I’m not sure why lgbt people are so invested in what Barack Obama says or does in support of us. Reading all the items out there about his reiteration that he thinks marriage equality is up to the states, I just keep wondering why he gets this kind of press about it when he’s clearly a political animal who is not going to change his position. And his idea that marriage is a state issue just makes me want to say three words to the man, “Loving v Virginia.” (If ‘v’ is considered a word.) From Think Progress: President Obama was asked if he believes that civil marriage is a constitutional right during his press conference this morning. Rather than answering that question, Obama reiterated his record on LGBT issues and argued that marriage is best left to the states. What happened in New York “was a good thing,” Obama said. “I think that’s exactly how things should work. I think it’s important for us to work through these issues because each state is going to be different and each community is going to be different”: OBAMA: What we’ve also done is we’ve said that DOMA — the Defense of Marriage Act — is unconstitutional and so we’ve said that we cannot defend the federal government poking its nose into what states are doing and putting our thumb on the scale against same-sex couples. What I’ve seen happen over the last several years and what happened in New York last week, I think was a good thing. Because what you saw was the people of New York having a debate, talking through these issues. It was contentious, it was emotional, but ultimately they made a decision to recognize civil marriages and I think that’s exactly how things should work. I think it’s important for us to work through these issues because each state is going to be different and each community is going to be different.
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Marriage is a very serious business. Frank and I both know we’ll be together until one of us dies, and if we’re lucky that will be at the same time (though I know those odds are slim). We have a registered domestic partnership for New York City, framed in a glass cabinet in the living room. I’d suggested several times we drive to Greenwich, CT, and just get married. No, he said, he wanted to wait until we could get married where we live, here in New York. And now it’s happened. It’s interesting, funny, and challenging to have to suddenly think about the realities of being married. It’s something that would never have even entered the minds of me and my partner Jim, who died in 1991. Same-sex marriage (or, for the sake of search engines, gay marriage), was a preposterous idea to just about everyone. Not because we didn’t want it, but because we never thought it would happen in our lifetimes. Rather than deal with that depressing reality, I told myself that marriage was for people with too little imagination. That it was passé, bourgeois. But there remained in me that 10 year old gay boy who used to sit on my parents’ bed watching soap operas and fantasizing that one day it would be me greeting my husband at the end of a work day. Now that boy is back. Frank seems a little nervous, wondering how marriage might change our relationship. I told him the domestic partnership certificate on the shelf didn’t change our relationship. It made it just a little more legally solid, but we knew we were in this for the long haul. And marriage won’t change it either, at least not for the worse. People worry that they’ll stop being friends if they get married, or they’ll fall out of love, or the life they’ve decided to spend together will now be based on obligation – that it will somehow stop being a choice. That’s a nice way to think if you could get married in the first place. It’s great for straight couples for whom the option was always there to reject. We, on the other hand, are gazing into history . This is something most of us never seriously considered because it was a pipe dream, a fool’s errand. Not anymore. It’s okay to be nervous. It’s okay to ask yourself if it’s the right thing to do . . . because you know it is. I’ll let you see the photos from City Hall, hopefully soon.]]>

I was on my way into lgbtSr headquarters (okay, so it’s just a regular 9-5 job for a global media company, but I’m all about living our dreams), and who should be causing a Times Square stir but Alicia Keys! That’s her in the second shot, waving to all our lgbtSr readers!]]>

Jean Harris, center Another icon leaves us to carry on. From LGBT POV: (UPDATED with bio at 2:10pm Pacific) Late Sunday night, June 26, open lesbian Palm Springs City Councilmember Ginny Foat sent an email to friends announcing the death of longtime lesbian politico Jean Harris: Hi Friends, First I must apologize for contacting you in this manner but there are so many people to contact that I could not call all of you.
It is with great sadness and grief that I let you know that our friend Jean Harris passed away yesterday. Many of you have not seen Jean in awhile since she retired to her condo in Palm Springs. After leaving her job with the State Senate she tried relaxing around the pool of her condo but did not give up politics. She was very active in my last campaign, Steve Pougnet’s congressional run for the 45thCD, several races in Long Beach and other parts of the State. And of course always in local and state Democratic party business. She was considering a possible position with the Democratic Party when her health took a bad turn. She has been very quiet about her physical condition. In Jean’s own inimitable way she was always in charge and tried to do that with her health. Unfortunately she was not in charge and rather suddenly lost that battle. We are not sure if her heart or her liver failed but what does it matter. Jean herself never failed. We have lost another icon in the LGBT movement. And from a press release: (Palm Springs) LGBT Community leader Jean Harris died at home in Palm Springs last week from complications due to several health issues. She was 66. Jean Harris has been on the cutting edge of LGBT politics for over three decades and has built state-wide nonpartisan LGBT political advocacy organizations in both Oregon and California. In Oregon, she brought together and organized LGBT activists to defeat a statewide discrimination measure (No on 13) and was the first Executive Director of “Basic Rights Oregon,” founded in 1996. Harris moved back to California, bringing her skills to The California Alliance for Pride and Equality (CAPE) which was to become the present-day Equality California (EQCA). As the Executive Director, she transformed CAPE from a fledging grass-roots organization to a powerful lobbying organization with a database of close to one million registered voters.]]>

This shouldn’t come as any surprise, but for me Palm Springs is just too damn hot! From MyDesert.com: Palm Springs has the highest concentration of same-sex couples living together in California, new findings from the 2010 Census show. With about 115 same-sex couples for every 1,000 households, Palm Springs ranks ahead of other notably gay-friendly cities like San Francisco and West Hollywood, according to an analysis of census data by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. Several other Coachella Valley cities ranked at the top of the list, including Rancho Mirage at No. 4, Cathedral City at No. 5 and Desert Hot Springs at No. 10.]]>

I posted about this last week – the Arkansas newspaper that omitted a surviving same-sex spouse in an obituary, then defended the decision by saying they don’t list pets, either.

From Reuters: (Reuters) – A battle between gay rights groups and an Arkansas newspaper over an obituary is picking up steam after a near-truce fell apart. After saying they would review their policy banning the inclusion of life partners in free obits, the Batesville Daily Guard’s newspaper executives published an editorial defending the policy. Now the protests are going forward, and the central figure in the controversy, the gay life partner of a man who died from spinal meningitis, is threatening legal action from a hospital bed. “I want a hundred times more now than I did at the beginning of all of this, which was just to have my name listed,” Terence James told Reuters on Monday. James has been diagnosed with the same illness that killed his partner, John Millican, on June 11. Oscar Jones, the newspaper’s attorney, told Reuters on Monday that the policy was still being reviewed and that it was “a process,” not something they could do overnight.
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It was John Wayne Gacy, the killer of teenage boys, who came from Waterloo, Iowa, not John Wayne the actor. And she sounded so informed on the Sunday talk shows . . .]]>

Located in Santa Rosa, CA, the nation’s first retirement community to provide continuing care for LGBT people has gotten a hearty reception. From PR Web: Fountaingrove Lodge, the nation’s first retirement community with the option of continuing care for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) community, is in high demand with approximately 50% of units already reserved. Fountaingrove Lodge is located on ten acres in Sonoma County in the heart of California’s Wine Country, and observed its Model Grand Opening on June 18-19 with a well-attended Open House and ribbon-cutting and a first look of the model home. The community is set to open its doors in late 2012 or early 2013. “In just the last few weeks we have received an incredibly enthusiastic response from the LGBT community,” says Bill Gallaher, co-founder and principal of Oakmont Senior Living (OSL). “Construction of the main building hasn’t begun and yet half of the units are already reserved, which truly illustrates the demand that exists for this type of community and the void that we are gladly able to fill.” More than 400 people attended the Model Grand Opening weekend festivities at Fountaingrove to get a look at the bungalow model home on the site. The event garnered significant media attention, with guests and dignitaries admiring the high-quality workmanship and exquisite design of the model home. A proclamation from California State Senator Mark Leno added to the prestige of Thursday afternoon’s ribbon-cutting and VIP preview celebration. Fountaingrove Lodge will be comprised of six bungalows and 64 well-appointed apartment homes in nine different floor plans – ranging from 830 to 2,001 square feet – designed in the Craftsman style of architecture, with the use of fine woodwork and stone inside and out that echo the native rocks and trees on the site.
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I read “Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe” by the late John Boswell many years ago, so it’s not news to me that same-sex unions have been with us much, much longer than our opponents would have us believe. It’s important to keep that in mind when we have people like Archbishop Dolan calling this a radical social change. Radical implies sudden, unexpected and recent. Our marriages are none of those. From Reason.com:

“I can’t go that far; that’s the year 2000! Negroes [and whites], okay. But that’s too far!”
—President Richard Nixon on gay marriage, speaking in August 1970; quoted in John Ehrlichman, Witness to Power No one knows the names of the first gay couple to exchange wedding vows. You should keep that in mind as same-sex marriage becomes law in New York: The earliest milestones on the road to marital equality were made quietly, privately, and far from any civil authority. The public recognition of gay unions emerged gradually, reaching wider and wider circles until finally even governments started climbing aboard. Contrary to the rhetoric you still hear from some of the idea’s opponents, gay marriage was not cooked up in some D.C. laboratory and imposed on America by social engineers. It was built from the bottom up, and it was alive at a time when the typical social engineer thought homosexuality was a disease. Members of the same gender have been coupling off for centuries, sometimes with ceremonies that look rather marital to modern eyes. Here in America, gay marriages predate the modern gay rights movement. Six years before Stonewall, the 1963 book The Homosexual and his Society described informal gay weddings where “all the formalities of [a] legally certified and religiously sanctioned ceremony are aped with the greatest of care.” Those unions didn’t always last (the authors noted that it “sometimes takes no more than a week or two” before the lovers “recall that their marriage has no legal, religious, or moral sanctions” and take off), but as the resilience of the euphemism longtime companion suggests, a match between two men or two women could be as lasting and loving as any heterosexual coupling. ]]>