#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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[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.

[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 … October 30

Peisistratus rides into Athens with Athene

605 BC – On this date the Athenian benevolent tyrant Peisistratus was born (d.527 BC). Peisistratos was the son of a philosopher and teacher called Hippocrates, and was named for the Peisistratos in the Odyssey. He lowered taxes and increased Athens' economy.

According to Plutarch he was the eromenos (Greek for "young lover") of the Athenian lawgiver Solon. He assisted Solon in his endeavors, and fought bravely in the battle of Salamis.

When Solon left Athens, Peisistratos became leader of the party of the Highlands (poor, rural people) in 565 BC. Peisistratos used a clever scheme, calling for bodyguards after he pretended to be attacked. Those bodyguards were composed of the people of the Highlands who had entered Athens. In 561 BC he seized the Acropolis with this group of bodyguards, becoming ruler. His rule did not last - he was driven out by Lycurgis, Megacles and others from the party of the Coast within the year. He returned 10 years later (in legend, with Athene at his side), regained power and reigned for 23 years until his death in 527 BC.

During his reign, many temples were built and he encouraged poets and artists by welcoming them into his court. According to a story first mentioned by the Latin author Cicero, Peisistratus ordered the writing down of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, which had previously been transmitted orally.

1882 – Johannes Holzmann (d.1914) was a German anarchist writer and activist who generally went by the pseudonym Senna Hoy.

Holzmann, born in Tuchel, Prussia (now Tuchola, Poland), hailed from a bourgeois Jewish family. Moving to Berlin, he became a teacher of religion at first. Like many intellectuals around the turn of the century, he felt oppressed by the restrictive morals then reigning German society. He quit teaching in 1902 and founded the League for Human Rights (Bund für Menschenrecht, in German) in 1903.

In 1904, he published a booklet entitled "Das dritte Geschlecht" ("The Third Gender"). In it, he attacked homophobia, laying most of the blame on religion. Above all, the text was intended to be educational and covered evolution, biology and issues then facing homosexuals.

From 1904 to 1905, Holzmann edited the journal Der Kampf: Zeitschrift für gesunden Menschenverstand (The Struggle: Journal for Common Sense). Though it was not published by any particular organization, the journal was anarchist in outlook. In addition to fictional stories, Der Kampf published articles on various topics, including many about homosexuality. Among its writers were Else Lasker-Schüler, Peter Hille, and Erich Mühsam and, at its best, it had a circulation of up to 10,000.

During this time, Holzmann wrote an article entitled "Die Homosexualität als Kulturbewegung" ("Homosexuality as a Cultural Movement"). He argued that the right to privacy entailed that "no one has the right to intrude in the private matters of another, to meddle in another's personal views and orientations, and that ultimately it is no one's business what two freely consenting adults do in their homes." He attacked Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code which criminalized homosexual acts.

To him, the struggle against the prohibition of homosexual acts was part of a larger struggle for emancipation. He disagreed with the mainstream socialist movement, namely the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), that viewed the repeal of Paragraph 175 as a minor issue. He also opposed the SPD's tactic of forcefully outing gays, such as the steel magnate Friedrich Alfred Krupp, in order to bring about the repeal of Paragraph 175. He called this tactic an "indecent weapon", saying that anyone who practices it "is willing to remove ground under his own feet by practicing the very injustice that he opposes". He also disagreed with many other German gay rights activists such as Adolf Brand who did not see their struggle as part of a wider movement.

He views caused him to be monitored by the police. Annoyed by this, he wrote a letter to the chief of the Berlin police, threatening to punch the next person he caught spying on him in the face. For this, he was sentenced to four months in prison, but he decided to flee rather than serve the sentence.

Once in Zurich, he worked for a newspaper called Der Weckruf (The Wake-up Call). He was arrested once more and deported. He sneaked back into Switzerland. He tried to stay in hiding by faking his own death. He wrote an obituary for himself claiming that he had been killed in the course of a prisoners' escape. After this was exposed, he was disgraced, even within the anarchist scene. Therefore, he decided to leave Zurich. After spending a couple of months in Paris, he decided to move to Russia.

He opted for Russia, having reported on the 1905 Russian Revolution in Der Kampf, because he thought Europe's future depended on the outcome of revolutionary developments in that country. He joined an anarchist federation in Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. He assisted that organization for several weeks, robbing rich merchants to fund the group's activities. In June 1907, he was caught and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. Having struggled for his release for years, his supporters finally managed to convince the Russian authorities to let him go. However, the German authorities refused to let him back into the country, so he was forced to remain incarcerated in Russia. Meanwhile, Holzmann's health deteriorated. He suffered from malnutrition and typhus and died on April 28, 1914.

1930 – The Oscar-winning Spanish-born Cuban cinematographer Néstor Almendros, was born on this date (d.1992). Born in Barcelona, Spain, Almendros moved to Cuba at age 18 to join his exiled anti-Franco father. In Havana, he founded a cinema club and wrote film reviews. Then he went on to study in Rome at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He directed six shorts in Cuba and two in New York. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, he returned and made several documentaries for the Castro regime. But after two of his shorts (Gente En La Playa and La Tumba Francesa) were banned, he moved to Paris. There he became the favorite of Éric Rohmer and François Truffaut. In 1978, he started his Hollywood career, and won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for the film Days of Heaven. Four years later he was nominated again by the Academy for his work on Sophie's Choice.

In his later years, Almendros co-directed two documentaries about the human rights situation in Cuba: Mauvaise Conduite (about the persecution of Gay people) and Nobody Listened (about the arrest, imprisonment, and torture of former comrades of Fidel Castro). He shot several prestigious advertisements for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein.

In 1992, Néstor Almendros died of AIDS in New York at age 61. Human Rights Watch International has named an award after him, given every year at the HRWI film festival.

1931 – Hubert Kennedy is an American author and mathematician.

Kennedy was born in Florida and studied mathematics at several universities. From 1961 he was professor of mathematics, with research interest in the history of mathematics, at Providence College (Rhode Island), He spent three sabbatical years doing research in Italy and Germany.

Kennedy came out as gay on the cover of the magazine The Cowl, and, along with Eric Gordon, was part of the first Gay Pride parade in Providence, Rhode Island, which was held on June 26, 1976.

In 1986 Kennedy moved to San Francisco, where he continued his historical research on the beginnings of the gay movement in Germany. Since 2003 he has been in a home for assisted living in Concord, California.He has over 200 publications in several languages, from an analysis of the mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx and a revelation of Marx's homophobia, to theoretical genetics and a proof of the impossibility of an organism that requires more than two sexes in order to reproduce. In addition, Dr. Kennedy has written biographies of the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano and the German homosexual emancipationist/theorist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and has edited the collected writings of Ulrichs. His translations of the boy-love novels of the German anarchist writer John Henry Mackay and his investigations of the writings of Mackay have helped establish Mackay's place in the gay canon.

Hysén speaks at Stockholm Pride

1959 – Glenn Hysén, born in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a football manager and former player who played for leading Dutch, Italian and English clubs and won 68 caps for Sweden. He is also a reality television star, coach, and football commentator.

Hysén is the father of Tobias Hysén of IFK Göteborg, Alexander Hysén of GIF Sundsvall, and Anton Hysén of Utsiktens BK.

At Frankfurt Airport in 2001, Hysén attacked a man who had groped him while in the public restroom. In 2007, Hysén spoke at Stockholm Pride, the largest gay pride festival in the Nordic region. Many people from the gay community were surprised due to the earlier incident. At the Stockholm Pride, he delivered a speech denouncing sports homophobia and laid to rest his 2001 airport incident.

He stated that,

"I know that many LGBT people have been the victims of assaults and hate crimes. I can therefore understand if some people have been upset by the airport incident, so I want to be clear: I think that it is completely unacceptable that anybody should be subjected to assaults, insults or hate crimes due to their sexual orientation or gender identity ...The incident had been blown out of proportion in the media...In order to finally flush the Frankfurt Airport punch down the toilet: it is not the case that I beat up a gay person. I categorically deny that ...I'm not proud that I took a swing at him, but I am proud that I have integrity and that I reacted."

In the same speech he asked "How easy would it be for a sixteen-year-old boy who plays football to come out as gay to his team mates?" In March 2011, his youngest son, Anton Hysén, a professional footballer himself, came out of the closet to the media.

1991 – Danell Leyva is a Cuban-American former gymnast who competed for the United States. He is the 2012 Olympic individual all-around bronze medalist and 2016 Olympic parallel bars and horizontal bar silver medalist. He is also the 2011 US national all-around gold medalist and the 2011 world champion on the parallel bars.

In gymnastics, Leyva was a specialist on parallel bars and horizontal bar, having his own signature move (jam-dislocate-hop to undergrips) on the latter.

In 2013, Leyva signed a multi-year sponsorship agreement with Adidas Gymnastics. Fellow US Olympic Team members Jake Dalton, McKayla Maroney and Jordyn Wieber were also sponsored by Adidas.

After ending his career in gymnastics, Leyva began to pursue an acting and media career. Soon after the 2016 Olympics, he moved from Miami to Los Angeles to pursue this career and enrolled in acting classes. By mid-2017, Leyva had already filmed two television advertisements, appeared on a Nickelodeon show, and worked as a choreography consultant on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. He had also purchased a production company, which he named "Parallel Entertainment".

Leyva competed on American Ninja Warrior in 2019.

On October 11, 2020, for National Coming Out Day, Leyva revealed via Twitter that he identifies as bisexual and pansexual.

1992 – New Ways Ministry, a Mt. Rainier, Maryland group led by three Roman Catholic bishops, announced it would release a statement of disagreement with the Vatican's call for Gays and Lesbians to be barred from becoming adoptive or foster parents, teachers, coaches, or military personnel. 1,500 lay persons signed the statement.

[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)

[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

[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

[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 … October 25

51 AD – Rome: Titus Flavius Domitianus (51-96) was born in Rome. The Emperor is the first recorded case of a married man leaving his wife for a man, a mime named Paris. After a public outcry Titus killed Paris and went back to his wife. However, he continued his affairs with young men; his wife had him assassinated. 

Claude Cahun Self-portrait

1894 – Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, Claude Cahun (d.1954) was a French artist, photographer and writer. Her work was both political and personal, and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality.

She began making photographic self-portraits as early as 1912, when she was 18 years old, and continued taking images of herself through the 1930s.

Around 1919, she settled on the pseudonym Claude Cahun, intentionally selecting a sexually ambiguous name. During the early 20s, she settled in Paris with her life-long partner and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe. For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Malherbe collaborated on various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. She published articles and novels, notably in the periodical "Mercure de France", and befriended Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange and Robert Desnos.

Around 1922 she and Malherbe began holding artists' salons at their home. Among the regulars who would attend were artists Henri Michaux and André Breton and literary entrepreneurs Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Cahun's work encompassed writing, photography, and theater. She is most remembered for her highly-staged self portraits and tableaux that incorporated the visual aesthetics of Surrealism

In 1937 Cahun and Malherbe settled in Jersey. Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey, strategically placing them in soldier's pockets, on their chairs, etc. Also, fliers were inconspicuously crumpled up and thrown into cars and windows. In many ways, Cahun and Malherbe's resistance efforts were not only political but artistic actions, using their creative talents to manipulate and undermine the authority which they despised.

In 1944 they were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentences were never carried out. However, Cahun's health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954. She is buried in St Brelade's Church with her partner Suzanne Malherbe.

1953 – Fenton Johnson, the award-winning author of "Crossing the River," "Scissors, Paper, Rock," "Geography of the Heart: A Memoir," and "Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey" was born today. He was born in Kentucky and was the ninth out of nine children.

He dreamed of becoming the U.S. President when he was younger, but decided to become a writer after he enrolled in Stanford University. Johnson is Gay, and explores Gay issues in his work. His memoir "Geography of the Heart" deals with the loss of his partner Larry to AIDS.

He is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and is working on a new novel The Man Who Loved Birds: A Novel. Johnson has received awards from the Wallace Stegner and James Michener Fellowships in Fiction and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and creative nonfiction. He has also received a Kentucky Literary Award, two Lambda Literary Awards for best creative nonfiction, as well as the American Library Association Award for best Gay/Lesbian nonfiction.

Furnish with husband Elton John

1962 – David Furnish is a Canadian/British filmmaker, former advertising executive, and now a film director and producer most known for his documentary Elton John: Tantrums & Tiaras. He is the civil partner of British entertainer Elton John.

David Furnish was born in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Furnish graduated from the Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute in 1981 and received an Honours Business Administration undergraduate degree fromthe University of Western Ontario in 1985. He was recruited by the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, eventually transferred to the London, England, office and was appointed to their Board.

A mutual friend of Furnish and Elton John left a message for Furnish inviting him to a dinner party at John's house on October 30, 1993. Initially fearing that the dinner would be unpleasant, or that John would be boring, he instead found John to be interesting and engaging. Both were attracted to each other; John asked for his phone number and the two had a private dinner the following night.

Furnish resigned from his position in 1994 after finding it increasingly difficult to balance the position's demands with the demands of his new life with John. With a keen interest in film, Furnish enrolled in courses at the British Film Institute. He is currently co-chief of Rocket Pictures along with John. Furnish is a contributing editor for Tatler magazine and also is a regular columnist for Interview and GQ. Furnish currently serves on the board of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, attending fundraisers and other events in support of that cause.

Furnish was proposed to by John in May 2005 at a dinner party with friends and family at one of their homes in Old Windsor. Furnish and John entered into a civil partnership on December 21, 2005, the first day that civil partnerships could be performed in England, in the town of Windsor, Berkshire. Their son Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John was born December 25, 2010 in California via a surrogate. Zachary weighed 7 pounds, 15 ounces.

Raphael Simon

1967 – Pseudonymous Bosch is the pen name of Raphael Simon, the author of The Secret Series and The Bad Books series of fiction books, as well as three stand-alone titles. He has released 12 books, each widely read.

Raphael Simon was born in Los Angeles County, California. His brother, Jesse, is a visual artist.

Simon came out as homosexual when he was 20 years old. He currently lives in Pasadena, California with his partner, Phillip de Leon. They have twin girls, the biological offspring of Simon, who were born around August 2008.

Bosch had long been suspected to be the author Raphael Simon, although Bosch disputed this until he "came out" as Simon in a May 8, 2016, editorial in The New York Times.

Pseudonymous Bosch

The pseudonym plays off that of the artist Hieronymus Bosch. It also may play off the fictional Los Angeles detective, Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, also named after the artist, created by the author Michael Connelly, and who has appeared in several of his novels starting in 1992.Bosch published Write This Book!, a do it yourself book; he calls it "a book that readers will write for me". Bosch elaborated in an interview with Wired stating that "it is a kind of half-written, guided mystery. Parts of it are going to be multiple choice, choose-your-own adventure, parts of it will be more like Mad Libs, and some silly stuff".

On May 14, 2019, Bosch published The Unbelievable Oliver and the Four Jokers, with illustrations by Shane Pangburn. The book is about an eight-year-old boy who longs to be a professional magician. A followup, The Unbelievable Oliver and the Sawed-in-Half Dads, was released on May 12, 2020.

In 2021, Bosch published The Anti-Book, his first book under his real name Raphael Simon.

1997 – Tyler Alvarez is an American actor, known for his roles as Diego Rueda in Nickelodeon's teen sitcom Every Witch Way and Peter Maldonado in Netflix's mockumentary series American Vandal.

Alvarez was born in New York City, to a first generation Cuban American father, and a fourth generation Puerto Rican American mother. His father works for the Drug Enforcement Administration and his mother works as a nurse administrator for a private hospital. Alvarez's parents divorced when he was a child and both subsequently remarried.

Alvarez's first professional acting job was in a Totino's pizza rolls commercial. In 2014, he began starring as Diego Rueda, a human with magical powers, in Nickelodeon's teen sitcom Every Witch Way. The following year, Alvarez began portraying Benny Mendoza, the eldest son of Litchfield inmate Gloria Mendoza, in Netflix's comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black.

In 2017, he began playing the lead role of Peter Maldonado in Netflix's true crime mockumentary series American Vandal. He returned for the second season which aired in 2018. The series has since been cancelled by Netflix.

Tyler Alvarez also appeared in the YouTube satirical miniseries ¡Me Llamo Alma!, starring as Miguel.

In 2020, Alvarez made his off-Broadway debut with the Roundabout Theatre Company's play 72 Miles to Go. The production closed prematurely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On June 11, 2021, Alvarez publicly came out as gay on social media.

[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)

[lesbianishstuff]

Today I came out to one of my docs at work. She high fived me

[padawan-historian]

Decolonized Booklist - Queer Edition

Lil Nas X is letting y'all know that queerness is not a "white people thing." 💁🏾‍♀️🌈

Queerness is ancestral || queer folks existed in pre-colonial spaces, struggled and resisted under colonialism, and are kicking down barriers in the 21st century.

Here are some must reads by scholars, poets, and activists who are sharing the histories, lived experiences, and ancestral-liberation work of those who came before and those blooming and yet to come~

Find their works listed below on my Neighborhood Historian bookshop.

Top Picks

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Audre Lorde (1984)

Freedom To Love For ALL: Homosexuality is not Un-African - Yemisi Ilesanmi (2013)

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity -  C Riley Snorton (2017)

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong (2019)

Black Girl, Call Home - Jasmine Mans (2021)

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice - Shon Faye (Pre-Order)

Queer History, Activism, and Liberation in the United States (by time period)

Female Husbands: A Trans History - Jen Manion (2020)

Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco - Clare Sears (2014)

We've Been Here All Along: Wisconsin's Early Gay History - R. Richard Wagner (2019)        

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940 - Julio Capó (2017)

Her Neighbor's Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage - Lauren Jae Gutterman (2019) 

Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics - Timothy Stewart-Winter (2017)        

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America - Erin Cervini (2021)

We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation - Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown (2019)

Queer Twin Cities - collected by Twin Cities Glbt Oral History Project (2010)

Queerness Across Borders and Generations

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir - Samra Habib (2019)

Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation - (2020)

Tolerance and Risk: How U.S. Liberalism Racializes Muslims - Mitra Rastegar (Pre-Order)

Lived Experiences and Memories in Marginalized Spaces

Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming - Carly Thomsen (2021)

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City - Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (Pre-order)

Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel - Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual - Merle Miller (1971)

Black Girl Dangerous on Race, Queerness, Class and Gender - Mia McKenzie (2014)

Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steelworkers - Anne Balay (2016)

Rust Belt Burlesque: The Softer Side of a Heavy Metal Town - Erin O'Brien and Bob Perkoski (2019)

Study Resources

We Will Always Be Here: A Guide to Exploring and Understanding the History of LGBTQ+ Activism in Wisconsin - Jenny Kalvaitis and Kristen Whitson (2021)

New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent - edited by Margaret Busby (2019)

Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology - E. Patrick Johnson (2005)