Flags flew at half-staff over Fire Island. Thousands of mourners stood for hours outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison Ave. It was Friday the 27th of June 1969, and Judy Garland was dead at 47, victim of pills, booze and misery. On record players and radios all across New York, she still yearned to be in the wonderful faraway place where troubles melt like lemon drops.
When two openly gay students at Kearney High in Missouri flipped through their yearbooks to their photos, rather than finding the inspirational quotes they’d chosen to go below their pictures, there was nothing but blank space because school officials removed the pro-gay quotes out of concern that other students could be offended, according to KCTV.
The Council of ex-Muslims of Britain will challenge Islam and any other religion for persecuting minorities, including the LGBT community, Jimmy Bangash, the spokesman for the controversial group, said during a debate on RT. The group made headlines in the UK after its members joined an LGBT parade in London on Tuesday. Their least controversial banners at the event read: “We’re here. We’re kaffir [unbelievers]. Get used to it,” “Celebrating apostasy,” “Make LGBT rights universal” and others, accompanied by a list of Muslim states that punish homosexuality by the death penalty.
One day this spring, Artem Kolesov set up a video camera in the Chicago townhouse where he lives, sat down in a chair and started talking to the young gay people of Russia. “Yesterday I turned 23 years old,” he began. He went on, in Russian, to tell the story of growing up as the fourth of six brothers in a small town, an hour’s drive from Moscow, where his father was a deacon and his mother was a youth pastor at the Pentecostal church.
Gavin Grimm, the Virginia transgender student who took a bathroom case to the United States Supreme Court, dropped part of his case Friday, after years of high-profile litigation that could have marked the first transgender case to be heard by the high court. Papers were filed in Richmond just before 4 p.m. to drop the appeal seeking an immediate end to the Gloucester County Virginia school district’s bathroom policy.
Moments before presenting themselves at the border in Nogales, Arizona, 16 gay and transgender refugees from Central America stood hand in hand for a moment of reflection. The journey to this point had been long, and it wasn’t over yet. Most of them had met each other for the first time on their way to Mexico, and all of them had faced persecution in their home countries. Some of them fled violence by police and gang members. Others fled violence from their families. They’d all heard stories of being turned away at the border, and so they banded together in a caravan.
I had the opportunity to talk with psychotherapist and author, Michael Dale Kimmel, about his new book, “The Gay Man’s Guide to Open and Monogamous Marriage.” Having written a book of my own on modern marriage, I am particularly interested in how Kimmel not only provides a necessarily specific guide for male-male marriages, but also how this wisdom can be utilized by all couples, regardless of gender.
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