Daily Archives: July 21, 2015
Daniel Day Lewis Experiences Unforgettable Forbidden Romance In “My Beautiful Launderette”
Daniel Day Lewis Experiences Unforgettable Forbidden Romance In “My Beautiful Launderette”
Stephen Frears’s landmark drama, My Beautiful Launderette was one of the four LGBT films released in 1985 that prompted Film Comment magazine to proclaim the arrival of the “Gay New Wave” (the others were Parting Glances, Desert Hearts and Dona Herlinda and Her Sons). Today marks the arrival of a brand new Blu-ray release of the film from the fabulous folks at the Criterion Collection. The Blu-ray includes a fresh new 2K digital transfer of the film and restored mono soundtrack plus conversations with director Frears and the film’s writer Hanif Kureishi.
Co-starring the hot young actor Daniel Day Lewis (in one if his earliest starring roles) as the white punk skinhead who falls in love with Pakistani laundry owner Gordon Warnecke, My Beautiful Launderette is a true gay classic that takes on homophobia and racism in Thatcher-era England and remains a favorite in the canon of LGBT cinema.
Thankfully Criterion landed on a cover design that incorporates the gay content of the film (Daniel Day Lewis licking Gordon Warnecke’s neck — on the right) as an update to the cheesy ’80s aesthetic of the original poster design (left) to appeal to contemporary audiences who will, hopefully, discover anew this wonderful romantic drama.
Jenni
New York Responds to Critics, Issues Statewide Guidelines for Trans Student Inclusion
New York Responds to Critics, Issues Statewide Guidelines for Trans Student Inclusion
Groups that have championed the cause of LGBT students say the new guidelines go a long way toward protecting vulnerable children.
Dawn Ennis
Robbie Rogers and other LGTBI athletes weigh in on the ‘perfect body’
Robbie Rogers and other LGTBI athletes weigh in on the ‘perfect body’
Robbie Rogers is among the LGBTI athletes who have been asked to weigh in on what they consider to be the ‘perfect body.’
‘I think of it in a different way then most people,’ Rogers tells BuzzFeed. ‘Most people would be, “Six-packs and pecs.” I don’t really care what I look like in a bathing suit during the season as long as I’m able to run eight or nine miles a game.’
The LA Galaxy player says he starts to think about his weight – things like body fat and muscle mass – when he is getting set to play a season for his Major League Soccer team.
Julie Shaw, basketball coach at LaVerne University, puts an emphasis on health over appearance.
‘A perfect body is a body that you’re comfortable with, one that is healthy for you,’ she says.
‘Perfection is I think at tomes unattainable – especially when you’re talking about health and your body. I think we all have to own our bodies and know what’s good for us and know what’s healthy for us.’
The post Robbie Rogers and other LGTBI athletes weigh in on the ‘perfect body’ appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
www.gaystarnews.com/article/robbie-rogers-and-other-lgtbi-athletes-weigh-in-on-the-perfect-body/
Former TV Star Reveals How Internalized Homophobia Led To Being The Drunkest Guy In The Room
Former TV Star Reveals How Internalized Homophobia Led To Being The Drunkest Guy In The Room
Novelist and former Channel 4 News culture editor Matt Cain may have been out, but he certainly wasn’t proud.
He’d endured a decade of homophobic bullying in grade school where he learned to eat his lunch in a toilet stall to avoid being spat at by other kids, or worse. On the bus he’d feel everyone’s pointed fingers as they chanted a single word: queer.
When he was around 16, he details in a first-person account on Buzzfeed, he discovered a magic solution to come out of his shell and get people to like him: alcohol.
After getting hammered, he was loud, confident, funny and above all else, popular. It didn’t occur to him that as he got older, his peers became less homophobic. The equation was simple and reliable — alcohol = likability.
“I was ready to do anything to get the party going and the first person everyone wanted at any drink-fuelled celebration. I went from being the most unpopular person in school to the most popular person at sixth-form college, and, later, university,” he writes.
He came out at 17 and began drunkenly sleeping around, and quickly learned that his self-deprecating stories of sexual encounters played great at the pubs among his straight friends.
“Yes, I was having fun – of sorts – but it continued right through my twenties, and as I approached 30 my life was revolving around an endless cycle of drinking, casual sex, and unhealthy relationships with unsuitable men,” he recounts. “I was constantly having to up the ante by getting drunker and dirtier just to maintain the momentum. On more than one occasion I found myself going home with a man with an unusual profession just because I thought it would make a good anecdote.”
Just after turning 30, he hit rock bottom. For the first time, his reliance on alcohol began to come into focus. Once it did, he looked deeper to discover why he was destroying himself in the first place.
“I was trying to annihilate my real self because there was something about that person that I still hated…I began to realise that even though I’d come to feel happy being gay, having grown up in a world where I was constantly told that my sexuality was disgusting and therefore I was disgusting had cast a long shadow of self-loathing.
“You don’t have to look far among gay men, particularly those brought up before attitudes began to change, to see this self-destructive pattern repeated and repeated.”
Five years into sobriety, he started to experiment with drinking again.
“I wrote myself a set of rules, the foremost of which is never to drink when unhappy. Also, to not sacrifice my dignity for the sake of entertaining others. And to ensure I go home before I’m tempted to jump into bed with an unsuitable man.
“I’ve had the occasional mishap. But on the whole, armed with more self-awareness and a desire to take care of myself, I’m doing well. The angry edge that used to accompany my nights out is gone. The objective, to punish myself, has disappeared.”
Now he channels all those juicy stories into his novels. His first, Nothing But Trouble, got its name from how people used to refer to him.
You can read his full story here, and please, let’s all stop punishing ourselves!
Dan Tracer
News: John Kasich, ‘Religious Freedom’, Philip of Macedon, Taye Diggs
News: John Kasich, ‘Religious Freedom’, Philip of Macedon, Taye Diggs
> Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) announces he’s running for President. But where does he stand on LGBT issues?
> Op-Ed in NYT: “Is Polygamy Next?”
> Mitch McConnell won’t rule out a vote on federal anti-gay ‘religious freedom’ (aka license to discriminate) bill.
> Gay mythical monsters need love too.
> Perez Hilton, who once was known for outing celebrities, weighs in on Gawker’s outing scandal.
> Charlize Theron invited President Obama to a strip club.
> Miley Cyrus to host the VMAs.
> Grave of Phillip II of Macedon, father to Alexander the Great, reportedly identified.
> Man eats Chipotle for 153 days in a row–and counting.
> Dan Savage eviscerates the ban on drag acts at Glasgow’s ‘Free Pride’: “The takeaway will be this: ‘If queer people can kick other queer people out of a pride celebration for making other queers uncomfortable… shouldn’t we be able to kick out queer people who make us uncomfortable, too?’”
> First look: Disney & Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur.
> Diner owner gets flack for yelling at a screaming child.
> Is Taye Diggs transforming the role of Hedwig?
> Clueless meets The Golden Girls.
> Donald Trump gives out Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number at rally in response to Graham calling Trump a jackass.
Probably getting a new phone. iPhone or Android?
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) July 21, 2015
The post News: John Kasich, ‘Religious Freedom’, Philip of Macedon, Taye Diggs appeared first on Towleroad.
Sean Mandell
News: John Kasich, ‘Religious Freedom’, Philip of Macedon, Taye Diggs
Friend Montage: July 2015
Canadian Professor Fired for Antigay Facebook Post
Canadian Professor Fired for Antigay Facebook Post
‘It’s the queers they should be hanging, not the flag,’ said professor Rick Coupland in a comment about the raising of rainbow flags.
Trudy Ring
www.advocate.com/education/2015/07/21/canadian-professor-fired-antigay-facebook-post
A Golden Girl’s Legacy Brings Hope To LGBT Youth
A Golden Girl’s Legacy Brings Hope To LGBT Youth
NEW YORK CITY — Despite a slew of recent gay rights victories, advocates estimate that hundreds of thousands of LGBT teens around the country are still rejected by their families. A lot of these kids end up homeless in New York City, which has only about 100 beds dedicated to LGBT youth.
At the Ali Forney Center, the largest agency dedicated to LGBTQ homeless youth in the country, about 1400 adolescents walk in looking for shelter every year, and there are about 150 young people on the center’s waiting list.
But this week, the problem got a little bit smaller. On Monday, the center held a ground-breaking ceremony for the 18-bed Bea Arthur Residence in Manhattan. Several dozen advocates, community leaders and LGBT youth gathered in the heat to eat cheesecake and celebrate the unlikely donor for whom the building will be named.
Back in 2005, when the Ali Forney Center could only shelter 12 kids a time, “Golden Girls” star Bea Arthur had flown to New York to lend the organization her support. Her one-woman show, “Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends,” raised more than $40,000 for the center, and Arthur contributed a personal donation as well.
But when Arthur passed away in 2009, the center was struggling to keep up with rent, food and payroll payments. Carl Siciliano, the center’s director, was driving to work when he got a call from a landlord threatening to bring eviction proceedings against the center. A Roman Catholic and former Benedictine monk, Siciliano pulled his car to the side of the road and prayed for help.
“I prayed to all my favorite saints, and everyone I could think of in heaven that cared about me or our kids. I included Bea in those prayers, knowing how good she had been to us,” Siciliano told the Huffington Post.
When Siciliano arrived at work that day, one of Arthur’s closest friends called to tell him that the Ali Forney Center was at the top of Arthur’s list of charities in her will. Several weeks later, a check for $300,000 arrived from her estate.
“At the time, it was the height of the recession, and I don’t know how we would have survived without that great gift and that support,” Siciliano told the crowd gathered on Monday.
Renovations on the building that will become the Bea Arthur Residence are expected to begin later this month, using funds from the city and private donors. Corey Johnson, a New York City councilman and a member of the LGBT Caucus who was present at the ground-breaking ceremony, summed up the day’s sentiments: “This is more than just bricks and mortar. This is, I think, a beacon of hope across the city, that our city wants to take care of our most vulnerable,” he said.
Like most of the speakers, Johnson said he had a particular connection with Bea Arthur. “It shouldn’t have been a surprise to my family that I was gay,” he said, “because I was a major ‘Golden Girls’ fan in high school.”
LGBT youth in New York City have far more resources to draw on today, said Steve Ashkinazy, who opened the first shelter for LGBT homeless youth in the city in 1992 and also attended Monday’s ceremony. “But what hasn’t changed too much is what happens in individual families, individual neighborhoods, individual streets, when these kids come out,” he said.
“Young people are very dependent on their immediate surroundings,” Ashkinazy added. “They can’t move to a different neighborhood, a new apartment. If the people they depend on aren’t going to support them, then all of the great advances that we’ve seen around us don’t quite affect them. When their immediate world is so unwelcoming and so unsafe, it feels as if the whole world is like that.”
Many LGBT homeless youth say that few environments are less welcoming and more unsafe than homeless shelters that aren’t specifically set up for young LGBT people. Manny Collazo, a 23-year-old intern for the Ali Forney Center, said that he was “constantly harassed” at other shelters because he was gay. “I’d rather sleep on the subway,” he said.
After he started staying at the Ali Forney Center, Collazo got a target tattooed on his left forearm. “There were so many times I was so close to giving up, and everybody at the Ali Forney Center would tell me, ‘No, man, keep your eye on the target.’”
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Lesbian fired by Catholic school wants to raise awareness about discrimination within the church
Lesbian fired by Catholic school wants to raise awareness about discrimination within the church
Margie Winters isn’t even sure she’d want her job back at Waldron Mercy Academy but she wants everyone to know why she doesn’t work there anymore.
Winters was fired last month as the Catholic school’s director of religious education because she is married to a woman. She’s been married since 2007 and had worked at the school in Merion, Pennsylvania, for eight years.
It all happened because a parent complained directly to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia which has spoken out in favor of the firing.
‘There was never a conflict with my job,’ Winters tells CNN. ‘The conflict is with the understanding of the teachings of the Church. For me it’s a conflict of vision of who we are as Church. … The marriage issue goes to who I am as a person, and who God made me as.’
Winters is not speaking out to win her job back and does not plan to sue the school. Instead, she wants to raise awareness of the discrimination going on in the Catholic Church.
Her wife Andrea says in the CNN interview: ‘When Christ walked the earth, he railed against the hierarchy for trying to exclude people, by using the laws of the faith at that time to exclude people. If that’s not happening now, I don’t know what else this is.
Winters had been upfront with school administrators at the time of her hiring and was advised to keep a low profile which she says she did.
There has been community outrage over her firing plenty of support for the couple. A Stand With Margie Facebook page has been created and has more than 11,000 ‘Likes’ and a Go Fund Me page for Winters has raised more than $16,000.
The funds will go directly to Winters for her to cover any costs involved with the loss of her job.
‘I think people are just in disbelief,’ Winters says. ‘In particular, I think it just goes against who they are. This community has claimed mercy and openness and trust and hospitality. They’re struggling with the tension between this decision and who we are.’
The post Lesbian fired by Catholic school wants to raise awareness about discrimination within the church appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
