Remembering Our LGBT Heroes as One World Trade Center Opens
The tallest building in the western hemisphere is now open on the site where 2,753 people died, two dozen of them members of the LGBT community.
Dawn Ennis
www.advocate.com/lgbt/2015/05/29/remembering-our-lgbt-heroes-one-world-trade-center-opens
Towleroad Guide to the Tube #1744
GOOGLE: Their big jump into virtual reality
TEXAS: AFA caller blames floods on witchcraft and sodomy
BEN & JERRY’S: Join the climate movement
EXPENSIVE WINE: It’s for suckers
For more recent Guides to the Tube, click HERE.
Kyler Geoffroy
www.towleroad.com/2015/05/towleroad-guide-to-the-tube-1744.html
One Ally's Story in Celebration of Pride Month
Holden Caulfield was my best friend the summer that I stopped eating. It was 1982, I was 12, and I was at overnight camp. I wanted nothing to do with the girls in my bunk. They were all about boobs, make up and boy talk. It felt so foreign to me. I just wasn’t interested, and they wanted nothing to do with me either. I sat on my bunk and read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye over and over again. Along with reading, starving myself was something I could do to gain control of a lonely summer. It nearly killed me. I was hospitalized for three months with anorexia, a secret shadow that has followed me around for the past 30 years. It was also a sort of self-imposed puberty blocker, I think. No part of me wanted to become the young women I saw around me. (I haven’t read anything about this as a strategy among transgender kids, even in the amazing recent resource book, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves. But, it resonates with me.)
When I was even younger — seven or eight, I’d guess — I wanted to be a boy. That’s how I think of it: it was aspirational more than anything else. I remember standing on a baseball diamond at day camp, playing terribly as always. A girl on the opposing team ran past me as she rounded the bases and growled, “Are you a boy or a girl?” She was intending to bully me, but I was thrilled that I was confusing her. I wore boy’s clothes, bought in the actual boys’ section of clothing stores, whenever I could. After a long fight about my outfit for a family wedding, I persuaded my mom to let me forgo a dress and wear a suit, a hideous green ’70s number with unfortunate flowers on it. I was convinced that my body was becoming a “boy’s body.” I wanted people to call me Leonard, the only boy’s name I could think of that started with an L.
I don’t remember when or how I stopped being or actively wanting to be Leonard. My memory is murky. For many years, I had no language or venue in which to talk about this. I know that I was always an extreme rule follower and people pleaser. I wasn’t going to get to be Leonard. I was being socialized to be a girl. So, I became one. I know that’s not something everyone can do. It’s certainly not something young people should do: fall in line with the gender they are being socialized into.
As I grew up, I faced — and continue to face — the structural forms of inequality and the daily microaggressions that come with presenting as a woman every day. These experiences have made me who I have become, and I would not take them back. I became an ardent and proud feminist, sociologist, teacher and mom. I married the boy who was my chess and White Sox buddy and my first crush in elementary school. And when I found gender, queer and LGBTQ studies, they filled my head and heart and I felt like I was home.
Leonard is still part of me. He wasn’t just some passing phase. I will never be fully comfortable having the physical traits that get me called a woman every day. There are so many things about “womanhood” that I feel I don’t do naturally at all. When I talk with trans guys about their stories or read memoirs and testimonials by trans men or transmasculine writers, I think, with a little jealousy and a lot of admiration: I might have been these guys. I also know in my bones that gender is a spectrum and not a binary. The binary is too restrictive, for me and, I’d argue, for everyone. Everyone.
But I am in quite a conventional package. There is no denying that I benefit from cisgender privilege and straight privilege every minute of my life. These intersect with my race and class privilege. I know this, and I try to pay as much attention to it in as many ways as I can, in my work and in my life. No need to be sanctimonious about it, I’m making it up as I go along. There is so much I don’t know, and everyday I try to put myself in situations where I’m learning. I have learned from many mentors — and hopefully one of the things they have taught me is when to lead, teach and speak, and when to follow, listen and just shut up.
This lifelong privilege is what determines that the letter that most accurately defines me in the alphabet soup that is current queer identity and politics is A — for ally — rather than LGBT or Q (though I’d like to think I can be both an A and at least a little bit Q). My allyship for LGBTQ social justice comes from my political commitments. It comes from loving and caring about so many amazing LGBT and queer people and feeling that my wellbeing is inextricably tied to their wellbeing. It also comes from my own story: a story I’ll continue to work to understand for the rest of my life.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Illinois Bill Protecting LGBT Youth from Dangerous Conversion Therapy Moves to Governor
Moments ago, the Illinois State Senate voted 34 -19 to pass House Bill 217, the Illinois Youth Mental Health Protection Act that will protect LGBTQ youth from the dangerous and discredited practices of conversion therapy.
HRC.org
Lesbian Posing As Gay Man Killed Closeted Married Lawyer During Fake Hookup
David Messerschmitt
When 30-year-old lawyer David Messerschmitt got a response to his Craigslist ad seeking some male affections outside his heterosexual marriage, he never could have expected the danger he’d be walking into.
Here are the details that show just how bizarre the case is: Messerschmitt went to meet “Chris Sanchez” at a hotel in Washington, D.C. in February, but little did he know that Sanchez was actually Jamyra Gallmon, 21, and her 19-year-old girlfriend Dominique Johnson posing as the fictitious gay man. The women used a photo of a male torso to seal the deal.
Related: Married D.C. Lawyer May Have Been Murdered During Secret Gay Hookup
Gallmon entered Messerschmitt’s room at the unnamed hotel and attempted to rob him. We’d say “that’s when things went wrong,” but this whole mess was clearly wrong from the very beginning.
The young woman claims that Messerschmitt trapped her in the room, triggering a previous trauma from a past assault.
At least that’s the argument she’s using in court to try and explain how she came to stab Messerschmitt seven times in the abdomen, groin and heart, killing him.
She made it out of the room with $40 cash and Messerschmitt’s metro card, and walked hand-in-hand with Johnson to a bus stop. Housekeeping found Messerschmitt’s body the next day, his arms bound in rainbow-colored zip ties.
We have to wonder how Messerschmitt could have trapped Gallmon while his arms were bound, unless of course her story is completely made up.
And it would appear that it is, as she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder while armed in court on Thursday.
Gallmon faces 18 to 25 years in prison and Wilson up to five.
Dan Tracer
United States Ranks the 26th Best Place in the World to Be Gay: LIST
A survey by dating and community site PlanetRomeo shows that the United States ranks 26th in the Gay Happiness Index, reports the Washington Post.
The Netherlands-based company collaborated with the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany to carry out an online survey of 115,000 gay men around the world.
The survey combines rankings on public opinion, public behavior and life satisfaction to provide a worldwide ranking on gay happiness.
While Iceland tops the list and the United States comes in at 26th, the ten worst countries are Kazakhstan, Ghana, Cameroon, Iran, Nigeria, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda.
The survey also found that in the top 20 countries, 37 percent of respondents were currently in a committed relationship with another man, while 3 percent were in a relationship with a woman.
Several countries, including Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia, Russia, Turkey and Hungary show a negative trend in the index.
Coming in at 127th on the index, Uganda is the worst place to be gay in the countries surveyed.
Although Ireland is one place ahead of the U.S. at 25th, it is likely to improve following the successful referendum on same-sex marriage.
See the full rankings, AFTER THE JUMP…
Jim Redmond
www.towleroad.com/2015/05/united-states-is-the-26th-best-place-in-the-world-to-be-gay.html
OutNYC Co-Owner Cut $2,700 Check to Ted Cruz
Ian Reisner first said the dinner he hosted for Ted Cruz was not a fundraiser, but he was just caught giving money to the candidate.
Neal Broverman
www.advocate.com/politics/politicians/2015/05/29/outnyc-co-owner-cut-2700-check-ted-cruz
Healing Homophobia
Homophobia
noun ho·mo·pho·bia ˌhō-mə-ˈfō-bē-ə
irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals
I saw it again today in a comment on Facebook. “I’m not homophobic because I’m not afraid of gays — but I just don’t think homosexuals should raise kids.”
News Flash: According to the definition in Merriam-Webster you are. Homophobic, that is. Because by definition the word “homophobia” transcends simple “irrational fear” to include “irrational aversion to” and “irrational discrimination against” homosexuality or homosexuals.
And discrimination against gay or lesbian parents raising children is inarguably irrational, as it flies in the face of all the data we have on effective parenting. Considering 75 peer-reviewed studies, Columbia Law School concluded “this research forms an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children.”
Then there was this. “Just because I’m against gay marriage doesn’t make me homophobic. Marriage should only be between one man and one woman because the idea of two men getting married just creeps me out.”
It’s a free country, and you are absolutely entitled to be creeped out about whatever you choose to be creeped out about. You are not, however, entitled to use that aversion (a dictionary word for “creeped out”) to keep other Americans from the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. So yes — according to Merriam-Webster — discrimination against the married couple next door just because they are a same-sex couple does, indeed, land you in the homophobic category.
Now, all of this is not to argue for throwing around the word homophobic in our discourse as we continue to work for the end to discrimination against LGBT people. As tempting as it might be, calling out your Facebook friend or debate opponent as a homophobe is pretty much guaranteed not to go anywhere productive.
It is, however, to argue that homophobia is a deeply ingrained, powerfully insidious reality we can and must continue to challenge by education and engagement. And just because it doesn’t look like the overt fear and hatred exemplified by folks like the Westboro Baptist bunch, doesn’t mean it isn’t exercising a pervasive influence. The good news is it is an influence that can be overcome like an infection that can be healed.
Here’s a great example — from a straight ally on my own Facebook page this morning:
Over the past 25 years I’ve pretty much been healed of my heterosexism. But I have to say that all of the “talk” in the world would not have brought me to where I am today — still learning and, I hope, a genuine advocate of equal rights across the entire spectrum.
So if it wasn’t talk that did it, what did? It was the brave men and women who had the courage to embrace me and to let me see them for who they really are, and I fell forever in love. I confess, I am far more impatient with this subject than many of my gay friends are, and THAT does puzzle and humble me.
I sometimes wish I had the grace to be more patient, but frankly, I do not. Let’s get on with this.
And there you have it. The “this” she refers to “getting on with” is full marriage equality in the Episcopal Church — something we’ll be working toward at our upcoming General Convention (June 22-July 3 in… wait for it… Salt Lake City.) But for me, this is “Exhibit A” of one of my most deeply held convictions:
Homosexuality is not what needs healing — homophobia is. And it not only can be healed, it is being healed… as exemplified in the story of my Facebook friend. So — like she said — Let’s get on with it.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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