Google marches along with gay pride

”Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last.”

on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last.”

From a posting by Cynthia Yeung on the official Google Blog which features a series of photos of LGBT employees marching with Google/YouTube banners in several major US cities including San Francisco, New York and Chicago as well as some European cities. (Google Blog)

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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.”

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The Gay Movement, After Marriage New York Observer -

On the night of June 26, two days before the gay pride parade would overtake Manhattan in honor of the 40th birthday of the Stonewall riots that are popularly imagined as the birth of the gay rights movement, a group numbering a couple of dozen mostly gay men and women found themselves crammed into the parlor floor of the West Village townhouse of John Connor, a former banker who lives with his companion, the designer Steven Gambrel.

It raged and stormed outside, while inside, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the first openly gay person to win that office, thanked the group for coming.

They’d been summoned either because they had money or because they had influence in the “gay movement,” such as it is today, and the organizers of this affair needed their money and influence to stage a large national march for gay rights in Washington, D.C., this October.

The mood was intense, and hardly celebratory, despite the tremendous progress toward legalizing gay marriage in New York State that many of the attendees had been involved in.

“We want results,” Ms. Quinn said. “We want them now. We don’t want to be told any longer that we have to wait. ‘Cause look, in Albany? They said they couldn’t do marriage at the beginning of the session—that they had to get other business done first. And now it’s exploded in Albany. If they kept their promise from Day 1, we wouldn’t be where we are.”

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‘Yay gay!’: San Francisco Pride takes over city streets in its 39th year

From leather-clad to barely clad, masses numbering in the hundreds of thousands partied proud in downtown San Francisco this past weekend. June 27-28 marked the 39th anniversary of the San Francisco Pride Celebration & Parade, and judging by the morning-after media reports, the famous festival doesn’t seem to be getting dull with age.

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Labor Chief Deplores Defacing of Gay Pride Posters

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis issued a warning letter to departmental employees late last week, after posters celebrating Gay Pride Month hanging in 35 department elevators since June 22 have been either defaced or removed altogether.

In an e-mail message sent to the entire department, Ms. Solis, who helped found the House of Representative’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Caucus when she was in Congress, said she was outraged by the behavior.

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Cultures collide: Somali youth harass gay man at Pride

Cultures collided Sunday when a gay man was harassed by more than a dozen Somali youths while heading home after the Twin Cities GLBT Pride Festival. Shouting “I hate gay people,” “Fuck gay people,” and “Gay is not the way,” the youths followed the man for several blocks. The entire incident was caught on video.

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When Gay Pride Day Takes Two Weeks

MADRID | As happens with many Spanish celebrations, Gay Pride “Day” has rather miraculously been stretched out into nearly two weeks of parties, performances, parades, rallies, exhibitions, conferences, and lots and lots of late-night festivities. When I arrived here from New York City nearly seven years ago, Orgullo, as the festival is known, was already a five-day extravaganza bursting at the seams with events and activities and non-stop socializing from which the city’s citizenry — gay, straight and undecided — often needed about five days to recover.

But Madrid has recently begun pushing the envelope even further by scheduling its pride parade a week after the typical last-weekend-in-June date respected almost everywhere else around the globe. By ceding this Saturday, June 27, to Spain’s provincial capitals for their local pride celebrations, Madrid now guarantees that all of Spain will be free to attend its parade and parties on the following Saturday, this year on July 4.

And indeed, attendance in recent years has reportedly topped 2 million, making Madrid’s Orgullo festivities likely the largest party in Europe of any stripe for four years running.

Which is not to say that this weekend, as the parades and parties are getting under way in other cities and towns across the country from Barcelona to Tenerife, that gay Madrid will staying in and resting up.

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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.

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How long has Seattle supported gay rights?

Seattle: 1st in gay rights

Seattle has been at the vanguard of gay rights for at least three decades. Remember Anita Bryant? While she was getting cities across the county to repeal gay rights ordinances in the 1970s, Seattle voters held the line — the first city in America to vote in favor of gay rights. The City of Seattle adopted a fair employment ordinance in 1973 which specifically prohibited discrimination against gay people in the workplace, followed by a fair housing ordinance in 1975. But in 1978, Initiative 13 attempted to repeal the ordinances. It went down in defeat, and Seattle voters successful stopped the national movement to turn back the clock of gay rights. Since then, the cities of Tacoma, Spokane, and others followed suit; Seattle has elected openly gay city council members for decades and is considered to have one of the largest gay populations in the nation.

– Leonard Garfield

Sunday’s gay pride parade marks the event’s 32nd year. See photos from the event here.

Learn more about Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry at seattlehistory.org.

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Seattle Post Intelligencer

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