On Gay Issues, Obama Asks to Be Judged on Vows Kept
WASHINGTON — President Obama defended his policies on gay rights on Monday, telling an audience of gay men and lesbians that he remained committed to overturning the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule and that he expected to be judged “not by promises I’ve made but by the promises that my administration keeps.”
Mr. Obama made his remarks at a reception in the East Room of the White House to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the 1969 uprising that gave rise to the modern gay rights movement. Joined by his wife, Michelle, the president directly addressed criticism from gay and lesbian leaders that he had not been a forceful advocate for them.
“I know that many in this room don’t believe progress has come fast enough, and I understand that,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s not for me to tell you to be patient any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African-Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half-century ago.
“We’ve been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration.”
Many lesbians and gay men supported Mr. Obama’s election, but their leaders have grown increasingly impatient and critical of him as president.
See On Gay Issues, Obama Asks to Be Judged on Vows Kept
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‘I am a gay American, and I am a second-class citizen’
Members of the Bloomington Gay Recruiters group conduct a marriage equality sit-in on Thursday morning outside the Monroe County Justice Building. Along with signs, the group also chanted “1,138 federal rights denied. I am a gay American and I am a second-class citizen.”
Honoring the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City on June 28, 1969, Bloomington residents Lillie Aydt and her group Gay Recruiters led Bloomington’s first-ever sit-in for marriage equality Thursday at the Monroe County Justice Building downtown. The Stonewall riots occurred when members of the LGBT community in Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Inn fought back against the
oppression they faced from various government-sponsored systems.
Gay Recruiters was formed in response to the Proposition 8 Supreme Court decision, which upheld the illegality of same-sex marriage in California and thus established what Aydt called “an Orwellian precedent, allowing certain gay citizens more rights than others.” See ‘I am a gay American, and I am a second-class citizen’
Indiana Daily Student
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A Texas gay raid and Stonewall
The Fort Worth police have “some explaining to do,” said Jacquielynn Floyd in The Dallas Morning News. On June 28, officers raided a gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge, sending a patron to intensive care with a head injury. “In what I can only hope is a spectacularly infelicitous coincidence,” it took place on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Raid, the gay-rights movement’s catalyst. The cops’ story—drunk gay men groped them—doesn’t add up.
Well, police chief Jeff Halstead is backing his men and their classic “Gay Panic Defense,” said Dan Savage in The Stranger, which goes: He made a pass at me, so I was justified in beating/killing him. That would still be illegal, but it’s also bunk. “I’ve been in a million gay bars” like the Rainbow Lounge, and “gay men don’t grope police officers when they enter gay bars.”
It is, “obviously, very sad” that one of the Rainbow Lounge patrons is in critical condition, said Rod Dreher in BeliefNet, but come on, the report that “cops who entered a gay bar were set upon by drunk, horny patrons who played grab-ass with them” is “hilarious,” and not at all far-fetched. Gay people, especially drunk gay people, can be “as stupid as the rest of us.”
Except that the hospitalized man was reportedly drinking bottled water, said Jeff Epperly in New England’s Bay Windows. But 40 years after Stonewall, this kind of gay harassment goes on all over the U.S., not just in Texas. The raid at Forth Worth’s Rainbow Lounge “was the work of a police department that wasn’t smart enough to hide its bigotry.” See A Texas gay raid and Stonewall The Week Magazine
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The New York Blade Suspends Publication
The New York Blade, one of the two major gay and lesbian newspapers in New York City, has laid off its editor in chief and suspended publication, the chief executive of its publishing company said on Wednesday.
“Everyone was let go, but the people on The Blade know that they may come back if The Blade is coming back,” said the executive, Matthew Bank, of HX Media, which was formed in 2005 by the merger of The Blade and HX Magazine.
The moves came on Tuesday after HX was sold to undisclosed buyers. The Blade, a biweekly paper with a free circulation of 22,000, was left with an uncertain future.
“It doesn’t have an issue scheduled until a week from Friday.” Mr. Bank said. “There are a lot of things that can happen between now and then.”
The decision to suspend publication comes at a particularly active period for journalism concerned with gay issues: the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the gay pride parade on Sunday, the proposed same-sex marriage bill in the State Senate and discontent over the Obama administration’s performance on gay-rights issues.
“It is an incredibly exciting time for gay journalism,” said Kat Long, who had been editor in chief of The Blade since February. “It’s important that gay papers are around to document it.”
Paul Schindler, editor in chief of Gay City News, the rival New York City gay newspaper, said The Blade had “made good contributions over the years.”
See New York Gay Newspaper Suspends Publication
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Bar raid demands independent probe
Don’t expect law enforcement agencies involved in Rainbow Lounge incident to police themselves
It’s not exactly clear how the Fort Worth Police Department and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission will wiggle out of the public relations stranglehold the LGBT community now has on the two agencies, but I know from years of watching these dramas unfold that they will unless there is an independent investigation.
The local police officers and the state agents who descended on the Rainbow Lounge on Sunday morning, June 28, about 1 a.m. — arresting some patrons for public intoxication and apparently seriously injuring one — will all watch each other’s backs.
The official police reports that the law enforcement officials filed following the raid — which ironically occurred on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion and the birth of the gay rights movement in New York City in 1969 — already hold the arresting officers and agents harmless.
The officers and agents claim in the reports that they encountered belligerent drunks in the one-week-old nightclub who threatened them in a sexually suggestive manner. That’s possibly the most preposterous part of the official version of the incident.
See Bar raid demands independent probe
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Se3nate Power struggle impedes New York gay marriage vote
New York’s annual Gay Pride parade was a colorful celebration of 40 years of progress toward civil rights for gays, but once the dust settled, gay couples who wish to marry in New York state remain thwarted.
A bill to legalize gay marriage in the state that saw the dawn of the gay rights movement is mired in political stalemate in the state capital Albany, where Democrats and Republicans are battling over control of the state Senate.
“I had hoped today’s march would have been a bit of a wedding march. It’s not,” Christine Quinn, the gay speaker of the New York City Council, said at Sunday’s Gay Pride parade. Held annually, this year’s event marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, which triggered the modern U.S. gay rights movement.
“We are disappointed. … But I know there have been other times our community has been disappointed and you need to keep fighting,” Quinn said at the start of the parade, which organizers said drew more than a million people.
Gay couples can marry in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa and will be allowed marry in Vermont starting in September and in New Hampshire from January. Other states offer same-sex unions that grant many of the same rights as marriage.
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A Long Road Traveled
The last time I got as close to the White House as I did this week was many years ago—six years after the Stonewall riots, when I was a 13-year-old National Spelling Bee participant from St. Margaret’s School in Lowell, Mass. We spelling bee kids didn’t make it into the White House that day—we stood outside as first lady Betty Ford spoke to us from a balcony. By then I already knew I was gay. Raised in a staunch Catholic home and taught (and tormented) by nuns, I was certain that an open homosexual (that was the only term I knew back then) could never be allowed inside the White House. I knew nothing of the nascent gay-rights movement—it hadn’t reached Lowell in 1975. All I knew was that that whatever words there were to describe what I was, it would have to be suppressed forever. I assumed that I would have to either become a priest or figure out some other way to hide.
Thankfully, time marched on, and I eventually became a politicized college student rather than a candidate for the priesthood—and ultimately I kicked open my closet door and came out. But I can’t help thinking about that personal history as I replay the reel of yesterday’s visit to the White House in my head. As the executive director of SAGE, an advocacy group for LGBT senior citizens, I was invited, along with some 200 other LGBT leaders, to join the Obamas in commemorating gay pride—which falls this year on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
I was accompanied by three SAGE members: a lesbian couple who are 86 and 91, who reminisced about voting for FDR and described Barack Obama as “the most inspiring politician since Adlai Stevenson,” and a Stonewall veteran and founder of the Gay Liberation Front, an activist group formed in the aftermath, who proudly chose his SAGE T shirt over the ties worn by every other man in the room.
Apart from celebrating, we had gone to the White House to make a point: that older people have to be included in the Obama agenda for LGBT progress. And we did what we came to do, with one of our members (the Stonewall vet) even receiving a personal meeting with the president and Mrs. Obama. But as I stood with my partner, in the front row, some five feet from the presidential podium, I realized how intensely personal this experience was for me. I thought about how each member of the SAGE contingent has had our own life’s journey—and each of us was moved deeply and differently by that moment.
See A Long Road Traveled Newsweek
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Fort Worth police better start clarifying gay bar ‘check’
The Fort Worth Police Department still has some explaining to do about what happened early Sunday at a southside gay bar called the Rainbow Lounge. Or some clarifying or some illuminating or some supplementary detailing – anything to mitigate the apparently self-administered public-relations shot-to-the-foot it suffered after what it keeps calling a routine “bar check.” ‘Cause – Problem No. 1 – bar patrons who were there say it wasn’t a “check,” it was a “raid.” Problem No. 2, this particular “check” ended with a kid in the intensive-care unit with a head injury. Problem No. 3, in what I can only hope is a spectacularly infelicitous coincidence, all this took place on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Raid. The landmark date marks a 1969 clash between New York City police and club patrons, widely viewed as the catalyst for the modern American gay-rights movement.
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The Stonewall generation looks back
It’s been a grueling journey from the deep closet to the equal-marriage battles of today. But it’s also remarkable that that journey has taken place within the space of typical American’s lifetime.
Older LGBT people have seen—and created—enormous changes in our society. A timeline produced by SAGE for the 40th anniversary …
Tags: 40th Anniversary, Enormous Changes, Equal Marriage, Grueling Journey, Lgbt, Lifetime, marriage, Sage, Timeline, Typical AmericanWhy Some People Are Gay: Notes (and Clues) from the Animal Kingdom
We have known for at least a decade that hundreds of animal species — including birds, reptiles, mollusks and, of course, humans — engage in same-gender sexual acts. But no one is quite sure why. After all, same-sex couplings don’t usually result in offspring. (I say usually because when male marine snails pair with other males, one partner conveniently changes sex, allowing for reproduction.) Evolutionarily speaking, homosexuality should have disappeared long ago.
A yearlong study just completed at the University of California at Riverside offers several fascinating competing theories about why same-gender sexual behavior has endured. And although it’s gay-pride month — and the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that sparked the gay-rights movement — not all the theories will give same-gender-loving humans a reason to celebrate. (See the top 10 animal stories of 2007.)
One particularly charged finding is that in most species besides humans, same-gender pairings rarely lead to lifelong relationships. In other words, when one attractive bonobo male eyes another in a lovely patch of Congo swamp forest, they occasionally kiss and then move on to other oral pleasures, but they don’t bother anyone afterward about trying to legalize their right to an open-banana-bar ceremony. In fact, they are likely to move on to girl bonobos: most animals that engage in same-gender sex acts do so only when an opposite-sex partner is unavailable.
And yet the study’s authors, Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk of UC Riverside’s biology department, report some exceptions, like the laysan albatross. Last year, researchers studying a Hawaiian colony of albatrosses found that nearly a third of all the couples involved two females who courted and then shared parenting responsibilities. (Albatrosses don’t have U-Hauls, so no lesbian jokes, please.) Male chinstrap penguins also form long-term relationships, at least in captivity. And some male bighorn sheep will mount females only after the females adopt male-like behaviors.
What explains all these variances? Here are some hypotheses I collected from Bailey and Zuk’s paper as well as from some of their original sources:
See Why Some People Are Gay: Notes (and Clues) from the Animal Kingdom
TIME
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