Friday, February 28, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
LGBT Women's News: Kristy McNichol, 'Empty Nest' And 'Family' Actress, Comes Out As Lesbian In People Magazine
Yesterday, Kristy McNichol, best known for her roles on the TV shows "Family" and "Empty Nest," joined the ranks of celebrities who have come out of the closet.
People reports that McNichol, who was beloved for playing Buddy Lawrence in the '70s show "Family," for which she won an Emmy, and later Barbara Weston on the "Golden Girls" spin-off "Empty Nest," revealed she is a lesbian because she is "approaching 50" and wants to "be open about who I am."
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/07/kristy-mcnichol-comes-out-as-lesbian_n_1191204.html?utm_hp_ref=lesbian
Monday, February 24, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
LGBT Women's News: The Forbidden Lesbian Sex Act
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Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Monday, February 17, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Saturday, February 15, 2014
LGBT Women's News: Ellen Page Comes Out As Gay
The 26-year-old actress told the crowd "I’m here today because I am gay," adding "and because maybe I can make a difference. To help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility."
Page was speaking at the Human Rights Campaign's THRIVE conference, an event supporting LGBTQ youth. Page spoke of the pressures of a life in the spotlight, and the toll that celebrity can take on one's life.
"It’s weird because here I am, an actress, representing -- at least in some sense -- an industry that places crushing standards on all of us," the star of the upcoming movie "X-Men: Days of Future Past" said. "Not just young people, but everyone. Standards of beauty. Of a good life. Of success. Standards that, I hate to admit, have affected me."
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Page expressed displeasure with gender stereotyping, and pointed to examples of "courage all around us," including football player Michael Sam, "Orange Is the New Black" starLaverne Cox and musicians Tegan and Sara Quinn.
The Human Rights Campaign posted Page's remarks online. Watch the amazing warm reception to her coming out at minute 5:20 in the video above posted by the Human Rights Campaign.
Page has previously advocated for women's empowerment and lamented sexism in the entertainment industry.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Women's News: As Gay Marriage Suits Multiply, Backers In Kentucky Bring Home A Victory
By BRETT BARROUQUERE and DAVID CRARY
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Kentucky must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, part of an unprecedented barrage of marriage-equality lawsuits in states where voters have overwhelmingly opposed recognition of gay and lesbian couples.
U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn II struck down part of the gay-marriage ban that Kentuckians had approved in 2004, saying it treated gays and lesbians "in a way that demeans them."
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/12/gay-marriage_n_4777136.html?&ir=Gay%20Voices&utm_hp_ref=gay-voices
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
LGBT Women's News: Confusion Between 'Diverse Opinions' and 'Oppressive Characterizations'
Warren J. Blumenfeld
College of Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst
"Why do Leftists have such a hard time with the concept of Free Speech? They are so intolerant of those who disagree with them and seem to always want to censor ideas they do not like... I thought Leftists or at Liberals claimed to love Diversity. How about showing it?"("What the Duck: Justice or Lost Opportunity")
This respondent's reply to my recent Huffington Post editorial blog on the controversy swirling around Phil Robertson, the patriarch on A&E's popular show Duck Dynasty, reflects larger questions on issues of free speech, multiculturalism, dominant group privilege, and oppression.
In my editorial, I challenged Roberson's comments in a GQ interview focusing on homosexuality, "race" relations, and socioeconomic class:
On the topic of homosexuality, Robertson quipped that 'It seems like, to me, a vagina -- as a man -- would be more desirable than a man's anus,' and he proclaimed that same-sex sexuality leads to promiscuity with multiple male and female partners, while likening it to bestiality. He concluded by paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 6-9 from the Christian testaments: 'Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers -- they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right.' Three years prior to his GQ interview, Phil Robertsonasserted as a guest speaker at the Berean Bible Church in Pottstown, Pennsylvania: "Women with women, men with men, they committed indecent acts with one another and they received in themselves the due penancey for their perversions. They're full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God haters, they are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless, they invent ways of doing evil."Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-j-blumenfeld/confusion-between-diverse_b_4515954.html?utm_hp_ref=lesbianOn race relations and socioeconomic class: During his youth growing up in the Jim Crow South, Robertson talked about the "singing and happy" black people whom he worked alongside hoeing and picking cotton since, as Roberson phrased it, he himself was "white trash." "I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once." Then taking aim at current safety-net programs, he asserted: "Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues."
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
LGBT News: Black History Month: 24 Prominent Black LGBT Icons
As we recognize and celebrate Black History Month, it is important to take a moment to remember and honor the contributions of LGBT black figures who have shone throughout the course of our nation's history.
These black LGBT icons, while often invisible or erased from the dominant queer narrative, have been at the heart of our struggle for rights and inclusion.
In fact, what many refer to as the LGBT movement's beginning, the rebellion against the police at the Stonewall Inn, was predominately instigated by queer and trans youth of color.
In celebration of Black History Month and the journey of queer people throughout time, check out the selection of 24 influential black LGBT icons below. Who else would you add to the list?
- Alice WalkerWriter Alice Walker earned a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple, which was later adapted into film. As a civil rights activist she walked in the 1963 March on Washington and volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.
- Bayard RustinBlack civil rights activist Bayard Rustin was an adamant supporter of gay rights. He was also Martin Luther King Jr.'s advisor and personal secretary. Rustin helped organize the 1963 March on Washington.
- Patrik Ian Polk
Getty Images
Patrik Ian Polk is an openly gay film director who is known for his films on the African American LGBT experience and relationships. Polk's 2008 film "Noah's Ark: Jumping The Broom" won a GLAAD Award for Best Feature Film and was nominated for three NAACP awards. - Audre LordeCarribean American writer Audre Lorde was actively involved in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. She was also an activist for civil rights and feminist movements. Her poetry focuses on the female experience, race, and sexuality.
- Keith Boykin
WikiMedia:
Keith Boykin was an editor of The Daily Voice and a White House aide to President Bill Clinton. After Clinton's election, Boykin became a director of specialty media. He became the highest-ranking openly gay person in the Clinton White House and helped organize the nation's first meeting between gay and lesbian leaders and a U.S. President. Since his time in the White House, Boykin has written a number of books on gay issues. - Bruce Nugent
WikiMedia:
Bruce Nugent was a writer and painter of the Harlem Renaissance. His short story "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" has been regarded by many as the first publication by an African American that openly discussed homosexuality. - Wanda Sykes
Getty
Emmy award-winning comedian Wanda Sykes is actively involved in the LGBT community. She came out at a same-sex marriage rally in Las Vegas for Proposition 8 in 2006, having married her partner Alex a month earlier. Sykes was also the first African American woman and openly LGBT featured entertainer at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in 2009. - Tracy Chapman
WikiMedia:
Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman is most well-known for her Grammy Award-winning music. Though very quiet about her private life, she also dated writer Alice Walker in the mid-1990s. Chapman is also a social activist and performed at Nelson Mandela's 70th Birthday Tribute, which raised money for South Africa's Anti-Apartheid Movement and AIDSLifeCycle. In 2004, Chapman received an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts by her alma mater, Tufts University, recognizing her commitment to social activism. - Langston HughesWriter Langston Hughes' innovative poetry and stories lead him to became an icon of the Harlem Renaissance. Although he was known for his strong political views, he remained closeted throughout the course of his life.
- Laverne Cox
Angela Weiss via Getty Images
Laverne Cox is a transgender activist and actress, best known for her role on Netflix's "Orange Is The New Black" and her work with GLAAD. She remains one of the the most prominent and outspoken transgender advocates in the entertainment industry. - Sheryl Swoopes
Getty
Three time WNBA MVP, Sheryl Swoopes was the first player to be signed to the WNBA after its inception. Not only was she a star on the court, but she was one of the first high profile athletes to come out publicly and later voted one of the Top 15 players in WNBA history. - RuPaulA long-time fixture in the New York nightlife community, RuPaul rose to prominence with his hit single and music video 'Supermodel (Of The World)" in 1993. Credited as the master of transformation, his career is still going strong with the massive success of his reality television show "RuPaul's Drag Race."
- James BaldwinLegendary writer James Baldwin pushed boundaries with his novelGiovanni's Room, which focused on an American man living in Paris and his relationships with various men. Baldwin lived most of his life as an expatriate in Paris where he attempted to escape American prejudice towards blacks and gay individuals.
- Isis King
American Apparel
King was the first transgender model to be featured on the reality fashion competition "America's Next Top Model." She was seen on both the 11th and 17th "cycles" of the show and recently became American Apparel's first transgender model. - Janet Mock
Jamie McCarthy via Getty Images
The former staff editor of People magazine's website, Janet Mock has become one of the most visible transgender icons following her public coming out in 2011. Mock released her first book Redefining Realness in February 2014 and pioneered the #girlslikeus campaign, a movement encouraging trans women to live visibly. - Alvin AileyChoreographer Alvin Ailey revolutionized modern dance and formed the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in New York in 1958. Ailey was known for his multi-racial company at a time when many talented black dancers were excluded from performances. In 1992, three years after his death, Ailey was inducted into the C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance.
- Frank Ocean
AP
No mainstream black male hip-hop artist had ever come out until Frank Ocean did in July 2012, just before he debuted his first solo album "Channel Orange." The singer-songwriter posted a Tumblr post which read, in part, "4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. Everyday almost. And on the days we were together, time would glide.” After that, Ocean received support from fellow hip-hop artists Jay-Z (and wife, Beyoncé), 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes and more. Daryl Hannah, director of media and community partnerships for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said, "[The support for Frank is] an extension of the overall kind of support we’re seeing across the country for LGBT people, and not just in a broad sense, but specifically from iconic members of the black community.” - John Amaechi
Getty
After retiring from the NBA in 2007, John Amaechi became the first NBA player to come out publicly. In his memoir Man in The Middle, he discusses his career and life as a closeted athlete. - Dee Rees
Getty
Film director Dee Rees is behind the movie "Pariah," which follows a 17-year-old African American teenager struggling with her sexuality. The film was a hit at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. - Felicia Pearson
Getty Images
Felicia Pearson is best known for her role as "Snoop" on The Wire. Pearson is a co-founder of a youth drama organization named "Moving Mountains," which aims to stop youth violence, teach performing arts and help kids stay off the streets and out trouble. In her memoir Grace After Midnight, Pearson opens up about coming out and her experiences on the streets of Baltimore. - E. Lynn Harris
Getty Images
E. Lynn Harris was best known for his writing, which explored African American men who were closeted or on the "down-low." After quitting his job as a computer salesmen Harris discovered his passion for writing. He sold his first self-published novel, Invisible Life, out of the trunk of his car. Ten of his 11 novels made The New York Times Best Seller list.
Friday, February 7, 2014
LGBT Women's News: How Far Has LGBT Health Research Progressed Since Bush-Era 'Big Chill'?
Scout, Ph.D
Director of CenterLink's Network for LGBT Health Equity
For any longtime LGBT health researcher, 2003 stands out -- it was the year that the Traditional Values Coalition compiled a list of research studies by the National Institutes of Health and slipped that list to Congress. What follows rocked the LGBT research world and was described by the New York Times as "Big Chill at the Lab". Established investigators were put on edge for months, living with the threat that extensively peer reviewed research would be defunded in a flame of political backlash. Many anxiously waited the call to defend their studies before Congress. Extensively-justified research projects that independent scientists had judged to be worth enough to achieve NIH funding were now reduced to sensational headlines. After lambasting a funded project for being based on the supposedly frivolous assumption that American Indian transgender people were understudied, Rep. Toomey asks on the House of Representatives floor, "Who thinks this stuff up? And, worse, who decides to actually fund these things? Well, unfortunately, NIH has done so."
Eventually, many of us survived the politics of 2003 but the months of attacks on LGBT and HIV related research had left a long shadow on my colleagues. According to a later study by Kempner, some researchers even left the arena, others stopped researching hot topics, and most learned to hide their studies by avoiding using any obvious words like gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. In effect, LGBT health research had to go into the closet to survive.
During these years I was an idealistic new LGBT health investigator, working on my dissertation exploring the social determinants of transgender health. I remember thinking to myself... "I'm screwed. Why in the world am I training into a field that people are leaving?" Just like I learned statistics and ethics, I also learned which code-words helped hide the true nature of LGBT research. I also watched federal allies at HHS get muzzled, or moved to the career equivalent of Siberia.
Fast forward to today, a decade has passed, so many things have changed and nicely, scientists instead of politicians are the people who we again trust to judge if a health study is worthwhile.
Which is why I was particularly dismayed at the findings from a study I helped coordinate with colleagues from Boston University. The just released study,Research Funded by the National Institutes of Health on the Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations (Coulter RW, Kenst KS, Bowen DJ, Scout. Am J Public Health. 2013 Dec 12. [Epub ahead of print]), takes a big view approach to seeing how many NIH studies mention LGBT populations in some capacity. Coulter & Kenst both combed through 127k individual abstracts from NIH research funded from 1989 through 2011, looking for any hint the studies had any appreciable focus on LGBT people. We thought of all the words we could come up with, including the coded ones so widely used in past years. We suspected the study would help show gaps, and that it certainly did.
The first news was how little research there was. Over all those years, only 0.5 percent of any abstracts had any mention of LGBT populations, even if only as a variable of interest. This wasn't a great surprise, we know that LGBT variables are not yet routinely included in data collection, which is a huge shame because it effectively masks our health problems. But beyond that, we were surprised to see how little research had been funded on LGBT issues that went beyond HIV or sexual health. Even though I think of LGBT health in terms of the range of our major health issues, tobacco use, cancer, access to care, mental health problems, youth suicide, and HIV... over 80 percent of the funded research was on HIV and sexual health. In fact there were incredibly few studies in some of our largest health areas, such as tobacco use and cancer.
There were other imbalances too, too little research on women, on transgender people, on youth, and on elders. Overall the picture was grim, we need more of all of this work.
Now 2013 has actually been a banner year for NIH taking steps in this area. In January they put out a response to the earlier Institute of Medicine report on LGBT Health. One key step was convening an LGBTI Research Coordinating Committee, which would continue to give input on strategies to make their activities large and small more inclusive. Then midyear their new LGBTI liaison, Dr. Rashada Alexander, brought researchers in for the first listening session. It was at that session that I really think some of the management "got it" -- listening rapt to our cataloging of many of the barriers to our health, and our health research. Since then there've been more listening sessions and I know they're doing more to outreach to LGBT youth for training and LGBT adults for careers. (If you want to hear more about a January webinar on their training and scholarship programs, follow lgbthealthequity.wordpress.com). All of these steps are exactly the stuff from which change is made. Kudos to NIH for leaning into this effort.
While I love this NIH movement, one part of our analysis showed me just how slow the change has been since the Big Chill of 2003. The graph tracking percent of all NIH studies which focus on broader LGBT health topics (beyond HIV or sexual health)... isn't appreciably climbing. Frankly it's hard to tell a difference in the percent of studies found in 2003 versus 2011. While I'd like to think all LGBT health research has come out of the closet and really recovered from those days when lawmakers mocked it on the House floor, once we finally crunched the numbers, the biggest takeaway is how much has not changed since 2003. The thermostat is definitely being turned up, but evidence shows it is still a chilly environment at NIH for LGBT research studies.
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scout-phd/how-far-have-we-come-in-l_b_4468902.html?utm_hp_ref=lesbian
Thursday, February 6, 2014
LGBT News: Noah vs. Brandon and the Posture of Pursuing LGBTQ Equality
Amelia Markham
Director of Outreach, Planting Peace
During the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's there were multiple groups advocating for minority empowerment. The two most notable schools of thought that attracted national attention and stimulated the social change that would follow were arguably those represented by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior and one of a different but just as influential thread, Malcolm X. The former provided rhetoric we could call "accommodating," where MLKJ and like-minded others would employ speech and action that was moved by a means of pacifism, civil disobedience, and peaceful protest. However, Malcolm X and like-minded others pursued change with what many would call "aggression," employing assertive discourse, advocacy for self-defense, Black Nationalism, and over all more confrontational methodology.
Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amelia-markham/noah-vs-brandon-the-postu_b_4556517.html?utm_hp_ref=lesbian
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