Apparently the President of Change (perhaps he means "spare change"?) is counting on the idea that no one is going to check too closely when he issues these pandering crumbs tot he GLBT community. The Office of Personal Management policy paragraph (below) regarding "new" benefits available to domestic partners? —these benefits have been available for YEARS !!!!
For civil service employees, domestic partners of federal employees can be added to the long-term care insurance program; supervisors can also be required to allow employees to use their sick leave to take care of domestic partners and non-biological, non-adopted children.
Nothing new here.
1) See the OPM website which permits long term care to be extended "Qualified Relatives" that includes:
QUALIFIED RELATIVE- The term ‘qualified relative’ means each of the following: The spouse of an individual described in paragraph (1), (2), (3), or (4).
A parent, stepparent, or parent-in-law of an individual described in paragraph (1) or (3).
A child (including an adopted child, a stepchild, or, to the extent the Office of Personnel Management by regulation provides, a foster child) of an individual described in paragraph (1), (2), (3), or (4), if such child is at least 18 years of age.
An individual having such other relationship to an individual described in paragraph (1), (2), (3), or (4) as the Office may by regulation prescribe.
2) During the Clinton administration — guidance was requested about whether sick leave could be used to take care of same-sex partners and/children. The answer came back that a federal employee could use their sick leave to take care of, attend doctor appointments, or even attend funerals for anyone who had the "close approximation of family". This was a guidance memo — not policy — but it has been available since the mid 1990's.
According to one Lisa Polyak of Baltimore, Maryland, the reason we know this is that she has worked for a Department of Defense Agency for 23 years and even DOD allowed her to take sick leave to care for her partner and her non-biological child.
In case no one noticed, or read their tweets lately, there’s a bit of a revolution going on now in Iran. Why should the LGBT community care?
As reference, imagine a United States of the late 80s when Pat Robertson was making a serious run for the president. Now, imagine a worst-case scenario where he’d actually won, and through a series of power grabs had declared the U.S. a Christian nation and that biblical law would take precedence over any silly old constitution or flawed laws that man might make here on earth. Then as the voice of God on earth (since after all God had gotten him elected) he starts making new laws based purely on his conservative take on literal biblical interpretations. It’s not just him making laws, it’s God guiding his hand on the pen. If you didn’t agree with him, then you obviously were a godless heathen, and had no place in the new world order. Soon women aren’t allowed to cut their hair, shellfish is banned, adultery is punishable by stoning, and gays and lesbians have to start going into hiding.
We dodged a bullet on that one, it wasn’t until much later, when in his opinion God was sending hurricanes to Florida to punish the gays – that we realized just what a total nut job Pat Robertson was, and he’s only gotten worse over the years. It’s scary to think though, that this man did mount a serious campaign, with serious backing. This in a nutshell is a version of what happened to Iraq in 1979 with the Islamic revolution. There was some serious corruption in Iran at the time, and some serious abuses of power. The revolution at the time seemed to many like a breath of fresh air, it seemed to be that someone with their “values” was representing them, and finally the average Joe was getting his day in the sun. However, as in many revolutions, it seems one corrupt regime was just swapped for another.
Iran, with the 1979 Islamic Revolution, became the touchstone for many of the radical Islamic movements that would follow. To consolidate power, it became oppressive, restrictive, tyrannical, and for many downright deadly. It would also lay the ground work for some of the worst atrocities against the global LGBT community seen this century.
Sharia law is not kind to the LGBT community. In theory, Sharia law lays interpretations of Allah’s will and implementation of law with a small group of highly educated, devout, highly-ethical, impartial and practical clerics. However, in recent years, these clerics, such as Grand Ayatollah Alia al Sistani in Iraq and the now in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have become increasingly self-serving, and increasingly more concerned about consolidating influence and staying in power. In Iraq there was the 2006 fatwa issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, that gays and lesbians should be killed in the most severe ways. In Iraq still, under the watch of the U.S., honor killing of homosexuals is still constitutionally protected as Sharia law. We all know how gays fare here in the U.S.
Then, in Iran, let’s not forget the public hanging of two gay teens in 2005. Persecution of LGBT people also leads to vast abuses in power. Don’t like someone? Someone becoming a political threat, one tribal group or another getting out of hand? – just throw around a few accusations that they’re gay or lesbian, they’re molesting boys, breaking up marriages, and people start to disappear. Oddly enough this all happens in a culture where homosexual acts are common, but there seems to be a huge line between using a man for sexual relief, and actually being “gay.”
Then there’s just the atmosphere created for LGBT people in this environment. We’ve seen first hand in this country how a strident right-wing government, with all it’s rhetoric, baiting, bashing, and hate speech, can lead to real dangerous conditions. Where it creates an atmosphere, where otherwise good people will look away and let violence and often murder go unheeded. It creates an atmosphere where people, even blame the victims for “flaming” or “just asking for it.” There’s an atmosphere where we have such ludicrous concepts like gay-panic defense pop up in court. Under militant Islamic rule, the LGBT community becomes the ultimate “other," much as in this country, where the issue of gay marriage is used by the right to play to the base. The LGBT community is demonized and blamed for weakening, even destroying, the very foundations and institutions that make us who we are as a nation.
This is not to say that if there was a change in regime in Iran that there would be a lavender revolution that would follow the green; however, we could hope that members of the LGBT community in Iran would at least not be hunted down and murdered. Obama has worked hard to remove the United States as a presence in Iranian politics. The hardliners there often pull out the threat of a boogie man U.S. to build base support, and divert attention from bread and butter, home grown issues like the economy and human rights. Sound familiar? Yes Iran hardline politicos use U.S. influence much like the right here in the U.S. uses gay marriage. All too often in Islamic countries gay and lesbians are not so much demonized on religious grounds (there is in fact a long history of tolerance going back centuries) they are more demonized as a symptom of western corruption. Remember Ahmadinejad’s UN speech: “There really are no gays in Iran!”
So why should the LGBT community care about what’s going on in Iran? First this truly does directly impact our community in the middle east. Then there’s the larger issue of just common decency. As members of the LGBT community we should be sensitized more than most to oppression and tyranny, we should always be out front in helping not just ourselves, but those who are ideologically part of our community, those seeking freedom and to live openly and democratically under a fair constitution. As members of the LGBT community here in the United States, even with our battles still to be fought, we must appreciate our relatively secure and open lives here in comparison to our community in the middle east. We just also think outside the box a bit, look outside of our country and yes, even outside of our community to support all of those fighting for a better life now in Iran.
We received word that Harold Norse passed away on Monday. He was 92.
The Beat Museum will be hosting a Memorial for Harold Norse on Sunday, July 12th, time TBA.
From the Beat Museum: "In 1951, Norse's talent was recognized by William Carlos Williams, who invited him to read at the Museum of Modern Art in early 1952. Williams remarked on Norse's ability to "use the direct image on its own," and became an important mentor to Harold. Williams would later call Norse "the best poet of his generation," a profound accolade considering Williams was mentor to such figures as Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg. Following the 1953 publication of his first book of poetry, The Undersea Mountain, which was reviewed in The New York Times and Poetry magazine, Norse left America for Italy.
"In 1957, Norse was nearly deported from Italy when the Italian government deemed his poem "Victor Emmanuel Monument (Rome)," political fodder for the Communists.
"Norse moved to Paris in 1960, on a tip from Williams and, at the Beat Hotel, met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and others, drawn by their interest in Buddhist meditation, which Norse had recently taken up. Using the cut-up technique devised by Gysin and Burroughs, Norse wrote his experimental novel, Beat Hotel. Originally titled Sniffing Keyholes, the first chapter—which he describes as "a sex/dope scene between a muscular black youth called Melo and a blond Russian princess called Z.Z."— made even the often stoic Burroughs laugh. During his time at the Beat Hotel, Norse began creating his 'random paintings' or Cosmographs (using the hotel's bidet).
"Norse returned to America in 1969 and, with Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems 1941-1976, became a leading gay liberation poet. For the last 35 years he lived in San Francisco’s Mission District."
Friends have created a memorial website http://haroldnorse.com/But apparently the bandwidth has been exceeded and you may have difficulty reaching the site.
Got some good news in the morning email (almost called it "the post" which has a whole new meaning now) from psychotherapist and filmmaker, Brian Gleason, who works so hard in Los Angeles.
Some of you may be familiar with the Rise Up & Shout! project with which White Crane has been associated. It started in Los Angeles, with people like Brian, Malcolm Boyd, Don Kilhefner, Mark Thompson (I'm leaving out many, may other names of people…this kind of thing takes dozens of people…just don't have them in front of me as I write. I'll find them and include them later, promise) working with young GLBT people in L.A. to produce a talent show showcasing their various and sundry talents.
More importantly, it offered young GLBT people a chance to come in contact with elder GLBT people and let the intergenerational transfer of wisdom and experience mingle with the exuberance and freshness of youth. The first Rise Up & Shout, was a live stage production at the Barnsdall Park theater, directed by award-winning Broadway director, Jim Pentacost, and benefited White Crane, among others. And it was filmed by Brian Gleason.
That film will now receive the wider audience it deserves when it is aired on the Sundance Channel, later this month. The schedule is:
Mon 06/22/09 9:00PMSat 06/27/09 3:35PM Sun 06/28/09 06:40AM
This is MUST SEE TELEVISION folks! Stirring, inspiring, touching. Worth getting cable for, even.
Check your local listings, as they say, for airtimes in your area.
As an event and as a symbol, the Stonewall Riots of June 27-29 1969 continues to shape our lives. Forty years later, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender generation that was not even born in 1969 looks back fondly at “the Stonewall girls” as role models for GLBT activism and resistance. Even so, there are many young people today who do not know what “Stonewall” was, or what is represents, or why so many of our institutions and organizations are named after it.
When “Stonewall” took place, I lived in Miami. I was sixteen years old, in high school and uncertain about my future. It wasn’t until I graduated from high school in 1972 that I learned about the events that shook Greenwich Village three years before. By then the event that Martin Duberman (in his 1993 study Stonewall) called “the emblematic event in modern lesbian and gay history,” had already become a symbol of pride and resistance. The late Donn Teal, whose Gay Militants (1971) included the best account of the Riots prior to the one in David Carter’s Stonewall (2004), wrote that Stonewall “jolted awake . . . an only half-remembered outrage against straight society’s bigotries in those older, generally conservative ‘Boys in the Band’ who had been out of town on the weekend of the 27th-28th-29th, tanning their thighs at Cherry Grove and the Hamptons. And, as a slur, it posed a challenge to and goal for those younger . . . gays who’d had to make do with Greenwich Village and who’d seen [the] action. It may have created the gay liberation movement.”
Though Stonewall inspired a generation of young New Yorkers (and others), its effect on the rest of us was more symbolic than real. After all, Stonewall was not the beginning of queer liberation. The Riots came after almost two decades of Mattachine Society and ONE and Daughters of Bilitis and Tangents and Janus Society and Society for Individual Rights and West Side Discussion Group; of demonstrations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.; and of riots in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere. It was the much-maligned Mattachine Society that got New York City to repeal its law against serving liquor to homosexuals in 1966, three years before Stonewall. (The NYPD continued to raid gay bars after the Riots, as it continues to do so today, though not because of the bar patrons’ sexual orientation.) Historian John Loughery was right when, in The Other Side of Silence, he pointed out that Stonewall was only the climax of a “maelstrom” year of gay resistance and activism.
New York City is the capital of America’s communications industry, and anything that happens there gets blown out of proportion. Though the New York media — especially the Village Voice, which had an office down the street from the Stonewall Inn – covered the Riots in their own unique ways, out of town papers largely ignored the event. And I was not the only gay person who lived through 1969 in blissful ignorance of Stonewall. In fact, most gays at the time were not aware of the Riots till they became a symbol. For most lesbians, Stonewall made less of an impact on their lives than the feminist movement, then in its heyday. To this day there is still doubt as to what role lesbians played in the Stonewall Riots, or even if there were lesbians at the Stonewall Inn.
Like any symbolic event, the truth about Stonewall lies hidden in myth and legend. To this day, the Uprising has been attributed to a variety of causes, from the full moon to Judy Garland’s death (her funeral was on the morning before the Riots). Even the names and number of Rioters are in dispute: for example, the transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, who played a mayor role in Duberman’s Stonewall, is absent from Carter’s Stonewall. None of the Rioters – Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Jackie Hormona, Zazu Nova or Jim Fouratt, just to name a few – achieved the mythic status given Diego Viñales, the Argentine student who was impaled on a fence while trying to escape the cops in the aftermath of a police raid on the Snake Pit, another Village bar (March 8, 1970). The Stonewall Riots were largely a group effort; and history has kept it that way.
Having said all that, one must give Stonewall credit where credit is due. Taking place in 1969, Stonewall was the culmination of a decade of political activism and resistance. Some Rioters were veterans of the 60s counterculture and/or the civil rights, antiwar, feminist or youth movements, and used their experiences to help create a new, more radical gay liberation movement. New York activists, living at the hub of American business and culture, used their privileged positions to launch a national movement. For much of the seventies — until the rise of Harvey Milk, himself a New Yorker who moved to San Francisco — New York activists led most of the groups that we joined (or its local chapters) and published most of the books that we read.
All in all, the Stonewall Riot’s greatest achievement was their impact on the hearts and minds of several generations of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Though many heterosexuals remained firmly antigay, most of us who are G, L, B or T learned to accept and celebrate who we are. Thus it is significant that the anniversary of Stonewall has become the date of most annual GLBT Pride celebrations, not only in New York City but around the world. The late poet Allen Ginsberg, one of the fathers of our movement, saw the significance of Stonewall when he visited the site of the Riots soon after the first night: “Gay power! Isn’t that great! . . . We’re one of the largest minorities in the country – 10 per cent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.”
Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay activist who lives in South Florida with his life partner. Write him at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.
…and furthermore…if the churches continue to actively lobby against these particular legislations and participate in the electoral process by taking sides, we need to demand that their nonprofit status be TAKEN AWAY! They have a right to their opinion…but they don't have a right to my tax dollars to promote it.
Join the NYC Circle of Radical Faeries for an evening of readings, ritual, high drag and magic! Celebrate the 35th anniversary of RFD,
the digest of the Radical Faerie community.
Saturday, May 30th at BLUESTOCKINGS
6:00 PM Meet, Greet, Drum and Chant
7:00 PM Readings…and…
DRESS WITCHIE!
The current issue explores the relationship between the Radical Faerie's ritual practices and Starhawk's Reclaiming Collective. It includes articles on the life of Faeries and Witches in the 1970', 80's and 90's as well as meditations on the current practice of Faerie Ritual. Rare back copies from the last 35 years of quarterly publication will also be available for sale.
BLUESTOCKINGS a bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 172 Allen St. New York, NY 10002 212.777.6028 Directions: Bluestockings is located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington, one block south of Houston and First Avenue.
By train: F train to 2nd Ave , exit at 1st Ave , and walk one block south.
By car: If you take the Houston exit off of the FDR, then turn left onto Essex (a.k.a. Avenue A), then right on Rivington, and finally right on Allen, you will be very, very close.
Building Connections & Community for Gay Men since 1989
domestic partners? — these benefits have been available for YEARS !!!!
