Love this simple analysis of the issue. Empathy may be the way to win over individual supporters (and is certainly important to the cause as a whole), but legally speaking it needs to be a black and white issue of inviolable rights.
How has no one bought this woman’s life rights yet.
I want a film. Albert Nobbs was good and all, but I’m more interested in the absolutely insane stories of ye-olde male impersonation.
Linck had grown up in an orphanage, and left it dressed as a young man “in order to lead a life of chastity.” She soon fell in with an ecstatic Christian cult given to hitting their heads against walls and speaking in tongues. For two years, Linck traveled with the group as an itinerant preacher and soothsayer, though her predictions did not always materialize — when she urged two men to walk on water and they sank, she fled. She became a swineherd, and later joined the army of Hannover as a musketeer until her desertion three years later.
Next came a stint in the Polish army. Her regiment was captured by French troops, but she managed to escape imprisonment. Her subsequent hitch with the Hessian army lasted about one year. Linck had by now fashioned a leather penis for herself, to which she appended two stuffed testicles made from a pig’s bladder. The contraption, held in place with a leather strap, served her well: She used it on a string of young girls, widows, and prostitutes.
Internet, you can’t make your jokes so subtle this early in the morning. I actually need gay airline news right now, cute as this is.
I’m totally with Miranda on this one.
Cynthia Nixon is taking a lot of heat right now for her assertion that for her, sexuality was a choice, and that fact doesn’t make her humanity or family any less valid. Good on her. I agree that the “born this way” line of thinking is in no small part pandering to bigots, as if who I sleep with would be anybody’s business under any circumstances. I respect the experience of anyone and everyone who believes they were born with a certain sexuality or gender identity, but I certainly believe circumstances and choices helped make me who I am today. I’ve never identified as anything other than a lesbian, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t have.
Anyway, good for her. We need a bigger tent that includes all queer people, not a petty attempt to disown those who don’t toe the party line. Amen.
I’m 24 years old. I’ve been out for nearly a decade. And I just had to have my first “don’t use ‘gay’ to mean ‘bad’ conversation” with a co-worker.
This probably speaks to my own privilege more than anything, having generally been surrounded by supportive people in liberal-leaning environments for most of my life, but I’m kind of in disbelief that I had to have this conversation at all. In NYC. In 2011.
In fairness to my co-worker, she was apologetic and said she’d make an effort not to use the term as a derogatory in the future, and I believe all of that absolutely. But there was the grating “I didn’t mean it that way” elementto the conversation. Which is like… I’m sure you didn’t. But some people do. And it puts me on edge. And if you think about it for five seconds, you’ll understand why.
I’m relatively sure there won’t be any negative fallout associated with the situation, but it does make me feel like crap. The last thing I want to do at a new job is present myself as the PC police or an oversensitive busybody. It’s also not the way I want to “come out” to anyone, ever.
That’s probably the strangest part of the whole thing. I haven’t had to “come out” to anyone since high school. Within a week or two of existing in a new social environment, the fact that I’m gay will almost inevitably come up in casual conversation, whether I’m mentioning a girlfriend or my LGBT advocacy work or why I love Dolly Parton so much. But the office culture here isn’t the warmest, and it hasn’t come up with more than a few people. Which is fine! Gay is not the defining feature of my personality, life, et al. But if people don’t know I’m gay, they don’t know to be sensitive to it. Which they should be all the time (sensitive), because that’s basic human courtesy since you never know the orientation of the people around you, but I get it that the world isn’t as enlightened as we wish it were and it takes a personal connection for many people to make a change.
Anyway, I feel weird. What whiplash to go from being a professional homosexual arguing for the most radical queer agenda within an advocacy organization… to being a mostly closeted advertising professional. Maybe I’m still breaking this job in, but right now this doesn’t feel like the long-term career path for me.
The chaplain’s bottom line was simple: As professionals, we were expected to behave respectfully toward all people, no exceptions. His presentation started by describing practical, administrative changes, but after that came the interesting part—the hypothetical scenarios, the “what-if” questions that are so common to military briefings, and that are used to vividly explain proper protocol.
One instructive example was that of a soldier who comes to an officer because he is upset that he has to shower with another soldier who identified as gay. The PowerPoint slides matter-of-factly explained how the soldier can go about requesting a separate shower time. The other examples similarly used the anodyne language of military bureaucracy to express what is actually a profound cultural change: While the chain-of-command must accommodate separation, it’s the soldier who is uncomfortable with gayness, not the gay soldier, who will now be segregated from the group.
Right on, U.S. military. I don’t know why I’m surprised they got this right, but either way it’s awesome: they know not to punish the victims of discrimination, but rather to remove the bully from the situation.
If only we could get the same policies in schools and the site of every sexual harassment suit.
I’ve never actually heard of discrimination against MSM pirates, but this tune is catchy and the low-budget, high impact production values on this music video about gay buccaneers are phenomenal.
I think I would like to live inside this ad-spot. Time to reconsider a move back to the holy land? It is getting nippy here…
This is a super important one — please reblog if you can.
A woman was out to brunch with her friends at a Sizzler steakhouse in Queens when basically out of nowhere a manager assaulted her, hurling anti-gay slurs and leading an angry mob of patrons in a violent attack, all over a dispute about the check.
We need to make it clear that things like this don’t get pigeonholed as “gay issues.” They’re issues to everyone who knows and cares about a gay person. They’re issues for anyone who could possibly be perceived as gay, or in any way “different,” and could be the next victim of an attack like this. We need to make it clear that a much larger community is ready to hold corporations like this accountable for not enforcing nondiscrimination policies.
Sign the petition and share it with your friends on every social network you can. All your friends deserve to know it’s safe to eat brunch.
Poetry, politics, social anxiety, and all other matters of the heart.
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