Category Archives: Homophobia

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Gay Health, Health, History, Homophobia, Nature, Religion, Right Wingers, Science

Papal Rectal Cranial Inversion

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It's gratifying to see a scientific journal with the intellectual heft of The Lancet taking on the pope and his recent idiotic rantings in Africa and how condoms "contribute to HIV/AIDS":

Pope_condom_hat "Whether the Pope's error was due to ignorance or a deliberate attempt to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology is unclear. But the comment still stands and the Vatican's attempts to tweak the Pope's words, further tampering with the truth, is not the way forward. When any influential person, be it a religious or political leader, makes a false scientific statement that could be devastating to the health of millions of people, they should retract or correct the public record. Anything less from Pope Benedict would be an immense disservice to the public and health advocates, including many thousands of Catholics, who work tirelessly to try and prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS worldwide."
 

But they're being nice. Or tactful. Or something. I'm sorry, but is it really "unclear" if his intent was to manipulate science to support Catholic ideology? Really? Unclear to whom? 

Note to Galileo: About 1.7 million people, mostly women, in sub-Saharan Africa became infected with the HIV virus in 2007, bringing the total number of infections in the region to 22.5 million, according to the latest report by UNAIDS, the United Nations program that deals with HIV/AIDS. That’s two-thirds of the global number of people living with the virus.

The pope's comments are nothing short of an outrage, and frankly are as much a "crime against humanity" as any genocide. Medieval rot.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time…and the Vatican's record on astronomy would be enough to give anyone pause when it came to listening to papal science (which, interestingly, if you Google "papal science" the first thing that comes up is Paypal. Somehow perfect.) 

"Papal science"…Is that an oxymoron? Or just a moronic?

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Elders, Gay Health, Health, Homophobia, Politics

AARP Blows off Gay People

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AARP

So, as a 50-ish, nearly 60-ish Gay man, I am, as a result of a 50th birthday present from my own parents, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Retired People, AARP. I get their magazine, and I use their discounts whenever I can, and I was actually pleased to find out that I could include my younger partner as part of my membership.

But then it occured to me…I wondered what their position was on Gay marriage? So I wrote and asked.

This was the reply:

Dear Bo Young:

Thank you for contacting the AARP national office.  We appreciate
being able to respond to your concern.  You asked whether AARP
supports gay marriage, or a gay or lesbian lifestyle in our policies
and publications, or perhaps whether we have any special affiliate
groups for gay or lesbian people.

AARP's all-volunteer Board supports particular public policies based
on the wide impact they would have on the entire population of older
Americans and their families.  Since resources are limited and the
issues are numerous, the Board focuses AARP support on issues of
broad effect on older Americans.  Therefore, AARP has no position on
gay marriage.

AARP has always been a leader in fighting discrimination against all
older people, in the courts, in Congress, in state legislatures and
in other venues.  It is important to remember that AARP's strength is
in its inclusiveness.  Our nearly 40 million members represent every
walk of life and a diverse population over 50 years of age in all 50
states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin
Islands.  AARP emphasizes the dignity and worth of every individual.
People featured in our publications always have been chosen for
interest and for the timeliness or uniqueness of their endeavors and
contributions. Our editorial policies contain the same principle of
inclusiveness as do our public policies.

I hope this gives you the information you need to answer your
concerns.  If you are interested in the specific policies AARP
supports, you may review "The Policy Book", a complete record of the
current AARP public policies published biennially.  Policies are
comprehensively reviewed every other year and more frequently as
needed. The National Policy Council conducts a deliberative and
inclusive study of the issues from numerous sources and forwards them
to the Board of Directors. The Board then adopts them, or not, after
careful consideration.

You can review the Policy Book on the internet from your home
computer or your public library.  Go to www.aarp.org/issues, and then
on the left, click on AARP Public Policies and under that, The Policy
Book.  This is a convenient way to review a very large collection of
policies published every two years.  The complete web address is:
www.aarp.org/issues/policies/policy_book/.

Again, thank you for getting in touch with us.  Please do not
hesitate to contact us if there is anything we can discuss with you
in the future.

Sincerely,

June
Member Communications
Member@aarp.org

Toll-free 1-888-OUR-AARP (1-888-687-2277)
Toll-free 1-877-434-7598 TTY

Community, Current Affairs, Gay History, Homophobia, Jesse Monteagudo, Men, Politics, Right Wingers

Jesse’s Journal

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 STOP THE ARRESTS!

Stonewall                      

It is hard to believe, but almost forty years after the Stonewall Riots Gay men are still being harassed by the New York City Police Department. Since 2004, the NYPD has entrapped and arrested 52 Gay or bisexual men on trumped-up prostitution charges in eight adult video stores in Manhattan. In each case, an attractive young man would approach an older man who is minding his own business in the sex shop and proposition him. Once the older man agrees to the proposition, the younger man would offer his partner money for sex, and then proceed to arrest him for “prostitution.”
 
Though police entrapment is bad enough, it is not the whole story. In fact, most of the time the men are not convicted of prostitution. Instead, at the advice of their lawyers, the men plead guilty to “disorderly conduct,” pay a fine, attend a health course for “sex workers” and agree to keep their mouths shut. The NYPD then proceeds against its real target, Manhattan’s Gay or Gay-friendly adult video stores. Using its 1977 “nuisance abatement” law, the City would sue the porn shops, asking the courts to close them down for allegedly “allowing” prostitution to go on in the premises. This, of course, is part of the decade-long campaign by NYC’s former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his successor Michael Bloomberg to turn Manhattan into a Disneyland for tourists.
 
All this would have gone undetected, even by the GLBT community, if it wasn’t for the hard work of two Gay men. The first one of this dynamic duo is Duncan Osborne, associate editor of New York’s Gay City News, who exposed the whole sordid campaign in a series of hard-driven news stories. The second man is Robert Pinter, who was one of a dozen men arrested last year at the Blue Door Video in the East Village. Though Pinter also pled guilty to “disorderly conduct,” he refused to go away quietly. Instead, Pinter decided to fight back. He started a new group, the Coalition to Stop the Arrests, “in response, not just to my arrest, but to this whole pattern of arrests.” Pinter hopes the Coalition would “take some kind of legal action and create awareness in our community that these arrests are happening.”
 
It wasn’t long before Pinter’s activism, combined with Osborne’s journalism, got Gotham’s queer community to stand up and take notice. New York’s LGBT Center joined forces with the City’s Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence (AVP) to host a Town Hall Meeting at the Center on January 15. A crowd of over 300 heard statements by Pinter, Osborne, the AVP’s Jennifer Ramirez, Joey Nelson of the Queer Justice League, and Sienna Basin and Andrea Ritchie of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center. According to activist Jim Eigo, who was present, the crowd “was fired up and angry that a full generation after Stonewall and a few years after the striking down of sodomy laws in the US we still had to contend with the interference of NY law enforcement with our basic sexual rights.” Eigo, Pinter and other activists hope that the Town Hall Meeting was just the beginning of a new era of queer activism that at least would put a stop to the NYPD’s arrests and harassment of gay or bisexual men. On Valentine’s Day Pinter, Bill Dobbs and other activists picketed outside Mayor Bloomberg’s home, demanding that the mayor put a stop to the whole sorry business.
 
For too long, the GLBT community has been passive, thinking that our rights would be given to us on a silver plate. The passage of Proposition 8 in California and Amendment 2 in Florida led to a wave of community activism unheard of since the days of ACT-UP and Queer Nation. But there is more to the GLBT movement than the legal rights of same-sex couples. The recent wave of arrests and entrapment of queer men in New York reminds us that for all that we do to be “just like them,” we will continue to be persecuted because we are, in fact, different. Even the established Gay media failed to do its job, and it took Osborne and the Gay City News to tell us what we should have known all along. And anti-Gay police entrapment is not limited to New York City. Over five years after the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, GLBT communities everywhere must continue to fight any and all attempts to “recriminalize” homosexuality.
 
For more information: Coalition to Stop the Arrests
Robert Pinter, Coordinator STOPTHEARRESTS@aol.com
Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Gay Health, Gay Wisdom, Health, History, Homophobia, Nature, Science

Crimes Against Nature

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=b0vGamcQIYs

One of the most common slurs aimed at Gay folk is the "crime against Nature" accusation…the idea that homosexuality doesn't occur "naturally." Now, of course, we all know that's a bunch of heteronormative bunkum…Gay penguins, Lesbian seagulls, Bonobos (known taxonomically as Pan paniscus, or the "diminutive Pan"), dolphins ("birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it!")…all you have to do if you're looking for instances of homoeroticism in Nature is look for it and be willing to actually see it.

Apu - Eight is Enough! On the other hand, am I the only person in the room who is mildly disturbed by these stories of multiple births (eight at last count in California, to a woman who apparently already had six children…and they are questioning whether fertility drugs were involved. Well duh!…ya think!?) and, this morning, a 60 year old woman who gave birth. Now…I'm going to be 59 myself this year, and I can tell you, the idea of getting up for middle-of-the-night feedings, to say nothing of diapers, is the very last thing I would welcome. The story mentioned that this 60-year-old woman had turned to fertility drugs after decades of attempting to conceive… ahem… naturally. In my humble opinion, these aren't births…they're litters.

No one is supposed to question the aching desire of these women. Nevermind how self-centered and entitled it all is. My favorite part of all of these stories is how the mother in question always manages to see herself and her conception as something for which god needs to be involved and thanked, completely ignoring the fact that none of it would have happened without the science of in vitro fertilization. One wonders how many of these women who see their wombs as "miracle sites" would in the next breath condemn evolution. Or the women who, with multiple embryos crowding their otherwise unfertile wombs, decline what the doctors refer to as "selective reduction", i.e. selective abortions of some of the embryos for the health of the remaining embryos, citing "god's will," as though god had anything to do with the multiple embryos science placed in her. If god had anything to do with it, then perhaps the very idea that someone, after decades of infertility, might figure out the message that perhaps she isn't supposed to conceive.

And I have to wonder: did anyone bother to tell these self-absorbed "aching wombs" that, in the United States alone there are more than 129,000 children in foster care in need of a loving families and mothers?

And what doctor gave this woman fertility drugs? Where is the oversight? This woman is not married, already has 6 children, lives with her mother and her excuse for having fertility treatments – and therefore eight more children – is that she just wanted one more girl? She was lonely!!?? These are not Barbie Dolls, they're human beings. Babies. Yeah…that's the answer: Collect them all!

That's what I call "a crime against Nature."

And another question: How many of these multiple birth families end up needing public tax monies (paid by Gay people who are, in some states, forbidden to adopt) to manage their families?

Arts, Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Dan Vera, Elders, Friends, Gay History, Gay Wisdom, History, Homophobia, Men, Politics, Religion, Television

WE WILL NOT BE ERASED

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 Bishop_Gene_Robinson-1 As many of you know, the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the out Gay Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, gave the opening prayer at yesterday's Lincoln Memorial event. It was the first event in the inaugural festivities this year. HBO, which had paid for exclusive rights to the event chose not to broadcast Bishop Robinson's prayer. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kWWAnitUCw4

So if you watched there you wouldn't have caught it or even known that it occurred. To his ever-lasting credit, Brian Lehrer at WNYC in New York aired the first two minutes of the prayer on his morning show. But shamefully, there's no record of it in images placed on the sites of Getty Images, New York Times and the Washington Post.

It's a complete erasure of his ever having delivered the prayer. 

As if that wasn't enough, the chorus appearing behind Josh Groban, was none other than the Washington D.C. Gay Men's Chorus…also unidentified in the chiron, unlike virtually every other performer.   DC Gay Men's Chorus

Such is the continuing policy of silence and erasure we have to live with from people who should know better.  We are used to this. If you know your Gay history this has happened again and again. In fact White Crane is really about recovering the truth in our history and celebrating it.

So we're going to celebrate it by providing here the full text of Bishop Robinson's prayer. We suggest you forward this around so that everyone has a chance to enjoy it.

Lincoln memorial
   Opening Inaugural Event

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC

January 18, 2009

Delivered by the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson:

"Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God's blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic "answers" we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be "fixed" anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN."

Bo Young, Community, Gay Health, Gay History, History, Homophobia, Men

A Request for Justice

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Sean_William_Kennedy   We don't get these kinds of requests very often, but this one seems to be a simple enough one with which to comply that we thought we would share it.

In May of 2007, Stephen Andrew Moller punched Sean Kennedy, a 20-year-old Gay man who lived in Greenville, SC, in the face so violently that Kennedy's brain separated from its stem; Kennedy died several hours later. Despite the unprovoked nature of the assault and the homophobic slurs that Moller made both before and after the murder, Moller was plea bargained down to involuntary manslaughter and given a suspended sentence of 3 years in prison.

Sean Kennedy was murdered because he was Gay. This crime happened in our own community and it strikes fear into the hearts of us all. Moreover, the injustice of this case was outrageous.

Sean's murderer could be out of prison on parole as early as next month, meaning that he will have served only 8 months since his sentencing. We must protest this injustice and ask the parole board to make Moller serve the remainder of his sentence. It is critical that they hear from as many people as possible.

Join us in supporting Sean Kennedy's family and Sean's Last Wish and consider writing a letter to the parole board asking them to deny Stephen Moller parole and make him serve out his sentence, which will end in September 2009. In your letter, please remind the board of the violent and unprovoked nature of Moller's offense and the pain and suffering it has caused in the lives of Sean Kennedy's family and friends. If you knew Sean or know his family personally, please include that information.

Also, please let Elke Kennedy know if you send a letter and if possible, send her a copy of the letter at elke@seanslastwish.org, so she can have them to take with her to the parole hearing.

It is important to to include Moller's full name and ID number:

Stephen Andrew Moller – SCDC ID # 00328891.

Letters should be addressed and sent to:

Department of Probation Pardon and Parole Services

2221 Devine Street, Suite 600, PO Box 50666

Columbia SC 29250

Please forward to your contacts, friends and family.

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Gay History, History, Homophobia, Malcolm Boyd, Politics, Religion, Right Wingers

A Victory in California

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Episcopal_church Once again, the courts have dealt a blow of constitutional reality to religious bigots.

Word from California has been, at best, mixed, lately. But yesterday, we got word from our friend Mark Thompson, confirmed today in the NY Times, that the California State Supreme Court ruled that three parishes that left the Episcopal Church over its ordination of Gay ministers cannot retain ownership of their buildings and property…no small loss. And it was a unnanimous decision. We can only imagine it's only a matter of time before this gets kicked up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The full details are at the NY Times site, but the parishes are located in some high rent districts in Southern California: Newport Beach, Long Beach, and North Hollywood.

I guess the bigots are just going to have to move to some old abandoned drive-in.

Arts, Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Elders, Entertainment, Friends, Gay History, History, Homophobia, Music, Poetry, Politics, Right Wingers

A Great Voice Silenced

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I woke up this morning to hear the sad news of the death of a great woman, one of the single name wonders in the world, Odetta. I have no idea of Odetta's sexuality, but I know her, personally, from many years ago when we were fighting another anti-Gay initiative in California, the one in the new film about Harvey Milk, Prop. Six. One of the many ways we raised funds for that fight (including an art auction and a state-wide Hair-cut-athon) was a fantastic concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul & Mary) performed and so did Odetta.

I honestly don't remember what she sang that day. But it is impossible not to remember her voice, her incredible voice that was like a force of nature itself. I remember her devotion to civil rights.

I remember, even then, how her presence was a blessing on a campaign we were none too sure was going to go our way.

I remember, when she agreed to come, I offered my profuse thanks to which she responded "Where else would I be?"

Indeed. Once more, the LGBT community has lost a friend and ally.