blind spots. For example, until now, the 1973 Upstairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans was the largest mass killing of gay people in the US, 32 dead by arson by a man suspected to be a gay patron. Reaction spoke volumes about the value of our lives at the time: families refused to claim bodies, the media ignored us, politicians joked and pastors remained silent.

In a social media culture that values talking over listening, it’s crucial to take a break from posting to really observe how Orlando is being dealt with. Who ignores the gayness, the color of the victims, the homosexual history of the murderer? Which politicians will try to mutate gay solidarity into Islamophobia and drag us into another election year? How are your family, co-workers, even your Lyft driver talking about this?

Are they talking about this? The answers may be hard to stomach but they break through the politeness of “tolerance” and educate us in a way that nothing else can.

You are still safe in our spaces.

Our nightlife has survived police prosecution, AIDS, gentrification and it will survive this. We are a people with a rich history of peaceful gathering, who can channel grief and aggression into dancing and sex. It is normal to look over your shoulder a little bit more during this time, but it’s important to remember this level of mayhem is still an aberration, the freak collision of American gun laws and mental illness.

We are no more worthy of martyrdom and paranoia than others who have fallen victim to these mass shootings. Just as a black churches continue their worship and faith after Charleston, and parents still happily send their children to school after Sandy Hook, our own sacred spaces can and will survive. We are also a people who know how to demand equality and civil rights and now that our cause has become directly involved in gun control, American politics will try and mold this narrative to their own interests.

Regardless of how this plays out, our community will need to direct how we hold and respect our own spaces, so that club owners, bouncers and promoters can go back to fighting the real threat to our nightlife: bachelorette parties.

There is one rainbow flag.

For too long, being “PC” has caused a rift between the letters of the LGBTQI community. These happen in cycles, like family fights. Just as gay men and lesbians in the Gay Liberation movement split in the 1970’s over political differences then came together during the AIDS crisis, this will galvanize and remind us once again that trans, gay men, lesbians and intersex are all one family and unfortunately, hated in equal measure.

Yes, there is severe inequality that prevents many of our people, especially trans and minorities, from getting access to the most basic medical and social services, but these are problems that we fight together, not with one another. It’s important we keep our community from becoming a hierarchy of privilege and victim-hood, focusing too much energy on who can be the most offended, or who can be the least guilty of “privilege.”

We are a culture that has historically thrived on camp and humor to deal with this kind of hate and now more than ever it’s important we can joke and mourn with one another across the spectrum of identities.

Institutionalized homophobia still exists.

Gay men who lined up to donate blood after the shooting were turned away, unaware that for thirty years there has been a government ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men, an FDA regulation that dates to the early days of AIDS. Although testing advancements rendered the ban obsolete decades ago, it has remained, now in the form of a 12 month celibacy period required only of gay and bisexual men. It’s government-sanctioned HIV stigma, the same stigma that makes us feel “unclean,” that causes HIV rates in minorities to reach apocalyptic levels, that keeps HIV criminalization and trans discrimination laws on the books.

While the rest of straight American chases its tail on how to deal with this, now is an opportunity for us to view the cracks in the foundation of our “freedoms” and demand changes at a government level.

Community is our religion.

This communal PTSD we are all feeling is proof of a beautiful thing: shared experiences bind every gay person in the world. Gossip, romances and even one night stands of Orlando’s queer community will be touched by this event for generations and you know what? That’s how it should be.

Just as Pride, Marriage Equality, and RuPaul on Mondays join us, these catastrophes join just as powerfully, if not more. Across the globe, the webs of interactions that make up our small gay world are vibrating with love and sadness. If you don’t feel this way, this is a reminder that you should do everything you can to join and build community.

This kind of hatred will not go away, we all know that by now, but the only way to combat it is through worshiping one another in friendship, finding catharsis through queer love in ALL its forms, to show the world that for us solidarity doesn’t just mean slapping a Facebook filter on a photograph.

In 1973, when the memorial service for the Upstairs Lounge was finally held, mourners who were closeted exited through the front steps of the church unafraid of facing the cameras, anonymous donors paid for the funerals of unclaimed bodies and although the fire was largely ignored by history, Southern queers that had no benefits from Stonewall looked after one another. We are a resilient people and our response to catastrophes have always been elegant, tender, and furious. This will be no different.

Leo Herrera is a Mexican artist/activist and a featured Towleroad contributor. His work focuses on gay male history, sexuality and nightlife. Current projects include the film documentation of Blood Mirror protesting the FDA’s current ban on gay blood, as well as the recreation of 3 Eras of Gay Sex and 50 Years of Gay Male Culture. For more work, visit LeoHerrera.com and follow on Instagram.

All opinions expressed are those of the author.

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Pam Bondi Isn’t Done Fighting with Anderson Cooper Over Her Anti-Gay Past – WATCH

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is still pissed that Anderson Cooper held her accountable for her history of opposing gay rights.

As we reported, Cooper grilled Bondi earlier in the week on why she now is painting herself as a champion of the LGBT community when she has fought tooth and nail against gay couples’ right to marry.

On Wednesday, Bondi called into a friend’s radio show to blast Cooper for his handling of the interview. Bondi said, “The interview was supposed to be about helping people’s families, not creating more anger and havoc and hatred yesterday. Yesterday was about unity, about bringing people together, about helping people.”

Following that attack, Cooper took to his show on Wednesday night to defend his questioning Bondi on gay rights, saying,

“The fact is, Attorney General Bondi signed off on a 2014 federal court brief that claimed married gay people would pose ‘significant public harm’. Harm. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Gay and straight taxpayers money, trying to keep gays and lesbians from getting the right to marry.”

Of why he thought it relevant to bring up Bondi’s history of opposing gay marriage, Cooper said,

“Ms. Bondi is championing right now her efforts to help survivors but the very right which allows gay spouses to bury their dead loved ones – that’s a right that would not exist if Ms Bondi had had her way. I think it’s fair to ask her about that. There is an irony in that.”

PREVIOUSLY: Anderson Cooper Reacts to Pam Bondi Attacks: She Signed Off on Anti-Gay Legislation — WATCH

Cooper’s rebuttal apparently incensed Bondi, who went after Cooper again in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. She continued to insist that Cooper’s line of questioning was inappropriate.

Said Bondi,

“…he just flipped on me. There’s a time and place for everything. If he wants to ask me about doing my job, defending the constitution, but to incite anger and hatred–was not the time nor the place in front of a hospital.”

Bondi added,

“I get it. He’s hurt. He is a champion of the LGBT community. But you know, that’s a time for us to come together…Emotions are high. I saw later that he had cried when he was reading the names. let’s just focus on unity and love. He basically mocked me for saying that.”

RELATED: Anderson Cooper Grills Florida AG Pam Bondi Over Her Opposition to Gay Rights: WATCH

It’s worth noting that President Obama on Thursday in an address at a memorial for the victims of the Orlando massacre said, “You can’t express hatred towards groups…because of their sexuality and not feed something very dangerous in this world.”

Watch Bondi’s interview with Fox, below.

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