Gay is the New Black

Check out this interesting article in the Advocate! Provocative title but great writing:

By Michael Joseph Gross
Excerpted from The Advocate November 12, 2008

The night before Election Day, a black woman walked into the San Francisco headquarters of the No on Proposition 8 campaign. Someone had ripped down the No on 8 sign she’d posted in her yard and she wanted a replacement. She was old, limping, and carrying a cane. Walking up and down the stairs to this office was hard for her.

I asked why coming to get the sign was worth the trouble, and she answered, “All of us are equal, and all of us have to fight to make sure the law says that.” She said that she was straight, and she told me about one of the first times she ever hung out with gay people, in New Orleans in the 1970s. “I thought I was so cool for being there, and I said, ‘You faggots are a lot of fun!’ Well, that day I learned my lesson. A gay man turned on me and said, ‘A faggot is not a person. A faggot is a bunch of sticks you use to light a fire.’ ”

The combination of Obama’s win and gay people’s losses inflicted mass whiplash. We were elated, then furious. I’d spent the week in the No on Prop. 8 office in the Castro, a neighborhood where our defeat was existential. For the next few days, wherever I went -- barbershop, grocery store, gym, bars -- I heard people talk of almost nothing else.

The next day, Barack Obama was elected president, and gay marriage rights in California were taken away. At the same time, Arizona voters amended their state constitution to preemptively outlaw gay marriage. Florida went further, outlawing any legal union that’s treated as marriage, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions. Arkansas passed a vicious law denying us adoption rights.

You can find the rest after the jump...

‘Uniting for the greater cause’

Transgender Day of Remembrance is right around the corner and this is a very important day in the LGBT community. For more information about TDOR click here.

By DYANA BAGBY
NOV. 14, 2008

After honoring the Transgender Day of Remembrance for 10 years, Tracee McDaniel says it never becomes easier.

“It’s always emotional for me, but it’s always good to see we have support,” said McDaniel, executive director of the Juxtaposed Center for Transformation.

McDaniel is an organizer of Atlanta’s Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony, set for Nov. 20 at the State Capitol.

Each year on Nov. 20, cities across the globe take time out to remember transgender people who were killed or died because of who they are. Remembering their names once a year is an important way to mark the discrimination transgender people face on a daily basis, McDaniel said.

“We just need to keep awareness out there that there is discrimination against transgender people and until we get some kind of legal protections, employment protections, we will continue to raise awareness,” she said.

This year’s theme for the vigil is “Community Uniting for a Greater Cause” because, McDaniel said, “we are all one community regardless how we identify.” (Southern Voice)

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Black gays celebrate Obama’s win

The Washington Blade steps into the black LGBT community to get their take on the Obama victory:

Black lesbian activist Sheila Alexander-Reid, founder of D.C. based Women in the Life, is struggling to put her thoughts into words on the morning of Nov. 5.

“I am so incredibly exhausted,” she says.

Reid is speechless for other reasons, too. She cannot believe that the U.S. has elected a black man to its highest office.

Carlene Cheatam, a lesbian activist and one of the original organizers of D.C. Black Pride, said that on election night, she was “totally filled.”

Though she had never really thought about whether she’d see a black president in her lifetime, she said she “knew he would win.”

“The impact that he has on people here and around the world, I think, is amazing, and I’m grateful to be here today,” she says.

Alexander Robinson, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a black gay group, said he had faith the American people would eventually support a black president, but didn’t believe it would happen this soon.

Earline Budd, longtime transgender rights activist and former executive director of Transgender Health Empowerment Inc., said that as an HIV-positive transgender woman, Obama’s presidency means health services that are important and vital to her life will not be eliminated and will be given more consideration.

Budd worked to get transgender people in D.C. registered to vote in time for the election. A lot of her clients, she said, were voting for the first time.

And she admits that she never thought she’d see this day.

These longtime gay and black activists professed their belief that the administration of president-elect Barack Obama will be the best in history on gay rights.

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What can we expect from an Obama administration?

Now that Obama has won the election, one question remains: What now? Ethan Jacobs of the Boston Edge examines what we can expect from an Obama administration:

With the election of Barack Obama and the expanded Democratic majority in Congress LGBT advocates are hopeful that they will be able to move forward with a federal agenda that had largely stalled under the Bush administration. Yet despite the change in leadership in the White House, advocates say it is unclear when the new president and Congress would begin taking action on some of the big-ticket items on the LGBT political agenda - passage of an inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), expansion of hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity, repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and passage of the Uniting American Families Act, to name a few measures Obama said he supports during the campaign.

Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), said HRC and other advocates would be assessing the make-up of the new Congress and the priorities of the new Obama administration to determine when different agenda items would be most viable.

"As a community and as a movement ... before we go back to talking about how [different agenda items] might play out, I think the first thing for us to do is evaluate what the face of the new Congress looks like. ... But I think you then have to move with an evaluative look at a whole range of LGBT issues, and I think you can see that different issues are at different places along the spectrum," said Solmonese.

He said hate crimes legislation, which passed in the House and Senate last year but was dropped from a defense authorization bill before final passage, would potentially be an easier victory in the short term, since lawmakers in both chambers have passed it and Obama has announced his support for the measure. ENDA would require more work, Solmonese said; last year the House passed a non-transgender-inclusive version of the bill, and the Senate has not yet voted on it, so there would be more work needed to build support for it in both chambers. Repealing "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" will require significantly more work, Solmonese said, since Congress has not voted on any repeal legislation and the new administration would have to win the support of the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Allison Herwitt, HRC’s legislative director, said as of the morning of Nov. 5 it was too soon to tell how supportive the new Congress would be.

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You can’t take this away from me: Proposition 8 broke our hearts, but it did not end our fight.

An Op-Ed from Joe Solmonese, President of HRC:

Like many in our movement, I found myself in Southern California last weekend. There, I had the opportunity to speak with a man who said that Proposition 8 completely changed the way he saw his own neighborhood. Every “Yes on 8” sign was a slap. For this man, for me, for the 18,000 couples who married in California, to LGBT people and the people who love us, its passage was worse than a slap in the face. It was nothing short of heartbreaking.

But it is not the end. Fifty-two percent of the voters of California voted to deny us our equality on Tuesday, but they did not vote our families or the power of our love out of existence; they did not vote us away.

As free and equal human beings, we were born with the right to equal families. The courts did not give us this right—they simply recognized it. And although California has ceased to grant us marriage licenses, our rights are not subject to anyone’s approval. We will keep fighting for them. They are as real and as enduring as the love that moves us to form families in the first place. There are many roads to marriage equality, and no single roadblock will prevent us from ultimately getting there.

And yet there is no denying, as we pick ourselves up after losing this most recent, hard-fought battle, that we’ve been injured, many of us by neighbors who claim to respect us. We see them in the supermarkets, on the sidewalk, and think “how could you?”

By the same token, we know that we are moving in the right direction. In 2000, California voters passed Proposition 22 by a margin of 61.4% to 38.6%. On Tuesday, fully 48% of Californians rejected Proposition 8. It wasn’t enough, but it was a massive shift. Nationally, although two other anti-marriage ballot measures won, Connecticut defeated an effort to hold a constitutional convention ending marriage, New York’s state legislature gained the seats necessary to consider a marriage law, and FMA architect Marilyn Musgrave lost her seat in Congress. We also elected a president who supports protecting the entire community from discrimination and who opposes discriminatory amendments.

Yet on Proposition 8 we lost at the ballot box, and I think that says something about this middle place where we find ourselves at this moment. In 2003, twelve states still had sodomy laws on the books, and only one state had civil unions. Four years ago, marriage was used to rile up a right-wing base, and we were branded as a bigger threat than terrorism. In 2008, most people know that we are not a threat. Proposition 8 did not result from a popular groundswell of opposition to our rights, but was the work of a small core of people who fought to get it on the ballot. The anti-LGBT message didn’t rally people to the polls, but unfortunately when people got to the polls, too many of them had no problem with hurting us. Faced with an economy in turmoil and two wars, most Californians didn’t choose the culture war. But faced with the question—brought to them by a small cadre of anti-LGBT hardliners – of whether our families should be treated differently from theirs, too many said yes.

But even before we do the hard work of deconstructing this campaign and readying for the future, it’s clear to me that our continuing mandate is to show our neighbors who we are.

Justice Lewis Powell was the swing vote in Bowers, the case that upheld Georgia’s sodomy law and that was reversed by Lawrence v. Texas five years ago. When Bowers was pending, Powell told one of his clerks “I don’t believe I’ve ever met a homosexual.” Ironically, that clerk was gay, and had never come out to the Justice. A decade later, Powell admitted his vote to uphold Georgia’s sodomy law was a mistake.

Everything we’ve learned points to one simple fact: people who know us are more likely to support our equality.

In recent years, I’ve been delivering this positive message: tell your story. Share who you are. And in fact, as our families become more familiar, support for us increases. But make no mistake: I do not think we have to audition for equality. Rather, I believe that each and every one of us who has been hurt by this hateful ballot measure, and each and every one of us who is still fighting to be equal, has to confront the neighbors who hurt us. We have to say to the man with the Yes on 8 sign—you disrespected my humanity, and I am not giving you a pass. I am not giving you a pass for explaining that you tolerate me, while at the same time denying that my family has a right to exist. I do not give you permission to say you have me as a “gay friend” when you cast a vote against my family, and my rights.

Wherever you are, tell a neighbor what the California Supreme Court so wisely affirmed: that you are equal, you are human, and that being denied equality harms you materially. Although I, like our whole community, am shaken by Prop 8’s passage, I am not yet ready to believe that anyone who knows us as human beings and understands what is at stake would consciously vote to harm us.

This is not over. In California, our legal rights have been lost, but our human rights endure, and we will continue to fight for them.

Third Gay Elected to Congress

365gay.com is reporting that the third gay representative has been elected to Congress:

(Washington) Colorado Democrat Jared Polis will become the third openly gay member of Congress when he is sworn in in January.

Polis, a 33-year-old entrepreneur who made millions creating Internet-based businesses, beat Republican Scott Starin to represent the 2nd District , which includes his hometown of Boulder.

He will join fellow Democrats Barney Frank (Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.) in the House.

There have been at least five other gays and lesbians in Congress, including currently serving Reps. Frank and Baldwin. Frank came out while in Congress. Baldwin was open about her sexuality when first elected.

Frank and Baldwin had little difficulty Tuesday winning re-election.

Polis’ 2nd District is firmly Democratic, but he took no chances and ran a strong campaign, putting much of his own money into the run. He also had the support of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.

Previously, Polis was elected statewide to the Colorado State Board of Education from 2001 - 2007. During that time he served a term as vice-chairman and one as chairman.

Find more after the jump...

Bittersweet Day for LGBT Americans

Nov. 5th marks a bittersweet day for LGBT Americans. There is great celebration within our community surrounding the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. His efforts of inclusion were exemplified again in his victory speech, where he made mention of gay Americans. This is a remarkable achievement of progressive advocates everywhere, that work so hard to see Obama elected.

Unfortunately, discriminatory measures were passed in states across the US:

WASHINGTON—Voters in Arizona and Florida passed amendments to their states’ constitutions enshrining discrimination against LGBT people and denying marriage, and in some cases civil unions or domestic partnerships as well, to same-sex couples. Proposition 8 in California still remains too close to call.

“We all know that our marriages did not begin with a court decision and they will not end with a vote on a discriminatory amendment,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese.

“In California, we firmly believe that all votes should be counted before calling the race. Several million votes in CA have yet to be counted. We are waiting to see the final results from those ballots and we should not be speculating about something as important as people’s fundamental rights,” continued Solmonese.

“Although we lost our battles in Arizona and Florida, we will not allow the lies and hate—the foundation on which our opponents built their campaign—to break our spirits. We are on the right side of history—and we will continue this journey.

“The continuing movement in public opinion underscores that it is only a matter of time before we undo this loss and add more states to the march for marriage equality,” Solmonese continued.

HRC played a key role in the efforts to defeat Proposition 8 and other the other ballot measures in Arizona and Florida. (HRC Press Release)

We must continue the fight to bring fair-minded Americans together in support of equality, as well as support a president that values who we are as a community.