Category: LGBTQ

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Tom Daley’s Not Gay

I don’t know (or care, really) who Tom Daley is, but here’s the thing: all day they’ve been saying he’s gay, when he says he “still fancies girls” but is happy to be in a relationship currently with a man. To me that means he’s bisexual, or pansexual, or has another word for himself, but “gay” isn’t it.

He never uses the word gay in his video (or homosexual, or any synonym for either).

So, yeah. This is why people don’t think bi people exist – because when they do come out, even if they clearly do not call themselves gay, everyone assumes they’re gay.

It tires me, the way gayness eclipses any other possible sexuality. Cranky queer het that I am.

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World AIDS Day

This is the kind of thing I find myself teaching, or referring to, because I teach things that touch on the history of sexuality and on LGBTQ issues. It’s very hard to get across what it was like to younger people who grew up in an era when people lived long, full, otherwise healthy lives despite AIDS. But now it’s gotten to the point where unprotected anal sex is on the rise, again, which means the rates of infection are going up (again).

I have covered wars, before the epidemic began and since. They are all ugly and painful and unjust, but for me, nothing has matched the dread I felt while walking through the Castro, the Village, or Dupont Circle at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It could seem as if a neutron bomb had exploded: the buildings stood; cars were parked along the roadside; there were newsstands and shops and planes flying overhead. But the people on the street were dying. The Castro was lined with thirty-year-old men who walked, when they could, with canes or by leaning on the arms of their slightly healthier lovers and friends. Wheelchairs filled the sidewalks. San Francisco had become a city of cadavers.

& Honestly, we can do better than that.

It’s World AIDS Day. Get tested, play safe.

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Fair Wisconsin LGBT Leadership Conference: Feb 7-9, 2014

Online registration for the 2014 Wisconsin LGBT Leadership Conference is now open — register now and enjoy early bird rates!  Held February 7-9, 2014, we have another weekend full of inspiring speakers, educational workshops and fun social networking planned, and you won’t want to miss it.  Click here to learn more about the conference and register today!

SAVE THE DATE: February 8, 2014 — for the 2014 Annual Leadership Awards and Gala Dinner in Milwaukee, featuring a Keynote by Kate Bornstein!  This annual gala dinner is our largest event and is held the same weekend as the Leadership Conference (tickets sold separately).  Online registration is coming soon!  Please contact breianna.hr@fairwisconsin.com for more information about sponsorship opportunities, or to reserve a table today.

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ENDA Again?

So it looks like ENDA may come to a vote early next week – according to Harry Reid.

The bill is unlikely to gain much traction in the Republican controlled House, but could provide Democrats with another opportunity to paint the GOP as out of step with most Americans by obstructing a bill aimed at ending workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Sign NCTE’s online petition.

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Domestic Partner Benefits Considered By WI State Supreme Court

So this happened in Wisconsin today: arguments were made to & for Wisconsin’s domestic partner benefits & registry.

At issue is whether domestic partnerships create a legal status that is “substantially similar” to marriage and therefore violate the state’s 2006 constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Gov. Jim Doyle signed the state’s domestic partnership registry into law as part of the 2009-2011 biennial budget. Domestic partnerships grant same-sex couples limited benefits, including visitation rights in hospitals and the right to inherit each other’s assets.

Julaine Appling, the executive director of Wisconsin Family Action, a socially conservative organization that opposes homosexuality, unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to take jurisdiction in an original action in 2009. The domestic partner registry has since been ruled constitutional by Dane County Judge Daniel Moeser, with that decision upheld by a state appeals court.

The appeals court ruled that, when considering eligibility requirements, formation requirements, rights, obligations, and termination requirements, “the ‘legal status’ of a domestic partnership is not ‘substantially similar’ to the ‘legal status’ of marriage.”

The idea is this: domestic partner benefits offer a few basic rights to same sex couples which come nowhere near what marriage bestows, but these wingnuts have taken the case to court in order to prove that even something as simple as hospital visitation “mimics” marriage which is expressly forbidden by the state’s super-DOMA.

Of course the problem is that Wisconsin has a super DOMA in the first place, and it can’t be challenged, even, until 2015.

Honestly, the whole fracas is embarrassing, especially now that it’s obvious which way the wind is blowing, but these conservative wingnuts are digging their heels in deeper now that it’s apparent they are losing the war (even if/when they win the battles).

*sigh*

Honestly, it’s like living in the Dark Ages, but cheers to my friends Kathy & Ann who are willing to stand up for their rights.

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GLB not T?

So here’s a bunch of interesting reading on that old horse of whether gay and trans politics are bedfellows, allied, or not – a series of pieces in the NYT (the NYT!) from people like Susan Stryker and Laverne Cox and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (who is, by the by, currently on tour).

From Susan Stryker:

Remember that in 1969, rebellion and resistance by the queens and hair fairies of Christopher Street transformed a police raid at the Stonewall Inn into a defiant act of “gay liberation.” Twenty years later, “queer” politics included transgender as another version of what it called “antiheteronormativity.” The ’90s version of “queer” morphed into the L.G.B.T. community of recent years — an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender — and for transfolk, it was politically invaluable to be part of that coalition. It still is.

From John Corvino:

But sometimes the answer is no: It does not always make sense to try to align sexual orientation and gender identity in one coalition. Each group has distinctive needs and challenges. By jumbling them all together into one alphabet soup — L.G.B.T.Q.I.T.S.L.F.A.A.*, anyone? — we run the risk of covering or erasing people’s experiences, especially those who are already most marginalized.

*In case you were wondering, it stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, two-spirit, leather-fetish, asexual and allies.” Even I had to ask about some of the letters.

& From Mattilda:

The gay movement would like us to think that gay marriage will give everyone housing and health care; that openly gay soldiers pressing buttons in Nevada to obliterate Somali villages means homophobia is on the wane; that strengthening the criminal legal system through hate crime legislation will bring murdered queers back to life. This is what we lose when we think of identity as an endpoint – just add “gay” (or even less acceptable terms like “queer” or “trans”) to any oppressive institution, and suddenly you have the new civil rights struggle. Gay marriage, gays in the military, gay members of Congress, gay priests, gay cops — what’s next?

So while a lot of my readers may be very familiar with all of these arguments, it’s a good introduction to the idea – and to the ideas of category & alliance – for newbies.

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Alison Bechdel!

Tomorrow, Alison Bechdel is speaking at Lawrence as part of our convocation series. We’re currently teaching Fun Home in Freshmen Studies, so it’s a very, very cool thing that she’s coming to speak, and I am very much looking forward to it.

I spent my young 20s reading Dykes to Watch Out For in The Voice – and that was at a time when I was regularly clocked as a dyke and friends were coming out around me, so she is very much part of my own personal queer history.

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Coming Out Straight?

Really, has it come to this? Lifelong lesbian moves to SF & starts dating & having sex with men.

Except the title’s all wrong since it’s part of a series about bisexuality, in fact.

Still, I loved this:

As if the hot boi in the bow tie and suspenders would suddenly leap up and pronounce me a fraud between Le Tigre mashups.

Because of course that hot boi in the bow tie could very well be a fraud in ‘not queer enough’ sense she’s making reference to, and really, who cares anymore? Does anyone care? & Yes, I know they do. I know lesbians who married men who got endless shit about it, got called sellouts & worse. I know that to some people I am not queer enough & never will be.

But it’s so, so tiresome, all of us always explaining and defending our authenticity. So how’s this: what if we all just leave labels out of it & have sex with who we want?

I know, that’s just nuts, isn’t it?

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Coming Out Ace

Okay, so they’ve made asexuality sound cool by shortening it to Ace – as Eddie Izzard would say, “well done there.” Because the culture at large tends to think of asexuality as kind of boring otherwise, right? So many preconceptions for those of us who are sexual, so many new ways of seeing.

As I’ve often admitted, it’s a hard one for me to understand. I understand celibacy – and even choosing celibacy. I wrote a column about not having sex as a feminist a few years back for Jezebel, even. And I especially love the kinds of distinctions that asexual people are bringing to the table – distinctions between sexual and romantic attraction, for instance. As with the kink community, some things that are central or vitally important to one community can be useful to a lot of others, so that we can all think about things in more complex ways that actually describe – as opposed to prescribe – out experiences and identities.

With that, here’s one “coming out as ace” advice page, and here’s another, and here’s a coming out story by someone else who identifies as asexual.

(Also,  I want especially to thank the students here at Lawrence, many of them involved with GLOW, who have been willing to explain, describe, and answer dumb questions from their sex positive prof. You know who you are.)