President Obama is “Proud” of Trailblazing Soccer Star

In a press conference today honoring the LA Galaxy, President Obama gave a special shout-out to American soccer star Robbie Rogers.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/president-obama-is-proud-of-trailblazing-soccer-star?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Gay Rabbi Wants You To Join Grindr Then Come Over To His Place For Shabbat Dinner

“There are a ton of Jews of all stripes, especially people who have nothing to do with organized religion,” Matt Green tells The Daily Beast. “Why not try getting to them on Grindr?”

24-year-old Green is in his second year as a rabbinical student at New York City’s Hebrew Union College. He’s quickly becoming known as the “Grindr Rebbe.”

Green, who is gay, says he first got the idea to encourage gay Jewish men to join Grindr when he joined the popular dating app during his first year of rabbinical school in Israel.

“People were contacting me saying are you Jewish? How was Israel?” Green says. “Then when I mentioned I was in rabbinical school, everyone kept asking about Kashrut [Jewish dietary laws], and Judaism!”

“It occurred to me that what happened on Grindr was speaking to a Jewish communal need,” Green says. “People wanted to talk about being Jewish and Jewish things.”

But it didn’t stop there. After Green returned to Brooklyn, he continued to receive messages from men on Grindr hoping to talk about Jewish things. So last fall he submitted a grant proposal for a Be Wise Fellowship in Entrepreneurship grant, a program dedicated to responding to social, cultural, and technological changes in the American Jewish landscape.

In his proposal, Green argued that Grindr is an excellent tool for curious or unaffiliated Jews to locate one another, build a social network, and share in a Jewish experience, calling it an “untapped place for outreach potential.”

We suppose that’s one way of looking at it.

Much to his surprise, Green was awarded the grant. And he wasted no time getting to work, hosting two large Shabbat dinners for guys he met on Grindr. Just last weekend he had a dozen people over for dinner.

“Shabbat has largely consisted of long, hilarious, and Jewishly rich dinners,” Green explains. “So many people don’t have Judaism in their lives, so I said ‘Look, come over, and we’ll talk about Woody Allen and eat kugel.’”

The dinner included lighting the traditional Shabbat candles, making Kiddush, and blessing the challah bread. As they dined, Green says, guests talked about “relevant issues in the sphere of queer Jewish life.”

Sounds like a very lovely and spiritual evening. Although we can’t help but wonder what happened after dinner. Green didn’t say. But he did say he’s planning on hosting more events in the future.

“Kabbalat Shabbat services are on the horizon,” he says. He also hopes to host a holiday party for Purim, a Jewish holiday in March.

Related stories:

Brother Nathanael Is Surprisingly Spry As He Reveals The Jewish Plot To Make America Gay

PHOTOS: Nice Jewish Boys Make The “Cut” In NYC

Rabbi Bans Students From Eating Soy For Fear It May Turn Them Gay

Graham Gremore

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/_sjnX3IDoOk/gay-rabbi-wants-you-to-join-grindr-then-come-over-to-his-place-for-shabbat-dinner-20150202

Obama Praises Robbie Rogers for 'Blazing Trail' as Out Gay Player at L.A. Galaxy White House Visit: VIDEO

Andy Towle

www.towleroad.com/2015/02/rogerswh.html

WATCH: Mike Huckabee Says Being Gay Is Like Drinking, Swearing

The potential presidential candidate says he can oppose marriage equality and have gay friends — it’s like being a teetotaler who’s friends with drinkers.

read more

Trudy Ring

www.advocate.com/politics/politicians/2015/02/02/watch-mike-huckabee-says-being-gay-drinking-swearing

Mary Cheney, Here's Why Drag and Blackface Are Different (VIDEO)
Last week Mary Cheney asked why blackface is bad but drag isn’t. Here’s what she wrote:

Why is it socially acceptable … for men to put on dresses, make up and high heels and act out every offensive stereotype of women (bitchy, catty, dumb, slutty, etc.) — but it is not socially acceptable … for a white person to put on blackface and act out offensive stereotypes of African Americans?

Shouldn’t both be ok or neither?

And can you believe that made people upset? Usually my videos are about what’s happening with marriage equality over on my show Marriage News Watch, but I just have to weigh in here, because I love drag, I work with drag queens, and I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t know how to answer her question. Even if we think it’s a dumb question, we should have a smart, simple answer. So let’s talk about it: Why is drag different from blackface?

On the surface, yeah, there are similarities between blackface and drag. They’re both one group posing as another group. They both rely on exaggerated stereotypes of people who are disempowered. They’re both over-the-top caricatures.

But blackface is inherently racist. You can’t take the racism out of it. Drag, on the other hand, you can easily separate from misogyny. Most drag — in fact, almost all drag — is about strong, powerful, admirable female characters. With blackface black people are the butt of the joke. But with drag it’s not women who are the butt of the joke but rules about gender roles. Nobody looks at a drag queens and thinks, “Oh, yeah, that’s what women are really like” — the way that a lot of Americans did with blackface and minstrel shows.

And there’s something else going on with drag. Unlike stock minstrel characters, drag characters are a personal expression of the performer. Drag queens aren’t just imitating female stereotypes; they’re expressing how fluid their own gender can be. That’s why a performer’s drag name, and drag family, and drag costume are so important to them. Blackface performers, on the other hand, aren’t expressing anything internal. They’re not asserting their personal racial fluidity. All that blackface does is lie about what people of color are like.

Now there is, of course, bad drag. Bad drag is just a man wearing a dress, not making any effort to perform, or create a character, or express anything. With bad drag, the whole joke is that it’s supposedly embarrassing for a man to be seen acting feminine. That’s not real drag. That’s just ridiculing women and queers, and if you want to be fancy about it, it’s perpetuating the cycle of patriarchal hegemony. That’s bad.

I’m saying that drag is not demeaning to women, but maybe you shouldn’t completely take my word for it, because I’m not a woman. A lot of the people publicly weighing in right now are men. And that’s great, but since we’re talking about how drag affects women, it’s important to, you know, actually listen to what women are saying about it.

And this gets to another difference between drag and blackface. Not only are women not usually offended by drag, but women actually perform drag themselves. Even little girls do drag when they dress up as princesses. Those are exaggerated feminine characters, an expression of an attraction to or curiosity about gender roles. Drag is how you explore who you are, or who you can become. As RuPaul says, we’re born naked and the rest is drag. No one has ever said we’re born naked and the rest is a minstrel show.

So let’s sum it up. Next time someone asks why drag is OK and blackface isn’t, you can tell them that drag is an expression of yourself, whereas blackface is an attack on someone else; blackface reinforces an imbalance of power, whereas drag disassembles an imbalance of power; blackface is a relic, whereas drag is what we all do, every day, every time we put on clothes.

So hopefully that clears things up, and the next time we’re talking about Mary Cheney, we’re talking instead about how she supports the disastrous Keystone pipeline. Or how she donated money to Republican candidates who opposed the freedom to marry, like Mitt Romney, and Kelly Ayotte, and Rob Portman (before he changed his mind), and Sam Brownback, for crying out loud. In 2012 Gov. Brownback recommended that Kansas keep a law that allows the police to arrest you just for being gay. Cheney apparently liked that so much that, two years later, her consulting firm spent over half a million dollars on Brownback’s reelection campaign. She also supported the reelection of Florida Gov. Rick McCollum; he’s the guy who hired “ex-gay” abuser George Rekers to testify against marriage equality. Rekers was later spotted returning from a European vacation with a rent boy, and we really haven’t heard a lot from him since then.

So if Mary really wants to talk about LGBT issues, she could start by apologizing for any number of those mistakes. Or for completely misrepresenting what drag is when she wrote last week that performers “act out every offensive stereotype of women (bitchy, catty, dumb, slutty, etc).” In a million years, that is not even a fragment of what drag is. If she really misunderstands drag that deeply, maybe she should try spending a little less time with Sam Brownback and a little more time around other gay people.

Big thanks to all my friends who commented on Facebook about this issue and messaged me privately to share their thoughts. I couldn’t have articulated any of this without your help, so please, keep talking, and let me know what you think. I’m @mattbaume on Twitter. And if you’re in Seattle, let’s go catch a drag show sometime.

www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-baume/heres-why-drag-and-blackf_b_6598636.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Petrow Talks Chick-fil-A: “He Can’t Eat His Chicken and Have His Principles, Too”

In this week’s advice column for The Washington Post, Steven Petrow answered a question concerning one of HRC’s least favorite restaurants: Chick-fil-A.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/petrow-talks-chick-fil-a-he-cant-eat-his-chicken-and-have-his-principles-to?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

ACT UP Gathers To Protest HRC’s Annual Black Tie Gala; Here’s Why

HRC’s annual fundraising gala in New York City last weekend had some unlikely protesters. Not Westboro or any other antigay organizations, but rather ACT UP, the HIV/AIDS political advocacy group formed in the ’80s.

Specifically, ACT UP was seeking to raise awareness of what they feel is a shortcoming of HRC’s equality index used to rate Fortune 500 companies on their treatment of LGBT employees — that HIV issues aren’t properly incorporated into the scores.

Activists gathered outside the event at the Waldorf Astoria, where tickets went for a cool $475, to voice their message.

ACT UP explained their reasoning in more detail via their Facebook page:

HRC has created an LGBT equality index to score the Fortune 500 companies, but there’s no mention of HIV and the thousands of LGBT people with HIV in the workplace. We demand that HRC include several criteria to evaluate companies on their treatment of employees living with HIV, as well as their contributions to organizations and causes relate [sic] to reducing the incidence of HIV among LGBT Americans, particularly among the young. For over 30 years, too many have been fired, harassed, outed and discriminated against at work for having HIV. Also at this gala, many of the corporations that HRC will honor actively work against the interests of middle-class and poor Americans, including people with HIV. ACT UP denounces this frequent practice of ‘”pinkwashing” whereby corporations with policies and practices that undermine the people’s well-being are given positive publicity in exchange for maintaining LGBT-friendly (or just equal) workplaces. This is short-sighted and divisive. We demand that HRC develop other criteria that takes into account the impact of companies’ policies on every American, not just LGBT Americans.

Here are some photos from the protest:

h/t: Joe My God

Dan Tracer

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/ktsZGeFyCGM/act-up-gathers-to-protest-hrcs-annual-black-tie-gala-heres-why-20150202

Avengers 2: Age Of Ultron Super Bowl TV Spot – VIDEO

Christian Walters

www.towleroad.com/2015/02/age-of-ultron-super-bowl-tv-spot-video.html

Op-ed: The Fearless Pearl of Africa

Writer and photographer David Robinson on how a trans Ugandan embarked on a journey to embrace herself and change the world.

read more

Denver David Robinson

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/02/02/op-ed-fearless-pearl-africa

4 Women Wore Hijabs For A Day To See What Life's Like For Some Muslim Women
If you are a woman who chooses to wear a hijab, do people treat you differently? Does the experience impact the way you feel about yourself? In a new Buzzfeed video, four female staffers — who don’t normally wear the head covering — try to answer those questions.

The traditional Muslim headscarf is sometimes viewed as oppressive and sexist in Western cultures. “I feel like it’s an American thing that if you see a woman with a hijab it’s like a symbol of oppression,” one woman said at the beginning of the video. By the end, however, the four women concluded that as long as a woman makes a personal choice to wear the hijab, no one has a right to judge that decision.

The women in the video spoke with Edina Lekovic, the director of policy and programming of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, to learn what the hijab stands for and how to put it on correctly. Lekovic also shared her personal experiences with the headscarf, telling the four women that the first time she wore her hijab a woman came up to her and said, “Honey you’re in America now, you don’t have to wear that here.”

Not knowing how people would react, all of the women who participated in the video were nervous to wear the hijab in public. Each of them received some stares and one reported that she was “patted down extra” at the airport. One of the women even shared a moment with another woman wearing a hijab, saying that she “recognized and smiled back at me. Like saying ‘OK sister, we’re on the same mission.’ We had this kind of female connection. It was very sweet.”

Towards the end of the video, one of the women perfectly summed up the conclusion all four of them reached: “As a woman you should be able to wear whatever you want, and if [a hijab is] what you want to wear that’s what you should wear.”

H/T WifeyTV

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/02/women-wear-hijabs-for-a-day-buzzfeed_n_6594206.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices