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Six hours into equality in New York State
]]>It’s just 6:00 am and I’m waking up in the Poconos, reading about the midnight ceremonies that tolled the bells for equality in New York. It brings with it a feeling of emancipation and a realization that the yoke of discrimination, worn so long it no longer presses down, is most noticeable when it’s gone. Congratulations to the happy couples and everyone who helped get them there. From the New York Times:
Homophobic assaults on the rise in Minnesota with push for marriage amendment
This comes as no surprise. As GOP politicians in Minnesota (aided and abetted by Michele Bachmann, who used the original marriage law in that state to rise to prominence) continue their divisive drive to write discrimination into their constitution, voilence against lgbt citizens is on the rise. One man retells his experience in the Star Tribune.
Gary Gimmestad: Homophobia is on the rise in Minnesota. Wonder why? | StarTribune.com
Google + (so far so good)
Cross-posted from MadeMark.net
I’m on the beta tryout for Google +, the giant’s attempt to take down Facebook. I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but one thing I really like: circles. You put people into different circles, such as ‘friends,’ ‘family,’ and ‘acquaintances.’ Then when you post things you select who can see it. I have several sisters I love dearly and am close to, but politically we’re quite far apart (they support equality, they just vote Republican). I’m not going to say on Facebook that Michele Bachmann is a harpy from hell, or some other snarky thing or overtly political comment. It’s not constraining myself, it’s just being sensitive to having a diverse set of friends and loved ones, which is a good thing. With Google + you can show that to just your friends if you want to, and save your family for the all the non-incendiary status updates. NOTE: This will also come in very handy at the job: you can put people into a ‘co-worker’ circle and no longer be busted for saying you hate the cubicle life, because they can’t see it.
It also looks really smooth. Facebook is too busy for me, too much crap on there, and it’s not all that user friendly. Just try finding the feed for your blog on there to funnel into your fan page. You have to click apps, and then notes, and then this and then that . . . hassle.
I think it’s going to take some time to catch on. Facebook has a very significant lead, but Google + (or, if you prefer, Google Plus) is a serious threat and worth a try from everyone looking to stay on the social media tip. (Hey, do you think ‘circle me’ will be the new ‘friend me’? At least it’s a verb.)]]>
Demographics changing in nursing homes as Caucasians find alternatives
A recent study finds that the number of Hispanic, Asian and African-American nursing home residents is on the rise, while Caucasians are seeking alternatives. Rather than signal greater access for minorities to nursing homes, it’s a reflection of income disparity.
From Senior Housing News:
Many Americans are choosing alternatives to nursing homes as they get older, which means that nursing homes are getting smaller, and the demographics are starting to shift. A new study shows that Hispanic, Asian, and African-American presence in nursing homes has increased significantly in the past decade or so, while the number of Caucasians has shrunk.
Brown University researchers published a study in the July edition of Health Affairs, saying this trend stems from changing demographics and disparities in what people can afford. While at first glance it may seem that minorities are gaining greater access to nursing home care, this growth is more likely due to the fact that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians aren’t as able to afford more desirable forms of health care as wealthier whites are, says Zhanlian Feng, assistant professor of community health in the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
“Seemingly, we are closing the gap in terms of minority access to nursing home beds, but I don’t think that is something to celebrate,” says Feng. “They are really the last resort. Most elders would rather stay in their homes, or some place like home, but not a nursing home unless they have to.”
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Rick Rose: Moments in Time – an AIDS remembrance
Editor’s note: This is the only posting for the day. I’ve been friends with Rick for over 20 years and shared some of the heartache he so beautifully expresses here. Our lost partners, our lives now without this shadow darkening them every day. Nothing more needs to be said – Mark.
It was thirty years ago that HIV/AIDS entered our world as we know it. A time capsule was created ten years into the pandemic which has brought excruciating pain and endless questions . In it are impassioned missives from those living with AIDS at that time left for us survivors today. On June 5th, the noted discovery day of HIV, several messages were opened and revealed. These words from one of the many linger with me: “Look back in wonder….Prepare for the next time….Do not forget us.”
Does this warning resonate with you dear friends as it does with me?
I haven’t forgotten the mid 90s when there wasn’t a time in the day where I wasn’t thinking or dealing with AIDS. How does my partner Charles go on balancing one medical appointment with another, counterbalancing one cocktail drug with another? When will Celio’s mother find the courage to say goodbye to her dear son? Why didn’t Linda’s husband tell her he had HIV before they consummated their marriage? Where did Jenny, who carried the virus, find the fearlessness to decide to be impregnated, carrying “a child at risk?” How did her husband take the risk and go through with it? And why, why do these friends have AIDS, and I don’t?
I haven’t forgotten Charles, Celiio, Linda or the many incredible lovers and loved ones who have blazed the trail before me, onward to eternal life. And I haven’t forgotten the lessons they’ve taught me in preparing for the “next time”…the “next time” I say goodbye (as I did with my Dad, grandmas, grandfather and best friend), the “next time” I am called to action following yet another unexpected disaster (as I did with the Haitian hurricane, the Japanese tsunami or the Joplin tornado), the “next time” I fight with their courage and strength for the passage of a law or obtaining medical services for someone in need (as I do often).
But I have forgotten…a lot. I have grown to comfortably know a new world without AIDS, without the suffering my friends and I endured on an ongoing basis for over a decade. I lost 19 friends in one year. Fifteen years ago, I rubbed the feet of my friends with neuropathy as they fell to sleep; I reminded my lover with dementia of his next checkup and drove him there; I fed my friends with wasting syndrome and defended them in the eyes of passersby who never came to accept the “face of AIDS”; I cried myself to sleep regularly and prayed at night to wake up to a morning news headline pronouncing an end to HIV and a world without AIDS. I guess I got my wish.
I am complacent. I walk in the light of each new day, forgetting the shadows of those passed. I am blessed to be HIV negative, to have survived, and thank God for it. Yet I once was the one asking God to give me AIDS if it meant it would save the life of a friend. Sub-Saharan Africa is miles away from my safe little world on the border of Louisiana and Texas yet Baton Rouge which is second in the nation in AIDS cases per capita is a simple three hour drive for me. I have embarrassingly made a subconscious decision to have no friends living with AIDS, having been hurt, burned and salty eyed for far too long.
I write with a contrite heart as I do look back in wonder…and I do vividly remember Suzanne, John, Michael, Brian, Randy, Mark, Robin, my three babies with AIDS who I cared for, Larry, Tony, Jim, Amanda, the other Mark, another Michael, Linda, Celio and Charles, visualizing their tender feet in my hands, their fearfully faithful eyes staring in mine. I go forward. I ask for forgiveness and preparation as I pray that I don’t have to read a headline on July 22, 2030 stating: 180 Million People Liiving with AIDS Now Dead Since It Was Recognized
50 Years Ago.
—
Rick Rose]]>
Review: ‘Savage Beauty’ & ‘Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas’
By Steve Barnes
“I think everyone has a deep sexuality,” Alexander McQueen says in the astonishing catalog for “Savage Beauty,” the retrospective of his work that is in its last few weeks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it’s up through August 7). “And sometimes it’s good to use a little of it—and sometimes a lot of it—like a masquerade.”
Both sexuality and masquerade make their presence strongly felt in the photograph on the page facing that quote. A provocative skirt and jacket ensemble that mixes black leather, fox fur and a series of silver metal hoops and studs, it seems to be made for a woman who is equal parts dominatrix, socialite and heroine from an Edward Gorey book. Its combination of childish whimsy, in-your-face sadomasochism and classically flawless high style makes it a near-perfect introduction to the unique world that McQueen created.
If you can’t make it to the Met, or don’t want to face the show’s daunting crowds, this sumptuously produced catalog is a good way to enter McQueen’s world. Its hundreds of photos show off many of the designer’s strengths—his amazingly precise hand at cutting garments, his unconventional yet always controlled sense of balance and his ability to bring together the most unexpected materials in ways that make the results seem as if we should have expected them all along. This is a man who makes a jacket on which crocodile heads serve as epaulets, creates a bodice from feathers, and constructs an aluminum facsimile of a spinal column to run along the backbone of a vest.
And most importantly, none of these things ever feel like stunts. McQueen always saw himself as a storyteller, his shows relating back to themes taken from film, literature and history. The clothes exist simultaneously as fashion statements and part of a larger artistic discussion. They absolutely belong in an art museum—and they will definitely repay the amount of time spent going back over them in the pages of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.
Sexuality and masquerade also figure prominently in another recent book that’s also well worth looking at. Christopher Reed’s Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas is an engaging, well-written history of how the development of homosexual identity and the major movements in art history have fed off of each other. Reed, an associate professor of English and Visual Culture at Penn State, discusses a broad range of ways that same-sex relationships have appeared throughout history, arguing that it was really not until the early 20th century that a homosexual identity as we currently understand it emerged in any public sort of way.
That is not at all to say that he finds no examples of homosexuality itself in earlier periods. From the patronage system of ancient Greece (in which relationships between an older man who served to “initiate” a younger man were common), through the many examples of same-sex relations in feudal Japan, the South Pacific islands, and the culture of the American Indians, Reed constructs a long history of alternatives to what we see as “normal” gender roles. But just as those social alternatives remained somewhat open-ended and unformed, so did their representation in sculptures and paintings.
Open-ended and unformed certainly does not mean invisible, however. We see a 12th century illustration depicting the wedding of two men, representations of rather bawdy relations between 13th century knights and monks, and 16th century engravings showing groups of fleshy naked women pleasuring themselves with no men anywhere near. We also get to know many of the artists who drew outside the lines when it comes to sexual behavior: Gianantonio Bazzi, who referred to himself as “Il Sodoma,” or the Sodomite; the 19th century painter Rosa Bonheur, who needed to file an official permit with the Paris police to allow her to wear men’s clothes and keep her hair cut short; and the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, whose brute strength permitted her to do the kind of rough cutting on marble that even most male sculptors left to their workmen.
Once modernity takes over, according to Reed, artistic temperament and homosexuality became intertwined in the public imagination. When homosexuality was turned into a medically and politically applied label, it became a much more direct target of attack for the powers that be, and many avant-garde artists strenuously tried to distance themselves from any suggestion of it. The macho posturings of the Abstract Expressionists are a major case in point, as are the directly anti-homosexual pontifications of such critics as Clement Greenberg. Reed points out the difficulty that such gay artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and especially, Andy Warhol, had in being accepted as serious artists by the boys in the Ab-Ex pack and their hangers-on. Vivian Gornick even went so far as to label Pop art “a malicious fairy’s joke” rather than an art movement.
But as our vantage point in history shows, Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol certainly succeeded in entering the highest reaches of the esthetic and financial art worlds. Despite the power of the many artists who fought the AIDS epidemic in their work and the extraordinary strides made by feminist and lesbian artists, however, Reed still finds a reticence on the part of museums and critics to open themselves up to the political messages that many gay (or queer, which seems to be his dominant term) artists are still trying to deliver. Thanks to this book, though, that message is getting a worthy platform.
Steve Barnes is a freelance writer based in New York City. His work has appeared in such publications as ARTnews and the Wall Street Journal. ]]>
Chicago to host 9th annual Salute to LGBT Veterans
Next week will see a salute to LGBT veterans by the city of Chicago. Another of many reasons to love the Windy City.
From the Windy City Times:
The Chicago Commission on Human Relations will host the City of Chicago’s ninth annual Salute to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Veterans, 12-1 p.m. Tuesday, July 26, at Richard J. Daley Plaza, 50 W. Washington Street.
This is the nation’s only municipally sponsored Salute to LGBT Veterans, and it is meant to pay tribute to their honorable service.
Veterans John Graziani, Veronica Hernandez, Marquell Smith and Willa J. Taylor will be featured speakers, and Chicago vocalist Alexandra St. James will perform the national anthem. The program will include a presentation of colors, a mayoral proclamation and a wreath-laying ceremony.]]>
50 useless signs
Time for the occasional ‘for no particular reason’ post. Here are 50 useless signs (BuzzFeed).]]>
Closet can be costly for employers, too
From Bloomberg: This post was written with Karen Sumberg, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy. Erika Karp vividly remembers the secrecy and subterfuge that colored every workday before she told her colleagues that she was a lesbian. “You have to devote a huge amount of psychic energy to being closeted — changing pronouns, switching names. I did that for years,” Karp recalls, all the while knowing that coming out could jeopardize her career in investment banking. “It was torture.” According to a 2009 Human Rights Campaign, more than half of LGBT employees are not “out” of the closet. Being in the closet is not just painful to individuals; it’s also an enormous talent drain for their employers. By not promoting and supporting an inclusive workplace, organizations whose workplace environments cause LGBTs to stay in the closet risk alienating and ultimately losing a critical tranche of talent. A new study by the Center for Work-Life Policy published in the July/August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review quantifies just how high the cost is for both closeted LGBTs and their employers. Nearly one-third (31%) of LGBTs surveyed in the study live double lives — out to their family or friends, but closeted on the job. Being forced to stay in the closet — or feeling penalized by a disapproving or hostile environment once they do come out — puts their career ambitions at war with their ability to put their whole self behind those ambitions. Like Karp, LGBT employees expend an enormous amount of energy simply keeping their stories straight, leaving less for focusing on the work they need to do to advance. Forced to lie about their private lives, they are excluded from the collegiate banter about weekend outings and personal interests that forges bonds in the workplace. Continue reading]]>
WeddingChannel.com expands LGBT organizations on its charity registry
Someone asked me over the weekend if Frank and I were going to register. I don’t know about that – it’s all so foreign to me – but WeddingChannel.com is getting ahead of the curve by adding several LGBT organizations to its charity registry program.
From MarketWatch:
LOS ANGELES, Jul 18, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — In celebration of the Marriage Equality Act recently passed in New York and due to popular demand, WeddingChannel.com, the leading wedding and gift registry website, today announced the addition of Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) to the robust registry offerings in its Charity Donation Program, which already includes Lambda Legal and Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
Now when same-sex and heterosexual couples register for retailers like Macy’s and Michael C. Fina through WeddingChannel.com, they can donate to their favorite organization working to achieve LGBT equality in one of two ways: WeddingChannel.com will make a donation to the couple’s charity of choice each time a guest uses WeddingChannel.com to purchase a gift through their registry search, or guests can donate directly to the charity as their wedding gift.
“The addition of GLAAD, GLSEN and PFLAG to our Charity Donation Program further establishes WeddingChannel.com as the ultimate one-stop destination for couples and wedding guests to register for and donate to charities,” said Amy Eisinger, editor of WeddingChannel.com. “To honor this historic milestone and answer our audience’s demand, we’re thrilled to provide engaged couples with even more LGBT organizations that will continue the fight for marriage equality across the country.” ]]>
LGBT consumers prefer brands that support equality
Not surprisingly, LGBT consumers prefer brands we’re aware of that support equality and diversity. It can also trump price, despite a tough economy.
From PR Newswire:
NEW YORK and WASHINGTON, July 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Brand preferences and customer loyalty often are measured by marketers as the “holy grail” and as benchmarks of consumer behaviors. In a new poll released today, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) adults confirmed attitudes that strengthen their loyalty to companies as well as their brand preferences.
The new national survey found that nearly three-fourths (74%) of LGBT adults are likely to consider brands that support nonprofits and/or causes that are important to them as a LGBT person, an increase from January 2007 when 62% reported they were likely to consider those brands. A significant portion of these adults, two-fifths (41%) say they are extremely likely or very likely to consider these brands.
When it comes to workplace policies, nearly nine out of ten (87%) LGBT adults say they are likely to consider a brand that is known to provide equal workplace benefits for all of their employees, including gay and lesbian employees. More significantly perhaps, nearly half (49%) of LGBT adults say that they are extremely or very likely to consider these brands. This finding represents an increase from January 2007 when 78 percent reported they were likely to consider. By comparison, the survey also revealed that three out of four (75%) heterosexual adults agree they are likely to consider a brand that is known to provide equal workplace benefits for all of their employees, compared to 70% in January 2007.
The new nationwide online survey of 2,357 U.S. adults, (ages 18 and over), of whom 328 self identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender, was conducted between June 13 and 20, 2011, by Harris Interactive, a global market research and consulting firm, in conjunction with Witeck-Combs Communications, Inc., a strategic public relations and marketing communications firm with special expertise in the LGBT market.
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Gay man elected to head Utah Democratic Party
I don’t use the qualifier “openly” unless it’s unavoidable – it’s time we do away with that if we expect equality. The bottom line is: we don’t identify people as gay unless they’re out. That said. . . this is nice to see in a state run by the Mormon Church.
From Lez Get Real:
Jim Dabakis is the new Democratic State Party Chairman for the state of Utah. He was elected in a statewide race, making him the first openly gay man elected in a statewide race, and he is one of the first few openly lesbian or gay Democratic Party Chairs nationwide.
According to Pride in Utah, though “Utah has seen two openly-gay Representatives in the State House. It has also seen an openly gay State Senator. But this is the first time an openly-LGBT person has been elected to an office by voters statewide, and it comes just 3 years after Prop 8.”
Dabakis stated “It’s an honor and a thrill [to be elected Chairman] of the State Democratic Party.” The campaign began five months ago, and Dabakis did not think then or now that his sexuality would be a factor. He stated “I don’t see it as a relevant factor. I am here to do a job and do it the best I can whether I’m gay, straight, black, white or purple.”]]>
Think tank launches LGBT history course with focus on India
From Mid-Day:
A four month-old thinktank for gay and lesbian people has thought up a novel way to spread awareness about the Queer community in the country. MINGLE or Mission for Indian Gay & Lesbian Empowerment will soon launch a certificate course on LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Transgender) history, with a focus on India.
While the course material is still in the process of being compiled, the six month to one year-long free certificate course that is open to everyone, will have both, an offline and an online component. Registrations are currently open on the website, www.mingle.org.in.]]>