Only 24 percent of U.S. adults approve of the Trump administration’ handling of LGBTQ rights while 38 percent disapprove, A Hill-YouGov poll has found. Republicans expressed stronger support than Democrats, but neither political party expressed overwhelming support for the administration’s LGBTQ policies.
Just 8 percent of Democratic respondents either somewhat or strongly approve of the administration’s handling of LGBTQ issues, compared to 47 percent of Republicans. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats somewhat or strongly disapproved compared to just 12 percent of Republicans.
The survey also found that half of adults support legislation to ban discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, as the House-passed Equality Act aims to do. Only 21 percent opposed such legislation while 19 percent were neutral.
A FUNDRAISER FOR THE FALL 2019 TRANSLIFE CONFERENCE
SATURDAY, JUNE 29, 5:30-9:00
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DELIGHTFUL DINNER INCLUDED, STUPENDOUS SILENT AUCTION, AND VARIED ENTERTAINMENT FROM THE VAUDEVILLE STAGE!
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BACKGROUND
In 2015, a group of dedicated community members came together to create an event to foster community building for our transgender/gender nonconforming community. Since then, the TRANSLIFE Community Conference brings together transgender/gender-nonconforming individuals from the North Bay counties to increase connections, share information, and expand individual self-advocacy and knowledge.
Each year, representatives from multiple organizations are in attendance to share information on the social, legal, economic, and health services available to the community, and to provide hands-on resources that can be put to use right away. Additionally, the conference provides some fun social and networking opportunities geared specifically to the transgender/gender-nonconforming community!
In 2018, a Professional Symposium was added to create a space for professionals to ask their questions and gain a broader understanding of the needs of people who identify as transgender or gender expansive.
The next TRANSLIFE Community Conference will take place on October 19, 2019.
TRANSLIFE operates as a project of Santa Rosa Community Health with leadership from across the commuity. All proceeds from this event will support the Community Conference to keep it an open and accessible event for all people in the transgnder/gender nonconforming communuity.
Parents of gay, lesbian and bisexual kids take years to adjust to their children coming out.
A new study has shown that parents of LGB youth struggle for years after finding out about their sexuality.
A study tackling the struggles of LGB kids
The research by George Washington University is the first of its kind to specifically tackle parents of LGB kids.
For the study, the researchers surveyed 1,200 parents of LGB youth ages 10 to 25.
They answered questions like, ‘How hard is it for you, knowing that your son or daughter is LBG?’
Significantly, the study has found little difference between the responses of mothers and fathers whose child had just come out compared to those who had years to process the new information.
Parents still struggle after their kids have come out
‘Surprisingly, we found that parents who knew about a child’s sexual orientation for two years struggled as much as parents who had recently learned the news,’ said David Huebner, a lead researcher for the study.
‘Two years is a very long time in the life of a child who is faced with the stress of a disapproving or rejecting parent.’
The study also highlighted that parents of older children had a tougher time, but both mothers and fathers had similar struggles.
Parents need to speed up their adjustment process
Recent research also showed that nine in 10 LGBTI young people in the UK experience anxiety or depression. Knowing that one’s closest family members aren’t accepting of their sexuality might also impact LGBTI kids’ mental health.
Moreover, Huebner feels strongly that mothers and fathers who have a difficult time adjusting still genuinely care about their children and eventually do come around.
‘Our results suggest interventions to speed up the adjustment process would help not only the parents but also their children,’ said Huebner.
‘LGB youth with accepting families are more likely to thrive as they enter adulthood.’
Lucio Castro’s feature debut End of the Century is an erotic, emotional imagining of a Grindr hookup as memory palace. The film opens in the present as Ocho (Juan Barberini), a poet from New York, cruises the streets and beaches while on vacation in Barcelona. One day, from the balcony of his Airbnb, Ocho sees Javi (Ramon Pujol), a fetching, brawny specimen, his biceps bulging out the sleeves of a KISS t-shirt.
They later do some abortive ogling by the seashore. But fate seems to want them together: When Ocho again spots Javi from his terrace, he works up the courage to call out and invite him up. Turns out Javi is also on vacation (from Berlin) and is staying right next door. After beers and some small talk, the two end up screwing, though Ocho, hilariously, has to run out mid-coitus — and despite being on PrEP (very 2019) — to purchase some condoms.
There’s a pattern for this sort of thing — once beaten off, a half-hearted exchange of WhatsApp contact info and a permanent parting of the ways. But Javi does reach out to Ocho, and over wine and cheese during their second encounter, he casually drops this tidbit: They’ve met before.
The ensuing flashback, via a breathless smash cut, to Charli XCX’s beloved 1999 beautifully deepens what we’ve just experienced. It almost doesn’t matter that neither Ocho nor Javi look demonstrably different since they carry themselves much more callowly and uncertainly. Ocho, especially, is less noticeably wizened as he arrives during a backpacking excursion at the apartment of a friend, Sonia (Mía Maestro), who turns out to be dating Javi.
Both men are closeted, though an attraction is still palpable. Javi has channeled his anxieties into an in-progress movie about Y2K that he claims he might never finish. Ocho, meanwhile, is so paranoid about sex that a random hookup in a park sends him retching into the bathroom, as well as to a charmingly quaint WebMD page about oral sex and HIV.
Different era, though Castro isn’t longing for one decade over another so much as he’s exploring the porousness of time — the way even a dropped connection can resonate far beyond what we might envision. That guy who you once drunkenly hooked up with to the Flock of Seagulls synth-pop smash “Space Age Love Song” (the film’s finest, sexiest scene) could have been the one. But perhaps it’s enough that he was just one of many?
Life is going to sort you out, regardless, and End of the Century is at its best whenever Castro keeps things thematically and temperamentally woozy. It’s a mark of the writer-director’s generousness that, in the third act, he gifts his two protagonists some bittersweet wish-fulfillment, though it feels oddly conventional given everything that’s preceded.
Aesthetically, the film is much more rigorous, with the compositions by cinematographer Bernat Mestres frequently doing Antonioni-esque dancing about architecture. One shot of Ocho’s head peering out from the top of a modernist building makes the allusion explicit, as does a finale that strains a bit too heavily toward the symphony of absence and alienation that concludes L’Eclisse (1962), though in a much gentler register.
The first Pride to be held in the Eurasian country of Georgia is taking place in its capital, Tbilisi, this week. Recent violence and threats against the organizers of Tbilisi Pride and their supporters have put the almost week-long series of events from June 18-23 at risk of being canceled.
On Monday, Georgia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) met with Tbilisi Pride organizers and the country’s ombudswoman and asked that the event be canceled, an organizer told the Washington Blade. This meeting follows a weekend when organizers were threatened by hooligans and a Georgian millionaire began calling for groups to form against those who would participate in pride.
In defiance of the threats, organizers on Tuesday released a statement confirming they will continue to go ahead with the Pride schedule and calling on people in Georgia to attend to preserve a democratic system.
Tbilisi Pride is scheduled to include a conference and play and will end in a dignity march in the city’s center.
The government told Pride organizers last month they may not be able to provide the needed security that this weekend’s march would need. The discussion came after threats were received by the organizers on social media. After Pride was announced, far-right groups in Geogia began posting anti-LGBTI posts on Facebook, according to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. This may have exasperated the already low acceptance of LGBTI people in the country.
“MIA representatives informed us that law enforcement agencies would not be defending LGBT community’s freedom of assembly due to what they see as increased risks and threats coming from radical groups,” Tbilisi Pride’s team said in May.
Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili said last week, “I am everyone’s president, regardless of [sexual orientation] or religious affiliation. No human should be discriminated against. I must also emphasize that our country is dealing with enough controversies and doesn’t need any further provocation from any side of the[LGBTQ] debate.”
Tbilisi Pride Co-founder Tamaz Sozashvili responded to the statement on Twitter, writing that it was a “shame” that Zourachichvili “says that our right to practice the right of [peaceful assembly] and organize [the] first-ever [Tbilisi Pride] is provocation!”
“How can [she] consider peaceful citizens and aggressive fundamentalists as equal sides?”
On June 14, LGBTI rights supporters attempted to gather in front of a government building to urge the Georgian government to guarantee protection to marchers at pride. A mob of anti-LGBTI protesters moved around the activists, trying to attack them through a police barricade and throwing eggs and other items at the activists. Georgian authorities said they detained 28 people who attempted to break through the barricade and get to the activists.
Levan Vasadze, a millionaire who is known to be close to the powerful Georgian Orthodox Church, has called for groups to prevent Pride. According to OC Media, Vasadze is a representative for the U.S.-based World Congress of Families, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group, in the country.
“We will organize ourselves into citizens’ brigades … and they will unite in a legion,” Vasadze said at a rally on June 16, local media reported. “Among us are lots of people with military experience, famous athletes, rugby players, wrestlers … if the propagandists of perversion attempt to hold some sort of demonstration, we will break through any police cordon.”
Vasadze also threatened Western diplomats to avoid involvement, according to Eurasianet.
In response to the comments by Vasadze, the Georgian government opened an investigation looking into the organizing of the anti-pride units.
The State Department told Voice of America it was concerned at the threats of violence against LGBTI people planning to attend Tbilisi Pride.
Writing in an op-ed, LGBTQ activist and Tbilisi Pride organizer Giorgi Tabagari said, “I see Tbilisi Pride as an opportunity to unite people against hatred, to stand up against inequality, and to send a message to everyone that we need to start doing something about our future.”
Organizers announced Tbilisi Pride in February. Last year, activists had to cancel events scheduled in Tbilisi after anti-LGBTQ groups threatened the rallies. In 2013, participants at a gathering against homophobia were forced to run after a group of priests and scores of anti-LGBTQ protestors surrounded them.
In its recent yearly benchmarking tool of LGBTI rights, international rights group ILGA-Europe ranked Georgia 30 percent out of 100.
In honour of Pride month, the New York City Commission of Human Rights temporarily renamed New York’s Gay Street to ‘Acceptance Street’ on Monday (June 17).
The short, angled street was originally a stable alley, and is one of the most picturesque in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. It’s located a short walk away from the Stonewall Inn, where the modern LGBT+ rights movement began with a riot in 1969.
While the historic origins of the name Gay Street are debated, it is not in reference to the LGBT+ community, but is believed to have come from a family named Gay who lived or owned land there in the late 18th Century.
The famous street has featured in the opening shots of Cyndi Lauper’s music video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and Sheryl Crow’s music video for “A Change Would Do You Good.”
Monty’s life had always been fodder for the tabloid press because he had always refused to conform. He passed up several movies at the beginning of his career as he was determined to wait for the right role for his screen debut. He refused to go under Contract to any one studio which was unheard off in those days, and more importantly on a personal level, unlike other gay actors of the time like CARY GRANT and ROCK HUDSON, he wouldn’t toe the line and marry for the sake of his (and the Studios’) reputation
It meant that when news of the personal issues and demons became public knowledge, the Press didn’t hesitate to make them into scandals whether they warranted it or not. Rumours , most of the malicious kind, surrounded his life (and death) such as the claim that his mesmerising performance in Stanley Kramer’s ‘JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG‘ was him actually having a nervous breakdown during the filming.
In this documentary Clift and his co-director HILLARY DEMMONuse their skills and archived evidence to de-construct all the myths that had misled people to believe that Montgomery Clift’s whole life had been one long melodramatic sad cliche. They by no means attempted to portray him as a saint, but at least by separating the facts from some of the wicked fiction, they give us a portrait of a talented, and sometimes tormented extraordinary actor and man, who we should rightfully recognise as a gay icon who our community are truly proud off.
A word of warning . This rather wonderful documentary will make you want to go back and revisit all of Montys films. Well it did to us.
One of the country’s most infamous providers of so-called conversion therapy — a contentious practice that tries to change a gay person’s sexual orientation — will be forced to pay up to $3.5 million after it was found to be in violation of a 2015 court order to shut down.
“It’s a deterrent and a warning shot,” Michael Ferguson, one of the plaintiffs in the case, told NBC News. “If you’re practicing conversion therapy, make no mistake that you will be found out and you will be punished. We are not going to tolerate these practices on members of our community any longer, particularly the most vulnerable.”
On Monday, Judge Peter F. Bariso Jr. of New Jersey Superior Court granted a permanent injunction against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), a conversion therapy organization based in Jersey City. After a six-person jury found JONAH guilty of “unconscionable commercial practices” in 2015, its offices reopened under a new name: the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA).
In a 47-page decision, Bariso claimed JIFGA is a “mere continuation of JONAH.” He called upon the organization to “cease any and all operations within 30 days of the entry of this order,” as well as to shut down its website and dissolve all corporate holdings.
Arthur Goldberg and Elaine Berk, who served as the co-directors of JIFGA, will also be “permanently enjoined” from holding any position in executive leadership or sitting on the board of a nonprofit or other tax-exempt entity.
Lastly, the defendants will be held liable for the remainder of the sum awarded by the court four years ago. In that decision, hailed as a “landmark” ruling by opponents of conversion therapy, the court claimed that JONAH had committed fraud by offering services that claimed to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of patients. Nearly every leading medical association has condemned conversion therapy as ineffective and harmful.
In the three-and-a-half week jury trial, former clients of JONAH attested to the extreme harms they experienced as a result of its services. The organization referred patients to conversion therapists like Alan Downing, who plaintiffs testified ordered them to strip naked and beat pillows that represented their mothers in order to “cure” them of their same-sex attractions.
As part of the settlement agreement, JONAH agreed to pay a portion of the plaintiffs’ legal fees. If the organization did not cease its referral services over the next five years, it would be forced to pay the remaining balance of $3.5 million.
Attorney David Dinielli delivers the opening statements for the plaintiff in a fraud trial against Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, (JONAH) on June 3, 2015, in Jersey City, New Jersey.Alex Remnick / The Star-Ledger via AP Pool
David Dinielli, deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s LGBTQ rights and special litigation project, could not comment on how much JONAH paid to plaintiffs in 2015 or how much will be awarded as a result of Monday’s verdict. He claimed the settlement was designed to ensure that the organization complied with the injunction, under the threat of incurring further penalty.
“The most important thing was to get the defendants to stop engaging in dangerous behavior that puts young people at risk,” Dinielli told NBC News.
Ferguson, who was at a neuroscience conference in Rome at the time of Monday’s ruling, said he felt a wave of “righteous anger” when he learned that the New Jersey Superior Court had again ordered JONAH to cease all operations.
“There was this profound sense of vindication, that we were finally getting something that felt like it had teeth to it in the ruling,” he said. “When we got our initial ruling on the trial in 2015, it did not feel like it was sufficiently metered relative to the gross offenses of JONAH and the experiences of all the plaintiffs.”
Plaintiffs hope the case will set a precedent in how other states tackle the issue of conversion therapy. Although the Williams Institute, a pro-LGBTQ think tank at UCLA, has estimated that more 700,000 Americans have been subjected to efforts to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, the practice remains legal in 32 states. No state has banned conversion therapy on LGBTQ individuals over the age of 18.
But Ferguson believes that New Jersey Superior Court’s emphasis on penalizing JONAH’s activities as fraud opens up an opportunity to target conversion therapy providers in all 50 states. Every state has laws on the books forbidding private entities from advertising fraudulent services, as does the federal government.
“Fraud is already illegal,” Ferguson said. “I’m really hoping that the national strategy adapts so that we begin to enforce and deploy fraud laws that already exist in order to hold individuals accountable.”
That movement has already begun. Last year, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., sponsored a pair of federal bills that would classify conversion therapy as “fraud,” but those pieces of legislation both died in committee. In April, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., who is gay, reintroduced the Prohibition of Medicaid Funding for Conversion Therapy Act, which would prevent the use of Medicaid funding for “reparative” or “ex-gay” treatments.
But as LGBTQ advocacy groups like the Trevor Project and the National Center for Lesbian Rights work to ban conversion therapy across the country, Dinielli hopes this week’s judgment serves an “educational purpose.”
“Our case was the first time that people who had survived conversion therapy had an opportunity to stand in front of a jury and describe what had happened to them,” he said. “We hope that parents around the country will think twice before they encourage or require young people to participate in any effort intended to change their orientation or their gender identity.”
Tony Perkins, a vitriolic anti-LGBTI and Islamophobic figure, has been tapped to lead the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
Perkins, who is also the president of the far-right Christian lobbying organization the Family Research Council, was initially named chair of the Commission last year.
With this new appointment, he will oversee the mission of the USCIRF for at least a year.
Created by the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, the USCIRF ‘uses international standards to monitor religious freedom violations globally, and makes policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress’.
The President and Congressionals leaders from both parties appoint commissioners.
Hateful views instead of freedom
Despite leading a group advocating for freedom, Perkins’ various views counter the ‘freedoms of thought, conscience, expression, association, and assembly’ as outline by the Commission’s definition of religious freedom.
His thoughts on LGBTI rights are extensive and hateful.
Most recently, he called trans pride flags ‘unpleasant’.
The Southern Poverty Law Center also lists the Family Research Council, which endorses conversion therapy, as an anti-LGBTI hate group.
Perkins is also extremely Islamophobic.
In 2010 while appearing on CNN, he said people who follow the literal teachings of Islam ‘have perpetuated great evils on society’.
He also wrote that only 16% of Islam is a religion. The rest, he claimed, ‘is a combination of military, judicial, economic, and political system’ and therefore ‘Sharia is not a religion in the context of the First Amendment’.
Religious freedom as a weapon
Since Trump assumed office, his administration has used religious freedom as a guise to attack the LGBTI community and other marginalized communities.
It has also consistently advocated for religious freedom over anti-discrimination protections.
In January, the administration granted a foster care agency in South Carolina the right to discriminate against potential parents, including same-sex parents, due to the agency’s religious beliefs.
Last year, another Supreme Court case rocked the country when the justices voted in favor of a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The Trump administration fully supported this ruling.
Democrats, however, are trying to combat the use of religious freedom as a weapon. In February, they reintroduced the Do No Harm Act, which protects religious minorities and freedoms, while not bypassing anti-discrimination laws.
