HRC Arkansas Announces LGBT Workplace Equality Pledge, Over 100 Businesses Say ‘Yes’ to Diversity
HRC’s Equality Is Our Business Pledge Aims to Encourage Workplace Equality for LGBT People
HRC.org
Category Archives: NEWS
Russell Tovey Baffled By Becoming “Worst Gay Ever,” Half-Apologizes For Comments
Russell Tovey Baffled By Becoming “Worst Gay Ever,” Half-Apologizes For Comments
Yesterday the internet was divided over comments made by Looking actor Russell Tovey in an interview with The Guardian.
You can read more about that here.
Essentially, he expressed gratitude towards his father for not allowing him to go to a performing arts high school which might have made him a “more effeminate, tap dancing freak,” instead attending a school he feels “toughened him up.” His acting career, Russell contends, benefitted as a result.
Some readers thought we were making a mountain out of a mole hill by suggesting his comments were off-base, while many others took offense, feeling his words fell in line with a pattern of gay men casting shame on femme identity.
Russell, for his part, took to Twitter to sort-of apologize.
He fired off this series of Tweets:
— Russell Tovey (@russelltovey) March 3, 2015
I surrender. You got me. I’m sat baffled and saddened that a mis- fired inarticulate quote of mine, has branded me worst gay ever Contd
— Russell Tovey (@russelltovey) March 3, 2015
If you feel I have personally let you down, I’m sorry, that was never my intention — Russell Tovey (@russelltovey) March 3, 2015
I’m proud to be who I am and proud for others We’re in this together, I want you to know whatever you think I meant, I didn’t — Russell Tovey (@russelltovey) March 3, 2015
I’m gonna ride this out, and one day we will all look back on this moment with a half smile of fascination and amusement
— Russell Tovey (@russelltovey) March 3, 2015
Until that day I’m gonna carry on being me #lowersflag x
— Russell Tovey (@russelltovey) March 3, 2015
We’re not sure if everyone will look back on this with “fascination and amusement,” but we’re certainly not branding him the worst gay ever. Not while these guys are around.
Dan Tracer
Texas Lawmaker Introduces Arkansas-Style Ban On Local LGBT Protections
Texas Lawmaker Introduces Arkansas-Style Ban On Local LGBT Protections
A Texas lawmaker has introduced a draconian anti-LGBT bill almost identical to the one that became law in Arkansas last week.
The proposal from GOP Rep. Rick Miller (above) would prohibit cities from enforcing nondiscrimination ordinances that include protected classes not contained in state law.
The Texas Observer reports:
Texas law doesn’t include sexual orientation or gender identity and expression. If passed, Miller’s bill would undo LGBT protections passed by numerous cities, including Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston and Plano. Altogether more than 7.5 million Texas are covered by such ordinances.
Miller’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
HB 1556 is more specific than a similar measure introduced by Sen. Don Huffines (R-Dallas). Huffines’ SB 343 would bar cities from enforcing any ordinances that are more stringent than state law, unless otherwise authorized by statute.
In Arkansas last month, a similar bill became law without the governor’s signature. Grassroots activists criticized national LGBT organizations for not doing enough to oppose the Arkansas measure, SB 202, which was drafted in direct response to Fayetteville’s passage of an LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance.
It will be interesting to see if things are any different in Texas.
Read the full text of HB 1556, AFTER THE JUMP …
John Wright
Op-ed: Transitioning as a Guard at San Quentin State Prison
Op-ed: Transitioning as a Guard at San Quentin State Prison
A transgender guard at one of California’s most infamous prisons shares what it was like to transition there.
Mandi Camille Hauwert
www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/03/03/op-ed-transitioning-guard-san-quentin-state-prison
PREVIEW: Brighton Bear Weekender, 19-21 June
PREVIEW: Brighton Bear Weekender, 19-21 June
Beachside town braces itself for an influx of flesh
jamiet
www.gaystarnews.com/article/preview-brighton-bear-weekender-19-21-june030315
New “Love Has No Labels” PSAs Share Messages of Acceptance and Diversity
New “Love Has No Labels” PSAs Share Messages of Acceptance and Diversity
The “Love Has No Labels” campaign premiered new PSAs urging viewers to rethink bias and to celebrate understanding, acceptance and diversity.
HRC.org
Christian Man Files Ballot Initiative To Legalize The Shooting Of Gay People
Christian Man Files Ballot Initiative To Legalize The Shooting Of Gay People
A California man would like to make it legal to shoot “any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification.”
The effort is being spearheaded by Matthew McLaughlin, who just forked over $200 to file a ballot initiative with the Attorney General in Sacramento proposing the Sodomite Suppression Act become state law.
In a one-page document, McLaughlin calls gay sex an “abominable crime,” labeling it “a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha [sic].”
His solution?
Gay people must be executed.
More specifically, they should be “put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”
McLaughlin argues that it’s “better” if heterosexuals just kill the gays immediately rather than having everyone suffer God’s punishment in the afterlife, though he doesn’t say why.
In addition to requiring straight people to shoot gay people in the head, the Sodomite Suppression Act also bans gay people from running for public office, being employed by the state, or being granted any state or federal benefits, including unemployment, disability, welfare, and social security, or use of any public assets, like roads, parks, or libraries.
Oh, and any straight person who demonstrates tolerance or acceptance of a gay person will be fined “$1 million per occurrence, and/or imprisoned up to 10 years, and/or expelled from the boundaries of the state of California for up to life.”
Just to make sure everyone is aware of the law, McLaughlin is also demanding that the Sodomite Suppression Act must be “prominently posted in every public school classroom.”
Lastly, he says the law trumps all other laws. Civil rights laws, nondiscrimination laws, hate crimes laws, the state’s ban on the death penalty, you name it. Says McLaughlin: “All laws in conflict with this law are to that extent invalid.”
Now that the ballot initiative has been filed, McLaughlin will need to collect the signatures of at least 365,000 legitimate California residents in order for it to move forward.
h/t: The New Civil Rights Movement
Graham Gremore
feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/iPhoqlxPTno/gang-bang-20150303
Conservative Radio Host: Discriminating Against Gays Helps Protect Them From Getting Stoned To Death – VIDEO
Conservative Radio Host: Discriminating Against Gays Helps Protect Them From Getting Stoned To Death – VIDEO
Anti-gay activist Dana Loesch, the editor-in-chief of Andrew Breitbart‘s BigJournalism.com, has said that failure to protect the “right” of Christians to discriminate against people in public accommodations will lead to gay people being stoned to death on the streets, reports Right Wing Watch.
Appearing on a CPAC panel on religious liberty last weekend along with Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer and Tony Perkins, the leader of listed hate group the Family Research Council, Loesch made the bizarre connection between the right to discriminate and the potential murder of gay people, saying:
“You don’t have to be a Christian to be affected by loss of religious liberty, because if one liberty is taken, more liberties will be taken.
“If I’m not speaking up [while] you’re losing rights then what will happen to me when the day comes, if someone comes to me? What if you’re stoned for walking out in the street for being gay? I mean, come on, that’s where the conversation needs to go.”
Watch, AFTER THE JUMP…
Jim Redmond
Op-ed: How Gay Baseball Player Glenn Burke Made Bryant Gumbel Nervous
Op-ed: How Gay Baseball Player Glenn Burke Made Bryant Gumbel Nervous
Late baseball player Glenn Burke wrote in his 1995 memoir (which is being re-released today) about the aftermath of his public coming out.
Glenn Burke
A Few Words on Russell Tovey and Why If It Weren't for My Father, I Wouldn't Be a Faggot
A Few Words on Russell Tovey and Why If It Weren't for My Father, I Wouldn't Be a Faggot
Russell Tovey, one of the stars of HBO’s “Looking,” recent found himself at the center of a controversy after he made the following comments in a Guardian profile:
I feel like I could have been really effeminate, if I hadn’t gone to the school I went to. Where I felt like I had to toughen up. If I’d have been able to relax, prance around, sing in the street, I might be a different person now. I thank my dad for that, for not allowing me to go down that path. Because it’s probably given me the unique quality that people think I have.
Reactions to the actor’s statement came swiftly and most people fell into one of two camps: Some were outraged that Tovey would imply being effeminate is a condition that needs to be overcome and others believed that Tovey was, as one commenter I saw on Facebook put it, “just speaking his truth as a masculine gay man.”
My own truth is that I went down the very path that Tovey claims he was able to avoid: I was an extremely effeminate boy. A sissy. A faggot.
I know some of you are recoiling at the sight of that word. I am using it on purpose. It symbolizes everything that Tovey and his father were terrified of seeing materialize before their eyes and everything I was because I didn’t have a choice in the matter — or a father with a plan to prevent it. I wasn’t merely gay or just a boy attracted to other boys, I was a swishing, prancing princess wagging my penis at the garbage man and waving a My Little Pony figurine like a scepter as I sashayed through my neighborhood. I was the very embodiment of everything our society worries could go wrong with a little boy, and in my small Midwestern town in the early ’80s, I was every father’s nightmare awoken and menacingly mincing my way through our local mall’s food court.
But my father wasn’t like other (most?) fathers. My father didn’t care. Or, perhaps more importantly, if he did, he never let it show. When I was six and he signed me up for soccer, he made me play for a month and then let me quit when I made it clear that it was killing my soul. Then, instead, he let me take gymnastics at the YMCA. When I was eight he bought me a Cabbage Patch doll named Ivy Rose with corn silk hair. He was in many ways what many would refer to as “a man’s man” but he was also sensitive and cried easily and openly while watching old movies and there was never a moment that he made me feel I was anything less than exactly who I was supposed to be (unfortunately I can’t say the same for the rest of the world, but that’s a different story).
I don’t think most dads who want their sons to “man up” are bad guys. Like the rest of us, they’ve been living in and trying to measure up to a culture that tells us that if you’re assigned male at birth, then there are specific ways of being and acting that must be adhered to and if they aren’t, there will be trouble. It’s too frightening and too exhausting to attempt to challenge and change the culture, so instead, they attempt to challenge and change their boys.
The same goes for the boys themselves. I don’t think Tovey or anyone who thinks like Tovey is a bad person for feeling the way that he feels. But let’s be clear that Tovey is passing judgement on effeminacy. If we look at his statement again, he isn’t simply saying, as some have argued, that he is masculine and that’s just the way it goes. When I read comments from people trying to make this into some kind of attack on the masculine gay men of the world, I seethe. Tovey states that he “had to toughen up,” which implies that his natural state of being wasn’t tough. What’s more, when he says, “If I’d have been able to relax, prance around, sing in the street, I might be a different person now…” I can only read longing in that statement. Despite how much the lady doth protest, he gives himself away. He wanted to relax. He wanted to prance. He wanted to sing in the street. But because his dad — and society — wouldn’t allow him to “go down that path,” he didn’t. That’s not something to celebrate or be thankful for, even if it did result in “the unique quality that people think” Tovey has (which is what exactly? Not coming across as a faggot?). In fact, it just makes me feel sorry for him and his dad — and all of us. Being exactly who or however he was just wasn’t good or good enough and so he was forced to change and conform to what society says a boy should be. That’s not inspiring, that’s heartbreaking. But pity can be progress’ worst enemy and excusing thinking like his — or accepting the idea that it’s just his “truth” — leaves us exactly where we started: in a world where being a faggot is akin to a death sentence.
And of course it must be said that there are masculine gay men. And of course there are effeminate straight men. If you are gay and you’re masculine, that’s great. Congratulations. But let’s stop pretending and positing that masculinity is (or should be) the default and desired setting for gay boys and men, especially when it’s apparent that so many gay boys and men — like Tovey — would have to admit that their masculinity came about as a result of deliberate conditioning, whether by a father, a school or just the fear of the dire consequences they would face if they didn’t butch up.
In many ways, I think that masculinity is the final frontier for gay men. Even as we pass more laws to legitimize and protect our relationships, it’s the notion that gay men aren’t real men that continues to haunt us as individuals and as a movement. From Grindr profiles that demand “masc only” to men like Tovey who think their masculinity — however manufactured, however antithetical to who they truly were when they landed on this planet — is what makes them marketable or desirable, our obsession with what it means to be a man and what it means to fall short of that is keeping us from becoming truly liberated.
If it weren’t for my father, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I could have been forced to play football in hopes that it would somehow unleash the man dozing inside of me. I could have been sent to therapy in hopes that I could be reprogrammed, repaired, made whole. I could have ended up with a belt around my neck and swinging from the light fixture in our formal dining room. But I wasn’t. But I didn’t. I am one of the lucky ones.
My father died eight years ago. He never got to see the man that I’ve become and we never specifically talked about everything he did for me — what he made me — simply by loving me. Without a son of my own, it’s a gift that I can only attempt to pay forward to the thousands of boys and men who come after me — who brush past me in crowded subway cars or surround me on Facebook or might be reading this now — by speaking up and saying I am a faggot and it didn’t happen by mistake. And if you’re a faggot too, I hope you know you don’t need to toughen up. You never have to stop prancing. You are not a mistake.
