A story dominating headlines in the United States right now is the wall President Donald Trump wants along the US-Mexico border. It has caused a government shutdown (going on three weeks) and numerous debates around the country.
While it may be understood this has nothing to do with the LGBTI community, that’s simply not true.
In fact, immigration (and related issues, such as refugees seeking asylum) is intrinsically linked to LGBTI issues.
This is everything LGBTI people should know about the current border wall debate in the US.
Background on the wall
Trump has been promising a border wall to curb illegal immigration since he first began his presidential campaign. In one of his first speeches, he referred to Mexicans as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists’ as justification for the wall.
Barriers have existed along the border, aimed at preventing illegal immigration from Mexico, since the 1990s. These barriers are not one continuous structure, but numerous structures in certain areas.
Trump, however, has used fearmongering in an effort to rally support for a continuous, massive border wall.
In September 2016, he said: ‘On Day One, we will begin working on intangible, physical, tall, power, beautiful southern border wall.’
A message projected onto a prototype of Trump’s wall | Photo: Flickr/Backbone Campagin
Make no mistake: this call for a wall is racist.
From his day one comments about Mexican people, all of his rallying cries for a border wall have been steeped in negative stereotypes about Latinx and other people of color.
In his recent Oval Office address on the border wall, he linked drugs, violence, and terrorism to immigrants.
Multiple White House officials, including press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Vice President Mike Pence, claimed Customs and Border Patrol apprehended 4,000 known or suspected terrorists crossing the southern border.
In fact, between 2017 and 2018, only six were on the Terrorist Screening Database.
Further, multiple studies have shown illegal immigrants commit less crimes on US soil than US citizens themselves, and legal immigrants commit even less.
Amber Heard and other celebrities attended a protest at the border wall | Photo: Instagram @amberheard
Recent history
The US federal government is in its third week of a shutdown, leaving federal employees out of jobs without pay.
Despite once claiming he would take responsibility for the shutdown if funding wasn’t provided for the border wall, Trump now blames Democrats.
Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have met with Trump multiple times. Each time, they’ve refused to give in to Trump’s demands.
This, however, does not mean Democrats are against border security.
In fact, when Democrats took control of the House of Representatives at the start of the year, they passed legislation which included $1.3 billion in border security funding.
In years past, Democrats also supported other border security measures. One measure was the 2013 Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act. Another was the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
It’s different now because they simply won’t give Trump the $5.7 billion he demands for his racist and unethical wall.
How this affects LGBTI people
As previously mentioned, many federal employees are currently out of their jobs without pay due to the shutdown. This includes LGBTI federal employees.
LGBTI people south of the border are also severely affected by this.
It is no secret that LGBTI people of color face disproportionate rates of discrimination and violence worldwide. This is especially true in countries lacking protections or rights for LGBTI people.
Many of the refugees seeking asylum from Central and South America are LGBTI people. They’re escaping discrimination and violence in their home countries.
Roxsana Hernandez, the trans woman who died in the custody of US immigration, was only 33 | Photo: Facebook/Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement
In 2018, a transgender woman seeking asylum from the violence she faced in Honduras due to her gender identity, died in the care of US immigration.
Let’s not forget, as well, that the United States helped cultivate such violence and political corruption in Central and South America due to its involvement in numerous countries’ elections during the Cold War and beyond.
In Nicaragua, for example, the US backed and funded the Contras, right-wing rebel groups in the 1980s and 90s. These groups used terrorist tactics to commit thousands of human rights violations.
We should care
More than anything else, we should care about other marginalized groups – period.
It’s true that LGBTI people are among the caravans seeking asylum. Regardless, though, it is in the interest of fostering compassion and a progressive future to advocate for and heed the oppression of other minority groups in general.
The oppression of any marginalized community affects all others.
The fight for equality and rights, in the face of dictatorial forces of power, fails without intersectionality.
In May 2014, Time magazine featured trans actress Laverne Cox on their front cover and declared the arrival of a “trans tipping point.” American Vogue described 2015 as “the year of trans visibility.”
For someone like myself, intimately aware of the place of trans people in culture since my teens in the 1960s, and having been a leading campaigner for almost 30 years, these were monumental events and you might forgive me for thinking by September 2016, when pitching an anthology-based history of trans emergence in Britain, that I was going to be putting together a retrospective on a community whose story of emergence and freedom was almost over. We felt like the worst was behind us.
How could I have been so wrong, so prematurely relaxed?
2016 was a year historians will be writing about in a hundred years, of course, just as we look now on the origins of the First World War. Who could have predicted the emergence of a very ugly kind of populism, fuelled by economic grievance but weaponised by the production of easy scapegoats? Foreigners. Nationalism. The EU. Experts. Brexit was already a reality by the time I sat down to pitch my story about a community whose history goes back far longer than most people imagine. And Trump was just about to unexpectedly win the presidency, helped in large part by his policies designed to placate angry evangelicals, right wing neoliberals and actual Nazis and white nationalists. Still, you’d have thought that was far away and unlikely to touch us, eh?
Two significant events then happened: One public and one that we are only now figuring out.
In April 2017, Theresa May called a snap General Election. All three parties made manifesto commitments to reform the Gender Recognition Act (GRA). Indeed it was the Tories’ only LGBT manifesto commitment. In October that same year May made the elimination of medical evidence in GRA applications part of a speech at the Conservative Annual Conference. The idea of ‘Self-ID’ (a really bad choice of words) was on the table as potential government policy.
Less obvious to us in Britain, that same month, the US right wing’s Values Voter Summit — an annual strategic planning jamboree for anti-LGBT interests — was discussing the need to switch focus onto splitting the LGBT alliance, by targeting all their guns on trans people. Attacking trans people was to be the way of regrouping and rallying the troops after losing their war on equal marriage
Correlation isn’t causation — a smoking gun (if it exists) is yet to be uncovered — but it was shortly after these two seemingly disconnected events that the current controversy about trans people and our rights became really unpleasant in Britain. And that became the backdrop for the whole of 2018.
“2018 has been defined by a campaign against trans people and anyone identified as a possible ally.”
— Christine Burns
Groups that nobody had ever heard of before suddenly emerged, with glossy websites registered in the US, claiming to represent mainstream women’s interests. Questions have been raised about some of their funding. The ‘Feminist’ section of Mumsnet became the unofficial base for radicalising ordinary women who knew no more than what the leading figures were telling them.
And those leaders found a ready ear in some of Britain’s right-leaning press — so much so that there was barely a Sunday in 2018 when the Sunday Times (and sometimes the Mail) was not running story after story hostile to trans people, with no effective right of reply. “We’re being silenced,” cried the people silencing trans people. This peaked as first Scotland and then Westminster conducted public consultations on how to improve the GRA
Everything else is just detail. 2018 has been defined by a campaign against trans people and anyone identified as a possible ally. Everyone agrees it is unprecedentedly toxic but, just as Donald Trump pretended after Charlottesville, this is not an issue where ‘both sides’ can be considered equivalent.
How will it end? At the moment I don’t know. I pray that some of the blatant stirring by anti-trans campaigners doesn’t lead to physical violence. 2019 will be horrible, set against a political and economic landscape that may be nothing short of apocalyptic. At such times it is easy to make scapegoats. My prayer for the year ahead is that we — trans people — are not ‘it.’
Apparently, being Kevin Hart means never having to say you’re sorry.
Just weeks after vehemently defending the controversial “Cowboys and Indians”-themed birthday party he threw for his one-year-old son (on Thanksgiving Day, no less), the comedian is at the center of yet another controversy that he refused to apologize for.
This homophobia was not reserved to his Twitter account. In his 2010 special, “Seriously Funny,” in talking about raising his son Hart said, “One of my biggest fears is my son growing up and being gay. That’s a fear. Keep in mind, I’m not homophobic. . . . Be happy. Do what you want to do. But me, as a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.”
The outrage over this is reasonable. In a society where LGBTQ youth are 120 percent more likely to be homeless, have higher rates of mental illness and risk of suicide, statements like Hart’s are not neutral in the present day―nor were they in the past―regardless of the social acceptability of bigotry that was in much media in the 2000s (if you need an example, try watching Bring it On. It’s a friggin’ homophobic mess).
It’s no surprise that that people began to dig up the homophobic tweets from Hart’s past when he was invited to host the next Academy Awards ceremony in which several movies, like “Boy Erased” and “The Favourite,” center storylines about LGBTQ+-identifying people. When Hart’s tweets came to the attention of the Academy, they asked him to apologize.
And he refused.
Can Hart show that he’s realized that he harmed people and make right on the harm that he caused? Apparently not.
“I passed on the apology,” Hart said in a video posted to Instagram. “The reason why I passed is because I’ve addressed this several times … I’m not going to continue to go back and tap into the days of old when I’ve moved, and I’m in a complete[ly] different stage in my life…I’m going to be me. I’m going to stand my ground.”
“If you don’t believe that people change, grow evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you,” Hart said in another Instagram video. “If you want to hold people in a position where they always have to justify for their past…I’m the wrong guy. I’m in a great place. A great mature place where all I do is spread positivity.”
What Hart (and many of his fans who agree with his decision) seems to misunderstand is that acknowledging that people were hurt by something that he said does not mean that he has changed the behavior or ideologies that caused the hurt. His internal sense of dealing with it and moving on doesn’t undo the initial harm he caused.
Hart later went to Twitter to formally announce that he was stepping down from his role as host, saying that he was sorry for being insensitive and that he is “evolving.” Yet he still misses the point.
His critics and the Academy are not challenging whether he is more sensitive or a different person than he was in 2011 (hopefully, he is! Hopefully, we all are). They are challenging his professed evolution. Can he show that he’s realized that he harmed people and make right on the harm that he caused?
Apparently not.
Sure, he may have said he was sorry and that he “sincerely apologized.” But apologies in this way are cheap. A person says “I’m sorry,” and expects a get-out-of-jail-free card. Perpetrators of harm let themselves off the hook by uttering two simple words and acknowledging that they caused pain without taking on the responsibility to learn, grow and change.
A true apology, a true acknowledgment of harm done from Hart would involve talking about the implications of his words, not just apologizing for who he used to be. Accountability and apologizing aren’t mutually exclusive, but in Hart’s case and many others, people want their apologies to be the end of the story. They have “I’m sorry” absolve them of the responsibility to be accountable for their work.
But apologizing is like a math problem. To get the credit, you have to show your work.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Hart cannot expect people to get over his homophobia and its implications when he has clearly chosen not to fully engage with the specific critiques that people are bringing to him.
In Hart’s case, the work could have looked like discontinuing Seriously Funny, deleting the old tweets before they were found, donating money to LGBTQ organizations, requesting an LGBTQ-identifying host (or even co-host) for the Academy Awards or many other things.
Instead, he chose to focus on our societal sensitivity and inability to accept change, saying the world has “gone crazy” for expecting him to apologize. That is how we know that he has missed the evolution that he claims to have undergone.
The culture of outrage in which we currently live and breathe isn’t born from nothing. People from marginalized communities have never been happy about their marginalization. It’s only as a result of recent movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, #NoDAPL and more that we’ve started to have conversations about the many grievances marginalized people in this country face. And as such, we’re holding people in power accountable for oppressive behaviors that were once the norm.
This isn’t a liberal agenda, it is holding people accountable to the level of progress that society has made, even if they haven’t chosen to keep up.
But this consistent effort to hold people accountable is often be seen as not giving people a chance to change and grow when they are constantly brought to answer for their past. However, this is a misdirection. In most cases where cultural outrage pulls people’s past sins into the foreground, it provides an opportunity to do more than simply say “I’m sorry.” It’s an opportunity to do the work, to get specific in acknowledging not only that people were harmed, but that the person doing harm understands why they felt that way and why that harm isn’t easily healed.
In the midst of problematic ideologies, we must push for a culture of accountability and change, not just meaningless apologies.
Some people are celebrating Hart stepping down, but I think that also misses the point. His stepping down allows him to continue to avoid taking more responsibility and apologizing not just with his words. Let’s be honest, tweeting “I apologize” isn’t that hard and doesn’t really involve much internal reckoning, but with his actions, he can show a changed life.
The expectation of forgiveness or moving on in this context cheapens forgiveness by cheapening trauma. Hart cannot expect people to get over his homophobia and its implications when he has clearly chosen not to fully engage with the specific critiques that people are bringing to him. Hart feels entitled to forgiveness but doesn’t seem to be responsible for what he has put into the world.
Hart may not the be the 2009-2011 homophobe he was before, but that is a low bar. He used his medium of comedy to make money off of normalizing parental homophobia toward their children. He made money by indoctrinating his son into his own homophobia through fear and advising others doing the same.
Hart himself claims that he evolved but he has missed an opportunity to actually prove it, to step back, to think deeply, to have himself be changed by his critics and not just chased away by them. His defensiveness and disengagement aren’t unique and are markers of many of us who don’t know how to deal with our pasts.
Like Hart, we all have many opportunities in life to not simply try to scoot past the harm we are responsible for causing, but to be accountable, to take responsibility, to prove that we understand why the harmed person is upset, to try to make things right and then, after all of that work is over, to apologize.
Because an apology without change is simply hiding our problematic selves under the guise of emotional sensitivity. We can do better and build inner lives that can not only handle critique, but we can use these experiences as a motivator to examine ourselves closely and change in the places where we have caused harm.
In the last few years, it has become clear that celebrities, men, white people, straight people―really all people―are ideologically and generally problematic. In the midst of problematic ideologies, we must push for a culture of accountability and change, not just meaningless apologies.
Efforts to address Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) tends to focus on heterosexual women, despite IPV happening at similar or higher rates among the LGBTQ community.
The American Medical Association (AMA) recently adopted policy at its Interim Meeting that aims to address IPV in the LGBTQ population. The new policy calls for physician and community awareness of IPV among LGBTQ patients. It also requires federal funding to support programs and services for survivors that do not discriminate against underserved communities, including sexual and gender minorities, according to a press release.
Due to the limited data available, the policy also encourages more of the research on IPV in the LGBTQ community to include studies on the prevalence, accuracy of screening tools, effectiveness of early detection and interventions, as well as the benefits and harms of screening. The policy also encourages the research to be shard and used to educate physicians and the community on these issues.
“We encourage physicians to be alert to the possibility of intimate partner violence among their LGBTQ patients and for them to become familiar with the resources available in their communities for these patients,” AMA Board of Trustees member E. Scott Ferguson said. “As Congress considers reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, it will be important to ensure federally funded programs and services for survivors do not discriminate against sexual and gender minorities.”
IPV includes physical violence, sexual violence, stalking and psychological aggression (including coercive acts) by a current or former intimate partner—including current or former spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends, dating partners or sexual partners, according to a press release.
In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey provided the first national-level data on the prevalence of intimate partner violence, sexual violence and stalking among the lesbian, gay and bisexual population. The pattern of results suggests that these individuals experience an equal or greater likelihood of experiencing sexual violence, stalking and IPV compared with heterosexuals, according to the AMA.
Jeff Rohrer (left) and Joshua Ross will marry one another this Sunday.Allen Zaki
With Jeff Rohrer, you have to expect the unexpected.
When the 6-foot-3, 235-pound former Dallas Cowboys linebacker approached our table in the corner of a dimly lit Beverly Hills restaurant a couple of weeks ago, he was dressed like a stereotypical straight guy, clothes on the baggy side, carrying an over-sized duffel bag… and a delicately clenched martini.
Sitting down, he quickly launched into some questions for me, as well as ground rules for our conversation. He was nervously hopeful about this entire public coming-out process and the small collection of writers he had to open up to with his story. He wanted to share his story, but not all of it. Not yet.
Still, as we tip-toed into some questions about the first 59-plus years of his life it was clear Rohrer had a lot to say. There was an understated excitement about him, giving long, detailed answers to simple questions, like he couldn’t share his story quickly or deeply enough.
He’d been lying to himself about his own life for so long that now, with the opportunity to finally tell himself and the rest of the world hid truth, he just couldn’t talk fast enough.
The appetizer had barely been cleared before there was suddenly a redness in Rohrer’s eyes as conversation turned to his revelations since meeting his fiancé. His pace of speaking slowed.
As he talked about the reaction to his private coming out to some of his Cowboys teammates, his ex-wife, his friends in Los Angeles’ beach communities, and almost everyone else in his life, Rohrer became emotionally present with something bubbling inside of him.
I asked him what that was.
“Oh boy,” he said, quickly covering his face with his black napkin, a moment of raw emotion he simply hadn’t yet let out. We sat in silence for the better part of a minute, him present with the last few months of his life. When he pulled the napkin away, his eyes were scorched and watery.
”The kindness of my friends and my family and my teammates” he said, his voice trembling, pausing between words, doing everything he could to express the sudden joy that enveloped his new gay life. “It’s just been fucking ridiculous how nice they have been, and how supportive. And how they don’t care about any of that. They just love me, they always have. Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed.”
It was like a fog had lifted from his sight, and he saw his own kindness — years of generosity with teammates and friends — coming back to him. When his friends and family and teammates had told him over the years that they loved him, they really meant it. Who he had been with them in that time was far more important to them than what he is.
”To know that at a time like this, that they have my back, it’s fucking amazing. I never expected it. I figured the world is fucked, but it’s not. It’s amazing. It’s fucking amazing.”
A Dallas Cowboy marrying the man he loves
This Sunday at a not-so-small ceremony in Southern California, Rohrer will marry his boyfriend of two-plus years, Joshua Ross.
This was inconceivable for Rohrer just a few years ago. He had never, while he was playing in the NFL for the Cowboys or at any point during his marriage to his wife, dated men, had a boyfriend or had any kind of gay experience. While he pursued a life he loved, with people he still loves very much, there was still something he knew was a secret bubbling inside of him, a secret he could never let out.
Jeff Rohrer is a man on a mission to open hearts and minds to gay people.Allen Zaki
“So many nights I cried myself to sleep, feeling like I was the Wolfman, or Jekyll and Hyde, or Frankenstein, some kind of monster that only comes out when it’s a full moon, always living in the shadows.”
It was an evening about three years ago that Rohrer let the Wolfman out, quietly making his way up Robertson Blvd. for an after-work cocktail at the popular gay West Hollywood watering hole, Tortilla Republic. Not out to anyone, he was simply “working in the area” and “wanted to avoid rush-hour traffic.” Like ya do.
It was there at the bar that he struck up a conversation with a young man named Josh. Sparks didn’t fly that night, but Rohrer said leaving the bar with the young man’s contact information, he knew he wanted to spend more time with Ross.
”I think we both knew where it was going.”
Where it was going was a place Rohrer had never been before. Still living with his ex-wife and with a career in the entertainment industry, he had built a story for his own life that revolved around family, film and football.
Yet he just had to see Ross again. It was a burning desire he had squelched in the past. All the while it had been there under the surface for years, something in his late 50s he simply couldn’t deny anymore.
“My experience is that people are born gay, and anyone who wants to dispute that I’d be happy to have a conversation with them, including Mike Pence. I’d love to sit down with him.”
Once a Cowboy, always a Cowboy
Rohrer played for the Dallas Cowboys for six seasons, spending his final 1988 season on the sideline with an injury. By the time Jimmy Johnson arrived in Dallas in 1989, ushering in an era of youth and renewed excitement, Rohrer was part of the old guard, and injured on top of that. Rohrer never played a down in the regular season for Johnson.
Before his NFL career was cut short, he was an integral part of America’s team. Over the course of those six seasons with the Cowboys he started 41 games for legendary coach Tom Landry, racking up 7.5 sacks and four fumble recoveries, all in his final four seasons.
When he was drafted in the second round out of Yale, some people scratched their heads — sports columnist Jim Lassiter called him “unheard of.” When Rohrer got the draft call from Cowboys player personnel guru Gil Brandt, he was studying for a final — He thought the call was a prank by friends.
Mind you, this was when the Ivy League was no slouch. His Yale Bulldogs won the Ivy League each of his last three seasons. While a second-round draft pick may have been a reach at the time, success surrounded Rohrer.
Jeff Rohrer played in the NFL for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1980s.Photo courtesy of Jeff Rohrer
In football, where he excelled wildly and crafted a professional career, Rohrer found a constant reason to keep his true feelings silent.
“Living with my family in that [Southern California] community, it was not acceptable. That was not part of the plan, and it wasn’t going to happen. When I went to Yale, it was the same thing there. And then I got drafted by the Cowboys. What am I going to do, come out then?”
The inertia of his life from youth to the NFL was unquestioned. He was just another red-blooded American boy playing football. “Straight” was simply assumed.
”Football is a gladiator sport. It’s very, very physical, very tough. At least at this point in our society, toughness is not associated with the gay community. It’s not a natural fit to a lot of people.”
Despite the perception, Rohrer isn’t sure he ever heard a gay slur in the Cowboys locker room.
“It was a football locker room, like every other locker room I’ve ever been in. Nothing was anti-gay.”
That reflects my interview with Cowboys Hall of Famer Michael Irvin several years ago. In that conversation The Playmaker said he believed that if a teammate had come out as gay to the rest of the Cowboys in the 1990s, they would have accepted him and moved on.
”I would agree with Michael,” Rohrer said. “The generation before him, I would say that’s true as well. I’m not sure about the Cowboy leadership, but the team, knowing the guys and especially how they have reacted to me so far, they wouldn’t have cared.”
Rohrer certainly would have never made that observation while he was in the middle of his Cowboys career. Whether or not there were gay slurs thrown around the locker room, there is a machismo in virtually every football locker room that seems to send an unspoken message exuding heterosexism.
Yet Rohrer now feels that aura is a lot of bluster. Yes, strength and power are admired in an NFL locker room. They are mandatory. But that doesn’t mean that strength and power must come from a straight guy.
“In professional football the game is so hard, and you have to be so good, and you have to be so spot on to make it, let alone to start, that there isn’t a lot of time to give much thought to somebody’s sexual orientation. It’s brutal. You get halfway through the season and half the guys are hurt. It’s a game of survival and courage, and there’s really not a lot of time for that kind of nonsense.”
Yet in the midst of his career, Rohrer couldn’t see the accepting forest through the trees.
60 going on 16
On Christmas Day, Rohrer will turn 60. He jokes that Ross, a skin-care expert who grew up in Texas not far from the very stadium in which Rohrer played, insisted they get married before then so he wasn’t marrying someone in his 60s. Despite approaching retirement age, Rohrer said he hasn’t felt younger in literally decades.
In part that’s due to dating. While he certainly dated young women in his teens, and eventually married, the dating scene lacked for him the level of excitement that his buddies seemed to experience in their younger years. Now he knows what it felt like for his straight teen friends all those decades ago.
”I feel like I’m 16,” Rohrer said. “I feel revived. Like I’m born again. Again.”
He joked that some of his straight friends today are jealous of his new lifestyle. When he describes his week-to-week life to them, they can’t believe how much fun he’s having. Plus, he’s even looking younger, slimming down to near his playing weight at an age when so many of his friends and former teammates are headed in the opposite direction.
”I am in better shape now than I’ve been in in 20 years. I’m healthier than I have been in 20 years. I’m very, very happy.”
Gay acceptance is present in football
While he was playing football, Rohrer felt that this secret feeling inside of him was a curse.
“I asked God all the time, What is this? Why am I this person?”
The answer to his questions is finally being returned to him all these years later. At a time when acceptance of gay people is at an all-time high, there are still corners of our culture where homophobia runs rampant. Beyond finding a happiness he never thought possible for himself, he now has the opportunity to break into the dark corners of that culture where anti-gay sentiment festers.
A big, tough former NFL player on America’s Team, he’s a “straight talker” who would – quite literally if need be – give someone the shirt off his back. It’s hard to not like a guy like that. When he was married to a woman, a lot of people in places like Texas liked him very much. If it was hard to not like him when he was straight and married to a woman, for those very same people it will now be hard to not like him now that he’s gay and marrying a man.
”I’m not going to change the world, but we can at least get the message out there that it’s OK and I’m proud of where I am. I’m not ashamed. I’m not the Wolfman anymore. My family and friends are 100% behind me. That kind of message can maybe move the ball forward a little bit.”
Truth is, he’s faced very little negative reaction. Rohrer said he has told a handful of former Cowboys teammates, but word has spread through the “Cowboys family” very quickly. The level of acceptance has been far beyond his imagination.
Until just this year he couldn’t get his head around the idea that this extended family would ever accept him as a gay man. Yet with Josh’s prodding and support, Rohrer has given the people around him the opportunity to know the real Jeff Rohrer.
“It’s given me a new view on life and society and people and our country. I would have never expected it. I have just as many right- and left-leaning friends, and it doesn’t matter, the support cuts right through all of them.”
The chance to come out publicly as gay
Rohrer is now a successful commercial producer in Los Angeles. His Hollywood career has taken him where his NFL playing days never did: the Super Bowl. In the last few years he’s produced three Super Bowl commercials, for Doritos, Heinz and the NFL.
Coming out publicly in a couple of media appearances wasn’t what Rohrer had in mind ahead of his wedding. For the last couple of years he and Josh have lived what Rohrer called an “unnoticed” life together. Last year they attended the wedding of a gay couple — Josh’s friends in New York. Rohrer was painfully nervous about attending, as he figured the entire world would recognize the former Cowboy with a young man on his arm and he’d be outed.
Yet there was no Page Six article. No rumors swirled around the Cowboys family. Rohrer learned then that he could live his life more openly and gradually ease into his new love. It’s a lesson various gay former professional athletes have learned.
The wedding has made it easier to tell the people around him that he’s gay. In fact, he used the wedding invitations to do just that. When he sent out invitations to hundreds of people earlier this year, some of them replied with “Oh you’re so funny,” thinking it was Rohrer’s joking way of inviting them to an early 60th birthday party for himself.
When he explained that it wasn’t a joke, and he was indeed marrying his boyfriend, that got some phone calls.
“People are floored. I guess I was a really good actor.”
Now his impending marriage is also making it easier to tell the world. When he and Ross talked about their wedding, they asked their friend, Camille Grammer, about sharing the story with the world on their own terms. Ross, founder of SkinLab, has had his business featured on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, in which Grammer has starred. Grammer introduced them to publicist Howard Bragman, who has taken dozens of athletes and celebrities out of the closet, including Michael Sam, Esera Tuaolo and John Amaechi. Now the couple gets to, as they hoped, tell their story in their own words.
Best of all, instead of some public announcement simply for the purpose of announcing his sexual orientation to the world, Rohrer and his fiancé Ross are featured in the New York Times and here on Outsports for their wedding.
The 2018 midterm election has been considered the most diverse election in terms of candidates and elected officials in America’s history.
It was the lowest year ever in terms of straight white male candidates running for political office. There were a record number of queer and transgender candidates in the 2018 midterms, many of them winning their races.
With over 150 queer and trans folks victorious in their respective elections, this midterm was a major advancement in social progress.
Many are calling this “Rainbow Wave” a major checkpoint in the fight to achieve equality for queer and trans people in the United States. There were many queer and trans people who made history this election season, being the first of their people to be elected in their position.
Colorado elected the nation’s first openly gay governor with Democrat Jared Polis. Coming from a state with homophobic bakery owners to electing an openly gay man to the state’s highest elected position, this midterm election has shown Colorado’s evolution with gay rights and equality. As the first openly gay governor elect, Polis is the first to have such major influence over queer and trans policy in a state.
Sharice Davids became the first ever queer person to be elected to Congress from the state of Kansas. Winning Kansas’s 3rd District, Davids was also one of two women this midterm election to be the first Native American women to be elected to U.S. Congress, joining Debra Haaland of New Mexico. In a year where thousands of Native Americans were threatened to be disenfranchised, its is encouraging to see two Native American women victorious.
New Hampshire elected to two openly trans women to their state legislature. Lisa Bunker and Gerri Cannon make history by joining the very few openly trans officials in elected positions. With their victories, this can be considered a major triumph for trans rights.
Over 110 million people and counting voted in the 2018 midterm election, making this the highest ever voter turnout in a midterm election, with around 48 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot this November, according to AP projections.
Undoubtedly, the spike in queer and trans representation can be attributed to the spike in voter turnout. Historically, high voter turnout favors left-leaning candidates, and there were no queer or trans candidates for the republican party.
With more representation, queer and trans folks will have more of a say in creating, defending, and combating policy that will directly affect them.
Matthew Shepard, on right. (Photo courtesy Michele Jouse)
Twenty years ago this month, when Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, went to a bar, he likely wasn’t thinking he’d die that day or that his all-too-brief life and horrific death would put a human face on homophobia and hate.
How could Shepard have foreseen on Oct. 6, 1998 that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson would entice him to step into their vehicle and then tie him to a fence outside Laramie, Wyo.?Then beat him mercilessly – striking his head, as the Blade reported, with the barrel of .357 Magnum pistol?That the day after this blood-curdling attack, he’d be found and taken to a Colorado hospital? That this would be too late and he would die five days later on Oct. 12, 1998?
Two decades later, Shepard’s murder is still horrifying and incomprehensible. It shouldn’t be surprising that McKinney invoked the “gay panic” defense – alleging that Shepard, in the vehicle, groped him. (McKinney and Henderson have been sentenced to life in prison without parole. They said originally they intended to rob Shepard; $20 was stolen from Shepard’s wallet.)Today, in the age of marriage equality, the “gay and trans panic” defense is still legal in 47 states, according to the National LGBT Bar Association. Still, our hearts break trying to understand how Henderson and McKinney could have committed such a brutal act.
In “October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard,” Lesléa Newman, a poet and author of “Heather Has Two Mommies,” struggles to comprehend Shepard’s murder. “Deliver a baby/Read War and Peace/Fall in love/Fall out of love/,” Newman writes in the poem What You Can Do in Eighteen Hours, “…Wait to be discovered/lashed to a fence/Shivering under a blanket/of stars.”
On Oct. 26, Shepard’s ashes will be interred at the Washington National Cathedral. The Cathedral is an ideal choice for his final resting place, Matthew’s mother Judy Shepard, said in a statement. “Matt loved the Episcopal Church and felt welcomed by his church in Wyoming,” she said.
In December 1998, shortly after Shepard died, his parents Judy and Dennis Shepard founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation.“For the past 20 years, we have shared Matt’s story with the world,” Judy Shepard said in her statement on the upcoming interment of her son’s ashes at the Washington National Cathedral. “It’s reassuring to know he now will rest in a sacred spot where folks can come to reflect on creating a safer, kinder world.”
This reassurance is needed now more than ever.
If you’re queer, whether you were alive when Shepard died or born after his murder, you’ve likely experienced hate-based violence or lived under its shadow.Years ago in the 1990s, my late partner and I walked to the grocery store after dinner. As we walked, a man from a passing car yelled out “you dykes!”He didn’t physically hurt us, but the verbal violence and threat of physical violence were there.
A few years ago, I waited for a bus at my bus stop. Suddenly, a man came up from behind and roughly twisted my arm, while screaming, “I hate you, fucking dyke!”
I’m acutely aware that I’m cisgender and white (as was my late partner).The rate of violence cisgender white people fear and experience has historically been lower, and received more attention, than the hate-filled violence directed at transgender people and people of color.Charles Blow, the New York Times columnist and author of the memoir “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” grew up in poverty in rural Louisiana. His older cousin, Blow, who is black and bisexual, told the Blade, was tied to a bed, beaten and murdered because he dared to be openly gay. “This hate crime against a black man, unlike Matthew Shepard’s murder didn’t receive media attention,” he said.
Shortly before Shepard was killed, James Byrd, Jr, a black man, was brutally beaten and murdered by white supremacists. After years of advocacy, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed in 2009. HCPA added sexual orientation, gender identity and disability to the 1968 federal hate crimes law.
Unfortunately, despite this legislation, hate crimes haveincreased against LGBTQ people, particularly against transgender people and people of color. Hate violence-related homicides of LGBTQ people between 2016 and 2017 increased by 86 percent, according to the Anti-Violence Project.
For Trump, hate has become a weapon to energize his base. We need to work for a “safer, kinder world” ASAP.
Eminem used the word ‘faggot’ and absolutely no one was shocked.
A couple of weeks ago Eminem dropped his surprise album, Kamikaze, featuring one of the diss tracks he’s built his entire career perfecting. But you’d think that someone so known for weaving together insulting tracks could steer away from such lazy expressions like the f-word.
I, a weaker writer than this supposed legend, don’t have to resort to slurs. I can just call him a has-been who’s built his relic of a career on the backs of insulting minority groups and such a deep hatred of women I’m surprised he’s not currently in police custody. But here we are.
Yet now he’s sort-of, kinda apologized for using the word. Again. We need to reject this apology.
The word appears on the track Fall, where he slams Tyler the Creator – who has opened up about his sexuality on past albums – with the lyrics: ‘Tyler create nothing, I see why you called yourself a faggot, bitch / It’s not just ‘cause you lack attention / It’s cause you worship D12’s balls, you’re sacrilegious.’
Not just one but two bits of homophobia. All because he said that one of his albums wasn’t very good.
People against the rapper
The backlash was inevitable. People called him out on social media. LGBTI ally and creator of ‘that song you swear you remember from somewhere’ Dan Reynolds from Imagine Dragons dragged him. Justin Vernon, who appeared on the track, distanced himself from its ‘tired’ message’. And now Eminem has sadly addressed the whole matter in an interview with Sway.
You can read the full ‘expression of regret’ here, but the non-apology ends with ‘I wasn’t in the right mind frame. I was angry.’
He ‘[realizes] that I was hurting a lot of other people by saying it,’ but it doesn’t matter, because he was angry. Mr Mathers, you are a grown man. You are responsible for your own emotions. Your anger doesn’t justify using a homophobic slur and perpetuating a negative attitude towards homosexuality. I don’t know why I need to explain this to an adult. I would explain this to a three-year-old.
Tyler the Creator isn’t free from this. Sure, he’s now hinted towards his sexuality, but it doesn’t automatically do away with the fact he used the f-word negatively 9 times on Gobblin. Yet whataboutisms aren’t helpful. Eminem’s use is insulting and his non-apology is even more so.
Because Eminem doesn’t actually care. The Marshall Mathers LP, one of his most popular albums, is basically built on that word from the ground up. He probably doesn’t even hold any homophobic beliefs; he just likes the reaction. But Eminem is slightly worried that this negative tide against homophobia might one day affect his album sales, though right now he doesn’t have to worry. Loads of fans bought it.
People don’t care about homophobia if the music is good
People are performatively woke but once that album drops, suddenly calling people out on social media takes a backseat to Slim Shady’s bars. And Eminem has been weaponizing homophobia since the beginning. Even if he justifies it, like in this Rolling Stone interview where he says: ‘Those kinds of words, when I came up battle-rappin’ or whatever, I never equated those words [with being gay].’
Eminem doesn’t and might never care what he is doing. But you know who should care? Fans of Eminem. The ones who are out there buying his stuff. Streaming the album. Spending $100 on a concert ticket. He shouldn’t be censored by anyone but the reaction of his fans.
Because they are propagating a culture that allows people to profit from using slurs as insults, that continues to equate being gay with something negative. Homophobia in society builds around this. If you think it’s ‘just a word’, that people are ‘easily offended’, and that Eminem is ‘just an artist’, then, my friend, you definitely haven’t been paying attention.
It’s a slippery slope, and the more people like Eminem equate the word ‘gay’ or ‘f**got’ with a negative attribute and get away with it, the more we create a culture that views people of that sexuality as bad.
Japanese-American professional golfer Tadd Fujikawa has come out as gay.
In 2006, Fujikawa became the youngest player every to qualify for the US Open at the age of 15. He is one of the first pro golfers to come out, and the first US Open player to do so.
On Tuesday (11 September), Fujikawa made an Instagram post to announce his coming out.
‘So… I’m gay,’ he begins the post simply. ‘My hope is this post will inspire each and every one of you to be more empathetic and loving towards one another.’
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnkdY3TlalW/
He reveals later in the post he wasn’t sure about whether or not he wanted to come out publicly.
‘I thought that I didn’t need to come out because it doesn’t matter if anyone knows,’ he explains. ‘But I remember how much other’s stories have helped me in my darkest times to have hope.
Fujikawa writes he used to hide and hate who he was because of what people would think or say, and it led to mental health problems.
‘Now I’m standing up for myself and the rest of the LGBTQ community in hopes of being an inspiration and making a difference in someone’s life,’ he continues. ‘Although it’s a lot more accepted in our society today, we still see children, teens, and adults being ridiculed and discriminated against for being the way we are. Some have even taken their lives because of it.’
While this continues to happen, he wants to do his best ‘bring more awareness to this issue and to fight for equality’.
The post ends:
‘I can’t wait for the day we all can live without feeling like we’re different and excluded. A time where we don’t have to come out, we can love the way we want to love and not be ashamed. We are all human and equal after all. So I dare you…spread love. Let’s do our part to make this world a better place.’
Sinakhone Keodara plans to sue Grindr over countless incidents of racism he has experienced from fellow users on the dating app.
Keodara, a 45-year-old gay Asian man, told PinkNews he has been using Grindr “on and off for several years” and has grown tired of the messages he receives from app users.
Keodara’s claims follow a long-held discussion around racism on Grindr, including queer pop star MNEK who recently spoke out about the app’s launch of a Kindr version.“My experiences have been pretty harrowing,” Keodara explained, after receiving a message the previous day asking: “How hung can an Asian be?”
“That really hurt, I’ve never forgotten that,” he told PinkNews. “It wouldn’t leave my mind that I’m paying $14.99 for this service and why do I have to pay for my own oppression and Grindr is complicit in being a breeding ground that perpetuates racism against gay Asian men?”
Keodara said he regularly sees profiles stating “Not interested in Asians” and “No beans, no rice, no chocolate.”
He plans to sue the tech giant in the hope it will limit the amount of racist messages he is able to receive.
“I’m suing Grindr because they’ve been a breeding ground, perpetuating racism against Asian people, against nlack people, against Latino, against Latin American—you name it,” he explained.
Sinakhone Keodara plans to sue Grindr (Sinakhone Keodara)
“It’s got to stop. They’ve been allowing this to happen, they’ve been turning the other cheek, for as long as they’ve been in existence.
“I hope the court will order Grindr to redesign their app to eliminate the ethnicity filter on their app that gives users the ability to exclude people based on race.
One of the messages Keodora has received (Sinakhone Keodara)
“This I believe reaffirms racist belief and encourages racist action giving racist gay white men the ability to discriminate against, not just gay Asian men, but against LGBTQ people of colour in general.
Keodara wants Grindr to take action (Sinakhone Keodara)
“I also want the court to order Grindr to institute a software that monitors and censors racist language in user profiles and chats globally. It’s doable.”
Grindr did not respond to PinkNews’ request for comment.
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