With thanks to Franklin Abbott, a perfectly concise picture of marriage equality, from Ireland.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6ULdaSrYGLQ
A friend posted this link on Facebook, and I can't think of a better way to honor Ted Kennedy than to get Congress to get off their,…um….dime…and pass legislation. Single payer. Universal healthcare. Now.
Go to this website, and sign the petition.Like any self-respecting Gay Foodie, I’m a long time fan of Top Chef…and I must admit to a crush on Tom Colicchio (both a culinary crush and a flat he’s-hot-crush). Now I have another reason. An upcoming episode of the show has one of the Lesbian chefs balking at a “wedding challenge”. Kudos to her. But to add complement to spine, Colicchio had this to say in a blog post of his own:
Your stature's one I want to memorize–
OK…I'm in love with both of these people.
Apparently a security camera caught security guards confronting a gay couple after they kissed on the LDS plaza in Salt Lake City, Utah, on July 9, 2009. YouTube processed this file at double speed and shows a group of Mormon goons in suits arguing with Matt Aune and Derek Jones before handcuffing them. Charges against Aune and Jones have since been dropped.
Our friend, White Crane contributor, and author of Stonewall: The Riot That Sparked The Gay Revolution, David Carter sends this…
Dear Friends, The first rough cut of the full-length PBS film on the Stonewall Riots — now one and a half hours long
— is close to being assembled and we are looking for era maps of Greenwich Village to use in the film.
I will make inquiries at the usual and obvious archives and collections, but we all know that one can't assume that one will find the best such map in any one collection … and that any friend who either lived in New York at the time or has moved here since and who loves the Village might have a much better map than even New York's most famous archives might own: so if any of you happen to own a map that was made in the late 1960s or early 1970s of Greenwich Village, especially one that is detailed or features the area around the Stonewall Inn, and you would be happy to share it with the world in an American Experience documentary … please let me know. The filmmakers are on deadline for submission of the rough cut to a film festival and need a PDF of such a map ASAP … they'd like to receive the PDF this coming week if possible.
If you have a map that they can use and can help, please contact David at History69@aol.com or the editors at White Crane at editors@gaywisdom.org
For the past month or so, the legislators in New York State have been behaving, well, to say rather badly would be to put it mildly. But there are some heroes in the state capital. And Senator Tom Duane is one of them. He may not have the oratory skills of our president. But his passion is clear:
Whatever happened to the word “Gay”? If you go down to the Community Center on Market Street in San Francisco, you’ll have to look long and hard until you find it. Likewise if you visit the Historical Center on Castro Street. Not to mention that it fell out of the term “Pride Week” a long time ago.
The situation reminds me of the pre-Stonewall era. Many in our community in those days were embarrassed by the word. They balked when new groups appeared calling themselves the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance. But these were the groups that triggered the Gay revolution.
After Stonewall, politicians eventually deigned to talk to us, but some still choked on the word “Gay.” I remember how this reticence infuriated Chris Perry, a founder of the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club.
In the late 1970s, Chris got the club to go after Quentin Kopp, a local politician, because he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word in public. Ironically, that group today calls itself the San Francisco LGBT Democratic Club. The word has shrunk to a letter, and in second place.
The taboo on the word “Gay” developed because lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people saw the word as referring only to homosexual males. However, such a limitation was never intended. In effect, we let the popular media take a word away from us and redefine it for their own purposes, diminishing us all in the process.
Some academicians have added to the problem. They claim that the word with its present double meaning of both cheerful and homosexual doesn’t go back before the 19th century. Apparently, they never heard of the myth of Ganymede, the beloved of Zeus. In ancient Greek, the word “Ganymede” (Ganumedes) means both cheerful and homosexual, just like our word “Gay.” Both words come from a common Indo-European root (ga-).
The word “queer,” which has supplanted “Gay” in some quarters, is an insult. It means odd or unnatural. But there is nothing odd or unnatural about being Gay. Homophobia is the thing that’s odd and unnatural.
I acknowledge the right of other people to call themselves GLBT, or G, or queer, if they want to. But please don’t dump any those terms on me. I’m still Gay and proud.
Yours for gay liberation, Arthur Evans