SF mayor Newsom to run for CA lieutenant governor

(San Francisco) After dropping out of the gubernatorial race last year, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he is running for lieutenant governor.

Newsom’s announcement wasn’t a surprise – he filed papers Feb. 17 with the secretary of state, a necessary step to run again for a statewide office. …

Fans delighted by DeGeneres’ ‘Idol’ debut

(Los Angeles) Ellen DeGeneres hit the right notes with “American Idol” viewers.

Fans took to the Internet to express their pleasant surprise over the 52-year-old funnylady’s debut as the singing competition’s fourth judge. DeGeneres assumed her judging panel post for Tuesday’s episode chronicling the first round of “Hollywood Week,” the cutthroat …

Corvino: No Asians?

Not long ago a friend approached me for relationship advice. He’s a white guy who was contemplating dating a black guy, and, as he put it, “I thought you could give me some insight since you’re in an interracial relationship.”

His query took me by surprise. To be honest, I had …

Withers: Albany pols promise gay marriage vote

Trying to decipher the machinations of deal making in Albany, New York is impossible. Add to that a political culture that is a wreck of mess, and it should come as no surprise the state is facing budget ruin. Despite all of this, it looks like gay marriage will get …

Vatican to decide each case of Anglican priests

(Vatican City) The Vatican said Saturday that married Anglican priests will be admitted to the Catholic priesthood on a case-by-case basis as Rome makes it easier for disillusioned conservative Anglicans to convert.

A surprise Vatican decision, announced 10 days earlier to make it easier for Anglicans to become Roman Catholics while …

Chicago HIV report sparks reaction

The Chicago Public Health Department’s alarming report, released Friday, that suggests the HIV infection rate among gay men in Chicago is nearly 20% has drawn varied responses from Chicago’s gay and lesbian community.
ChicagoPride.com surveyed a number of gay men on a busy Saturday night in Boystown.
From Waveland to Buckingham, the responses were varied with one common undertone that gay men no longer think HIV is a death sentence. And despite extensive media coverage on the recently release report, many were unaware of the report and its contents.
“I’m not at all surprised by these statistics.” Said thirty-something Al joined by Jared and Jamie outside of the Center on Halsted. “The fact that a lot of our own community members are not aware of their status is probably because of their fear of knowing.”
“We are very closeted in the U.S. regarding educating our youth,” added Jaime.
Some do not believe the numbers and conclusions published in the report.
“You can work the numbers however you want,” said Matthew a bartender at Buck’s. See Chicago HIV report sparks reaction

ChicagoPride.com –

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/chicago-hiv-r…

Backers of Gay Marriage Rethink California Push

LOS ANGELES — Discouraged by stubborn poll numbers and pessimistic political consultants, major financial backers of same-sex marriage are cautioning gay rights groups to delay a campaign to overturn California’s ban on such unions until at least 2012.

Earlier this year, many supporters of same-sex marriage seemed eager to mount a 2010 campaign to overturn Proposition 8, which was passed by California voters in November and defined marriage as “between a man and a woman.”

But the timing of another campaign has since been questioned by several of the movement’s big donors, including David Bohnett, a millionaire philanthropist and technology entrepreneur who gave more than $1 million to the unsuccessful campaign to defeat Proposition 8.

“In conversations with a number of my fellow major No on 8 donors,” Mr. Bohnett said in an e-mail message, “I find that they share my sentiment: namely, that we will step up to the plate — with resources and talent — when the time is right.”

“The only thing worse than losing in 2008,” he added, “would be to lose again in 2010.”

The issue of when to go back to the polls was also the central topic at a contentious “leadership summit” held Saturday at a church in San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, where about 200 gay rights advocates gathered to discuss their next step. It was the second large meeting of gay leaders since late May when the California Supreme Court ruled against a legal challenge to Proposition 8, which passed with 52 percent of the vote.

Shortly after the court’s decision, officials at Equality California, one of the largest gay rights groups in California, issued an online plea for donations for a possible 2010 campaign, citing a need to capitalize on anger over the decision and on the seeming momentum from the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in several other states.

But that thinking has apparently evolved.

Marc Solomon, marriage director for Equality California, said he spent June and early July asking the opinions of nearly two dozen California political consultants and pollsters and had been surprised by the almost unanimous opinion that a 2010 race was a bad idea.

“I expected having watched the protests and the real pain that the L.G.B.T. community had experienced that there would be some real measurable remorse in the electorate,” Mr. Solomon said, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “But if you look at the poll numbers since November, they really haven’t moved at all.”

A major factor in any California balloting, of course, is money; campaigns here are remarkably expensive, with a number of costly media markets. The Proposition 8 campaign, for example, cost more than $80 million, with opponents spending some $43 million.

Sarah Callahan, ch

See Backers of Gay Marriage Rethink California Push

New York Times

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/backers-of-ga…

Salt Lake City leaders seek to eradicate discrimination

Fair housing was the topic of Debra Daniels’ first high school debate speech.

With the release of a report Tuesday detailing incidents of discrimination in Salt Lake City, Daniels is still talking about the need for equality some 35 years later.

“I am surprised today, in 2009, that we are still asking that our citizens be allowed to move into a neighborhood, to … access employment and health care … and they’re being denied based on who they are,” Daniels said on the steps of the Salt Lake City-County Building.

The report by the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission found discrimination based on race, faith, class and sexual orientation happens often in the city.

See Salt Lake City leaders seek to eradicate discrimination

Deseret News -

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/salt-lake-cit…

Changes in San Diego reflected in San Diego’s Pride Parade, Festival

The hundreds of San Diegans who marched for gay rights in the mid-1970s walked through a city largely indifferent, even antagonistic, to the cause.

What strides they have made.

Today, up to 9,000 people will take part in the San Diego Pride Parade, including the mayor, police chief and seven of the eight City Council members. Organizers are expecting 175,000 spectators from across the country and as far away as Australia, Germany and Britain.

While San Diego’s parade may never be as big as those in San Francisco or Los Angeles, there are many signs of how San Diego has changed into a city in the forefront of the campaign for gay rights.

In November, in the days after California voted to ban same-sex marriage, the largest protest in the nation occurred in San Diego. More than 20,000 people marched, double any other city’s turnout.

The size of San Diego’s crowd came as a surprise to many, including Cleve Jones, the gay rights activist and lecturer who founded the AIDS Memorial Quilt and was an intern for slain San Francisco supervisor and gay icon Harvey Milk. Jones is the grand marshal of today’s parade and several others around the country.

See Changes in San Diego reflected in today’s Pride Parade, Festival

San Diego Union Tribune

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/changes-in-sa…

Gays Step Up Efforts to Reverse Gay-as-Godless Stereotype

A groundbreaking survey about the faith lives of gay Americans that the Barna Group put out last week got surprisingly little attention. In my latest God & Country column for U.S. News Weekly, I tied the Barna survey’s fascinating portrait of gay religious life to the gay rights movement’s recent efforts to ratchet up outreach and messaging. Much of the work is aimed at reversing the gay-as-Godless stereotype.

Here’s the top:

Though he was raised in the United Methodist Church, Harry Knox knew he couldn’t become a minister in his denomination because it doesn’t ordain openly gay members. He enrolled in a seminary of the more liberal United Church of Christ but was eventually denied ordination anyway. “My whole career as an activist is an accidental ministry,” says Knox, 48, who now works at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights group. “I would rather be a local pastor.”

Instead, since 2005, Knox has built HRC’s “religion and faith program,” which works to combat the stereotype of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community as antireligious. “For far too long, LGBT organizations did not put religious allies at the forefront of our efforts,” Knox says. “That’s a mistake we’re making less often now.”

Those religious allies may be more plentiful than most Americans think. A Barna Group survey out last week shows that most gay Americans lead pretty robust faith lives. While 72 percent of straight American adults describe their faith as “very important” in their lives, so do 60 percent of gays and lesbians. Almost as many, 58 percent, say they’ve made a personal and ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ.

And though they are much less likely than straights to share the beliefs of born-again Christians—which comes as no surprise, since most churches in the born-again tradition condemn homosexuality—the Barna survey found that 27 percent of gays do hold those beliefs. “Many in the Christian community assume there’s this significant gap between heterosexuals and homosexuals in terms of faith beliefs and activities,” says George Barna, the country’s top pollster on religious issues, who supervised the survey. “While there are statistically significant differences, it’s the narrow size of the gap that’s most surprising.”

The poll unleashed a torrent of hate mail, mostly from believers furious with Barna’s conclusion: that many gays are Bible-believing Christians. But more and more gay rights organizations are joining HRC in stepping up efforts to highlight the faith beliefs of many gay Americans, largely through religious outreach programs. And some religious traditions and denominations are taking steps to welcome gay and lesbian members.

Gay rights activists say that the 2004 election, when voters in 11 states passed gay marriage bans that were heavily promoted through churches, was a wake-up call. To help counter the image of the gay marriage battle as a fight between gays and religious Americans, HRC, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and other national gay rights groups quickly hired religious outreach staff.

Read the full story here.

See Gays Step Up Efforts to Reverse Gay-as-Godless Stereotype

U.S. News & World Report

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual