Sean Cormie, a newly out gay man, and his boyfriend, Gary Gardner, were attacked at First Assembly of God in Blackwell, Oklahoma after being lured there by Cormie's family.
Cormie says that he is traumatized by what happened.
"I wanted to go to church to make my mom proud and make her happy."
What started off as a normal service soon turned ugly when the pastor began preaching directly at Cormie and Gardner that homosexuality was "an abomination."
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK, actor Kristen Stewart, who has been romantically linked to model Stella Maxwell since 2017, said, “I have fully been told, ‘If you just like do yourself a favor, and don’t go out holding your girlfriend’s hand in public, you might get a Marvel movie.’ I don’t want to work with people like that.”
Stewart has said publicly she does not identify as bisexual or lesbian, and doesn’t want to choose a label for her sexuality. In the same interview she added, “I was informed by an old school mentality, which is — you want to preserve your career and your success and your productivity, and there are people in the world who don’t like you, and they don’t like that you date girls, and they don’t like that you don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘lesbian’, but you also don’t identify as a quote unquote ‘heterosexual’. And people like to know stuff, so what the fuck are you?’”
A prominent LGBTQ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) announced Thursday that it will host a presidential town hall on LGBTQ issues next month. The event will air on CNN.
LGBTQ advocacy groups told ThinkProgress that they know exactly what ideas they want to hear discussed at the town hall set for Oct. 10, which is National Coming Out Day. Many said that first and foremost, they want candidates to acknowledge the struggles of the most marginalized in the community, including LGBTQ people of color, and put forward policies to respond to anti-LGBTQ bias in the criminal justice system.
“LGBTQ people are more likely to come into contact with the police due to discriminatory policing, be incarcerated, and experience violence while locked up than non-LGBTQ people. Black and Latinx LGBTQ people are most impacted,” Tyrone Hanley, senior policy counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told ThinkProgress.
The Winchester Star, a daily newspaper in Virginia that claims to be pro-LGBTQ, published an editorial recently that both called into question the right of same-sex couples to marry and the very existence of transgender people.
The publication, part of the Ogden Newspapers chain, is controlled by the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, Robert Nutting.
As first noted by the progressive blog Blue Virginia, the paper published an editorial on Wednesday slamming Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) for boycotting President Donald Trump’s recent appearance at the 400th anniversary commemoration of the Jamestown settlement.
“Gov. Northam?” the paper opined. “He made a speech earlier in the day, a few hours before Mr. Trump, speaking not of the tradition’s majesty, but of Virginia’s dubious 21st century achievements — i.e., homosexual marriage, elevation of the transgender lifestyle, etc. And then disgracefully departed, nowhere to be seen or heard when Mr. Trump spoke.”
A new law in Illinois will promote a more LGBTQ-inclusive history curricula in schools across the state. The measure goes into effect in July of next year.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed the legislation into law on Friday. The bill, which passed the House in March and the Senate in May, would amend the school code to ensure public schools “teach about the the roles and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people” in U.S. and state history.
The measure provides for textbooks in public schools that include the “roles and contributions of all people protected under the Illinois Human Rights Act” and mandates that they be non-discriminatory toward those groups. Queer, trans, and nonbinary people are protected under state law.
Lawmakers who supported the bill say that LGBTQ-inclusive curricula will not only provide a more accurate telling of history but will work against transphobia and queerphobia and help LGBTQ students feel more welcome at school.
By almost all measures, AT&T has been a stalwart supporter of LGBTQ equality for a long time. It has protected workers from sexual orientation discrimination since 1975. It sponsors the Trevor Project to help LGBTQ youth in crisis. It received a perfect 100 score from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in its annual equality index, ranking among the nation’s most inclusive places to work.
By any measure, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is among the nation’s most anti-LGBTQ bigots. He defended bans on same-sex marriage as “sound public policy” and spearheaded the effort to block the elected government in Washington, D.C., from enacting marriage equality. He boasted of receiving a “True Blue Award” from the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated anti-LGBT hate group. He consistently earns a 0 score on HRC’s congressional scorecard, ranking among the lawmakers most virulently opposing equality.
Yet, AT&T’s corporate political action committee has given tens of thousands of dollars to Jordan’s campaigns since 2010, helping bankroll the re-elections of a man who HRC once inducted into its anti-equality “Hall of Shame” for “proactively [working] to undermine existing legal protections and promote anti-LGBT discrimination.” And AT&T’s PAC has given more than $400,000 to other firmly anti-LGBTQ members of Congress in recent years.
In 1966, three years before the world-famous Stonewall riot in New York, a group of trans women in San Francisco stood up to police inside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood and popular queer gathering spot. A trans woman fed up with the harassment and abuse is said to have thrown a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, sparking a chaotic riot and unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence.Full story
Asked about his 2017 decision to ban transgender troops from openly serving in the military, Trump claimed: “They take massive amounts of drugs, they have to. And you’re not allowed to take drugs, you know, in the military you’re not allowed to take any drugs, take an aspirin.
“They have to, after the operation, they have no choice, they have to. You would actually have to break rules and regulations in order to have that.”
Pressed on why he was enacting an anti-transgender policy while claiming to support LGBT+ rights, the president responded: “It is what it is. Look, also people were going in and then asking for the operation, and the operation is $250,000 dollars.
“The recovery period is long, and they have to take large amounts of drugs after that… and you can’t do that. I said, when it came time to make a decision on that, because of the drugs and the cost of the operation.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two LGBT rights activists who took part in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion and founded an organization that helped homeless gay youths, will be honored with a public monument in New York City, officials announced Thursday.
The yet-to-be-commissioned monument is part of an initiative to increase the diversity of the statues and monuments in public places around New York City. It will be paid for out of $10 million allocated for new public artworks.
The monument will be installed in Greenwich Village a block away from the Stonewall Inn, where patrons resisted a police raid on June 28, 1969, and helped usher in a new, militant phase of the movement for gay rights.
Last week, the annual Side by Side (Bok o Bok in Russian) LGBT International Film Festival was held in Moscow. Amid screenings of films, gatherings within the community and providing a safe space for the LGBT community, the presence of anti-LGBT protestors and bomb threats tainted an otherwise peaceful event in the capital.
“The first festival in 2008 (in St. Petersburg) faced a lot of challenges, with pressure on the venues not to support [us], and emergency services closing down spaces,” organizer Manny de Guerre told The Moscow Times. “In some respect, we still face the same challenges today.”
In spite of these ongoing difficulties, the festival has powered through and has no intention of stopping. “Hundreds came to the event [in 2008] and it was clear that the festival was needed and in demand,” de Guerre said. “That is what kept us going.”
Last week was a harsh week for LGBT Kenyans.
Kenya's high court upheld colonial-era anti-sodomy laws and the community lost Binyavanga Wainaina, a beloved, award-winning writer and gay activist.
"It's a dark day not just for Kenya, but also for Africa," Andrew Maina, program coordinator at HIVOS, told Reuters.
He hoped Kenya would set a precedent and be a beacon of hope for other African countries that have similar anti-sodomy laws.
The court ruling came a few days after Wainaina's death on May 21.
NPR reported that Wainaina, who came out as being HIV-positive in 2016, died of an illness. Reports are unclear if it was an illness due to HIV. He was 48.
Wainaina came out as gay in 2014 in a lost chapter of his memoir, "I Am a Homosexual, Mum." He published the essay largely due to Kenya's criminalization of LGBT people.
"I felt this is one of the most successfully, put-together and honest pieces I've ever written," he told NPR at the time.
When a debate broke out over which bathrooms transgender individuals should be able to use, Trump told the Today show that Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower. He later tweeted that he would be better for LGBT Americans than Hillary Clinton. And during his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, he cited the shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
“As your President, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” he vowed.
But since becoming president, Trump and his administration have repeatedly rolled back existing protections, especially for transgender Americans.
Transgender and gender non-conforming people could soon be barred from federally funded shelters, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced plans Wednesday to scrap recently added regulator protections.
HUD’s rulemaking would rescind the Equal Access Rule that currently requires shelters that wish to segregate clients according to their gender to modify their structures accordingly – rather than turn people away.
Homeless shelters serve a particularly crucial role in protecting the lives and safety of gender minorities, who are often put out on the street early in life by intolerant families and are frequent targets for violent bigots once they find themselves in such a vulnerable situation. The Equal Access Rule, enacted in 2012, has been heralded as an essential protection by hundreds of advocacy groups concerned by this cycle of abandonment and violence.
Alabama Public Television chose not to air PBS’s Arthur episode that included a same-sex marriage.
In the episode, which aired nationwide May 13, Arthur and his friends attend their beloved teacher Mr. Ratburn’s nuptials to his partner.
APT preempted the episode by showing a re-run of Arthur.
Mike Mckenzie, director of programming at APT, said APT was notified by WGBH and PBS in mid-April about the episode titled “Mr. Ratburn and the Special Someone” and decided to show a re-run. Mckenzie said APT has no plans to air the episode at a later date.
OMAHA, Neb. - A group of teenagers decided not to stand by and watch as the United Methodist Church voted in favor of anti-LGBT measures.
The confirmation class of 2019 was all set to finally become full members of their church -- the First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska -- after a year of learning about their faith and exploring their beliefs.
But when it came time to join, the eight teens decided against it.
"We want to be clear that, while we love our congregation, we believe that the United Methodist policies on LGBTQ+ clergy and same sex marriage are immoral," the group wrote in a statement. "We are concerned that if we join at this time, we will be sending a message that we approve of this decision."
President Donald Trump’s State Department is quietly de-recognizing the marriages of some LGBT couples, and using that as an excuse to then deny their children birthright citizenship.
The policy specifically deals with an interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that sets forth the conditions for eligibility for birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
According to the State Department website, “The U.S. Department of State interprets the INA to mean that a child born abroad must be biologically related to a U.S. citizen parent. Even if local law recognizes a surrogacy agreement and finds that U.S. parents are the legal parents of a child conceived and born abroad… if the child does not have a biological connection to a U.S. citizen parent, the child will not be a U.S. citizen at birth.”
The LGBT Caucus of the Democratic Party of Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i’s only political, legislative and/or policy organization dedicated to advocating for LGBTQIA rights, congratulates Taiwan’s LGBTQIA community as they achieve Marriage Equality and become the first Asian country to reach this historic milestone. On Friday, May 17, 2019, the Taiwanese Parliament in a vote of 66 to 27 passed this momentous legislation.
Taiwan’s LGBTQIA community won a landmark court case in 2017 when the court ruled that same-sex couples had the constitutional right to marry. The court gave the Taiwan’s government until May 24, 2019, to extend these rights. There were three competing bills to achieve this requirement.
As a gay man living in the United States, Brian Kelly was shocked to read about the violent anti-gay crackdown in the Russian republic of Chechnya a few years ago. So when he heard about Rainbow Railroad, he knew he wanted to help.
Based in Toronto and operating without government funding, Rainbow Railroad helps LGBT individuals escape violence and persecution in their home countries and get across borders to safety. Named in homage to the Underground Railroad, the group has its work cut out for it: same-sex relations are a crime in 70 countries worldwide, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association.
The first time I met Shaquanda, the drag persona of Andre Springer, was during Queer Soup Night, a party highlighting LGBTQ+ chefs while raising money for community organizations. She was hosting a queer chili cook off, sauntering through the crowd providing cheeky commentary while encouraging attendees to make donations, and of course, sample the chili. She greeted me with the warmest embrace, pressing my face into her colorful hair wrap and dangling gold earrings. After chatting with her for several months via Instagram, it was a delight to feel her radiant energy in real life.
Shaquanda's Hot Pepper Sauce was launched in 2014 when Springer debuted his hot sauce at Bushwig, a drag and music festival hosted in Brooklyn, New York. Springer wanted to add another dimension to his drag, and introducing hot sauce would take his performances from eyes to mouth. Springer enlisted the help of his friend (and current business partner) Dominic Mondavi to create custom bottle labels adorned with Shaquanda's face and cheeky, queer-centric catchphrases. He filled each one up with his signature hot sauce blend and attended the event in full Shaquanda drag, complete with a colorful bandana and linen apron — a look inspired by his Barbadian grandmother and the many characters he grew up with in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. His signature sauce, made with fresh chiles and a slew of aromatics, filled audience members' mouths with flavor as lively as Shaquanda herself. The performance was a success, and from that initial debut, Shaquanda's Hot Pepper Sauce took off.
