The Washington Blade

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Revolutionizing retirement: How LGBTQ+ housing communities empower elders to live authentically

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David Kilmnick knew an LGBTQ+ retirement community was needed when reaching out to elder facilities for educational programs. The founder and president of the LGBT Network on Long Island, New York, he recalls a facility telling him “we have none of those here,” referring to LGBTQ+ people. “I’m not talking this was 50 years ago or 20 years ago,” he says. “This was like five years ago.” In September 2021, Kilmnick and his nonprofit opened the doors to The LGBT Network’s LGBT/LGBT Friendly Senior Housing, a 75-unit affordable housing community for LGBTQ+ elders. Here, residents can live out and proud with their partners and participate […]

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Activist, organizer, author Amber Hollibaugh dies at 77

Amber Hollibaugh, an activist, organizer, author of “My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home” and a self-educated leading public intellectual in the LGBTQ, feminist, sexual liberation and economic justice movements, died suddenly of complications of diabetes in her home in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 20. She was 77. Hollibaugh is she is survived by her life partner, award-winning novelist Jenifer Levin, and stepsons Mak Levin and Van De Laurier. Hollibaugh was born in Bakersfield, Calif., on June 20, 1946. She lived in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Mississippi, Chicago and Canada before she moved to New York in 1981. […]

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‘Queer’ evolves from hateful epithet to expression of pride

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It hit me one morning this fall as I woke up: I’ve turned 70. As I’ve been celebrating this milestone, I’ve marveled at the changes that have occurred for our LGBTQ community during my lifetime. Marriage equality, Pete Buttigieg (or any LGBTQ person) running for president and/or the fab queer rom-com “Bros” would have been unimaginable when I began coming out 50 years ago. Then, just three years after the Stonewall uprising, I and many other LGBTQ folk felt far more shame than pride about our queerness. Most of us in that era wouldn’t have dreamed that, decades later, not […]

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Lambda Legal sues Oklahoma over transgender birth certificate policy

Lambda Legal joined by Tulsa attorney Karen Keith Wilkens filed a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma Republican Governor Kevin Stitt’s executive order prohibiting transgender people born in Oklahoma from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates to match their gender identity. The suit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, states that On November 8, 2021, Governor Stitt issued an executive order that reversed the Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH)’s prior practice of allowing transgender people to correct their birth certificates to match their gender identity. Previously, transgender people could correct their birth certificates by presenting a court order to […]

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Va. school district to pay $1.3 million in legal fees to resolve Gavin Grimm case

A Virginia school district will pay more than $1.3 million in legal fees to resolve the case of Gavin Grimm, former high school student who challenged its bathroom policy. The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday announced in a press release the Gloucester County School Board in a court filing said it would not challenge Grimm’s request to pay the fees and other costs associated with his case. Grimm was a sophomore at Gloucester County High School in 2015 when he filed a federal lawsuit against the Gloucester County School District’s policy that prohibited students from using bathrooms and locker […]