Alabama Judge Follows Kim Davis’ Lead, Won’t Issue ‘License to Engage in Sodomy’

Washington County, Alabama Probate Judge Nick Williams asked the Alabama Supreme Court on Wednesday to issue an order protecting those who won’t marry gay couples or issue marriage licenses to gay couples based on their religious beliefs, AL.com reports:

Williams filed the petition for declaratory judgment or protective order in light of the recent jailing of a Kentucky clerk for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

“The jailing of Kentucky clerk Kimberly B. Davis put at immediate risk the liberty interest of all faithful and religiously sincere public officials in Alabama whose office has responsibility for making decisions as to whether to give sanction and honor to homosexual relationships to include the issuance of a license to engage in sodomy,” according to the petition filed on Williams’ behalf by Montgomery attorney Jack B. Hinton.

The ACLU says there’s no reason Williams needs protection:

Randall Marshall, legal director for the ACLU of Alabama, said that Williams’ filing mis-characterizes the current threat to Alabama probate judges. No Alabama probate judge currently faces a lawsuit for failing to issue a license, so the judges aren’t in any immediate risk of violating a court order, he said.

“Needless to say from our perspective this (Williams’ filing) is the dying gasp of a probate judge.  … If public officials don’t want to do their jobs then they don’t need to be public officials,” he said.

A small group of Alabama probate judges have been fighting same-sex marriage since January when a federal judge struck down the state’s gay marriage ban.

Since then, of course, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Williams attacks SCOTUS in his filing.

“Clerk Davis would not have been placed in that position had a bar majority of five justices on the United States Supreme Court not chose to substitute their own will as superior to the written United States Constitution, the will of the people as expressed in more than 36 state constitutions, and the common wisdom of our forebears in more than 220 years of American history, and millennia of our Anglo-Western heritage.”

Williams at an Alabama for Marriage Rally in June:

The post Alabama Judge Follows Kim Davis’ Lead, Won’t Issue ‘License to Engage in Sodomy’ appeared first on Towleroad.

Andy Towle

Alabama Judge Follows Kim Davis’ Lead, Won’t Issue ‘License to Engage in Sodomy’

Trans Man Who Met Pope Saw 'Kindness Personified'

Pope Francis hasn’t always had encouraging words about transgender people, but the Spanish trans man who met with Francis in January says he received nothing but kindness and affirmation from the pontiff.

“He is ‘la bondad personificada,’” Diego Neria Lejárraga (pictured above) said of the pope in a new interview with People, using a Spanish term meaning “kindness personified.”

Neria, a lifelong Catholic, had written to the pope last year, saying that he had become estranged from the church ever since his gender transition in 2007. “I explained how I felt pushed out to the margins of society by the faithful in my local parish of Plasencia after I underwent a sex change,” he told People of the letter. “I was even called the ‘hija del diablo’ [daughter of the devil] by a priest in broad daylight.”

He received a surprise phone call from the pope in December, in which Francis said he’d been moved by Neria’s story. They then arranged a meeting, with Neria and his fiancée, Macarena, going to Rome in January. “He welcomed us with an enormous smile and kind, kind eyes,” Neria said, and the visit lasted over an hour.

The Spaniard said he wished to keep some details of the meeting private, but noted, “In the presence of Pope Francis you feel loved, respected, embraced. I admired him before visiting, but that was nothing compared to the devotion I have for him now.”

The People article doesn’t address the pope’s criticism of the concept of gender mutability or a recent Vatican ruling that transgender people cannot be godparents. Instead, it focuses on how the visit with Pope Francis helped Neria overcome the pain of rejection.

“I think that God had a moment of forgetfulness with me, but Francis … he fixed it,” Neria told the magazine. “He has become a father to me in the broadest sense of the word. He gave me a safe place where I was able to cry and leave my doubts, pain, and suffering behind. I left them all there with the pope.”

Pope Francis has invited Neria to visit again, and he hopes to do so soon. Neria is also writing a book about his experiences and advising others on how to overcome negative feelings.

“I just pass on the kindness that Pope Francis showed me,” he told People. “He has changed my life, first in a spiritual sense and subsequently in all other aspects. … Today, my soul is in peace, thanks to Pope Francis.”

Trudy Ring

www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/9/18/trans-man-who-met-pope-saw-kindness-personified

Kim Davis inspires mayoral candidate in North Carolina to jail gay people

A mayoral candidate wants to throw LGBTI people in jail, saying he was ‘inspired’ by Kim Davis.

Eugene Holmes, who is running to become mayor of Kings Mountain, a suburb in Charlotte, North Carolina, says if he is elected he will be aim to ‘eradicate homosexuality’.

‘In my administration I would do just like Mrs. Davis did in Kentucky,’ Holmes said, according to the Kings Mountain Herald.

‘If you elect me, I’ll uphold the law of the state of North Carolina. I would get the D.A. to swear out a warrant on any man who says he’s gay. Sodomy is a crime, a felony in the state of North Carolina.’

He added: ‘What’s wrong with eradicating homosexuals? We should jail them, throw them all in jail!’

Holmes has had his own experience of jail, after being arrested in March for going to a Family Worship Center church to shout homophobic and transphobic slurs. According to the Herald, he was also jailed for felony, theft and larceny convictions, as well as spending time in a psychiatric ward for treatment after suffering from ‘religious hallucinations’.

When the Herald asked him what his plans were, other than targeting the LGBTI community, he said he wanted to ban alcohol, divorce and all immigration to the US.

The post Kim Davis inspires mayoral candidate in North Carolina to jail gay people appeared first on Gay Star News.

Joe Morgan

www.gaystarnews.com/article/kim-davis-inspires-mayoral-candidate-in-north-carolina-to-jail-gay-people/

Is “Showgirls” The Greatest Bad Movie Of All Time?

Each week online comedian, voice actor and chest hair model Sam Kalidi creates a new meme for Queerty readers. This week he looks back at what is perhaps the greatest of all bad movies, Showgirls, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary on September 22. Sam looks forward to all your hate mail. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and at your local glory hole.

Jeremy Kinser

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/CwQQ63vOI2I/is-showgirls-the-greatest-bad-movie-of-all-time-20150918

PHOTOS: It's Always Wedding Season

Christopher Harrity

www.advocate.com/photography/2015/9/18/photos-its-always-wedding-season

Posters promoting unprotected gay sex appear in Melbourne

Posters promoting unprotected gay sex appeared all over Melbourne on Thursday (18 September).

‘You can fuck raw,’ proclaim the posters, which were put up overnight.

The posters also feature a blue Truvada pill with the words underneath: ‘PrEP works. No more HIV.’

SEEITCLEARLY2020, a new activist group ‘with the aim of promoting PrEP as the most powerful tool we have to end HIV,’ has claimed responsibly for the posters.

‘Our current poster campaign is designed to shock, it is designed to start a conversation and it has been implemented across Melbourne because of the lack of education and the lack of awareness by existing public health authorities,’ they said in a statement.

‘So we are taking it into our own hands, and we are talking about bareback sex when no other group will.’

Studies have shown that PrEP is effective at preventing transmission of the HIV virus, but the drug is currently unavailable in Australia.

‘We cannot be blind to reality and the reality is that HIV will continue to be transmitted by raw sex if we do not make PrEP fully accessible to Australians,’ SEEITCLEARLY2020 said.

‘We are unforgiving in our messages, and we will continue to shock, we don’t mind if you don’t agree with our message, but gay men all need to believe in PrEP and understand the power they have to create positive change.’

The group has succeeded in getting a reaction from established AIDS groups, even if they did not agree with their methods.

The Victorian AIDS Council (VAC) and Living Positive Victoria (LPV) issued a joint statement on the posters.

‘This is a passionate issue for our community, and the vocal response to the posters strong language demonstrates that,’ said VAC’s acting CEO Kent Burgess.

‘PrEP is an effective HIV-prevention tool, and we still have a lot of work to do to inform the community about how it works. We have some concerns about how the posters might stigmatize gay sex and people living with HIV through simplistic, inflammatory language, but one message is clear: our community wants and needs PrEP.’

While Brent Allan, CEO of LPV,  said:

‘PrEP isn’t about giving gay men a license to “fuck raw,” it’s about putting them in control of their sexual health by ensuring that they have the tools they need to stay HIV negative. It’s also about breaking down the barriers between positive and negative men, reducing anxiety about HIV, and challenging stigma,’ said

‘While we have concerns about the appropriateness of the messages conveyed by this campaign, we think it shows the level of interest in and demand for more effective HIV prevention in our community.

‘And though I am not sure that having a discussion about PrEP on the streets of Melbourne is the best place, it’s pretty clear that we cannot ignore this call to action, and we have no desire to silence those who rightly demand access to lifesaving forms of proven HIV prevention. Both state and federal governments should consider their own capacity to act and make PrEP available.’

The post Posters promoting unprotected gay sex appear in Melbourne appeared first on Gay Star News.

Darren Wee

www.gaystarnews.com/article/posters-promoting-unprotected-gay-sex-appear-in-melbourne/

Here's How to Break the Pink Ceiling

I vividly remember a moment during my orientation at New York University’s Stern School of Business when I mentioned my boyfriend and I watched a classmate’s eyes light up. “I’m so glad I’m not the only one,” he exclaimed.

It turned out that there were seven others in our class of over 400, about 2.5 percent of the class, who would identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (we had no out trans students) with several others coming out at or after graduation. The percentage seemed a little low, but we saw it as a win since the prior class had only three out LGBT students.

Five years later, I became executive director of Reaching Out, the only national organization dedicated to educating, inspiring, and connecting LGBT MBA students and professionals. One of my first new initiatives was an annual survey on LGBT populations at business schools around the world. Despite increased social acceptance, this survey has consistently shown that the percentage of LGBTs in business schools has stayed stagnant at under 3 percent on average, regardless of class size or geography. 

With recent studies suggesting that 7 percent of millennials self-identify as LGBT, this stagnant number is a demonstration that LGBT Americans are opting out of business school, or often simply staying closeted, as I’ve personally witnessed several of our student leaders do upon starting corporate interviews.

The reality is, the perception that MBA programs and corporate business in general are not particularly welcoming to LGBT students is common. I can tell you nothing is further from the truth. If the 80 Fortune 500 companies that come to our annual conference are any indication, corporate America is embracing the LGBT community.

Refreshingly, the country’s top business schools shared our concerns about creating an inclusive campus and demonstrating it to those LGBT people actively thinking about going to business school or just pondering the possibility. Together, we created the Reaching Out LGBT MBA Fellowship, a scholarship and leadership program to encourage out LGBT people to enter business school and stay out as their authentic selves.

Each participating school in the program commits to offering admission to an LGBT (or active ally) applicant who is both academically strong and shows potential to be a leader for the LGBT community. Each fellow receives a minimum $10,000-a-year scholarship from the school in addition to leadership and mentorship opportunities through my organization, Reaching Out.

This year 16 schools participated, including MIT Sloan, Columbia Business School, and Rice University. We also saw immediate increases in engagement and applications from self-identified LGBT candidates. This month 22 ROMBA fellows from the class of 2017 will start their MBA programs. Next year that number will climb when 10 additional business schools are join the fellowship.

Yet the LGBT MBA Fellowship is more than another diversity inclusion program. I’m a big believer that inclusion is a lot like having a seat at the table — just because you have a seat doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear you talk. If policy, inclusion, and legal protections worked fully, we would have moved beyond gender and race struggles decades ago. Equality is about power and influence.

The list of out LGBT executives in Fortune 500 companies is remarkably thin and hardly representative. Business schools are designed to mold the next generation of leaders so that they will swiftly rise into positions of power. From these positions of power, leaders speak up for the underrepresented and effect change that echoes throughout society.

With this fellowship we are raising leaders with potential. Our goal is that the fellows launch their post-MBA careers as out LGBT professionals who will ultimately be more impactful as they climb the corporate ladder, because they influencing their peers from the start.

I can’t wait for the day when that queer kid starting her business career or MBA doesn’t debate coming out, but rather which LGBT leader she wants to emulate. 

MATT KIDD is the executive director of Reaching Out Inc., the nation’s leading not for profit organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender graduate business students.

Matt Kidd

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/9/18/heres-how-break-pink-ceiling

Woman and mother mistaken for couple and attacked at New York restaurant

A woman and and her mother were mistaken for a lesbian couple and attacked at a New York City restaurant on Saturday (12 September) night.

Tiffany Santiago, 27, was eating a late-night dinner at a Korean restaurant in Midtown when two women and a man at a nearby table started yelling anti-gay slurs and throwing things at them.

‘We keep hearing the word “lesbian” said over and over again,’ Santiago told CBS2.

‘Me and my mom look very similar in age, and so I think me with the short hair, and my mom’s really tall – she’s like five-eight; she’s a big lady.’

She added: ‘I think they thought we were on a date.’

The trio then forced Santiago to the ground and dragged her by her legs. Her mother was not attacked.

‘He threw me across the restaurant,’ she said.

‘I don’t even know how far I went, but I went through tables, chairs, glasses.’

Santiago was treated at hospital, where she received six stitches in her knee. She still has to walk with a cane and said it would be several days before she could go back to work as a veterinary technician.

Police are searching for a white balding man in his mid-40s, and two white women in their mid-30s.

The New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating.

Watch the CBS2 report below:

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), visitwww.nypdcrimestoppers.com or text tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577.

The post Woman and mother mistaken for couple and attacked at New York restaurant appeared first on Gay Star News.

Darren Wee

www.gaystarnews.com/article/woman-and-mother-mistaken-for-couple-and-attacked-at-new-york-restaurant/

India’s Supreme Court to decide whether being gay is a ‘social evil’

The Supreme Court of India will be asked to decide whether homosexuality is a ‘social evil’ akin to wife burning or forcing a woman’s family to pay a dowry when she marries after the state of Gujarat denied a tax exemption to a movie due to its depiction of gay themes.

Meghdhanushya – The Color of Life, released in 2013, was the first ever film with homosexual themes made in the Gudjarati language.

Since 1997 the Gujarat State Government has provided tax relief for films that are made in Gujarati to encourage the local film industry.

However the state’s laws state that tax exemptions are not available for films that depict ‘evil customs, blind faith, sati, dowry and other social evils or those against national unity.’

The film’s director Kiran Kumar Rameshbhai Devmani took the state government to the Gujarat High Court and in February last year it directed the government to grant tax exemption to the film.

However the state government immediately appealed the decision, bringing the issue to the Supreme Court of India.

The state of Gujarat is arguing their decision was correct as the film has a ‘controversial’ subject matter and was granted an adults only certification by India’s censorship board.

A Supreme Court panel headed by Justice AR Dave has agreed to here the case.

The Indian Supreme Court previously struck down a Delhi High Court verdict that had decriminalized homosexuality in India, reinstating a colonial era sodomy law in January last year that was first put on the books in 1860.

Sati, also spelled ‘suttee,’ is the traditional Hindu custom of a wife following her husband into his funeral pyre and has been outlawed across India since 1861 – though further laws to discourage the practice were passed as recently as 1988.

The post India’s Supreme Court to decide whether being gay is a ‘social evil’ appeared first on Gay Star News.

Andrew Potts

www.gaystarnews.com/article/indias-supreme-court-to-decide-whether-being-gay-is-a-social-evil/

Review: A History Of The Unmarried By Stephen S. Mills

Given that gay marriage has dominated the American political landscape for far too long, it should come as no surprise that somebody has written a book of poems about it all. But A History Of The Unmarried by Stephen S. Mills is not just another book of poetry that takes on marriage equality as its theme. It is that, but a whole lot more. Mills’ work is a terrifically rich, timely, and a seductively personal and honest look at what it means to be two men in a loving partnership.

Frank O’Hara, an obvious mentor and muse to Mills, is alive in this work, which is both conversational and confessional – a diary, of sorts, but a good one. The poems bring us universalism in a highly personal voice. This work speaks because it is authentic. In fact, we are given too much of the truth at times. Mills queers queer poetry, and he made this reader blush more than once – a certain feat on both counts.

A History of the Unmarried is a book about marriage, gay marriage, and marriage politics, as experienced by the poet and his partner over the course of many years.

…And what does it mean for two men
to be protected
under the law?
To call each other husband?
And what does it mean to know
that if we ever want to leave
each other
it will have to be official?
Paperwork goes both ways…
(Excerpt from, “Slicing Limes for Dustin”)

But this collection is really a love letter, a love letter between two men that is so commanding and genuine that even the most conservative reader will end up questioning what constitutes a sincere and loving partnership – a marriage. It is not a simple kind of love that is portrayed between these covers, it’s messy and often crude, but it’s powerful and particular. Mills has a way with words, with truth, facts, that prevent the reader from doubting that love actually can exist between two men in a bed with three bodies – a notion perhaps not familiar to many of us.

The man next to me isn’t you.
He’s taller. Hair shorter. Skin
darker. You’re on the other side.
The sheets on the floor. The dog
scratching the door. Everyone
naked. Everyone still. The sudden
peace that comes from release.
We don’t know his name.
It doesn’t matter. He is a body.
You are a body. I am a body…
(Excerpt from, “Obama Says Same-Sex Couples Should Be Allowed To Marry, May 2012”)

A History of the Unmarried is plainspoken and accessible, yet refined and visually replete. Mills appreciates the interrogative form and constructs his questions with terrific skill, executing them with impeccable timing again and again. Every poem in this collection leaves the reader’s mind twisting and turning long after the printed page. Simply put, Mills’ poems are an inescapably thought-provoking and wonderfully engaging look into what it means to queer the most heteronormative institution of all time.

…She wants to know if we were “normal,”
who would carry the children? Who
would pack the lunches? Sew the Halloween
costumes? Punish the little brats
with a wooden paddle? She wants to know
whose body part goes where. How to
connect our dots…
(Excerpt from, “A Stranger Asks: Who’s The Man And Who’s The Woman?”)

Stephen S. Mills takes the Mad Men-era notion of marriage that many of us grew up on and feeds it to the proverbial family dog. Love doesn’t come with a set of rules, Betty Draper. Nor is it synonymous with monogamy, thank you very much, President Obama. A History of the Unmarried will have you second-guessing everything you thought you knew about love, marriage, relationships, sex, and boys who dedicate books to their mothers.

Highly recommended.

A History of the Unmarried
Sibling Rivalry Press
Paper, $13.00
ISBN: 978-1-937420-79-6

Michael Ernest Sweet is a Canadian writer and photographer. He lives in New York City.

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