#glbt issues

[nerdygaymormon]

The LGBTQ community has seen controversy regarding acceptance of different groups (bisexual and transgender individuals have sometimes been marginalized by the larger community), but the term LGBT has been a positive symbol of inclusion and reflects the embrace of different identities and that we’re stronger together and need each other. While there are differences, we all face many of the same challenges from broader society.

In the 1960′s, in wider society the meaning of the word gay transitioned from ‘happy’ or ‘carefree’ to predominantly mean ‘homosexual’ as they adopted the word as was used by homosexual men, except that society also used it as an umbrella term that meant anyone who wasn’t cisgender or heterosexual. The wider queer community embraced the word ‘gay’ as a mark of pride.

The modern fight for queer rights is considered to have begun with The Stonewall Riots in 1969 and was called the Gay Liberation Movement and the Gay Rights Movement.

The acronym GLB surfaced around this time to also include Lesbian and Bisexual people who felt “gay” wasn’t inclusive of their identities. 

Early in the gay rights movement, gay men were largely the ones running the show and there was a focus on men’s issues. Lesbians were unhappy that gay men dominated the leadership and ignored their needs and the feminist fight. As a result, lesbians tended to focus their attention on the Women’s Rights Movement which was happening at the same time. This dominance by gay men was seen as yet one more example of patriarchy and sexism. 

In the 1970′s, sexism and homophobia existed in more virulent forms and those biases against lesbians also made it hard for them to find their voices within women’s liberation movements. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), commented that lesbians were a “lavender menace” that threatened the political efficacy of the organization and of feminism and many women felt including lesbians was a detriment.

In the 80s and 90s, a huge portion of gay men were suffering from AIDS while the lesbian community was largely unaffected. Lesbians helped gay men with medical care and were a massive part of the activism surrounding the gay community and AIDS. This willingness to support gay men in their time of need sparked a closer, more supportive relationship between both groups, and the gay community became more receptive to feminist ideals and goals. 

Approaching the 1990′s it was clear that GLB referred to sexual identity and wasn’t inclusive of gender identity and T should be added, especially since trans activist have long been at the forefront of the community’s fight for rights and acceptance, from Stonewall onward. Some argued that T should not be added, but many gay, lesbian and bisexual people pointed out that they also transgress established gender norms and therefore the GLB acronym should include gender identities and they pushed to include T in the acronym. 

GLBT became LGBT as a way to honor the tremendous work the lesbian community did during the AIDS crisis. 

Towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, movements took place to add additional letters to the acronym to recognize Intersex, Asexual, Aromantic, Agender, and others. As the acronym grew to LGBTIQ, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIAA, many complained this was becoming unwieldy and started using a ‘+’ to show LGBT aren’t the only identities in the community and this became more common, whether as LGBT+ or LGBTQ+. 

In the 2010′s, the process of reclaiming the word “queer” that began in the 1980′s was largely accomplished. In the 2020′s the LGBTQ+ acronym is used less often as Queer is becoming the more common term to represent the community. 

[waitingforthet]

They Were Roommates: Once again, Brantley makes a meeting of the University of Minnesota GLBT (Gay Legendary Beasts Trans) club all about him and his personal issues.

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[camisoledadparis]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … November 11

1872 – David I Walsh (d.1947) US Senator for Massachusetts, was named in 1942 by the New York Post as implicated in a sensational Nazi spy sex scandal.

It was alleged that he was a frequent visitor to a male brothel patronized by US Navy personnel, that had been infiltrated by Nazi spies. The brothel owner, Gustave Beekman, was subsequently convicted and sentenced to 20 years for sodomy, and three Nazi agents arrested and convicted.

Senator Walsh predictably protested his innocence, insisting that he had never been near the place. However, in statements to police, Beekman and others identified Walsh as a regular patron. President Roosevelt, in conversations with his vice-president and with the Senate majority leader, said "everybody knew" that Walsh was homosexual.

The scandal was complex in that it implicated the Senator as a homosexual, as a patron of a male bordello, and as a possible dupe of enemy agents. Homosexuality was a taboo subject for public discourse, so the Post referred to a "house of degradation." At one point a sub-headline in the New York Times called it a "Resort." In the Daily Mirror, columnist Walter Winchell mentioned "Brooklyn's spy nest, also known as the swastika swishery." The Post first suggested a scandal. Over the course of several weeks it hinted an important person was involved, then named "Senator X", and finally identified Walsh by name. Its sensational treatment of the story detracted from the seriousness of its charges.

The brothel's owner and several others arrested in a police raid identified Walsh to the police as "Doc," a regular client, whose visits ended just before police surveillance began. Some furnished intimate physical details.

On May 20, 1942, with a full report from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in hand, Senator Alben W. Barkley, the Senate majority leader, addressed the Senate at length on the irresponsibility of the New York Post, the laudable restraint of the rest of the press, the details of the FBI's report, and the Senate's affirmation of Walsh's "unsullied" reputation.

He declined to insert the FBI report in the Congressional Record, he said, "because it contains disgusting and unprintable things." Without addressing Walsh's sexuality, he said the report contained no evidence that Walsh ever "visited a 'house of degradation' to connive or to consort with, or to converse with, or to conspire with anyone who is the enemy of the United States." He denied the charges related to espionage. He provided no specifics about the sexual activity at issue and said the details of the charges were "too loathsome to mention in the Senate or in any group of ladies and gentlemen."The press treated the charges in a similar way. For example, the New York Times report of Barkley's speech said that the FBI reported that "there is not the 'slightest foundation' for charges that Senator Walsh, 69-year-old chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee, visited a 'house of degradation' in Brooklyn and was seen talking to Nazi agents there."

In other words, while outwardly saying the charges were untrue, they reiterated them.

1939-1945 – Canadian Gays at war find a new identity.

While there was a well-documented purge of gay servicemen during the '60s, '70s and '80s, the realities of gay life in the military a couple of decades earlier were quite different. During the Second World War, some gays were turfed, while others were tolerated. Often, getting kicked out of the military for being gay had to do with circumstance — when Canada's troop levels ran low, gays were far less likely to be discharged.

But for a generation of young men and women, the Second World War was both their coming of age experience and their opportunity to come out. The war changed the world of gay life indelibly. Several years of war helped thousands of young men and women explore their sexuality.

Montreal writer Paul Jackson has found that the war not only showed soldiers a world they had never seen before, it also revealed a way of life that was equally foreign.

"For many queer servicemen, the transfer overseas represented a break with heterocentric Canadian social structures," he wrote in One of the Boys, a book that chronicles the wartime experiences of Canadian gay men. "Many found new opportunities for sexual self-discovery."

During World War II, military bases (which were already homoerotically charged) became brazen cruising zones. So it's not surprising that one of the most prominent wartime hotspots for gays developed in one of central Canada's traditional military strongholds — Kingston, Ontario.

Marney McDiarmid, who wrote about Kingston's queer history, says the war transformed the city's relatively quiet gay community. She wrote that, during the conflict, "the sheer presence of so many young men, far from home, transformed city streets into sites of sexual possibility."

For years after the war, the Kingston garrison remained quite large. Six thousand men were stationed in town as late as the 1960s. McDiarmid detailed the experience of one man, identified only as Earl, whom she interviewed about that period of time.

"One of the great hobbies was to get in your car and drive the La Salle Causeway," he said, referring to the road that bridges the Cataraqui River between downtown and the army base.

"[Soldiers] were short of money — naturally, in the military, they weren't paid too well — and they were always walking up the hill," he said. "So you'd stop and offer a lift — and they'd get back a lot later than they should have."

But even though the Canadian conscription crisis interrupted the homosexual witch-hunt that was, until then, being carried out by commanding officers, psychiatrists and snitches at home and abroad, being discovered as gay was still something that earned a soldier a dishonourable discharge.

Jackson wrote that military officials argued — and in some cases, still argue — that "the presence of openly homosexual soldiers would disrupt unit cohesion. Queer soldiers would be a disturbing influence, weakening the bonds that hold a group together and making it less effective."

But, outside the context of outright discovery, gay presence and gay activity was often simply ignored.

Gay sex and intimacy were often tolerated by soldiers on the ground. Solidarity among men on the front lines — both gay and straight — often trumped any pre-war prejudice or bigotry that might otherwise have caused divisions.

"There were secrets everywhere, and soldiers protected each other from [their superiors] in the army, navy and air force. It was to everyone's benefit to protect the unit," Jackson said.

After the war, Jackson said, Canadian society embraced a return to pre-war normalcy. There was a sense that Canadians needed "to put society back together again," he said. But for that simple, gay farm boy from Upper Buttfuck, Saskatchewan, there was no going back.

- (Adapted from Xtra! Jan 20, 2010)

An early Mattachine meeting

1950 – The Mattachine Society – the organization founded by Harry Hay along with a small group of Los Angeles male friends, first met on this date. The met in Los Angeles with Hay, Rudi Gernreich, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Dale Jennings in attendance, but was not incorporated until 1954 when a different group assumed leadership positions.

Because of concerns for secrecy and the founders' leftist ideology, they adopted the cell organization being used by the Communist Party. In the anti-Communist atmosphere of the 1950s, the Society's growing membership replaced the group's early Communist model with a more traditional ameliorative civil rights leadership style and agenda. Then, as branches formed in other cities, the Society splintered in regional groups by 1961.

Harry Hay conceived of the idea of a homosexual activist group in 1948. After signing a petition for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace, Hay spoke with other gay men at a party about forming a gay support organization for him called "Bachelors for Wallace". Encouraged by the response he received, Hay wrote the organizing principles that night, a document he referred to as "The Call".

He planned to call this organization "Bachelors Anonymous" and envisioned it serving a similar function and purpose as Alcoholics Anonymous. Hay met Rudi Gernreich in July 1950. The two became lovers, and Hay showed Gernreich The Call. Gernreich, declaring the document "the most dangerous thing [he had] ever read", became an enthusiastic financial supporter of the venture, although he did not lend his name to it (going instead by the initial "R".

Finally on November 11, 1950, Hay, along with Gernreich and friends Dale Jennings and lovers Bob Hull and Chuck Rowland, held the first meeting of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, under the name "Society of Fools".

James Gruber and Konrad Stevens joined the Society in April 1951 and they are generally considered to be original members. Also that month the group changed its name to Mattachine Society, a name suggested by Gruber and chosen by Hay, after Medieval French secret societies of masked men who, through their anonymity, were empowered to criticize ruling monarchs with impunity.

A largely amicable split within the Society in 1952 resulted in a new organization called ONE, Inc. ONE admitted women and, together with Mattachine, provided vital help to the Daughters of Bilitis in the launching of that group's magazine, The Ladder, in 1956.

Ray Boltz with Franco Sperduti

1953 – Ray Boltz, born in Muncie, Indiana, is a singer-songwriter who first came to wide notice in contemporary Christian music. Many of his songs tell stories of faith and inspiration.Boltz is the middle child of his parents' three children (a fourth child died shortly after birth). He was married to his wife Carol for 33 years, and they have four children.

Boltz was virtually unknown when he wrote "Thank You", which won the Song of the Year prize at the 1990 GMA Dove Awards. His song "I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb" also won a Dove Award for Inspirational Recorded Song of the Year at the 25th GMA Dove Awards in 1994. After the release of Songs from the Potter's Field in 2002, and his last tour in 2004, Boltz retired from the music industry. He separated from his wife in 2005 before moving to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with their divorce being finalized in early 2008.

On Friday, September 12, 2008, during an interview with the Washington Blade, Boltz disclosed that he was gay. Since then, Boltz has performed at several churches of the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay-affirming Christian denomination. His songs often tell stories of faith and inspiration. He travels the world in the group of Michael English, Michael W Smith with Gaithers Group.In 2010, he released the album True, which won Album of the Year at the OUTMusic Awards. Boltz currently lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his partner Franco Sperduti, who is also his talent agent.

1966 – Todd Verow, born in Bangor, Maine, is an American film director who now resides in New York City, New York. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the AFI Conservatory. Together with his creative partner, James Derek Dwyer, he formed Bangor Films in 1995. He was also the cinematographer for Jon Moritsugu's film Terminal USA (1993).

After a string of widely screened and praised short films he shot his first feature film, Frisk (Sundance, Berlin, Toronto ’96) a hyper-controversial adaptation of the novel of the same name. Featuring PXL vision, video, and super 8, the film assaulted audiences. Praised and reviled, it more importantly proved that Verow was an original voice that could not be ignored.

In late 1996, Verow shifted creative gears. It was while searching for a more intimate film language with his new improvisational acting troupe that he happened to experiment with digital video technology. This led to the award winning films of his Addiction Trilogy; Little Shots of Happiness (Berlin 97, SXSW 97, Mill Valley ’97), Shucking the Curve (SF IndieFest 99, No Dance ’99.) and The Trouble With Perpetual Deja Vu (Singapore ’99, Chicago Underground ‘99, Vancouver International 99). Verow and producing/writing partner James Derek Dwyer created Bangor Films to support their prolific film output, (Verow vowed ten features by the year 2000.)

Verow’s twisted Anti-Bush/Dangerous Liasons political drama, Bulldog in the White House won the Best Film Prize at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

His most autobiographical pic to-date, Vacationland greeted the world with a multi-city film fest tour, a limited domestic and international theatrical engagement and a DVD release on Water Bearer Films in October 2007.

He has been called a veteran of the New Queer Cinema, and his numerous productions on digital video have led to his being called "once and future king of DV" by Film Threat.

Verow is openly gay.

1975 – Two members of Gays of Ottawa lay a wreath at the National War Memorial. It is the first time a gay group is allowed to participate in the Remembrance Day ceremony.

1983 – Philipp Lahm is a German footballer who has played for and captained both Bayern Munich and the Germany national football team. He is a staunch supporter of gay causes, evn though he is heterosexual.Lahm is considered one of the best full backs in the world, and was included in the World Cup team of the tournament in 2006 and 2010, the UEFA Team of the Tournament in 2008 and 2012 and in the FIFA Team of the Year 2008. Although Lahm is right-footed, he is able to play on both sides of the pitch. He often cuts from the flank to the inside of the pitch to either shoot or pass. He is well known for his pace, dribbling and precise tackling abilities as well as his small stature, giving him the nickname the "Magic Dwarf".

Lahm has established a foundation, Philipp Lahm-Stiftung, to support underprivileged children and is also an official ambassador representing "FIFA for SOS Children's Villages". In addition he was an ambassador of the 2007, 2008 and 2009 World AIDS Day. He has also taken part in a campaign against speeding and various others such as Bündnis für Kinder, a campaign against child abuse.

Lahm was awarded a Tolerantia-Preis on 20 September 2008, due to his outstanding contribution against intolerance and homophobia in sports, particularly in football. He also stated that it's a "pity that being gay in football is still a taboo subject" and he would have no problem with a homosexual teammate and is "not afraid of homosexuals". However, Lahm doesn't advise footballers to publicly admit to being homosexual, because of the abuse they would suffer. He alluded to the tragic death of homosexual footballer Justin Fashanu.

1985 – After a year of cold feet, "An Early Frost" airs on NBC. Writers Dan Lipman and Ron Cowen (later to produce "Sisters" and "Queer as Folk") attempt to create the first TV movie to deal with both homosexuality and the impact of AIDS on a beleaguered community of Gay men.

In the film, the suburban Pierson family not only deals with closeted workaholic son Nick's dual secret (along with the unfaithfulness of his partner Peter), but also the anger, resentment and frustrations of mother Kate and sister Susan.

While it draws an amazing ⅓ of the viewing audience, the daring broadcast loses NBC about a half million dollars in ad revenue. And while many consider the broadcast a success, others feel the film's directness stalls nationwide discussion of AIDS, "because it achieved its narrative and informational goals so well."

1986 – Rafael de la Fuente is a Venezuelan actor and singer. He is known for his roles in the fantasy television series Grachi (2011-2013) and the soap opera reboot Dynasty (2017-present). His other notable role was in the first and second seasons of the drama series Empire (2015-2016).

De la Fuente was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He started his acting career in 2009 with the role of Jorge Giraldo in the Telemundo telenovela, Más sabe el diablo. In 2011, de la Fuente appeared as Max in the telenovela Aurora. This was followed by the recurring role of Diego Forlán in the Nickelodeon Latin America fantasy series, Grachi, which became a main role in the second season. In 2014, de la Fuente appeared as Coach Julio on Every Witch Way, an English-language remake of Grachi.

In 2015 and 2016, de la Fuente appeared in the recurring role of Michael Sanchez, the boyfriend of Jamal Lyon, in the Fox musical prime time soap opera, Empire. In 2017, he appeared as Cleve Jones' boyfriend Ricardo Canto in the ABC miniseries When We Rise. In March 2017, de la Fuente was cast in The CW's Dynasty reboot as Sam Jones, a gay male version of the original series' Sammy Jo Carrington (Heather Locklear).

In December 2019, de la Fuente publicly acknowledged his sexuality, as a gay male.

1989 – Yanis Marshall is a French dancer and choreographer. He was born in Grasse, France. He specializes in a style of dance choreography in which dancers of all genders wear high-heeled shoes.

In 2014, he auditioned for Britain's Got Talent with two backup male dancers and ended up becoming a finalist. Marshall also has spent time working as a coach and choreographer on Dancing with the Stars and the Ukraine's version of So You Think You Can Dance. He is also the choreographer for Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas Zumanity show.

In 2018, he appeared as the dancing Deadpool in Céline Dion's video "Ashes", while Ryan Reynolds appeared as Deadpool in the speaking part. In 2019, he appeared in the 4th episode of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 11 "Trump: The Rusical".

Marshall is openly gay and has spoken about the role dancing plays in the coming out of people.

guess the 2 who are gay

1992 – Australia removes its restrictions on gays and lesbians serving in the military.

[iphigeniacomplex]

rejoice! the glbt historical society has a digital archive collecting the writing of camille moran, a transgender activist for psychiatric survivor rights who advocated for the removal of gender identity disorder from the dsm

you may be familiar with moran from her statement in the fall '93 issue of ex-patient newsletter dendron, "why a transgendered woman calls for psychiatry's destruction". (if not, it can be accessed here, on page 17.) her writing on the psychiatric abuse she experienced as a transgender woman is crucial reading for anyone interested in the psychiatric survivors movement or anti-psychiatric perspectives.

[whatevergreen]

The Ladder, A Lesbian Review (Daughters of Bilitis) June 1966

"The cover of this issue of The Ladder, features a portrait of Ernestine Eckstein (1941–1992), vice president of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the United States. The issue also features an extensive interview with Eckstein, who was one of the first African American leaders of the LGBTQ movement in the United States.

The monthly journal of the Daughters of Bilitis, The Ladder, was published from 1956 until 1972. It was the third nationally distributed magazine produced by what was then known as the homophile movement."

GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco

[pep-the-artemis]

When people say that LGBT and BLM or even LGB and T shouldn't be connected since they're separate issues they're dumb

Even ignoring how on a fundamental level they're all linked in a weird cobweb of problems, that doesn't matter. What matters is that the groups are being suppressed and discriminated against, we may be fighting different battles but it's all the same war.

For example, two things which couldn't be much more different are gay rights and miners rights but guess who stood by the miners when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher waged a class war against miners, who stood besides them... the GLBT community (or as we know them today the LGBT community but thats a story for another day).

The only reason to divide is to the advantage of our enemy, divide and conquer.

[placegrenette]

Longing for Dick and Laughing at Death: The Story of Diseased Pariah News

All right, Tumblr, gather round. This is not my usual style here, and I have missed World AIDS Day by a number of days, but I searched for “Diseased Pariah News” on this nonsense site and got all of two coherent hits, and that does not sit right with me. So let me tell y’all a story of black humor, porn, a pre-venture-capital-overrun Bay Area, lovingly photographed penises, recipe testing, friendship, and death. It’s all true but I wasn’t there; sources are linked throughout and compiled at the end.

Cover of Issue #3. This and all illustrations courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society and Calisphere, the online archives of the University of California. Support your librarians and archivists, kids!

“It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To”

The short version of the story is: Diseased Pariah News was a zine that ran for eleven issues, all published between 1990 and 1999. It was edited almost completely by, and addressed pretty much exclusively to, PWAs, or People With AIDS.

To remind you whippersnappers: to know you were HIV positive in 1990 was to know that you were going to die a lot sooner than average, and probably not peacefully. As Jonathan Kauffman wrote in “Get Fat, Don’t Die,” a 2020 Hazlitt essay on DPN: “So many of the narratives of the time circled around two themes: memorializing the terror and adulterated sweetness of being alive as everyone they knew was dying, and shearing through the cordon of dehumanizing indifference that the public had erected around plague-struck communities. The experience of daily diarrhea or constant nausea may have been too visceral, too private, or simply too grinding to fit into the arc of a plot.” The diarrhea could go on for months, by the way. And that was separate from debilitating fatigue, potential blindness (from CMV retinitis), or constant prickly pain in your hands and feet (from peripheral neuropathy).

This was years before the development of protease inhibitors and “the cocktail” could prevent HIV-positive patients from developing full-blown AIDS; AZT could slow things down, but it came with nasty side effects. AIDS was not like the tuberculosis, or rather like the romantic conception of tuberculosis, in which one’s dying status could be signaled by paleness and the occasional discreet cough. AIDS was painful, and complicated.

So somebody had to have a sense of humor about all this.

Co-founder, original Serene Editor, and the guy who gets the credit for having the idea in the first place, Tom Shearer

Tom Shearer was a computer hardware engineer living in San Francisco, running a zine on the side called GAWK (it stood for Gay Artists and Writers Kollective) when a reader named Beowulf Thorne (more on him later) complained that GAWK looked terrible. Shearer challenged Thorne to do better; Thorne rose to the challenge; one thing led to another and the pair ended up collaborating on a whole new zine, this one focused on the experience of dealing with AIDS. Shearer got the title from an Advocate comic in which a flight attendant asked a passenger: “Would you like the smoking, non-smoking, or diseased pariah section?” (This was during a time when airlines not only had smoking sections but were occasionally refusing outright to transport PWAs.)

From the very beginning, Diseased Pariah News was meant to be funny, helpful, and obsessed with dick. Page 3 of the first issue lists a number of practical steps PWAs can take (“Call Pac Bell for low income phone rates”). There was also a Resources page, dedicated to advocacy groups, support groups, even mail-order pharmacies easy to work with, anyone whom the editors judged would treat PWAs fairly and not waste their time. In between those two was the debut of the column, “Get Fat, Don’t Die!,” dedicated to high-calorie recipes specifically designed to combat wasting disease, illustrated by a naked man in a come-hither pose; the debut of the column “Porn Potato,” which reviewed porn videos while keeping a much better sense of narrative than its subjects; a short-short story titled “I Fisted Jesse Helms”; and a contest to guess Shearer’s T-cell count. (Not included yet was the centerfold feature, which would include the model’s history of infections and T-cell count alongside his full-frontal glory; that would come in later issues.)

Shearer died in April 1991, as the second issue of DPN was going to press. (”Thanks to Mike for guessing optimistically high,” ran the conclusion to the T-cell count contest.) Issue #3 starts with Thorne recounting the aftermath of his death, including a visit to “Akbar and Jeff’s Cremation Hut,” and then, contemplating taking over DPN by himself, allowing himself a rare show of mourning:

Seriously though, the reality of Tommy's death isn't funny. But then, neither is it funny that the first President to preside over the age of AIDS couldn't make himself say the name of the syndrome. Or that a septuagenarian senator would obstruct prevention programs because he would rather see his nation's children die than "promote deviant sexual behavior" (all the while forcing us to endure tobacco subsidies and its retinue of smoking related deaths). Or...well, you know enough about this yourself, you fill in the blanks. What can I say about this situation? You can either laugh or cry, but crying gives you crow's feet.

Fortunately Thorne wasn’t alone for the rest of the ride: as “Cranky Editor,” he was joined by Tom Ace, christened “Humpy Editor,” and Michael Botkin, who already had a reputation around the Bay Area as a suffering-no-fools journalist and critic, as “Sleazy Editor.” DPN had found an eager audience to begin with--Shearer and Thorne had to double back to the printer when the first print run of the first issue sold out--but at its peak it had a circulation of 5,000 and could be bought in dozens of bookstores across multiple countries. The guys were dedicated and passionate without being self-important, and it showed.

Left to right: Sleazy, Cranky, and Humpy, in an undated photo (1994?), for a DPN Christmas card.

All eleven issues have been archived and can be read in PDF form courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and the University of California’s online archiving efforts. Highlights include “AIDS Barbie,” in #8; an interview with playwright and ACT UP co-founder Larry Kramer in #9; Thorne’s evisceration of And the Band Played On author Randy Shilts (who had himself just died of AIDS) also in #9; and the Opportunistic Infection Merit Badges (OIMBs), introduced by Botkin in #10:

The outcome will be an array of badges and ribbons which tell the educated viewer, at a glance, just how progressed your HIV disease is. It will be particularly useful for health care providers, who instead of taking lengthy histories will instead be able to briefly study a PWA's array of service ribbons, badges, etc.... a careful study of my OIMBs would quickly reveal my obscenely low T-cell count (17 at last testing), the fact that I've had PCP, peripheral neuropathy, MAC, wasting syndrome, cryptococcal meningitis, and herpes, and that I've taken every nucleoside analogue known to man. This would allow those who want to fawn over or avoid me to act accordingly, and avoid the frustration of mistaken acquaintanceship.

I can’t speak for you, but the badges were what stuck in my mind: humor black enough to communicate the bleakness of its source. It’s funny how history can seem incommunicable. Odds are you reading this are young enough that if I try to tell you what it felt like to look down Lexington Avenue on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, and see a great column of smoke and no cars, you can place the reference but probably not the devastation. People dealing with the aftereffects of COVID now are having a hard time gaining empathy for what it feels like to have their body betray them; the distance of a couple decades or so is not going to help. To take history at all seriously is to admit that the various horrors of the past are ungraspable. But the badges allow you a glimpse of what it was like to live in the midst of this particular horror.

Which is not to say that the DPN guys were particularly concerned with history. Hamilton-style musings about legacies would have left them cold. History had, in a sense, been stolen from them, and so they were going to embrace the present they had left. Especially Thorne, who would be the guiding force behind DPN for the rest of its run.

The Story-within-a-Story of Beowulf “Biffy Mae” Thorne, Writer, Editor, Graphic Designer, Illustrator, Cartoonist, Recipe-Tester, Critic, Know-It-All, and Horndog Extraordinaire

and also, a babe. I don't care what your gender/sexuality combination is, you would've been at risk of doing some pining.

Beowulf Thorne--no, that wasn’t his birth name, but it seems to have been the name he used exclusively during DPN’s run, so that’s what we’ll stick with--was born in 1964 and grew up in southern California, but fled to the Bay Area in 1983. I saw one source say he tested HIV-positive as early as 1986, which is to say before the term “HIV” was even in widespread use. Suffice to say, dude had to start contemplating his mortality far, far earlier than he should have. He was enrolled at UC-Santa Cruz for a while, studying biology, but that whole contemplating-his-mortality part led him eventually to focus on graphic design and advocacy: first with various condom-promoting organizations, such as the Condom Resource Center in Oakland, and then DPN.

If he hadn’t been doomed, Thorne probably would’ve been one of those guys resented by his acquaintances, just for the sheer number of things he was good at. He was not only DPN’s chief writer and editor but its layout artist and the designer of its related merchandise (not to mention the OIMBs). While working as a graphic designer for Addison-Wesley, he would occasionally piss textbook authors off by pointing out errors in their text, even though he wasn’t supposed to be factchecking: he just couldn’t help it. He did full-page, multi-panel “Captain Condom” comics for several DPN issues; that takes some time and effort now, never mind with Adobe Illustrator as it was three decades ago. He tested all of the “Get Fat, Don’t Die!” recipes. He was a gardener who specialized in orchids, cacti, and meat-eating plants, and beautifully detailed plant sketches are scattered in his collected papers.

1994 version of the Condom Educator's Guide, co-written by Thorne and Daniel Bao (who would later work on DPN issues) and designed by Thorne on "his trusty Macintosh."

And he could write. Reading him, you’d never guess the man wasn’t a trained writer, or is now twenty-three years dead: his voice is unstoppable. I’m not the type who laughs out loud at books easily, and while reading the DPN back issues, I found myself giggling repeatedly at the turns of phrase in Thorne’s porn reviews.

Oh, yeah: he also was Porn Potato. And just generally an unabashed horndog. He and Ace met when Ace saw Thorne’s personal ad: “Relatively stable 25-year-old design student seeks other adventurous good-looking men for mutual sodomy and oral copulation.” When a POZ writer asked Thorne about this in 1997, Thorne--who by this point was dealing with neuropathy and killer candida that ate his gums down to the bone--said cheerfully of Ace: “He’s quite buxom. I’ve always had a letch on him.” If Thorne and DPN stood for anything, it was the conviction that an AIDS diagnosis could not take away the right and responsibility to live, and living included being sexual.

But You Already Know the End of the Story

The hardest issue of DPN to read is the eleventh and last one, which came out in 1999, three years after #10. “In the eternity since DPN #10 appeared,” ran a note under the masthead, “66.67% of the editorial staff expired.” Botkin had died in 1996; that left Thorne and Tom Ace. By this point there was a new set of treatments available, but they worked a lot better if you hadn’t already been fighting HIV (plus the side effects of AZT) for over a decade.

One of the last DPN pieces Thorne wrote was on viatication, the practice of selling your life-insurance policy to be able to collect cash while you’re still alive. His health was failing pretty fast at that point--another of the last pieces is about CMV retinitis blinding him--but the article is practical, funny, and devoid of self-pity. It will break your heart nonetheless.

Deciding to viaticate my policy started with some soulful contemplation. The first thing I had to face was my own impending mortality. It was as though signing the paperwork obliged me to kick the bucket on some kind of schedule. For an obsessive taskmaster such as myself, there were some control issues....

Finally, there's a little roulette. The closer to death's door you are—on an actuarial basis—the more moolah you get. You don't want to cash in too early for a measly 50% (two-year life expectancy). On the other hand, if you wait for that 80% jackpot (six-month life expectancy), you might croak before you can enjoy it all. I was feeling pretty grim at that point, so the time seemed right.*

* For all you voyeuristic sickies, It was necrotic periodontitis.

He died on May 8, 1999. Reportedly his friends tried and failed to create a snowglobe with some of his ashes and Astroglide lube.

Tom Ace, miraculously, is still in possession of his mortal coil, or at least was as of 2010, when Vice interviewed him. Kauffman was able to talk to several of Thorne’s friends for his 2020 Hazlitt article. Beyond that I didn’t find a lot of easily accessible information about DPN’s survivors, either editors or readers.

Why Remember Diseased Pariah News

It’s not for everyone, I’ll grant you that. It never was. Even setting aside the sharp (necessary) line it drew between PWAs and HIV-negative onlookers, it was very much a product of a small, dedicated group with its own goals. If you are not a white gay cis man, you were not going to feel seen, as the modern saying goes, reading DPN. And if you don’t draw as strong a link between sex and vitality as its editors did, the repeated explicit celebration of dick might well put you off.

It’s still worth remembering, and celebrating. DPN is the kind of work that’s not easy to preserve. There were thousands and thousands of zines in the 1990s, and we’ve got no hope of learning from all of them, or even a good percentage of them. Eventually the people who can remember getting zines in the mail (my husband still sometimes uses the term “trib,” short for “minimum acceptable contribution”) will be gone. Our ability to communicate has expanded so much in the last three decades that it’s hard to archive and learn from all that communication--think of all the lost MySpace and Geocities pages, bulletin boards, emails. Preservation will be by definition selective, and later generations’ sense of what was actually happening thereby skewed, but we ought to preserve what we can.

But also: these guys were trying to bring laughs, help, and comfort to a vulnerable population, and in 2022 we like to think we approve of that kind of thing. Meanwhile they themselves were vulnerable, far more so than they should have been, and they recognized the unfairness of their situation but they did not whine. They were brave in the face of death, which is hard, and physical pain and the deterioration of the body, which is even harder. And we still in these supposedly enlightened times don’t have a good mechanism for thinking of campy gay men as brave. They weren’t looking to be remembered. We should remember anyway.

Sources

All the back issues of DPN are archived on Calisphere, the archives of the University of California, with Beowulf Thorne’s papers. Direct links: #1 (1990), #2 (1991), #3 (1991), #4 (1991), #5 (1992), #6 (1992), #7 (1992), #8 (1993), #9 (1994), #10 (1996), #11 (1999). Some of the information comes from this collection of contemporary articles Thorne clipped.

Tom Ace, “Thorne on Our Side,” POZ, August 1, 1999

Mark Allen, “That’s Not Funny, Or Is It?,” Vice, December 31, 2010

Jonathan Kauffman, “Get Fat, Don’t Die,” Hazlitt, April 28, 2020

Greg Lugliani, “Last Laughs,” POZ, October 1, 1997

[talisidekick]

2SLGBTQIA+

The 2S is for Two Spirit. An umbrella term for various third gender rolls and identities in First Nations cultures. I originally saw it as LGBTQIA2S+, but was reminded elsewhere that the reason LGBT has this acronym and not GLBT as it originally was, was because the L got shifted when lesbians showed up for blood drives during the Aids Crisis both as donors and nurses. The L became up front to honour the sacrifices made back then by lesbians in the community; and to this day one of the driving forces behind the anti-discrimination laws Canada has written into our constitution is because of the efforts of First Nations people and Two Spirit identities. And seeing how Canada and largely North America as a whole has a notoriously bad history about treating First Nations peoples with any degree of respect or agency over their own affairs and culture, it seemed prudent to place it up front.

It duals as a reminder for me as well; that while queer sexualities and gender identities fight to achieve equality and recognition on the same level as cisgender white men, we, and importantly I, cannot forget that this fight isn't over until all the minorities touched on and apart of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community simultaneously also achieve the same equality and recognition in all other respects. 2SLGBTQIA+ isn't a separate fight, it's one part of a much larger equal rights movement spanning across issues of race, creed, religion, gender, sexuality, and identity.

This is also what I mean when I say "none of us are free until/unless all of us are". It's about equality for all. Respect it or get bricked.

(if u add a + just vote for whichever one you add it to <3)

[thecontextofthecoconuttree]

The Proud "Damned Lesbian," Roberta Achtenberg

Although Roberta Achtenberg is deeply entrenched as a fairly niche political figure, she has had a tremendous impact on the way we are educated about the LGBTQ+ Community and the way they are treated from court rooms to the Senate floor. I personally don't believe that there can be a discussion about inclusion within American politics without referencing Achtenberg's reception as a Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development nominee.

When Roberta was 27 and going through law school, at the University of Utah, she found herself attracted to a woman. Although she was too scared to discuss these feelings at the time, she researched homosexuality and what it meant to be a lesbian. After reuniting with her husband, they amicably divorced, and Roberta decided to come out exclusively to her family, fearing that revealing her sexuality would jeopardize her career as a lawyer and educator. However, her research exposed the disadvantages at which the LGBTQ+ community were often placed under within the law and issues such as; adoption, privacy rights, marriage, housing, and employment. In 2011, she noted "The fact that sodomy laws existed, and we were therefore criminals; and because we were criminals we were judged mentally deficient and because we were mentally deficient we were expendable... [meaning] we could be fired from our jobs or we could have custody of our children taken away" (Achtenberg, Youtube, 13:42-14:28). At the time, legal and societal prejudice made them vulnerable to losing basic human rights if they were to express their sexuality. These issues inspired her to co-found the National Center for Lesbian Rights in 1977, as well as join the National Lawyers Guild in 1978 and begin working within its Anti-Sexism Committee, which was tasked with creating a manual to help attorneys represent their LGBTQ+ clients, how to address their First Amendment issues, etc. This work resulted in her editing of "Sexual Orientation and the Law" (1985).

As she made her way through different positions, in 1993, she was appointed Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity by President Bill Clinton, making her the first openly LGBTQ person to be appointed and confirmed to a position within a cabinet office. However, this was no easy feat. Conservative groups and Senators, notably Senator Jesse Helms, lobbied against her. In fact, Senator Helms pledged to stall Achtenberg's nomination "for weeks and weeks and weeks" (Helms, UPI), using her sexuality as a central point of attack. In a particularly harsh statement to Times, he referred to her as a "damn lesbian" and an "intolerant radical," framing her nomination as a threat to the future electability of Achtenberg's supportive Senate members. Moreover, the Christian Action Network circulated a video of Achtenberg and her partner riding in a Gay Pride parade in 1992. Helms saw this as further evidence that this was an "insane assault on family values" and chastised her for "demanding that society accept as normal, a lifestyle that most of the world's major religions consider immoral and which the average American voter instinctively finds repulsive" (Helms, GLBT). These actions and statements reaffirmed an issue we continue to struggle with today--the separation of church and state. While some view LGPTQ+ rights as a matter of moral or religious conviction, Achtenberg's appointment underscored the importance of ensuring that public policy and government positions remain free from religious interference. Achtenberg also recalled in 2011 how she was confronted about her position on housing discrimination against gay people and whether or not she wanted to emplace protections. To which she denied, later stating, "I was so scared I wouldn't get confirmed... in 1993 I could not have imagined the temerity of asserting such a position" (24:10-24:47). Despite this she still managed to receive a vote of 58-31 affirming her position within Clinton's cabinet. One of her actions integrated the previously all-white town of Vidor, Texas creating opposition from the Ku Klux Klan. However, her role in this position, despite the national attention, gave the opportunity for gay individuals around the country to find hope in her success. Achtenberg herself stated "The ability to be in public life has been enormously positive to our movement, to our people, and being able to contribute has been very gratifying" (Achtenberg, GLBT).

To speak on her more recent activity and ideology, she gave a speech at Harvard in 2011 detailing how she believes "Old-time warriors like myself, it's time for us to stand down. Not because we're too old, or too tired, or too cynical, but because our skills are not the skills that are needed today to help the movement take the next step"(Achtenberg, Youtube, 11:35-12:20). This sentiment echoes a broader concern in today's political landscape, in which many older politicians refuse to step aside, clinging to their positions of power even as newer generations push for fresh perspectives and leadership. Achtenberg believes that in order to understand why we internalize homophobia and to do something about this, we must look to the next generation. Otherwise, the work of the LGBTQ+ movement will fail to be important and complex. It isn't so much about legalistic thinking or equal rights anymore, but rather a "cultural transformation... of souls, hearts, and minds" (Achtenberg, Youtube, 35:01-35:20). We have to learn to dress the antipathy that pervades the way our culture treats LGBTQ+ people.

Roberta Achtenberg's work, determination, and family life with her partner and son ultimately helped to broaden the definition of family within American culture.

Works Cited

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_e1RgSb4DM&list=PL1dGNrB33lS0vqNa7glklNwikwevRYbyl&index=1

http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/achtenberg_r_S.pdf

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/05/06/Helms-vows-to-block-open-lesbians-nomination/9012736660800/

https://kids.kiddle.co/Roberta_Achtenberg

[camisoledadparis]

THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … November 15

1919 – Paul Moore, Jr. (d.2003) was a bishop of the Episcopal Church and served as the 13th Bishop of New York from 1972 to 1989. During his lifetime, he was perhaps the best known Episcopal cleric in the United States, and among the best known of Christian clergy in any denomination.

Moore joined the Marine Corps in 1941. He was a highly decorated Marine Corps captain, a veteran of the Guadalcanal Campaign during World War II earning the Navy Cross, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

Returning home after the War, Moore was ordained in 1949 after graduating from the General Theological Seminary in New York City. Moore was named rector of Grace Church Van Vorst, an inner city parish in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he served from 1949 to 1957. There he began his career as a social activist, protesting inner city housing conditions and racial discrimination. He and his colleagues reinvigorated their inner city parish and were celebrated in the Church for their efforts.

In 1957, he was named Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis, Indiana. Moore introduced the conservative Midwestern capital to social activism through his work in the inner city. Moore served in Indianapolis until he was elected Suffragan Bishop of Washington, D.C., in 1964.

During his time in Washington he became nationally known as an advocate of civil rights and an opponent of the Vietnam War. He knew Martin Luther King, Jr., and marched with him in Selma and elsewhere. In 1970, he was elected as coadjutor and successor to Bishop Horace Donegan in New York City. He was installed as Bishop of the Diocese of New York in 1972 and held that position until 1989.

Moore was widely known for his liberal activism. Throughout his career he spoke out against homelessness and racism. He was an effective advocate of the interests of cities, once calling the corporations abandoning New York "rats leaving a sinking ship". He was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain an openly homosexual woman as a priest in the church. In his book, Take a Bishop Like Me (1979), he defended his position by arguing that many priests were homosexuals but few had the courage to acknowledge it.

His first wife, Jenny McKean Moore died of colon cancer in 1973. Eighteen months later Moore married Brenda Hughes Eagle, a childless widow twenty two years his junior. She died of alcoholism in 1999. It was she who discovered his bisexual infidelity, around 1990, and made it known to his children, who kept the secret, as he had asked them to, until Honor Moore's revelations in 2008.

Honor Moore, the oldest of the Moore children and a bisexual, revealed that her father was himself bisexual with a history of gay affairs in a story she wrote about him in the March 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker and in the book The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir. In addition, she described a call she received six months after her father's death from a man, identified in the article by a pseudonym, who was the only person named in Moore's will who was unknown to the family. Honor Moore learned from the man that he had been her father's longtime gay lover and that they had traveled together to Patmos in Greece and elsewhere.

1939 – Réal Lessard was born in Mansonville, Canada. He led a quiet life until he was eighteen years old. He he had always dreamed of traveling and becoming an artist.

Hitchhiking, he set out to conquer the world. In Miami, he met his fate: Fernand Legros. They began an uneven relationship. Legros occasionally accused Lessard of infidelity, although he himself slept with other men. An unscrupulous art dealer, Legros quickly discovered the innate talent of Réal Lessard who painted, without knowing it, in the manner of great Fauves fromturn of the century.

Promising an art show that would never happen, Legros sold Lessard's paintings, without the knowledge of the artist, as authentic Dufy, Matisse, Derain, Van Dongen, Modigliani and many others. He managed to get everyone in his pocket – experts, beneficiaries, and even widows of the painters. The world was awash with raw Réal Lessard.

Reál and Legros on the beach at Cannes

Lessard discovered the scam but dared not speak. It will not take long for the Association of Art Dealers of Americans to intervene and the affair would culminate in a trial. Real was cleared but he had to prove that thousands of paintings, dating from his first from his meeting with Legros, were from his brush.

1941 – Holocaust SS chief Heirich Himmler orders the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of all homosexuals in Germany, with the exception of certain top Nazi officials. He also announced a decree that any member of the Nazi SS or the police who had sex with another man would be put to death.

1952 – ONE, the official publication of the Mattachine Society, Articles of Incorporation signed in the Los Angeles law office of Eric Julber. In January 1953 ONE, Inc. began publishing ONE Magazine, the first U.S. pro-gay publication, and sold it openly on the streets of Los Angeles. In October 1954 the U.S. Post Office Department declared the magazine 'obscene'. ONE sued, and finally won in 1958, as part of the landmark First Amendment case, Roth v United States. The magazine continued until 1967.

ONE also published ONE Institute Quarterly (now the Journal of Homosexuality). It began to run symposia, and contributed greatly to scholarship on the subject of same-sex love (then called homophile studies').

ONE readily admitted women, and Joan Corbin (as Eve Elloree), Irma Wolf (as Ann Carrl Reid), Stella Rush (as Sten Russell), Helen Sandoz (as Helen Sanders), and Betty Perdue (as Geraldine Jackson) were vital to its early success. ONE and Mattachine in turn provided vital help to the Daughters of Bilitis in the launching of their newsletter The Ladder in 1956. The Daughters of Bilitis was the counterpart lesbian organization to the Mattachine Society, and the organizations worked together on some campaigns and ran lecture-series. Bilitis came under attack in the early 1970s for 'siding' with Mattachine and ONE, rather than with the new separatist feminists.

In 1965, ONE separated over irreconcilable differences between ONE's business manager Dorr Legg and ONE Magazine editor Don Slater. After a two-year court battle, Dorr Legg's faction retained the name "ONE, Inc." and Don Slater's faction retained most of the corporate library and archives.

1954 – Poet and Carl Sandburg Prize winner, Rane Ramón Arroyo born (d.2010); Arroyo was an American poet, playwright, and scholar of Puerto Rican heritage descent who wrote numerous books and received many literary awards. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Toledo in Ohio. His work deals extensively with issues of immigration, Latino culture and homosexuality. Arroyo was out Gay and frequently wrote self-reflexive, autobiographical texts. He was the long-term partner of the American poet Glenn Sheldon.

He published ten books of poems, a book of short stories, and a collection of selected plays. Arroyo said: "No one is more surprised than I at being read in my lifetime." Arroyo's most recent books include "The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems" , and "The Sky's Weight." "Midwest Challenge" was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize.

The Umbrella Class assignment: bring in an object that tells your life story. Friends bought a music box, a painting of a cowboy being tamed by a mountain, a jeweled Buddha, but I was poor and had to risk being modest. Then I saw the broken umbrella, turned it inside out and exposed its ribs. There was a pun in it, rain and Rane, but the teacher said, how sad is your life? The other students nodded for their grades, but I opened up the umbrella, holding it by what was left of the handle, and it blossomed before the astonished class. Once again, when dismissed, I made magic and I got an A for seeing among the blind. - Rane Ramón Arroyo

1967 – François Ozon is a French film director and screenwriter whose films are usually characterized by sharp satirical wit and a freewheeling view on human sexuality, particularly gay, bi, and lesbian sexuality. Ozon is himself openly gay.

He has achieved international acclaim for his films 8 femmes (2002) and Swimming Pool (2003). Ozon is considered to be one of the most important French film directors in the new “New Wave” in French cinema.

Ozon often features LGBT people in his films. Some examples include:

Une robe d'été: a young gay man strengthens his relationship with his boyfriend through a brief encounter with a woman.

Scènes de lit: this features a lesbian couple and a gay couple.

La petite mort: a gay man's relationship with his estranged father.

Sitcom: this spoof comedy has numerous lesbian and gay references. The family's son comes out, engages in sexual orgies and begins an affair with the maid's husband, a sports teacher. The maid, herself, finds out she's a lesbian and seems to have a relationship with the mother, who has tried to cure her son's homosexuality by sleeping with him - she, of course, fails.

Les amants criminels: the main male character is gay and in the closet; he kills his (male) object of desire out of jealousy and enjoys his relationship with an ogre-like man who's kidnapped him and his female friend who was, more or less, his beard.

Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes: the two male characters, Léopold and Franz, are lovers - they are either gay or bisexual, while Véra, a former boyfriend of Léopold's, is now an M2F transsexual/trans woman.

8 femmes: one woman is lesbian and two others are bisexuals; the maid is ambiguous towards her female boss all the while she is her male boss's mistress. This film presents a lesbian kiss between Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant. It's a gay cult movie in France.

5x2: a happy gay couple is used to highlight the unhappiness of the heterosexual couple in the film.

Le temps qui reste: this deals with the end of life of a young gay man dying of cancer.

Le Refuge: this film explores the relationship between a homosexual man and the pregnant girlfriend of his deceased brother.

1974 – Todd Klinck, born in Windsor, Ontario, is a Canadian writer, nightclub owner and pornography producer.

Klinck moved to Toronto at age 18 to study theatre at York University, but dropped out to focus on his career. In 1996, his novel Tacones (High Heels) was the winner of the Three-Day Novel Contest, and was published by Anvil Press to strong reviews in the Toronto Star and Quill and Quire.

Klinck also collaborated with John Palmer and Jaie Laplante on the screenplay for the 2004 film Sugar, which garnered a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 25th Genie Awards, and he was a columnist for fab until 2005. He wrote an online only column for Xtra! called "Sex Play" in 2009, and a column called "Porndoggy" in the same publication for most of 2010. His writing has been published in the National Post, Saturday Night and Bil Bo K (Belgium).

Klinck and his business partner Mandy Goodhandy have launched several sex businesses in the Toronto area, including a transgender strip club, "The Lounge", an adult DVD production company, "Mayhem North", and a porn site, "Amateur Canadian Guys". In 2006 they opened a pansexual nightclub, "Goodhandy's", located in downtown Toronto. Klinck has also worked as a professional BDSM dominant, and has appeared on the television series KinK.

With Goodhandy, Klinck was chosen to be the Grand Marshall of the Pride Toronto 2010 parade.

Ted Nebbeling & Jan Holmberg

2003 – With same-sex marriage recognized by the courts, British Columbia cabinet minister Ted Nebbeling becomes Canada's first serving cabinet minister to legally marry Jan Holmberg, his same-sex partner of 32 years, one of the world's first same-sex weddings of a serving cabinet minister.

The day after his marriage was announced in the media, Nebbeling was dropped from cabinet in a shuffle. The government stated that the timing was coincidental and that there was no prejudicial motive behind this, as Nebbeling was openly gay at the time of his election. Nebbeling and Holmberg are both immigrants to Canada, Nebbeling from the Netherlands and Holmberg from Sweden.

[josephine-practicum]

Nearing the End

Log for 11/18/2024

Today I worked from 11AM to 4:30PM. I mainly worked on outreach emails and publication research. Lawson was able to point me in the right direction for the latter, and I would like to showcase one of the magazines I found quirky.

The Out on the Town Magazine (2010s) is a "GLBT magazine for the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, the Nashville market in Tennessee, and the Springfield/Joplin markets in Missouri." (source). This publication was included in Invisible Histories' "Extra Extra, Queer All About It" presentation alongside other Queer magazines.

Covers for this magazine range wildly from eye-catching guests:

Out on the Town Magazine: Volume 2, Issue 6

To strangely intriguing:

Out on the Town Magazine: Volume 2, Issue 2

These magazines are a product of their time. The ones I showed here are from their online Issuu profile that has issues from 2010 to 2012.

In addition to uncovering this, I was able to send out five more outreach emails. My message to Jacksonville State University came a few hours later. They were able to direct me to "JSU Pride: First Openly Gay Professor Shares His Story"---an article on Freddy Clements. I came across this article during my search through the JSU archives, but I had not known about his work specifically. Not only did he design costumes for the university, but he made outfits for a local ball he attended. I plan on adding more information about him to the spreadsheet tomorrow.

Lastly, my meeting with Lawson and the rest of the team went smoothly. I confessed that I was running out of content to research, and thankfully that means I'm nearing the end of my project. Our last meeting will be on the 2nd of December. By then, I should have this spreadsheet complete and my final blog draft complete.

That's all for today, until tomorrow!=

[critterdotgo]

Speaking of Sullivan, here’s a interview that he was apart of:

And here’s another interview video where Lou is mentioned:

There’s also a book that contains a collection of diary entries that he made throughout his life. Its called We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan by Lou Sullivan with Susan Stryker, Zach Ozma, Ellis Martin.

Also here’s some websites:

Created by two of the editors who worked on We Both Laughed In Pleasure (also has a lot of sources on Lou):

GLBT Historical Society (Contains a lot of sources):

Internet Archives of FTM Newsletter:

reminder that trans men also fought for your rights and refusal to acknowledge this is tantamount to denying historical fact

[pashterlengkap]

Retired gay couple awarded for launching organization supporting LGBTQ+ elders of color

On November 12, Paul Glass and Charles D. Evans of Falmouth were honored with this year’s AARP Andrus Award for Community Service. It’s AARP’s most prestigious and visible state volunteer award for community service. They are the first married and Black gay couple in AARP’s history to receive the award. AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons,  is one of the largest organizations in the country. With a membership of over 38 million members as of 2018, it focuses on issues affecting Americans over the age of fifty. The AARP Andrus Award for Community Service is an annual awards program developed to honor individuals whose service is a unique and valuable contribution to their community and society, reflecting AARP’s vision and mission. Related: This tiny market in East Texas is made for LGBTQ+ people In one of the most conservative corners of the country, queer folks are supporting each other. “I am beyond honored and grateful for this recognition. I feel we are not put on this earth to exist but to be of service to others and our community,” Evans told LGBTQ Nation. Get the Daily Brief The news you care about, reported on by the people who care about you: Subscribe to our Newsletter When AARP Massachusetts was looking to honor the state’s top volunteer, Glass and Evans’s names rose to the top. They have made a difference in the lives around them, sharing their knowledge, experience, talent, and skills to enrich the lives of our community. Since childhood, their indefatigable spirit to give back to their community was ingrained in them.  “Paul and Charles have channeled the many negative experiences they endured into positive, healing, and inspiring volunteer work and leadership,” wrote Barrie Atkin of Swampscott, who nominated the couple. “Their signature work co-founding LGBTQ+ Elders of Color in 2013 in Massachusetts was innovative, unusual, and courageous. No such organization existed at that time. In collaboration with the LGBTQ+ Aging Project, they identified the need and turned the need into a reality. They didn’t just co-found the organization along with others. Their continued leadership inspires many others to be involved.”  People of color are underrepresented and underserved when it comes to aging services and resources. Paul and Charles understand the intersectional challenges and complexities of growing older as African-American gay men. LGBTQ+ senior communities with multiple identities confront multiple challenges. Their organization, LGBTQ+ Elders of Color, fills the gap missed by Massachusetts LGBTQ+ organizations and local, state, and federal public health systems. Outreach is essential because the challenges facing Black LGBTQ+ seniors intensify with age. According to Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (Sage) and the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), approximately one-third of LGBTQ+ elders live at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, with 40 percent being Black. These seniors often feel more vulnerable, invisible, and isolated by retirement. Historical and ongoing discrimination has created significant lifelong challenges for this demographic: limited wealth and savings, low wages, few labor protections, housing instability, food insecurity, stigma, immigration, HIV status, and higher mortality from treatable conditions. All have contributed to a lack of well-being and a lower quality of life. By 2050, POC seniors will comprise over 40 percent of the elderly population, and approximately 3 million seniors will identify as LGBTQ+. With this projection, specific cultural and linguistic competence training and nondiscrimination policies are needed to support a rapidly growing demographic group that has experienced a lifetime of health, educational, and economic disparities. In 2018, Massachusetts legislators passed “An Act Relative to LGBT Awareness Training for Aging Services Providers” mandating LGBTQ+ cultural awareness training for all… http://dlvr.it/SzJfYC

[border2borderentertainment]

WHAT WE'RE WATCHING - 'BEYOND GAY The Politics of Pride' - A doc that examines the role and relevance of Pride celebrations around the world, which now have turned into a global fight for human rights.⠀ ⠀ This feature length documentary follows the Vancouver Pride Society's (VPS) Parade Director Ken Coolen and his VPS colleagues as they travel to places where Pride is still steeped in protest to personally experience the rampant homophobia that still exists. They also travel to Sao Paulo Brazil for the world's largest gay parade and New York City, the birthplace of the modern gay liberation movement.⠀ ⠀ Increasingly the Pride movement is globalizing. Coolen and many Pride organizers in North America and Europe, where celebration has overtaken political action, strive to remind their communities that Pride is at its heart a global fight for human rights.⠀ ⠀ Despite the hundreds of thousands of people cheering in the streets, Pride is much, much more than a parade and a party. It is a giant step on the road to true equality. The GLBT community during Pride is an entertaining and engaging multi- ethnic group than can bring attention to the issue of human rights with diversity, insight, and of course plenty of fabulousness.⠀ ⠀ #lgbtq🌈 #GayRights #HumanRights #documentary #queerfilm #queerfilmmakers https://www.instagram.com/p/CmPCGhQJURt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[abitmoredetail]

[URBAN NOTE] Eight Toronto links

[URBAN NOTE] Eight Toronto links

Samantha Edwards writes at NOW Toronto about the controversy surrounding the visit of transphobe author Meghan Murphy to give a speech at the Palmerston library, with authors even threatening a boycott of the network.

Natasha Tusikov writes at The Conversation about how Sidewalk Labs’ proposals for the Port Lands would give it great and unaccountable political power.

blogTO looksat the 1945…

[progressivejudaism]

I believe that same-sex couples may not only be permitted but may indeed have a religious obligation to marry the one they love & are fully and exclusively committed to. It's true that according to one Talmudic approach, the purpose of marriage is to procreate together. But another Talmudic approach explains that the purpose of marriage is to liberate one another from the depths of existential loneliness. Indeed, this is a deep religious insight of the rabbis that marriage is just not just about family but also deeply existential. In Jewish thought, love is not a strange emotion to be conquered. Rather, love is a spiritual value to be cherished & celebrated wherever it is found. "Rav Nachman said in the name of Shmuel that even though a man has many children, he may not remain without a wife, as it says: ‘It is not good that man be alone.’ But others say that if he does have children then he may abstain from procreation and he may even abstain from taking a wife altogether," (Yevamot 61b). תלמוד בבלי מסכת יבמות דף סא עמוד ב מסייעא ליה לרב נחמן אמר שמואל, דאמר: אע"פ שיש לו לאדם כמה בנים - אסור לעמוד בלא אשה, שנאמר: +בראשית ב'+ לא טוב היות האדם לבדו. ואיכא דאמרי: הא יש לו בנים - בטיל מפריה ורביה ובטיל נמי מאשה

Rabbi-Shmuly Yanklowitz (Orthodox Rabbi and Activist)