#proudoutloud

[huffpost]

In Canada, A Powwow Dancer Blazes Through Gender Norms

Nenookaasi Ogichidaa, or “hummingbird warrior” in Ojibwe, is a two-spirit powwow dancer who is Black, Ukranian and Ojibwe, a First Nation based in Canada and the U.S. Two-spirit is an umbrella term that Indigenous people from North America use to describe their place on a spectrum of genders and sexualities. Neno goes by two sets of gender pronouns: they, their and them, as well as she and her. For Neno, it’s important to be identified by those pronouns as they navigate the world.

When Nenookaasi Ogichidaa dances fancy shawl, it’s like watching a butterfly in flight, looping and spinning through the air.

Nenookaasi, or “Neno” for short, wear a yellow shawl, blooming with fiery wings that trails into fringes. On their feet are handmade moccasins, decorated with flames and enforced with reclaimed leather from couches dumped curbside.

A nearby Chinese lion dance performance begins and the sound of the pounding drums carry. Neno takes off in circles. The butterfly spins.  

“I missed this so much,” they say.

Neno is dancing in front of a Medicine Wheel outside Toronto’s City Hall. A recent addition, the wheel is a tribute to Indigenous peoples living on the land now known as North America.

For First Nations and Inuit communities, its four colors symbolize, among other things, the emotional, spiritual, mental and physical components of wellbeing.

Neno describes dancing as their medicine work and the joy it brought was essential to their recovery from a car crash in 2009.

Under their shawl, they wear a pullover hoodie. Across their chest are the words, “Resilient And Relentless” ― words that Neno embodies. Depending on how you meet the 37-year-old, you’ll see a different side to their resilience. How you refer to them may change, too. Neno looks at gender pronouns as descriptors of responsibility.

There’s the powwow dancer who blazes through gender norms. The mental wellness navigator who works with Black and Indigenous communities in Ontario. The artist standing alone on city streets at night. The queer woman in love, who gushes over her wife and three kids (four, if you count Ra, the recently adopted puppy who joins us for the day, too).

“Being two-spirit, it’s not about gender roles. It’s about the responsibilities that we play. And sometimes those responsibilities, ‘they’ is appropriate,” Neno says. “When I’m doing advocacy as a woman, that’s really important.”

Read more of the interview with Neno here.

[romulosreis]

Eu ainda acredito nas pessoas e sempre me decepciono com elas . Eu sempre acho que o cara que tem um papo legal é diferente dos demais . No final ele mostra que é só mais um que chega e que vai embora. Então a dica que eu te dou : NUNCA CRIE EXPECTATIVAS. JAMAIS SE DEIXE ENVOLVER EM UM PAPO DIFERENCIADO PORQUE NO FINAL A PESSOA NÃO CONSEGUE SUSTENTAR O TEATRO E COMEÇA A SER SÓ MAIS UM E SOME. FIQUE LIGADOS NOS SINAIS . São sutis mas bem significativos . . . . . . . . . . ##naosejatrouxa #ProudOutLoud #seame #follow #saudemental #autocuidado #bemestar #wellness #saudemental{insônia} #insonia #pandemia #quarentena #saudemental #qualidadedevida #vidasaudavel #acepride #transnonbinary #asexual #theythemisnormal #aroace #lgbt🌈 #lgbtqiaplus #lgbtqiapride #1000 #lgbt #followforfollowback #seguidoresbr #seguidoreschile #ny #rj #brazil (at Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ci1CthrMDOH/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[eugpride]

Rainbow Trucker isn't just the name of our future Country Western band, it's also a description of our new product! Pre-orders are now open for caps and beanies and feature a special pre-order price. All pre-orders for the Rainbow Truckers will be fulfilled at the Pride Festival on August 13th. The other items will be fulfilled mid-September. #ProudOutLoud Eugenepride.org/merch https://instagr.am/p/CgxpDvJB7Rp/

[environmental-hippie-gal]

Hidden Within

You do not know me.

You see my face and you hear my voice; 

You know my talents, my dreams, my loves, my hates, my joys, my sorrows but even in knowing all of that, 

You do not know me. 

You tell me you love me and that you’re proud of me and you tell me that I can always come to you with anything but even with all of that support,

You can never know me.

Not all of me, because that support would weaken and that love would tarnish and that pride would fade, and it is for that pride that My Pride must remain hidden within.

[eriqk]

Everybody say LOVE! #pridecollection #proudoutloud #equality #vegas

[fabiohuwyler]

Die CVP INitiative beschäftigt Fabio und Michael... und Nadine. http://ift.tt/1lltbvN

[synchronizedreams]

#ProudOutLoud #Pride #NYC #LoveWins

[everevolvinghuman]

Happy to be a part of the @highlinenyc 's #proudoutloud message as both a member of the #lgbt community and a Friends of the High Line staff member 😁🌸🌺🌿 #transisbeautiful #trans #transgender #trans_woman #trans_girl #mtf #highlinenyc #sundeck #pride (at The High Line)

[huffpost]

Trans Rights Activist Empowers India’s LGBTQ Community

Sintu Bagui was 14 when she dropped out of school and started working in a plywood factory. For $1 a day, she hauled heavy sheets of wooden board and did assorted cleaning jobs in brutal 12-hour shifts. Her hands were bruised and blistered at the end of each day, but it was better than the government school she was supposed to attend. 

“Every time I walked into school, I died a little,” Bagui, who identifies as a trans woman, recalls. “I did not want to use the boys’ washroom, I did not want to wear a boy’s uniform, and I was tired of hearing boys and teachers bullying me to be less like a girl.”

Bagui’s mother, a sex worker who lived in a red-light area, was devastated. It had not been easy to enroll Bagui at the school.

“The school wanted my father’s signature and wanted him to enroll me,” Bagui says. “They probably suspected my mother was a sex worker and tried to turn us away. But some parents from the school protested and made them take me in.”

So when Bagui quit school, her mother — worn down by a hard life of endless marginalization and struggle — lashed out violently at Bagui. Bagui’s mother died in 2012 when Bagui was 20, unable to come to terms with her child’s gender expression.

It was only after her mother’s death that Bagui wore a sari and jewelry for the first time.

“My mother always kept saying, ‘Be like a man, be like a man.’ So I never felt like dressing the way I wanted to around her,” she says. After her mother’s death, Bagui says, her family tried to marry her off to a woman as a ‘cure.’ “Here I was dressed in a saree and bangles, and they were trying to find a bride for me,” Bagui says.

In 2018, India’s Supreme Court finally struck down a colonial-era law, commonly known as Section 377 after the relevant section of India’s penal code, that criminalized gay sex. The court’s welcome decision granted LGBTQ citizens equal rights after a lengthy struggle, but transgender individuals like Bagui, particularly from working-class families, continue to face discrimination, social stigma and violence.

Today, at 27, Bagui is a trans rights activist with Anandam, a nonprofit working with some of India’s most marginalized communities in small towns and settlements where LGBTQ people struggle to find support groups, civil society organizations and lawyers to fight for their rights.  

In conversations, Bagui preferred to use LGBTKH, where the traditional words “kothi” and “hijra” — rather than “queer” — speak more closely to her lived experience. Bagui continues to live where she grew up in Gorabagan, the red-light district of a small town called Seoraphuli, an hour’s drive from Kolkata in the east of India.

“Imagine what happens in small towns where there’s no immediate support nearby and the police and residents are hostile,” Bagui says, describing the hardship of transgender people in small-town India. “Most of them are poor and uneducated and have been shunned by their families. They don’t read about landmark judgments.” 

Read the full interview with Bagui here.

[huffpost]

Gay Suicides Are On The Rise. This Epidemiologist Explains Why.

One of the indescribable aspects of being a member of a minority group is knowing that things are better than they have ever been and, simultaneously, not good enough.

The LGBTQ community has won the right to same-sex marriage and achieved unprecedented visibility in politics, media and entertainment. Yet we still lag far behind the straight and cis population when it comes to mental health, substance abuse and HIV rates.

Travis Salway is an epidemiologist trying to close this gap. In 2014, he discovered that in Canada, suicide had surpassed HIV as the leading cause of death among gay and bisexual men. More recently, he’s been advocating to outlaw conversion therapy and offer mental health screenings at clinics that diagnose and treat sexually transmitted diseases.

HuffPost talked to Salway about these persistent challenges and the fight for health equity.

[huffpost]

Precious Brady-Davis Is Connecting The Dots

Precious Brady-Davis’ sterile, fluorescent-lit office in the densest part of America’s third-biggest city is a far cry from the grassy backyard in Omaha where she started her story. After four hours of recounting her life one afternoon in late April, from her troubled childhood in Nebraska to becoming a nationally recognized activist and speaker, it started to feel a bit like a courthouse deposition. She paused for a moment, growing quiet and pensive, before suddenly reemerging with the confident grin of a stage performer. 

She gestured toward a framed photograph of her and her husband with former President Barack Obama, marveling at the surreality of her own life story.

“This is me,” she said.

Brady-Davis, 33, is perhaps the most visible transgender woman of color in the climate movement today. She’s part of a new generation of environmentalists unmoored from the Patagonia-clad treehugger archetype and radicalized by global warming’s exacerbation of society’s worst inequities. As once-disparate social movements are awakening to climate change’s ubiquity, Brady-Davis, a top press secretary for the Sierra Club, is drawing on her roots as a queer African American from a pious family in a deep-red, rural state to build bridges over troubled and rising waters.

Her path from drag performer in Chicago to prominent LGBTQ activist to her central role at one of the country’s oldest and most influential environmental groups mirrors a nascent shift in the climate movement toward tactics long employed in civil rights struggles. It also highlights how much the effects of global warming on historically vulnerable communities remain underappreciated.

“Whether it’s a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body, a trans woman’s right to walk down the street without being murdered, or protecting clean water and air from pollutants, it’s all public health issues,” Brady-Davis said. “To not have a more well-rounded view of justice is just perilous.”

Read about Brady-Davis and her work here.

[huffpost]

Sabrina Jalees Is The ‘Lesbian Ray Romano’ We’ve Been Waiting For

It only takes 15 minutes. That’s the length of Sabrina Jalees’ set on Netflix’s “The Comedy Lineup” and the exact amount of time it will take for you to realize the comedy world needs her voice. 

The 34-year-old Toronto native never shies away from the things that make her comedy personal: She’s queer, half Pakistani, half Swiss and has been open throughout her career about coming out of the closet — initially getting rejected by some members of her extended Muslim family — all while navigating a post-9/11 world.

More recently, she and her wife, Shauna McCann, moved to Los Angeles and had a son named Wolfie. Jalees has been refreshingly open about Wolfie’s birth — so much so that her Instagram account serves as a sort of quasi-docuseries that fellow queer women like myself profoundly crave and rarely find. Jalees often admits she’s been a resource to other LGBTQ couples looking to have children, too.

Beyond the magic Jalees conjures onstage, she writes for smart comedies with big hearts, like TBS’s “Search Party” and Netflix’s “Big Mouth.” She also just snagged an acting role as a (“casually gay!”) medical intern on the upcoming CBS sitcom “Carol’s Second Act” (no, not that Carol, lesbians!) alongside powerhouses Patricia Heaton and Kyle MacLachlan. The comedy will premiere in the fall.

Regardless of the medium, Jalees continues to sprinkle her wit with vulnerability and honesty that should inspire anyone tiptoeing toward professional comedy. 

HuffPost caught up with Jalees to talk about her career, her son, leaving New York and what pride means to her.

[huffpost]

A YouTube Sensation Inspires LGBTQ Youth in France

What does it mean to be a “free electron”?

For Bilal Hassani, a French YouTube sensation who coined the term to describe himself, it means charting your own path.

The 19-year-old musician likes the idea of ​​changing people’s perceptions of gender norms and often performs in long, blonde wigs and glittering outfits. But he has no desire to make his style a political message. It speaks for him and him alone, he says.

“I’m not responsible enough to be anybody’s representative,” he said.

Even so, Hassani’s music and public persona have clearly struck a chord with young, French audiences. The musician has more than 970,000 followers on YouTube and last year the magazine Têtu described him as “an icon for French LGBT youth.”

Hassani’s fame got another boost this year after he won the competition to represent France in the Eurovision song contest, one of the world’s biggest live music events. The singer went on to compete in the May finals in Tel Aviv, Israel, but didn’t win.

Hassani grew up in a French Moroccan Muslim family in Paris and from an early age experimented with makeup and wigs. But neither his brother nor his mother Amina – now his manager – ever judged him, he said.

“They never made me feel like I was weird,” he said. “Kindness” and “respect” – those were the rules.

Check out the rest of the interview with Hassani here.

[huffpost]

3 Tumblr Artists Share Their Visions For Pride Month

It’s very easy these days to want to change the world for the better. But it’s also important to honor the strides we’ve made and be unapologetically proud of who we are now. Pride Month encompasses all of this ― a celebration of how far we’ve come, a way to honor those who struggled before us, and a time to strive to do more.

With the help of Tumblr, HuffPost was lucky enough to partner with some incredible artists for Pride Month this year: Jag Nagra, Milomars, and Sarah Zucker. We spoke with them about their artwork, their hopes for Pride and what it means to them to live Proud Out Loud.

Read what the artists had to say here.

[huffpost]

Meet Nic & Carla – A Queer, Truck-Driving Couple That Vlogs Their Life

The world of truck driving has long been a male-dominated industry, but that didn’t stop Nic and Carla Richelle. They’re a married, queer truck-driving couple who created a popular YouTube channel about their life on the road. 

The pair met at a job in a call center where Carla was Nic’s boss. As they describe it, things between them soon “got a little spicy” and they started dating.

After getting married in November 2018, they decided to quit their 9-5 jobs in the call center in order to become professional truckers. Trucking was their way to both work and travel together. After solidifying the idea as a New Year’s resolution on Jan. 1, 2018, they moved out of their home in Courtland, Alabama, got rid of most of their possessions and put a few important items in storage. Now they live their lives permanently on the road, with no home base.

Their truck has a bed and kitchen set up for when they’re running loads. And when they’re not working, the couple checks in to hotels in whatever city they happen to be in.

This nomadic lifestyle is exactly the sort of freedom they sought when they left the call center world.

Read more about Nic and Carla here.

[huffpost]

What Compels Nakhane To Live

When Nakhane released his album “You Will Not Die” last year, it introduced the world to the kind of artist who comes along once or twice a decade. With a giant, emotionally attuned voice, Nakhane’s music is both atmospheric and intimate at the same time, as if he is singing directly to you in a huge cathedral.

We tend to typecast such rare artists quickly. Media outlets rush to make the person sound as if they just walked through a star gate into our world. If you are an even rarer queer artist who has made it into the public consciousness like Nakhane, articles will describe you as mysterious, fragile or “feline,” as he has been called.

This is unfortunate because it makes the 31-year-old South African singer, actor and author sound humorless and dour, which he is not. On the phone, he is actually quite funny and cheerful, with an easy laugh. “My formative years have so many twists and turns. It’s kind of fun to read the articles. But it’s OK, they get the overall idea right,” he says with a laugh.

Nakhane’s backstory is a compelling one: He was born in Alice (a small town in Eastern Cape, South Africa) to a large, conservative, religious family, and left his biological mother at the age of 8 to live with an aunt in Port Elizabeth, taking her surname, Touré. (When asked, Nakhane says he is not ready to talk about why he had to leave his mother, other than to say there were “problems.”)

At 15, his new family moved to Johannesburg, where his aunt, a music teacher, encouraged singing and gave Nakhane a classical musical education, mixed in with a lot of soul music. By 19, he had come out of the closet to friends and family, but a year later he joined a Baptist church and renounced his sexuality.

At the same time, Nakhane began singing and playing guitar around town, composing the songs that would eventually become his first album, ”Brave Confusion.” When that came out in 2013, he came to terms with his sexuality and left the church. He released a novel, ”Piggy Boy’s Blues,” in 2015.

Then things ramped up. In 2017, he appeared in the award-winning film ”The Wound,” about a secret relationship between two Xhosa men in Eastern Cape who reunite during the annual Ulwaluko ceremony, a circumcision initiation ritual. The film became a flashpoint for its depiction of queer love in the Xhosa community (as well as for its portrayal of Ulwaluko). Screenings were canceled in Eastern Cape, and the crew and cast, including Nakhane, received death threats.

But the artist continued writing songs throughout this tumultuous time. His manager got him in touch with the singer-songwriter and producer Ben Christophers, who had helmed Bat for Lashes’ Mercury award-winning album, “The Bride,” in 2016. “[My manager] knew that he would be a good fit for what I was doing. After one phone call, I knew it, too.

By 2018, Nakhane had moved to London. ”You Will Not Die” was released to worldwide acclaim. Madonna announced he was one of her favorite artists, and he released a song with Anohni (formerly the lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons). Now Nakhane has the mind-scrambling schedule of an in-demand artist. 

Check out the whole interview with Nakhane here.