National Adoption Month: Join the Conversation on Twitter
This Tuesday, HRC Foundation will host a Twitter chat on LGBT adoption through foster care and finding permanent families for waiting youth.
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Category Archives: NEWS
British Actress “Devastated” After Discovering Boyfriend’s Not-So-Secret Gay S&M Past
British Actress “Devastated” After Discovering Boyfriend’s Not-So-Secret Gay S&M Past
Reid getting spanked by a tattooed assailant.
British actress Lorna Fitzgerald of the popular show EastEnders is reportedly in shambles after learning her boyfriend, Keo Reid, starred a series of gay fetish videos.
The 18-year-old actress is reported to be “absolutely distraught” after videos of 25-year-old Reid getting spanked, whipped, whacked, and receiving blowies from older chaps were discovered on an S&M website, according to Pink News.
“It’s any girlfriend’s worst nightmare,” a source told the prestigious Sun newspaper. “After seeing the videos, she feels she can never go back.”
A friend of Reid told The Mirror: “Keo just did these films as a bit of fun for good money… He could have had a job as a plumber or he could have a job getting his ass spanked. It’s as simple as that.”
The friend added, “Although it features men, it’s not a gay thing.”
Hmmm. We know straight men are a lot more bisexual than people think, but we’re pretty sure performing in an adult video alongside another guy would be considered by most everyone as “a gay thing.”
But Reid’s friend insists otherwise. “Keo is completely straight,” he said.
Reid was reportedly paid £350 ($550) for each fetish film, and is believed to have starred in as many as 20 videos. The oldest one was uploaded in December 2012. His most recent video was uploaded on October 16, after he and Fitzgerald had been dating for six months.
According to sources, Reid sincerely hopes his “completely straight” gay past doesn’t affect his relationship with Fitzgerald.
“He has been on such a journey in his life and has really turned things round,” a source said. “He’s really happy with Lorna. Keo has really fallen for her and he’s upset and so sorry to have embarrassed her like this.”
So far, both Fitzgerald and Reid are refusing to comment on the matter.
Related stories:
Straight Men Are A Lot More Bisexual Than You Might Think
Spencer Matthews “Mortified” Over Full Frontal Photo Leak
British Man Sleeps With 200 Men, Finds Christ, Converts To Heterosexuality
Graham Gremore is a columnist and contributor for Queerty and Life of the Law. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
Graham Gremore
Mexico City Approves Landmark Bill Allowing Trans People to Legally Change Gender Without Court Order
Mexico City Approves Landmark Bill Allowing Trans People to Legally Change Gender Without Court Order
Mexico City lawmakers approved a groundbreaking trans rights bill on Thursday allowing trans people to legally change their gender without a court order, reports Michael Lavers at the Washington Blade:
Members of Legislative Assembly of the Federal District, in which Mexico City is located, approved the measure by a 42-0 vote margin.
Six lawmakers abstained from the vote on the measure that Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera (pictured) proposed. Manuel Granados Covarrubias of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, known by the Spanish acronym PRD, welcomed the proposal’s approval.
The progressive mayor, as you may recall, married 26 gay couples in a mass wedding in July 2013.
The bill’s approval came following a campaign by The Mexico City Commission to Prevent and Eliminate Discrimination and is the first such law in Latin America, according to the Blade:
The Mexican capital’s comprehensive anti-discrimination law already includes gender identity and expression and designates transphobia as a form of discrimination.
Andy Towle
Eddie And Chip's Story From The Let Love Define Family Series
Eddie And Chip's Story From The Let Love Define Family Series
In today’s installment of the Huffington Post Gay Voices RaiseAChild.US “Let Love Define Family™” series, we highlight a culturally-diverse, multiracial family formed through foster-adoption whose differences ultimately add to the strengths of each of its members.
Eddie and Chip’s family is not simply multiracial but also multicultural in more ways than one. Eddie and Chip are both white and gay and their children are black, so the family incorporates both African American culture and LGBT culture. But because Eddie is deaf, the family also straddles the boundaries of deaf culture.
Edward “Eddie” Peigneux, Jr., 44, known as “Baba” to his kids, is the supervisor of California School for the deaf in Riverside, CA. His partner, Raymond “Chip” West III, 41, whom the children call “Dada,” is the assistant vice president for capital planning and facilities management at the University of La Verne. The couple lives in Diamond Bar, CA.
Many people are not aware that the word Deaf defines not only a medical condition, but a rich culture with specific history, jokes, poetry and literature. Eddie and Chip’s children are growing up conversant in the two languages spoken at home, English and American Sign Language, and culturally competent in mainstream American life, African American culture, LGBT community and deaf culture.
“Being deaf and gay as well, I have experienced all of the things that go along with that, the discrimination, the oppression, and the depression,” said Eddie through an ASL interpreter. “So I have a strong identity. I know who I am and I know that there are struggles out there so I’m very aware and very sensitive to those things.”
“I wanted to make sure that the African American culture is part of my children’s lives,” continued Eddie, who explains that he and his husband have worked carefully to find ways to immerse their children in their own cultural heritage. “For example, the children go to a day care run by a woman who is African American and there are African American children there as well. We want them to be exposed to the food, customs and all those things.”
“The daycare provider has been fabulous and has really taken the kids in,” added Chip. “And she tells Eddie and I all the time that she had a preconceived notion of gay couples and we really changed her mind, not only because Eddie is deaf but because of the relationship we have. We’ve been together 19 years, so we’re an old married couple even though we’re not married!”
To give the children a well-rounded cultural education, the dads select books for their children that reflect their family structure and cultures, take their children to cultural celebrations and participate in cultural dinners and activities. They also take the children a couple times a month to an African American Baptist church in Compton that Taylor’s adopted biological aunt attends.
Fostering runs deeply in both Chip and Eddie’s own family histories. Growing up in Virginia, Chip was inspired by his mother, who decided to become a foster parent while he was in high school. Preferring to foster rather than adopt, she had more than 12 kids in her care over the years. Eddie’s mother and father, who lived in Montana, also became foster parents while Eddie was growing up, and Eddie’s sister and her husband later became foster parents and adopted one of the children they fostered.
As a child, Eddie attended an all-deaf school in Great Falls, Montana about six hours away from his family’s home in Miles City. Eventually, a deaf family who had fostered him there decided to adopt him while he was in high school. He still maintains connections with his deaf family, as well as his hearing family.
Eddie and Chip started with fostering, taking care of two teens briefly, but when now 14-year-old Taylor was placed with them they fell in love with him and wanted to adopt him. A year later, at the final hearing for termination of parental rights, the biological aunt suddenly changed her mind — an experience Chip described as very painful. Nevertheless, the adoptive mother recognized the important role of the men in her son’s life and worked out an arrangement whereby Chip and Eddie pick him up every Thursday and keep him through Sunday. That arrangement has persisted fairly consistently over the past three years and created a strong support system for Taylor.
After that four foster children followed in rather rapid succession and were all adopted. The last two’s adoptions were finalized in October. Eli, 3, Chase, 3, Chloe, 2, and Ethan, 1, are all fluent in ASL, a particular blessing because all of the kids have had speech delays based on their individual circumstances — either drugs or neglect.
“Signing has been a really great tool for us,” said Chip, who says none of the children are deaf but some have biological family members who are deaf. “We’ve had each of the kids in speech therapy, so the signing is a great way to help them communicate as their spoken language has been a little delayed.”
The day care provider has been so impressed by the children’s communication skills that she has added ASL to her programming.
Growing up gay, Eddie never thought he would have the opportunity to adopt. But with Chip’s determination to pursue parenthood, the couple eventually expanded their family through working with the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services, which welcomes LGBT prospective parents. Today, Chip volunteers as a foster parent advocate for DCFS.
These days, Eddie anticipates meeting with his children’s elementary school teachers in the years to come — he is more concerned about being a deaf parent than a gay dad.
“The teachers might see bypassing me as a simpler way to communicate, so I would end up feeling excluded,” said Eddie. “There might be parent-teacher meetings where they might believe that since Chip’s going be there they wouldn’t need to get an interpreter. That’s something that I have faced already in my life so I anticipate that that might be an issue. But here in California I think people are pretty deaf aware, so I don’t foresee that as being a big barrier.”
Corinne Lightweaver is the Communications Manager at RaiseAChild.US, a national organization headquartered in Hollywood, California that encourages the LGBT community to build families through fostering and adopting to serve the needs of the 400,000 children in the U.S. foster care system. Since 2011, RaiseAChild.US has run media campaigns and events to educate prospective parents and the public, and has engaged more than 2,200 prospective parents. For information about how you can become a foster or fost/adopt parent, visit www.RaiseAChild.US.
Israel gay teens are eight times more likely to attempt suicide – and they're being ignored
Sixth Circuit Rulings in Ohio Marriage Cases Officially Appealed to Supreme Court
Sixth Circuit Rulings in Ohio Marriage Cases Officially Appealed to Supreme Court
Lambda Legal, the ACLU and private attorneys have jointly requested that the Supreme Court take up their cases on appeal
HRC.org
ACLU and Lambda Legal Ask Supreme Court to Review 6th Circuit Ruling Upholding Gay Marriage Bans
ACLU and Lambda Legal Ask Supreme Court to Review 6th Circuit Ruling Upholding Gay Marriage Bans
As expected, the ACLU and Lambda Legal have filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the Sixth Circuit’s anti-equality ruling that upheld gay marriage bans in Ohio, Michigan, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
Said Susan Sommer, Director of Constitutional Litigation for Lambda Legal via press release:
We have reached a tipping point, and the lives of thousands of same-sex spouses and their families hang in the balance. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling shines a spotlight on our divided country, where married same-sex couples are either respected or discriminated against, depending on where they live or even where they travel. As we have learned from other historic cases like Loving v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas, there comes a time when the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in, and provides the answer,–on the question of marriage for same-sex couples we believe that time has come.
Read the petition below via Equality Case Files:
Kyler Geoffroy
How Confusing Laws Are Hitting Our Bank Accounts
How Confusing Laws Are Hitting Our Bank Accounts
Family planning and anxieties about legal protections are having a significant effect on our bank accounts.
Brenden Shucart
www.advocate.com/business/2014/11/14/how-confusing-laws-are-hitting-our-bank-accounts
12 Things You May Not Know About 'Steel Magnolias'
12 Things You May Not Know About 'Steel Magnolias'
There may be no movie that better epitomizes the bond of female friendship than “Steel Magnolias.” Released 25 years ago this week, it’s become a touchstone — mothers share the film with their daughters, teen girls turn to it as a sleepover staple and men of all ages find themselves taken with the tale of six brassy Southern ladies (Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis and Julia Roberts) faced with one grave tragedy. Initial reviews were mixed, but it became 1989’s 14th highest-grossing film nonetheless. Today, you can’t turn on a television set without finding it somewhere. We caught up with Robert Harling, who adapted the movie from his 1987 play, to learn just how much “Steel Magnolias” means to him.
For Harling, it’s all a true story.
Even though “Steel Magnolias” doesn’t open with a “based on a true story” title card, Shelby’s tale belongs to Harling’s sister, Susan. Harling’s good friend Michael Weller, who wrote the play “Moonchildren” and adapted the movie “Hair,” and his wife, Kathy, urged Harling to process his sister’s death by writing something. He whipped up the stage version of “Steel Magnolias” in a quick 10 days. “I wrote it to somehow get this true story off my chest and to celebrate my sister in the process,” Harling said. That means all of the characters are based on real people from his hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana.
After opening off-Broadway, it was a seamless journey to the big screen.
Hollywood producer Ray Stark (“Funny Girl,” “Smokey and the Bandit”) saw the play and approached Harling about a potential movie. Stark wasn’t the only one, but his offer to shoot in Harling’s hometown — and a guarantee that he’d “get the greatest cast you can imagine” — became the winning bid. The deals were made in the fall of 1987, approximately six months after the play opened. “That’s how it came to me and then Ray got Herbert Ross to direct it and then it was this domino effect of superstar after superstar,” Harling recalled.
Harling created the role of Truvy, the beauty-shop owner, for Margo Martindale.
Two years before Dolly Parton played the part onscreen, Martindale originated Truvy in the off-Broadway debut. She and Harling were friends, and he wrote the part for her. Constance Shulman originated Annelle, and today you can see Shulman — who voiced Patti Mayonnaise on Nickelodeon’s “Doug” — as Yoga Jones on “Orange is the New Black.” The 2005 Broadway debut, directed by Jason Moore (“Pitch Perfect”), featured Delta Burke, Christine Ebersole, Rebecca Gayheart, Marsha Mason and Lily Rabe.
But back in 1987, no one expected it to be considered a comedy.
It wasn’t until audiences found “Magnolias” that Harling and the others involved with the production realized it had the trappings of a comedy. “All the women I knew were really funny,” Harling said of his approach to the setting that surrounds the tragedy at the story’s center. “They all love one-liners and they talk in bumper stickers, and they’re sharp, funny women.” Martindale still regales him with memories of their surprised reactions to the audience’s reception. “I just saw her not too long ago,” he said. “She’ll say, ‘Remember when we just didn’t realize we were gonna get all those laughs? We thought we were doin’ a drama!'”
Once Herbert Ross signed on, the A-listers started rolling in.
Ross directed “Funny Lady,” “The Sunshine Boys” and “Footloose” before “Steel Magnolias” entered his life. Ross sent around the script after it was done, and Harling recalls a dinner at Orso, a popular restaurant in New York City’s Theater District, where the director told him he’d run in to Sally Field a few days prior. “I think she would be very good to play your mother, don’t you think?” Ross asked. “Uh…yeah,” Harling responded. A few days later: “Dolly. She should be Truvy, don’t you think?” “Yeah.” And so on, until Shirley MacLaine (Ouiser), Olympia Dukakis (Clairee), Darryl Hanah (Annelle), Tom Skerritt (Drum), Sam Shepard (Spud) and Dylan McDermott (Jackson) rounded out the cast.
But Harling, like most others, had no idea who this gal named Julia Roberts was when casting director Hank McCann said, “Oh, there’s this great girl, but she’s off doing some movie about a pizza or something,” referring to 1988’s “Mystic Pizza.” “But you should see her, she’s terrific.” Indeed she was — “Steel Magnolias” was the last time Julia Roberts would appear in a movie without A-lister status, and, at 23, she became the source of the movie’s sole Oscar nomination.
Bette Davis invited Harling to her hotel for tea to discuss playing Truvy.
During the “avalanche” of the movie’s development process, Harling answered the phone one day to the sounds of someone claiming to be Bette Davis. Thinking it was a friend playing a prank, he responded by saying he did not have time at the moment. The caller repeated her introduction, because she was Bette Davis. The 80-year-old actress wanted to invite Harling for tea at her hotel near Columbus Circle. Davis hadn’t yet seen the play, but Elizabeth Taylor had. (Police were forced to shut down the street outside the theater because so many people were rubbernecking Taylor’s arrival.) Davis wanted to play Ouiser, and she suggested Taylor for M’Lynn and Katharine Hepburn for Clairee. “It was fantastic, “Harling recalled. “If I ever write a book, it’s a complete, incredible chapter. She basically, bless her heart, wanted to show that she was up and at ‘em and doing it. There was nobody else and she was looking fabulous.” Luckily for Harling, it was in someone else’s hands to break the news to Davis that the movie would be casting younger women.
Harling played the minister who serves at Shelby’s wedding and funeral.
Harling was on the set for the shoot, and Ross suggested he appear in the movie. He agreed, as long as he only had one line to say. “People have said, ‘Well, you’re an idiot, you just have one line, what’s the matter with you?'” Harling, who originally moved to New York to become an actor, said. “But that’s not what it was for. The movie had very little to do with me.”
The medical staff who attended to Harling’s sister also attended to Shelby in the movie.
The nurse who turned off Susan’s life-support equipment turned off Shelby’s machines after her body rejects the kidney M’Lynn has given her, which Harling said “added a sense of real gravity and reality to it all.” The day that scene was filmed, Harling’s mother, who’d also grown close with Roberts and the rest of the cast during the shoot, insisted on sticking around to watch the scene. Harling discouraged her, thinking it would be too traumatic — but then he realized he “wrote a play about steel magnolias and she’s going to do whatever she wants to do.” After the scene was done, Roberts rose from the bed and Harling went over to check on his mother. Her eyes were still dry. “I said, ‘I can’t believe you put yourself through that.’ She said, ‘No, I wanted to see Julia get up and walk away.’ The things we impose on situations, but Julia had become so special to my parents. She took some peace with that.”
Shelby leans in, years before that was part of anyone’s vernacular.
Shelby states, plain and simple, that she plans to keep her job as a nurse once she’s married and pregnant. Harling didn’t set out to craft an overt feminist message because to him that wasn’t even a consideration. “Whether you say that in 1988 or now, these women got it done,” he said. “We’ve managed to encompass that in our vocabulary, but it’s always been, where I’m from, about getting done. Now there’s a lot more Internet involved with it. But its basic force is: ‘I am woman, hear my roar.’ That’s been with us for decades.”
Yes, there were some heated moments on the set.
When Field and MacLaine presented “Steel Magnolias” at AFI’s Night at the Movies in 2013, they recounted memories of Ross, who died in 2001, clashing with the actresses on the set. The ladies recalled Ross telling Roberts and Parton they “couldn’t act.” Harling corroborated that tense energy, saying “it happens on every set.” “The women as a unit were completely impenetrable,” he said. “They were so exactly what this movie was about — they were totally, totally supportive of each other. And yes, Herbert had some strong moments and there were some disagreements. It happens on every set. But what I take away from that is all the other women coming to Julia’s defense. That was the most moving thing to me. I tell the truth: There were some clashes, but it was never that he hated any of the women. It was Herbert pushing everybody. Herbert pushed. He pushed really hard. It was really hard and when you’re working with Sally Field or Dolly Parton — they had been around for a while and they kind of know how to deal with that. That’s what happens in the business. Julia was new, and I just thought it was incredibly moving the way they rallied around Julia. And hey, she was the one who was nominated for an Oscar. She wins.”
After shooting would wrap each day, the cast would get together to eat and play games — and that’s how “Soapdish” was born.
There weren’t many nightlife options in Natchitoches, which today has a population of about 18,000, so the cast would play games like Pictionary and charades in the evenings. One night, after they’d exhausted most of their typical options, the group took to posing questions for everyone to answer. Harling asked each actress to name the role she’d most like to play. Dolly Parton’s was Medea. Shirley MacLaine said she’d never portrayed an alcoholic (that changed the following year when “Postcards From the Edge” came out). Julia Roberts reminded everyone she still “just wanted to work.” And Sally Field, after pondering it, said she always played “really noble, earnest women that wear crummy clothes. For once I’d like to play a bitch that gets to wear nice clothes.” And that was how “Sopadish” came about. Harling found himself thinking about the idea of America’s sweetheart actually being someone who “really destroyed the lives of everyone around her.” He put the concept to use in the 1991 comedy, which starred Field as an aging soap-opera actress who conspires to ruin the career of her co-star. (“Soapdish” will soon become a Broadway musical starring Kristin Chenoweth.)
Harling isn’t a big fan of Lifetime’s remake.
“It was unnecessary,” he said of the 2012 update starring Queen Latifah, Alfre Woodard, Jill Scott and Phylicia Rashād. He was familiar with African-American reboots and the smorgasbord of alternate versions performed across all ethnicities, and thinks it’s “thrilling” that so many different groups have found universality in the play. The Lifetime version had “remarkable” actresses, Harling said, but he wasn’t fond of the “hacked-up, copy-and-paste job” the script received. “It is the story of my sister,” he said. “It did not need to be cut up so the commercials can fit. I have stronger words for that, but I just thought it was exploitation. Thank you for that question because I like going on record saying it does not have my blessing.”
