Playground for LGBTI families to open in Florida

Families of all shapes and sizes are to benefit from a new interactive playground in Florida, USA, specifically designed to create a safe space for LGBTI parents, children, and straight allies to network.

The playground will be built at the Fort Lauderdale’s Pride Center – a community center which provides social services including counselling, mentoring, exercise classes and HIV testing – in order to support the growing number of LGBTI families in the South Florida area.

Surveys of local LGBTI parents have indicated there are insufficient resources and services locally, and that same-sex couples parenting children have their own set of unique challenges.

‘With the national legislation of gay marriages and state adoptions by gay couples, we are evolving to fulfill our mission,’ said Robert Boo, CEO of The Pride Center.

‘As our stakeholders expand their families, we must be prepared to respond to this changing environment and the playground build is an ideal start.’

When completed, the playground will be roughly half the size of an NBA basketball court (2,500 sq ft), and will use ideas from local children to ensure the space supports their creative development.

Following a design day last month (August 18), 20 children illustrated their dream playground and shared their designs with the project managers.

‘I like rainbows and a lot of things that challenge the muscles – such as a rock-climbing wall, tire slides and tall slides,’ said 12-year-old Adele Barsky Moore.

‘I’d like to see a Florida-themed playground that has underwater fish, a coral reef, mermaid designs and maybe a grotto.’

The Center has launched a fundraising challenge in order to raise the $75,000 needed to turn the playground into a reality, and is calling for 150 volunteers from the community to help construct it on October 16.

Boo added: ‘A playground is more than just a physical space. Creative play is developmentally important for our children and future leaders.

‘It’s a brain-expander, a friend-maker and a mentor-connector,’

‘Together, with our national benefactors plus the support of the local business community and volunteers, we can meet our mission of providing a welcoming space that celebrates, nurtures and empowers the LGBT community and our friends and neighbors in South Florida while setting an example for other national organizations.’

To volunteer, visit the Pride Center website.

The post Playground for LGBTI families to open in Florida appeared first on Gay Star News.

Mel Spencer

www.gaystarnews.com/article/playground-for-lgbti-families-to-open-in-florida/

PHOTOS: It’s All Glitz And Glam Inside Buenos Aires’ Hottest Discoteca

What’s new Buenos Aires? Glam is one of the hottest discotecas in all of Argentina. Known for its glitzy go-go boys, flashy bartenders, and world-class DJs who play all the latest electronic, dance and world music, this popular nightclub doesn’t close until well after sunrise.

Scroll down for a taste of Glam, and check out the full gallery of images over at GayCities…

Photo credit: Glam

Graham Gremore

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/hOtm1cwbgSA/photos-its-all-glitz-and-glam-inside-buenos-aires-hottest-discoteca-20150919

Golden Girls: Growing Old, Growing Up and Growing Asian American
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the debut of The Golden Girls on NBC. From modest beginnings, the show would become a huge success, garnering top ratings for NBC and accolades for the show, its cast and crew. But more importantly, from a cultural perspective, it has had a much larger impact. As the first network broadcast show to focus on older women, The Golden Girls changed the way we looked at them and broke many stereotypes. From water cooler chatter to professionally refereed academic journals, much has been made of what their groundbreaking portrayals mean for how we understand women and aging.

The Golden Girls, both the four women and the show named for them, did not operate in a vacuum. As women with families, jobs, lovers and friends living in a multicultural community in Miami, FL, they had a number of complicated experiences while living together with the resultant highs and lows that made their lives fun to watch. The show, by examining their reactions to a wide range of topics — from sex, to interracial relationships, to disability visibility, broached a number of topics that had been considered off limits for mainstream networks at the time and challenged previously entrenched notions of what was successful television. Tracey Ross, Center for American Progress Fellow, calls The Golden Girls, “the most progressive show on television,” thirty years out.

I was an avid fan of The Golden Girls while it was on the air. As a young Filipino American entering his teen years at the time, perhaps the larger implications of what the show meant escaped me. I found myself agreeing with the show’s messages about how people should respect difference — whether by age or by race or by any other community. My upbringing in a Filipino family taught me to respect my elders and so even though these white women were very different than my lolas (grandmothers), I knew that they deserved my respect, which they earned regardless through the strength they showed. As an Asian American outside the “black or white” dichotomy through which race was discussed even for a progressive show like The Golden Girls, I knew that someone’s skin color shouldn’t determine how I felt about them. Their positive messages about the gay men and lesbians in their lives spoke to me as I grappled with my own feelings and coming out process. Whether I knew it or not, who I was becoming as a young gay man of color, was keeping time with how these four women were becoming who they were.

I know I am not the only one who has been influenced by The Golden Girls. Their impact, on Asian Americans interestingly enough, shows how media messages can be received in many different ways. My friend, Jose Antonio Vargas, whose story as perhaps the most famous undocumented immigrant in the United States thanks to his “coming out” in 2011 and founding of the “Define American” project and most recently, #EmergeUS (a project with the Los Angeles Times), talks about how The Golden Girls helped teach him English, and undoubtedly, how to “be” American. Ai-Jen Poo, 2014 MacArthur Fellow, talks about The Golden Girls in her book “Aging with Dignity.” She writes, “Probably the single most effective product to come out of Hollywood in terms of turning around the cultural stereotypes about older women was the hugely popular and successful television show The Golden Girls in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

Ai-Jen, Jose and myself are probably not indicative of the entire Asian American community. As advocates, writers and policy wonks who work on issues such as aging, workers’ rights’ and immigration, our viewpoints reflect our own perspectives. But if The Golden Girls have taught us anything, it’s to walk our own path. Perhaps at that party their opening theme song sings about, this lesson is their biggest gift.

So, to The Golden Girls, at the ripe young age of 30, I still say, “Thank you for being a friend.”

— 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.

feeds.huffingtonpost.com/c/35496/f/677065/s/49fc606b/sc/28/l/0L0Shuffingtonpost0N0Cben0Ede0Eguzman0Cgolden0Egirls0Egrowing0Eold0E0Ib0I81548140Bhtml0Dutm0Ihp0Iref0Fgay0Evoices0Gir0FGay0KVoices/story01.htm

North Carolina bar faces national backlash after owner throws gay couple out

A bar in Fayetteville in the US state of North Carolina has come under fire after its owner told a gay couple to leave.

Pam Griffin, owner of Louie’s Sports Pub, said she has received threats from across the country via social media after the incident made the news.

Griffin and the couple however have different stories about what happened.

According to media reports, Andrew Deras and Dustin Baker, who have been together for the past few months, said it was just a 2-second peck.

‘He put his arm around me, he gave me a kiss, and she said this wasn’t right, this wasn’t OK,’ said Deras, who was visiting from California. ‘She threatened both of us. He gave me a kiss. It was very minor. It was just a peck. It was two seconds.’

Griffin said other customers were complaining and so she said she asked the couple to cool it.

‘I walked up to them calmly. I asked them guys, you know, can you kind of just separate, kind of move apart?’

She told WRAL News, ‘I don’t care if you stay and drink. We don’t need to be doing that, and just calm down because you’re making people feel uncomfortable.’

She said they then laughed and gave each other another ‘big kiss.’

Barker said he just gave Andrew another kiss, because ‘I’m certainly allowed to,’ he said in a Facebook post after the incident, the Fayetteville Observer reported.

‘That’s when she started getting really crazy’, he said.

‘She’s saying, “This is enough. This is enough,” like basically telling us to get out.’

The couple said they didn’t feel like complying, especially since they say their initial display of affection was a two-second-long peck so they paid their bill and left.

Griffin said the couple weren’t asked to leave because they are gay but because they were causing a disturbance.

She told ABC News, ‘It was only one reason why they were asked to go, when they disrespected and flipped me off, cussing and interlocked in a very deep kiss, then yes, I am going to ask you to go cause I have numerous customers complaining,’ she said.

She added that should a heterosexual couple acted similarly, she would have asked them to stop.

The pub’s Facebook page has since received dozens of comments deploring the owner’s treatment of the gay couple.

The post North Carolina bar faces national backlash after owner throws gay couple out appeared first on Gay Star News.

Sylvia Tan

www.gaystarnews.com/article/north-carolina-bar-faces-national-backlash-after-owner-throws-gay-couple-out/