Randy Rainbow: Give All the Tonys to 'Hamilton' (Video)
The gay comedian offers a hilarious take on why there may not be enough Tony Awards to go around this year, thanks to breakout hit Hamilton.
www.advocate.com/comedy/2016/6/07/randy-rainbow-give-all-tonys-hamilton-video
How Do You Know When A Hookup Is ‘The One’?
Is it the way he takes extra long to “look” for his socks, even though you both know they’re in the hallway where you pushed him up against a wall?
Do you know when he says something out of a fairytale like, “That was hot. I’m in town for another three days, maybe we can meet up again.”
Or is the fact that he finally hugged you before you fled his house at 4 a.m. on a Friday night?
Ah, love — it’s a magical thing.
On this weeks episode of Jimmy Fowlie‘s Go-go Boy Interrupted, Danny and the gang wonder how to tell if they’ve found “the one.”
Watch below:
feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/osToKYbu564/know-hookup-one-20160607
‘So You Think You Can Dance’ Contestant Pukes All Over Paula Abdul
It’s a story that has all the elements — reality TV, Beyoncé, Paula Abdul and upchuck.
Tahani, a 12-year-old who auditioned for So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation, left an indelible impression on ever-perky/Percocet-ey judge Paula Abdul — first through her electrifying dance routine, and later by puking all over her.
Related: Paula Abdul: Straight Up Herself
After raking in the applause with an unbridled performance to Beyoncé’s “Countdown,” Tahani was so stunned and excited by the attention and praise that she simply lost control and spewed all over the “Straight Up” singer/dancer.
Related: Paula Abdul Stalker Commits Suicide
“She just squeezed me too tight,” Tahani said to host Cat Deely, “and all the happiness came out on her jacket.”
How’s that for a soundbite?
Paula took the high road, airily quipping, “Never had anyone just vomited on me like that.”
And here it is:
Dolly Parton Weighs on Bathroom Bills: ‘If I Need To Pee, I’m Going To Pee’ – WATCH
Dolly Parton is weighing into the debate about transgender bathroom rights, making clear that she’s for treating everyone with respect.
Parton told CNNMoney last week,
“I think everybody should be treated with respect. I don’t judge people and I try not to get too caught up in the controversy of things. I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are. I just know if I have to pee, I’m going to pee — I don’t care where it’s going to be.”
Watch, below.
[h/t Huffington Post]
The post Dolly Parton Weighs on Bathroom Bills: ‘If I Need To Pee, I’m Going To Pee’ – WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.
To Keep Winning Against AIDS, China Needs to Talk More About Gay Sex
When it comes to public health, China’s leaders have done at least one thing very well: They’ve beaten back AIDS.
Indeed, China’s is one of the most impressive turnarounds in the history of HIV and AIDS policy. After facing the threat of an “AIDS typhoon” in the 1990s, China’s adult prevalence of HIV is now less than 0.1 percent, one of the lowest rates on the planet. But this success story is teetering on the edge of defeat, and it all comes down to a growing crisis in the nation’s gay community.
Last November, China Daily noted skyrocketing rates of HIV and AIDS among gay men. In spite of that, Premier Li Keqiang made no mention of the group when he chaired a State Council meeting in April at which AIDS was a main topic.
And that signals a big part of the problem.
“The government’s negligence and the societal stigma imposed on the gay community has made the group a more vulnerable target for HIV in China,” Beijing Today observed in March.
As a group, men who have sex with men are experiencing the worst spike in new infections of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, with male homosexual sex constituting 80 percent of new cases in China. Yet Beijing has never really managed to address the spread of the virus in this population.
HIV first hit China in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre. More than a decade later, aggressive policies to combat HIV managed to reverse a looming crisis. By 2011, nationwide prevalence was negligible. Among drug users, HIV infection rates were cut in half from 2003 to 2013, while infection among female prostitutes remained below 1 percent.
It was a tremendous accomplishment in a country of more than a billion people, but there was one thing wrong. HIV rates among men who have sex with men exploded during the same period, rising five-fold.
Why?
Inconsistent condom use among men who have sex with men is likely a factor. One study found that the rate of consistent condom usage among men who have sex with men in Chongqing was 52.1 percent in 2014, and a 2016 study found that the rate of consistent condom usage among gay men in Beijing was just 56.4 percent.
However, gay men aren’t alone in being slow to adopt condoms, which are still seen as something only women buy as part of their reproductive responsibilities. While the industry is growing rapidly in China, with high use found among female prostitutes, overall sales remain low.
A survey conducted in 2014 showed only 38 percent of sexually active college students, in fact, use condoms. Within that group, gay men are the most affected by HIV. According to a report by the South China Morning Post last November, among students recorded as HIV-positive in the first 10 months of 2015, roughly 82 percent became infected through gay sex.
The government tried to address this by asking all Beijing universities to install condom vending machines. The machines are often poorly maintained. They’ve also tried to target gay men for sexual health outreach by partnering with Blued, the world’s largest gay dating app, to provide medical information.
Efforts like these help. But it appears raising awareness isn’t enough if the stigma surrounding homosexuality is still strong enough to prevent gay men from seeking medical care.
While gay men in China have become more comfortable living openly, they continue to face heavy discrimination. Homosexuality was only legalized in the country in 1997, and being gay was classified as a mental disorder until 2001. Attitudes have changed significantly since then: Shanghai held its first gay pride parade in 2009, and by 2014, Global Times reports, only 2 percent of those surveyed opposed same-sex marriage. But there are still a number of civil rights that are denied to gay men in China.
People living with HIV are also stigmatized. In a 2010 study, more than 56 percent of respondents in Shanghai said they believed people who get HIV or AIDS deserve it, while 80 percent of respondents said they feared people who have HIV or AIDS.
“If [I am] positive,” said one man in a 2015 Xinhua report, “people will know I have AIDS because I’m gay. It will be worse than death.”
Encouraging the public to embrace a more compassionate attitude toward gay men and those living with HIV and AIDS is no easy proposition for Beijing. This is, after all, the same government that yanked Fan Popo’s documentary last year about mothers who love their gay children, decided in March that it won’t allow depictions of gay men on television, and in April ruled against same-sex marriage.
Continued success in HIV prevention will require humanizing not just the disease, but the people it affects, says Tommy Hung, a former AIDS researcher at the Yunnan Hospital of Infectious Diseases. He thinks the fact that HIV is growing among college students could shift perspectives.
“The shift from being a disease of the uneducated poor or the gluttonously wealthy to a disease of college students and the middle class has humanized it a little,” Hung says. “It creates fear, but it also creates more empathy.”
HIV was first recorded in China with the confirmation of 146 cases in the southwestern province of Yunnan, on the Burmese border, nearly three decades ago. At the time, the country now known as Myanmar was the world’s top heroin supplier — today it’s the second — and Yunnan, one of China’s poorest regions, suffered an epidemic of addiction among the local Dai and Jingpo people. Over the next several years, HIV spread across the rest of Yunnan, and by the early 2000s, it was found in most of China.
Western analysts were soon predicting a massive health crisis: UNAIDS released a 2001 report on “China’s Titanic Peril,” another study referred to “China’s time bomb,” and the American Enterprise Institute warned of an “AIDS typhoon.”
But the typhoon never came. The government did, at first, handle the problem in the worst imaginable way, covering up its own failures and limiting speech. In late 2003, The New York Times noted that the village of Xionqiao, like many others in central China’s Henan province, was “experiencing an AIDS epidemic caused by government-induced blood trading in the 1990s.” Three months later, The Guardian reported that charity groups were being barred from Henan, journalists who reported on the epidemic there had been fired, and health officials investigating the crisis had been sued. In Xionqiao itself, HIV-positive villagers were routinely being beaten for trying to raise awareness about the issue.
At the same time, China was reeling from the fallout of the SARS epidemic, which began in November 2002. It wasn’t until April of the following year that Beijing finally stopped denying the problem. But by then, the damage was done: SARS had gone global, with thousands of cases worldwide. The ordeal left China’s economy badly bruised, too — Hong Kong restaurant and retail sales dropped by as much as 50 percent.
By the end of 2003, Beijing officials had learned a valuable lesson that would change how they approached public health emergencies.
“The crisis exposed all the defects in the political system,” said Hu Angang, professor of economics at Tsinghua University’s school of public policy and management. “It turned out to be the best teacher for the government on how not to repeat those mistakes.”
Public awareness campaigns and measures to provide free antiretroviral (ARV) medicine marked a major turning point. By 2011, nationwide prevalence of HIV had plunged to roughly one-twentieth of one percent.
If Beijing doesn’t want to lose these hard-won gains, it’s going to have to foster a culture of safe gay sex. This will mean confronting the stigmas surrounding homosexuality and HIV — or at the very least, not censoring those who do.
This article first appeared on PRI’s The World.
The post To Keep Winning Against AIDS, China Needs to Talk More About Gay Sex appeared first on Towleroad.
Companies Take Pride in their Support for LGBTQ Equality
Kidnapped Honduran LGBTQ Rights Activist Found Dead
The body of Rene Martinez, a 40-year-old LGBTQ rights activist, was found in the city of San Pedro Sula, The Washington Blade reported. Martinez, who was kidnapped last week, had apparently been strangled.
Martinez was the president of a LGBTQ advocacy organization in San Pedro Sula. A member of Honduras’ ruling National Party, Martinez took part in an LGBTQ political empowerment conference organized last year in the capital Tegucigalpa. That conference was also attended by Randy Berry, U.S. Special Envoy for the Rights of LGBTI Persons, and Tamara Adrian, the first openly transgender person to be elected to Venezuela’s National Assembly.
“Crimes like these against our fellow LGBTQ activists in other parts of the world remind us of the horrific hate and violence that are a lived daily reality for many in our community.” HRC Global Director Ty Cobb. “ HRC Global is committed to working in solidarity with global activists to combat hate and violence.”
In a statement issued on Friday, the U.S. Embassy in Honduras condemned the “apparent murder” of Martinez in “the strongest terms” and called for a “full and thorough investigation into the circumstances of the death.” The U.S. Government has offered to assist Honduran authorities to bring Martinez’s killers to justice.
Violence and discrimination against LGBTQ people in Honduras is rampant, according to the Blade. A U.N. human rights report in June 2015 had expressed concern about the inflammatory and hateful rhetoric deployed against LGBTQ people in the country. The city of San Pedro Sula has been wracked by gang violence and drug trafficking related crimes for years and several prominent LGBTQ activists have been victims of violence in recent years.
HRC learned about the epidemic of violence in Honduras and the toll it is taking on the LGBTQ community from three Honduran activists who visited us last October. The violence against transgender Hondurans is especially severe and perpetrators act with impunity. According to Transgender Europe (TGEU), the country has the highest number of killings of transgender people relative to its population.
No Matter What Happens Next, Supreme Court Set for Major Trans Ruling
A Virginia school board just forced the issue of trans student access to the highest court.
The Complex Reason Donald Trump Lost Lindsey Graham’s Endorsement
Donald Trump’s comments were racist, but few will call the candidate racist.
www.advocate.com/election/2016/6/07/complex-reason-donald-trump-lost-lindsey-grahams-endorsement
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