The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies invites you to the 19th annual Kessler Lecture honoring Urvashi Vaid. Please join us for Urvashi’s lecture, What Can Brown Do For You? Race, Sexuality and the Future of LGBT Politics.
Thursday, November 18th, 6:30 pm
Proshansky Auditorium
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York
Free but Donations are always welcome!
Post-lecture fundraiser reception at Asian American Writers Workshop 9:00pm – 11:00pm
112 W. 27th Street, Ste 600
New York, New York
$35 in advance
$25 at the door
When I Was a Hipster
I never thought of the label as an insult until later – maybe the 90s – when being a NYC insider somehow earned you the wrath of all the people who come to NYC in order to find/buy/live near cool. I won’t call them arrivistes, like this article does, because that’s just silly.
Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.
It’s a pretty stunning observation, to my eye. Of course my hipsterism pre-dates skinny jeans and big glasses.
Brooklyn Queers Say It Gets Better
Oh, the lovely queers in Brooklyn say it gets better, too:
= makes me homesick, yes it does. I miss being in clubs full of crossdressers and drag queens, strippers, sex workers and straight guys. I really do.
Park Slope Tornado
Apparently I made a deal with the tornado gods, because last night, what looks like a tornado touched down in Park Slope. These are photos from about a block away from our brownstone.
Hope you all are okay. You NYers may understand now why these things freak me out. For the record, a tornado did touch down in Brooklyn before, only as recently as 2007, but before that, not for 57 years.
(If anyone happens to go down our particular block, tell me about the tree in front of our place. We love it. We miss it. We hope it’s okay.)
NYS GENDA Defeated
Senator Lanza apparently takes his marching orders from Senator Diaz. Tell him how you feel about him retracting his yes vote at the last minute, ask Tom Duane why the hell he wasn’t there.
Vote: 12 ayes, 11 nays, 0 abstentions
Sen. Diaz: (unintelligible)
(Senator Lanza retracts his yes vote.)
New tally: 11 ayes, 12 nayes, 0 abstentions.
Speaker 8: Where is the sponsor, Senator Tom Duane? I thought the idea of the new committee rules was to make this a better process. If the sponsor isn’t here to hear our thought process, how can this bill be made better?
It’s just sad all around.
NYS GENDA on the Move
GENDA is moving in the Senate – call your Senator NOW!
The Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) is on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda for tomorrow morning. This vital civil rights bill will make it illegal to discriminate against transgender New Yorkers in areas like employment, housing and public accommodations, and expand hate crimes protections to explicitly include gender identity and expression. Your Senator is a member of the Judiciary Committee and has the power to pass GENDA out of the committee and onto the Senate floor for a full vote.
We need you to get on the phone and call your Senator at their Albany office RIGHT NOW and tell them that you want them to pass GENDA in the Judiciary Committee. It is vital that they hear from you TODAY.
Here’s how to make your call:
1. Enter your address to find your State Senator’s Albany phone number here.
2. Tell your Senator: “I support the GENDA bill (S.2406). Please pass GENDA from the Judiciary Committee onto the floor for a full Senate vote.”
Your voice is crucial! Make your call now!
Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson died in 2004, and for the first time since then, MoMA has launc
hed a retrospective of his work. There are slide shows on both MoMA’s site & on CNN, where I found this info, via Fareed Zakaria (whose show I love, as it’s one of the only shows that is actually international in perspective, as opposed to being Here’s some stuff abotu some other countries, now back to the US, true center of the universe).
I’m sorely tempted to get to NYC before it ends in late June in order to see it. Here are a few of my favorites:
Gender Neutral Bathrooms at CSI
The College of Staten Island is making some of their restrooms unisex, or gender neutral. It’s not particularly tricky: they’re putting signs on the doors of both male & female stick figures, add a lock to the main door and a sign letting people know they can use the gender neutral bathroom as a single-use, private one.
Amazingly uncomplicated, and as the article points out, useful for more than people whose genders are in flux, fluid, or trans: a father who has to change his daughter’s diaper, for instance, doesn’t have to worry about finding a family bathroom, either.
(h/t to Darryl Hill, who is also mentioned in the article)
NYS Assembly passes GENDA
From the Empire State Pride Agenda:
The New York State Assembly has passed the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) for the third time. The Pride Agenda thanks the Assembly for once again taking a stand in support of transgender rights. We will post the final vote tally on “The Agenda” blog tomorrow.
Now, it’s time for the Senate to act! The Pride Agenda will be launching a GENDA Call-In Day to Senators statewide next week. Click here to tell your friends to sign up for our Action Alerts today so that they will hear from us next week when it’s time to take action!
The Pride Agenda just released the following statement regarding the Assembly’s passage of GENDA:Today the New York State Assembly voted by an overwhelming bipartisan margin to amend the state’s human rights law to include anti-discrimination protections based upon gender identity and expression. The bill (A.5710), known as the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), bans discrimination against transgender people in housing, employment, credit and public accommodations. It also expands the state’s hate crimes law to explicitly include crimes against transgender people. The Assembly has now passed the bill by large bipartisan margins the past three years; Governor Paterson has also said he will sign GENDA into law should the Legislature send it to him.
“Transgender New Yorkers shouldn’t have to live in fear that they lack basic protections and could lose their job or be denied a lease on an apartment or service in a restaurant just because of who they are,” said Interim Executive Director Joe Tarver. “In passing this bill, the Assembly continues to demonstrate its leadership on civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) New Yorkers. We thank Assemblymember Richard Gottfried for his sponsorship and support of this bill, as well as the Assemblymembers who voted to pass it.”
“The State Senate remains the only obstacle to passing GENDA. It is now time for the Senate to follow the Assembly’s lead and end discrimination against transgender New Yorkers once and for all by passing GENDA,” said Tarver. “Transgender New Yorkers can’t—and shouldn’t have to—wait any longer.”
Transgender people face severe discrimination in New York. A 2009 needs assessment of New York State’s LGBT community conducted for the Pride Agenda found that 20.7% of transgender New Yorkers have incomes of under $10,000 a year, and one-third are or have been homeless at one time; 28.4% have experienced a physical or sexual assault motivated by transphobic or homophobic violence that was serious enough to require medical care.
Twelve states and the District of Columbia have comprehensive laws banning discrimination based upon gender identity and expression, covering public and private sector employment as well as other areas of everyday life. Eight additional states including New York have executive orders covering public employees only.
According to a March 2008 Global Strategy poll, 78 percent of registered New York voters support passing a bill to protect transgender people. This support is strong across the state, including upstate (74%), New York City (79%) and the downstate suburbs (82%); and among Democrats (86%), Republicans (67%) and Independent voters (78%) alike.
Snow
New York, if you’re trying to get us back by proving you can have as much snow as Wisconsin, it’s not going to work.