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NYC Mayor Bloomberg sets aside funding for LGBT senior center
I’m a New Yorker (17 years and counting), and while I’m hoping to move to our house in the New Jersey countryside one of these days, it’s great to see that LGBT seniors are being included in initiatives for NYC seniors.
From SAGE News:
WNYC News Blog- http://www.wnyc.org
Friday, May 06, 2011 – 05:22 PM
By Kathleen Horan Mayor Michael Bloomberg set aside between $3 million and $5 million in his budget to fund 10 ‘innovative senior centers’–including one for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered New Yorkers. Advocates estimate there are more than 100,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered New Yorkers over 65 living in the five boroughs – and they are twice as likely to be living alone and much more likely to be childless and disconnected from their families. “Many LGBT seniors feel like they have to go back into the closet as they age,” said commissioner of the city’s Department for the Aging, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli. “Every senior center is a place where people feel welcomed. It’s difficult to feel that way when you can’t be who you are. This center will be like every other center except LGBT people will be welcomed and accepted for who they are.”]]> -
MARK'S CAFE MOIR: (video): Spring planting in New Jersey
It’s that time of year again, the best time of year in rural New Jersey. I’m slowly becoming more of a gardener and getting into it. One of these days this will be what I wake to in the mornings.
Cross-posted from MadeMark.net]]> -
MCC-DC celebrates 40 years with church founder Rev. Troy Perry
Rev. Troy Perry gives the Easter sermon at MCC New York I recently interviewed Rev. Pat Bumgardner from MCC New York, and just three weeks ago Frank and I attended their Easter banquet, where the denomination’s founder, Rev. Troy Perry, gave his annual Easter sermons. Rev. Perry will be in Washington helping MCC-DC celebrate their 40th anniversary. If you’re in the area, be sure to join the celebration. From Metro Weekly: In 1968 Rev. Troy Perry founded an LGBT-affirming Protestant Christian church in Los Angeles, eventually growing into 250 worldwide congregations as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC). In D.C., Rev. J. E. Paul Breton founded the Community Church of Washington D.C. at his home in Capitol Hill in 1970. The next year, it became chartered as an official MCC congregation. Perry is expected to join the Metropolitan Community Church of Washington, D.C., (MCC-DC) during its ”Fabulous and Faithful 40th Anniversary Event,” at the Human Rights Campaign, 1640 Rhode Island Ave. NW, on Friday, May 13, from 7 to 11 p.m. ”We wanted the celebration to be outside the church because we wanted people to be able to have some social time and we don’t allow alcohol at MCC, so they can drink there,” says Bob Whitman, who is gay and the vice moderator of the church’s board of directors.]]> -
Mombian blog for LGBT parenting
From the ‘about’ section: Mombian is a lifestyle site for lesbian moms and other LGBT parents, offering a mix of parenting, politics, diversions, and resources for all our varied roles. Mombian provides parenting tips, children’s activities, book reviews for parents and children, and political news and commentary, all from the perspective of a lesbian mom. It also includes a helping of lesbian culture and entertainment, in the belief that mothers don’t lose their other interests the moment they become parents.]]>
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Breaking the 3-minute mindset (or, life needs more than 140 characters)
Cross-posted from MadeMark.net I was making a video clip this morning of the plot and planters where we’ll be growing vegetables and flowers this year. It runs 3:43. I’m more and more aware these days of my desire to slow down. Life goes by so quickly even without us shoving it forward. Cutting it into byte-sized, 140 character micro-chapters only makes it more likely that we’ll miss most of it, as if we’re gazing at a tapestry and the only thing we see is the occasional thread. Everything I read about pleasing and attracting an online audience says shorter, shorter, shorter. Many people now have the attention spans of squirrels, picking up a nut, sniffing it, dropping it and looking for another. To paraphrase an old saying, life is what happens while we’re busy tweeting other plans. You can see this demonstrated acutely in any office elevator. People no longer have the patience or ability to speak to one another, to say good morning, to just take a very short ride in an elevator without grabbing the BlackBerry and seeing who needs them right this very instant. It’s a conditioning, and we’ve done it to ourselves. We’ve chopped our existences up into ever smaller bits until now life is not only short, it speeds by in data packets and laughing baby YouTube sensations and the quick, quick, quick grab for the ever-shrinking attention span. I’m going in the other direction. If I see or conduct an interview with someone who has something to teach me, or even interest me, I’m happy to give them 10 minutes. More if that’s what’s required. And I’m not going to try to keep any video I make short enough to provide a beginning, middle and end in just enough time to keep someone watching. Planting a garden is not done in under three minutes. Reading or writing a poem is not accomplished in 140 characters. To savor, whether it’s food or drink or another human being or the day we find ourselves in, requires allowing every flavor to seep in, in its own time. Come along to the gardens of each other’s imaginations and let it take as long as it needs. The rest of the world can spiral faster and faster to a day when nothing means anything and everything gets ten seconds because that’s all it’s worth.]]> -
MARK'S CAFE MOI: Happy two mothers day
This one’s not a cartoon. I really do have two mothers, one dead since 1999, one alive and ailing in Mississippi.
Mother’s Day is always challenging for me. I was given up for adoption at the age of two, having been born into a large (9 children) family to a woman who couldn’t raise that many children and a man who left her after I was born. I had no idea this birth family existed until I was 17 and I didn’t meet them until I was 35.
The challenge for me has been the complete lack of emotional connection or reaction to my birth mother, Helen. The woman who raised me, Margaret, had a profound effect on my life, for better and worse (she reacted violently to me being gay, but before then had been a sort of mother-idol for me, and the relationship healed before her death). When Margaret died from lung cancer in her own bedroom, with my father and my two sisters there, it was an ending for me. But then . . . there was Helen. And not only Helen, but five surviving sisters and two brothers to remind me I could not close this door. I could not throw a flower onto my mother’s grave and walk away, having buried one of my two parents. She was one of four! A father I never met, a birth mother still alive and well at the time, and a dad I would continue to visit in Indiana until his death in 2009.
I sent Helen flowers this year. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Try finding a Mother’s Day card for a woman you have no feeling for. It’s very difficult, because almost all the cards are mushy, you’re-the-best-mom-that-ever-happened-to-me schmaltz. I just want a damn card that says Happy Mother’s Day!
I’m told by my sister (I did get some good sibling relationships out of it) that Helen is not doing well mentally, that she’s about ready for assisted living. And I think, god, will it ever be over? And when she passes away, will I go? It’s an emotional reality I could do without, but it’s mine.]]> -
ToyCam photo with Droid
This is my partner, Frank. You’ll be hearing more about him (and us) in the coming months. The picture was taken with my Droid, with an app called FxCamera that has several fun settings.]]> -
GOP abandons Medicare plan under growing pressure
From the New York Times: WASHINGTON — House Republicans signaled Thursday that they were backing away from the centerpiece of their budget plan — a proposal to overhaul Medicare — in a decision that underscored both the difficulties and political perils of addressing the nation’s long-term fiscal problems. While top Republicans insisted that they remained committed to the Medicare initiative, which had become the target of intense attacks by Democrats and liberal groups in recent weeks, the lawmaker who would have to turn the proposal into legislation said he had no plans to do so any time soon. The lawmaker, Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said that while he still supports the party’s Medicare approach, opposition from Democrats made it pointless to proceed.
Continue reading.]]> -
Happy two mothers' day
My kind of kid. (via The New Yorker — cartoon by Willian Haefeli)]]>
INTERVIEW: Rev. Pat Bumgardner – MCC New York
I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my true inspirations, Rev. Pat Bumgardner from Metropolitan Community Church of New York (MCC New York). I first heard Rev. Pat on a Sunday morning fifteen or so years ago, and the power of her sermons, with their clear social justice message and their profound inclusion, which is something you feel immediately at this church, has kept me coming back ever since. She’s a safe space unto herself, and it was a privilege to get some time to talk with her.]]>
Column: Short-term memory: will the LGBT community forget its past?
David Webb – The Rare Reporter
Despite its stellar, well-known rise to political prominence in many cities across the country, local LGBT communities might find themselves hard-pressed to document their glory days in coming years.
We apparently are forgetting our history as fast as we live each new day. So many people have either died, moved away from the cities of their youth or both that the number of people who remember what happened in their locales after the birth of the gay rights movement in June 1969 are dwindling daily.
It’s not unusual for people not to be able to remember local LGBT political gains in cities nationwide because definitive histories have not been written about our local cultures. It’s not unusual for arguments to break out about what gay bars existed when and where because there is so little record of their existence.
If we don’t remember where we’ve been and what we’ve done, are we prepared for where we need to go in the future?
Many LGBT communities are fortunate to have long-running publications that have chronicled the events of several decades, but most lack those resources. Some LGBT people have amassed personal collections of gay magazines, newspapers and other literature dating back to World War II before most people in the community were born. But I’m only aware of a few cities where such collections have been saved for scholarly use.
When old timers in the LGBT community talk about what they witnessed decades ago, it provides a fascinating glimpse into what life was like for LGBT people struggling in an oppressive time that most of us have never experienced.
Research of newspaper archives reveals that in the 1950s and 1960s law enforcement agencies aggressively pursed gay people in their homes during private parties. People were literally arrested for same-sex dancing in those days.
PBS has produced a fascinating 90-minute documentary, “Stonewall Uprising,” that focuses on LGBT life in New York City in the 1960s and what led up to the pivotal moment in 1969 when gay men, lesbians and drag queens decided to revolt against tyranny.
Likewise, there have been show business histories written about the persecution of LGBT people in Hollywood in the 1950s, but what happened in most other cities is in danger of being lost forever. LGBT communities thrived in some manner in every city of any size, and it needs to be documented.
We can’t afford to forget that our lives today are literally blessed in comparison to what the people before us experienced. We can’t ever let politicians forget that our lives matter, and that we will never go back to the old days of subjugation.
And don’t ever forget that there are still many people around who would like to see our community dissolved and powerless. Pastors of churches that are members of the powerful Southern Baptist Convention are proponents of a movement to discredit and render us politically powerless.
That’s why it is important to document our history, to show young people in our community what we accomplished and to show our detractors that we’ve fought many battles in the past and that we will do it again if necessary.
Perhaps, it could be a collaborative effort with many writers who lived through the times reflecting on what happened.
We’ve certainly got the talent and the resources in every city to document our history. The idea has been tossed around before, but apparently nothing has ever came of it. Isn’t it time that we did it?
David Webb is a veteran journalist who has covered LGBT issues for the mainstream and alternative media for three decades. E-mail him at davidwaynewebb@yahoo.com. ]]>
61 years and still waiting to marry
My partner Frank and I live in New York. While I’d be happy to make the short trip to Greenwich, CT, to get married, Frank’s among the many who want to wait until we can do it in the state in which we live. So . . . here’s a video making the rounds of a charming, devoted couple who’ve been together for 61 years and are still waiting for that trip to the courthouse in their home state. Governor Cuomo thinks he can make it happen, I’ll reserve judgment.]]>
Iowa group focuses on LGBT seniors
From the Press-Citizen:
Elsie Gauley Vega has not always been comfortable about admitting her sexuality. She even married a man, even though she knew she was a lesbian, because she thought it was the only way she could have children.
“I wanted to be a mother, back in the ’50s, I knew no other way,” Vega said.
Today, the 83-year-old mother of four is not only open about discussing her sexual orientation, she produces a monthly television show where she interviews other gay and lesbian individuals and their family members.
“My goal is to let the public know we are as normal as God made us,” Vega said. “Those of us in the gay and lesbian community are members of society like our brothers and sisters.”
The “Friends and Neighbors” television show, which Vega produces at the Johnson County/Iowa City Senior Center, is just one of several local initiatives to reach out to all demographics of the LGBT community, including older residents. Another organization, the Visibility Action Team, has been working to address concerns specific to seniors.
Continue reading.]]>