Kramer on Kramer
On the publishing of his magnum opus, The American People, famed author Andrew Holleran asks our angriest activist all that he has learned.
Andrew Holleran
www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/people/2015/03/09/kramer-kramer
Category Archives: NEWS
Alabama Goes Rogue on Marriage
Alabama Goes Rogue on Marriage
The Alabama Supreme Court just went rogue on marriage, and that has George Takei pretty annoyed. Hundreds of Republicans just asked the U.S. Supreme Court to enact full federal equality. And the National Organization for Marriage’s losing streak continues with yet another slapdown in court.
Well, it seemed like marriage was safe in Alabama, but the state Supreme Court still had a one weird trick up its sleeve. Even though a federal court ordered marriage to begin, the Alabama Supreme Court has now ordered it to stop. The state justices claim that their interpretation of federal law trumps a federal judge’s.
Can they do that? Not really, no. This breaks all kinds of rules about jurisdiction and authority. The legal term for this is … well, there isn’t one, because it really isn’t a thing that’s done. It’s basically the state giving the finger to the country. Which is why George Takei has flipped it around by encouraging folks to show the state their wedding finger.
What happens next? Lawyers rack up a ton of hours filing motions, and and maybe marriage can start back up again sometime soon. Or we might just have to wait until the U.S. Supreme Court resolves things once and for all.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, last week was the deadline for amicus briefs in the marriage cases. Almost 400 companies submitted briefs in favor of marriage equality, including Coke, Delta, Apple, Nike, Amazon, GE, and many many more. Also of note: a pro-equality brief from over 300 Republicans. That includes several current and past senators, governors, mayors, White House officials, and even a Koch brother. This is more than double the number of Republicans who signed a similar brief for the DOMA case in 2013.
The Supreme Court won’t rule on marriage until sometime after oral argument on April 28. But they did just deliver some more bad news to the National Organization for Marriage. For years, NOM has been fighting to keep their donor identities secret, and last week the Supreme Court denied their request for a hearing, which puts an end to the case once and for all. It is weird that NOM stalled for this long, since the donor names have been available through the state since 2008. Essentially NOM just spent seven years and a ton of money on a fight that they lost a long time ago.
Watch the highlights of the 2015 Sydney Mardi Gras Parade
Watch the highlights of the 2015 Sydney Mardi Gras Parade
Australia’s SBS public broadcaster put together a highlights show of the best of this year’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade and you can watch it here
andrewp
www.gaystarnews.com/article/watch-highlights-2015-sydney-mardi-gras-parade090315
Three Reasons Homosexuality Is Not A Choice And That Gay Men Exist (And One Myth)
Three Reasons Homosexuality Is Not A Choice And That Gay Men Exist (And One Myth)
YouTubers Alex and his alter ego Xander want to know why feeling good often means being “bad.” So they’re going to use science, sketch comedy and a little skin to get at the core of taboo topics and pleasures. Introducing the new Queerty column, The Science of Sin.
Aspiring GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson thinks homosexuality is a choice (before he changed his mind). John Enslen, an Alabama judge, wrote in a Facebook post that “Homosexual marriage is on the wrong side of morality. Unlike skin color, homosexuality is not an immutable physical character trait disconnected with our moral agency.”
Come on, dudes, we can all at least agree that homosexuality is hardwired biologically, right? After all, that’s the scientific consensus–much like the fact that global warming is caused by humans.
Let’s review the facts.
To give the antigay wing nuts the benefit of the doubt, it can be hard to understand from an evolutionary, biological context why homosexual men exist (other than to create great outfits and run Apple). If gay men aren’t driven to procreational sex, how are gay genes passed on from generation to generation?
The Myth
At the turn of the 20th century, researchers like Sigmund Freud believed absent fathers made boys gay. They thought that since many gay men reported distant relationships with their dads, homosexuality arose because these men had not been properly “masculinized” by their aloof fathers.
But experts now believe it wasn’t the fatherly distance that caused homosexuality – but rather the homosexuality that caused the distance. In other words, the father withdrew from the homosexual child–if he was even around at all.
Today we know for a fact that homosexuality endures and even flourishes in every culture and throughout the animal kingdom. This means that being gay likely is the result of some biological and evolutionary mechanisms.
Here are the leading hypotheses as to why we have homos…
1. A lot of older brothers
Multiple studies have confirmed that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. That might be because a mother’s body develops antibodies to male hormones the more boys she has. The antibodies then influence the development of any future sons, making them homosexual. Why would this happen? Maybe because the less heterosexual men that are born, the better chance a society has of avoiding overpopulation.
2. Fertile Females
Studies show that compared to families with no gay men, some families with a lot of gay men have women that give birth to many more babies. This leads scientists to think that perhaps the genes that make these women extra fertile make men … extra gay. So even though some men might be taken out of the gene pool, their sisters (and mothers and cousins) more than make up for them.
3. Kin Selection
Finally, in the hypothesis we like the best, studies on cultures that still live tribally show that having gay men around add to a family’s fitness. The idea is that gay genes stick around because having homosexual, non-reproducing members of a family are crucial for survival. Gay uncles without children of their own can help take care of their nephews and nieces along with the elderly. This added support ensures their kin will grow healthy and strong and pass on their genes by having children of their own.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the biology of homosexuality (or sexuality for that matter). But it seems there are probably many different pathways to becoming gay. Woohoo!
Wanna learn more? Click the video to see Alex and Xander grapple with the existence of gay men…
Chris Bull
Rights Groups Seek to Resolve Alabama Marriage Question
RuPaul's Drag Race Pit Crew Plays Dirty Charades With Oiled Up, Red-Headed New Stud Bryce: VIDEO
RuPaul's Drag Race Pit Crew Plays Dirty Charades With Oiled Up, Red-Headed New Stud Bryce: VIDEO
The second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Oh Pit Crew! debuted this week and kicked off the show by introducing new pit crew member Bryce (with comments from host Detox) to the group. RuPaul and pit crew veterans Miles and Jason welcomed Bryce to the crew with a hearty round of Dirty Charades and an ab rubdown.
Watch the redheaded stud introduce himself, along with his abs, AFTER THE JUMP…
Anthony Costello
Planet Fitness Kicks Out Transphobic Gym Member For Trolling Transwoman
Planet Fitness Kicks Out Transphobic Gym Member For Trolling Transwoman
Planet Fitness bills itself as being a “Judgement Free Zone” in its ad-spots and in a stunning move the mega-chain has put its money where its mouth is. Yvette Cormier of Midland, Michigan was deeply troubled in late February when entering the women’s locker room of her local Planet Fitness. According to Cormier, she couldn’t use the locker room because it was being used by a transwoman.
“I was blocked, because a man was standing there,” Cormier told MLive, a Michigan news outlet. “It freaked me out because, why is a man in here?”
When Cormier brought the transwoman’s presence to Planet Fitness personnel, they informed her that the she identified as a woman and thus was more than welcome to use the womens’ locker room. Cormier, determined to raise alarm, took it upon herself to inform other female gym members that a transwoman had been given equal access to the gym’s female facilities.
Cormier further escalated matters by contacting Planet Fitness’s corporate offices with her complaint, but it was here that she was firmly shut down. Given the gym’s no judgement policy, a representative explained to her, they would never ask the transwoman to stop using the locker rooms. When asked if she would stop harassing the transwoman, Cormier asserted that she would continue to make noise until something was done about the matter. Then Planet Fitness canceled her membership.
“Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members,” said Planet Fitness PR director McCall Gosselin. “Our gender identity non-discrimination policy states that members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their sincere self-reported gender identity.”
Gosselin continued:
“The manner in which this member expressed her concerns about the policy exhibited behavior that management at the Midland club deemed inappropriate and disruptive to other members, which is a violation of the membership agreement and as a result her membership was cancelled.”
Charles Pulliam-Moore
Gay Author and Former Right-Wing Activist on Life as an 'Odd Man Out'
Dan Savage on Telling Ben Carson to 'Suck My D–k': 'Sometimes You Have to Fight Fire With Fire' – VIDEO
Dan Savage on Telling Ben Carson to 'Suck My D–k': 'Sometimes You Have to Fight Fire With Fire' – VIDEO
Following Dr. Ben Carson’s remarks this past week that being gay is a choice because “a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay,” Dan Savage penned an open letter to the 2016 GOP hopeful inviting the neurosurgeon to “suck my d–k.”
Wrote Savage:
If being gay is a choice, prove it. Choose it. Choose to be gay yourself. Show America how that’s done, Ben, show us how a man can choose to be gay. Suck my d–k. Name the time and the place and I’ll bring my d–k and a camera crew and you can suck me off and win the argument.
Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources earlier today, host Brian Stelter asked Savage why he decided to “lower” himself to Carson’s “equally vile” level.
Savage replied:
Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire….[Carson has] compared gay people to child rapists, to people who have sex with animals, necrophilia…He really says the vilest and most disgusting things about gay people. And sometimes to get the attention of someone like that, to really make it clear to them how low and disgusting they’re being, how vile they’re being, you have to meet them on the field where they’re doing battle and take them on.
Watch the interview, AFTER THE JUMP…
Kyler Geoffroy
Access to Care Is a Way to Save Transgender Youth's Lives Today
Access to Care Is a Way to Save Transgender Youth's Lives Today
So far this year, the transgender community has seen a mind-boggling amount of violence and loss.
Whether it is Penny Proud in New Orleans, Louisiana, or Bri Golec in Akron, Ohio, in each case the circumstances are eerily similar: Trans women losing their lives unnecessarily as victims of brutal, violent crimes. Other high profile cases of suicides among transgender individuals, or cases of discrimination suffered by transgender people in either housing or the workplace have captured the nation’s attention by sharing the challenges that transgender people face by being marginalized, othered, harassed, hurt and misunderstood. Collectively these cases have created a rise in social media posts with a poignant and all-too-familiar hash tag, #translivesmatter.
Among all of this loss, it is the Leelah Alcorn case, and others like hers, that I cannot seem to shake from my head as a pediatrician. You may recall that Leelah was the 17-year-old transgender woman who chose to, or was driven to, end her own life. At the time, the case garnered national headlines with the main focus on Leelah’s public social media posts in the weeks preceding her death. These haunting posts discussed her negative experiences with conversion therapy to supposedly “cure” her of her transgender identity.
However, the undiscussed aspect of the Leelah Alcorn case is that access to healthcare, particularly for gender-affirming medical therapies may have saved her life.
Re-read some of her social media posts before she took her life, “I can’t wait until I am 18 to begin transitioning,” and “I can’t wait one more day.” These posts point to her inability to access appropriate healthcare as a potential immediate precipitating factor in her death; one that may have been 100 percent preventable.
I suspect this aspect of the story was not pursued with vigor out of respect to Leelah’s grieving parents, who the media chose to, understandably, not challenge with respect to the rationale behind the decisions they may have made or not made for their child. And it certainly is not my intention to unnecessarily stir the pot, create drama or inflict more pain for on the Alcorn family.
However, there is a larger educational point that needs to be said loud and clear for the benefit of other families and for transgender or gender nonconforming youth. That message is simple: For transgender youth, access to health care services saves lives.
Truth is that in many centers, including the Gender and Sex Development Program that I co-direct at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, adolescents like Leelah shouldn’t have to wait until the age of 18 to begin engaging in gender-affirming care. Youth should and do have the opportunity to begin the process of transitioning in a way that allows them to live life as their authentic self.
Our Gender Program’s multidisciplinary team and other programs models across the country are complete with pediatricians, nurses, child development specialists, mental health providers and endocrinologists all committed to working with youth and families who are seeking advice or guidance in confronting the challenges of raising a gender non-conforming or transgender child. In many instances these individuals are not familiar with sources of support in the community or options related to medical therapies and interventions.
The Endocrine Society and World Professional Association of Transgender Health Professionals (WPATH) have what are now considered widely-used clinical care guidelines that support the use of pubertal blocking medications in certain gender non-conforming children or early adolescents based upon pubertal and developmental age. They also support the initiation of cross sex hormones in transgender young people as young as 16 years of age (and in some case and some centers even younger).
It is not unusual for teams such as ours to encounter parents or families of children that do not initially support these medical interventions — often due to a denial about the child’s authentic gender identity, a lack of education about the safety of potential medical interventions or a deeply rooted personal, religious or cultural objection. In the overwhelming majority of these cases (but certainly not all), we can work effectively with families and individuals to find a common path moving forward, or at the very least finding a path that ensures the safety and well-being of the child or adolescent.
Centers like ours strive to dispel myths that label being transgender as an affectation or pathology as opposed to the stable identity it represents for most individuals. We also work with families to see their children through a broader and more realistic lens than the spectrum of dysfunction that is too often the focus of negative media attention.
For, while it remains true that too many transgender youth are the victims of hate crimes, and too many become homeless or contemplate suicide, this spectrum of dysfunction does not capture the strength, perseverance, pride and resilience that in my professional opinion more accurately captures the spirit of the young transgender people I see each and every day.
Alongside educating families, it is important to educate the adolescents themselves about their individual rights with regard to medical decision-making particularly as it relates to mature minor statutes on the state level or legal emancipation as a last resort for those who may be at the point of crisis or self-harm.
In essence, for many individuals like Leelah, access to one of the many centers across the country that care for gender non-conforming children or adolescents could literally be a lifeline to a future as their authentic selves.
And most importantly, access to care at these sites can save lives starting today.
