via BREAKING: Arizona Marriage Ban Struck Down | The Bilerico Project.
Tag Archives: lgbt
Project ROSE: An example of the police state colluding with religion
LGBT, Minority Rights Focus of Several Bills Signed in Last Legislative Session | Diversity | Agenda | KCET
California has really progressed on LGBT rights this past session. Cheers to Gov. Brown and the California Legislature Dems in Sacramento!
Now if only the regular police patrol were not armed, and gun control applied to both the government and the public. Hopefully someone can take up that idea next session.
Coming Out Smart
Drag Performance, Brand Pages and Personal Identities
The issue of the “Real Name” policy, whereby users are told to use “real” names (not necessarily actual names, but “real-sounding” names), is problematic for social networking services (SNS). It’s especially problematic when SNS operators refer users to use brand pages – profiles which are maintained and moderated corporately by one or more users for organized purposes such as promoting a brand or a movement – as alternatives to using pseudonyms on their personal profiles. The reason is that such a solution is half-baked on the sites which most emphasize the use of “real names” for users’ profiles, particularly Facebook (and formerly Google+).
Functionality issues
The suggestion by Facebook for preferably-pseudonymous users to use their pseudonyms on brand pages ignores the fact that pages on Facebook offer less interactivity than personal profiles. Facebook pages don’t allow pages – which are built to serve organizations rather than pseudonymous personalities – to form or join groups. In relation to this, Facebook also does not allow brand pages to automatically invite other users to events; compare this to Facebook groups, which allow for automatic invitations of all members to event pages.
Google+ Pages, in comparison, offer a bit more interaction, with the ability to create and join “communities” (equivalent to groups) as your brand page. In addition, G+ Pages can also add user profiles to circles (a more advanced version of Facebook’s “adding friends”) and invite followed profiles, circles of profiles and whole communities to events.
Presentation issues
However, in the case of pseudonymous users being “nudged” to create pages for their pseudonyms, G+ and Facebook both suffer from a high learning curve and a lack of tailoring toward personal identity pseudonyms.
Facebook’s “Create a Page” has six main options: “Local Business or Place”, “Company, Organization or Institution”, “Brand or Product”, “Artist, Band or Public Figure”, “Entertainment”, and “Cause or Community”. The closest to a means of controlling a personal pseudonymic identity is “Artist, Band or Public Figure”, which is limited alongside other Facebook pages in its interaction abilities.
By comparison/contrast, G+ only has “Storefront (Restaurant, Retail Store, hotel, etc.)”, “Service Area (Plumber, pizza delivery, taxi service, etc.)”, and “Brand (Product, sports team, music band, cause, etc.)”, which is even more confusing from the outset by the grouping of so many options into just three categories.
The ideal page
The ideal brand page system which would work perfectly for personal pseudonyms at the intimacy perhaps most desired by drag performers in an SNS, IMO, is a combination of Facebook’s presentation and G+’s functionality and interactivity:
- Having at least 6 page-creation options including “Artist, Band or Public Figure”, or even a 7th “Character or Pseudonym” option.
- Having the ability to follow/be followed by users and create/join groups “as” the brand page.
- Have the option to switch to a preferred brand page identity upon login to one’s personal user identity.
- Have the ability to restrict access to one’s personal profile while simultaneously operating a brand-page identity.
In such a system, performance artists such as drag performers would have the full ability to interact with their fans as their pseudonyms or public personas, to organize their fans into discussion groups (both public, private and secret) under their personas, and to easily invite fans to events (or even games and apps), all without revealing or exposing any of their personal profiles to the public.
When the brand pages are not fully baked, not fully conceptualized as alternative identities for both individuals and corporated groups, the ability to control your presence is hobbled. Performers like Sister Roma offer an opportunity for Facebook, G+ and the SNS sites of our era to not only listen more to their users, but to make their brand pages more useful for more people. The “Real Name” policy (as well as the restriction against multiple profiles on sites like LinkedIn) only hurts privacy, doesn’t help the quality of conversations on Facebook, and is not remedied by half-baked brand page tools.
A quarter-century of civil recognition of same-sex relationships
Today, 25 years ago, we celebrate the first civil recognition of same-sex couples. On 1 October 1989, Denmark made history with approving a law for gender-neutral “registered partnerships” (registreret partnerskab). Among the first couples to be partnered in civil unions were activists Axel and Eigil Axgil, who had spent most of their 40-year-coupled lives fighting for rights for LGBT people in their country. Another couple that registered their union, Ivan Larsen, an ordained minister of the state-supported Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, and Ove Carlsen, a psychologist, were profiled in this recent BBC Witness clip:
via BBC News – The day same-sex civil unions became legal in Denmark.
What fascinates me about this is how things may have been different if civil unions, rather than marriage, would have remained the popular wisdom. What if the United States had been more accepting to civil unions at the federal level, and had not placed DOMA into place as a bulwark against any federal recognition? Even more so, even in the post-DOMA era of federal recognition for same-sex marriages, the present lack of federal recognition of state-level civil unions is perplexing.
Right now, there are three states which still have only domestic partnerships or civil unions: Wisconsin, Nevada and Colorado. Waiting for the judicial trajectory to move marriage equality to more states still doesn’t speak to the issue of unequal civil recognition of relationships, or the obvious overall federal favoritism to marriage as opposed to civil unions.
I’m of the opinion that marriage and civil unions should both be available as options to both same- and opposite-sex couples, at both federal and state levels.
In re: John Becker on “Indifference”
John Becker from The Bilerico Project demands, with reason, that the rest of us don’t say to survivors of the RCC’s anti-gay abuses two statements which we’re apt to use: “what did they expect?” and “why do they belong to an organization that hates them?”
Well, how else do we who are not or were never raised Catholic respond to a profoundly-undemocratic, intelligence-insulting, hierarchical culture that encourages the firings of church employees over LGBT identity? How do we respond in regards to Mormon excommunications of LGBT people (and feminists)? Or less-episcopalian polities like some rinky-dinky SBC Baptist church?
We’re outside of the culture, and there is no means for us to respond to their behavior except through the civil sphere or the liberal-religious niche outlets like Religion Dispatches, fully knowing that we will not be listened to or considered. So what can we say when our options are limited in communicating to members of a religious sect that their rhetoric is uncivil and bigoted?
Some of us tune them out. We tune out the bald-faced lies and scaremongering apocalypticism. We don’t dissect any of it, or at least we stop trying to dissect it. We just treat it like a bad dream on the periphery of our eyesight.
After so long of angrily tuning it out, we then hear of the firings, the excommunications, the “loyalty oath”-like contracts, and we hear of those turned out of their small lower niche of the religious hierarchy for their LGBT identity or their feminist critique. We wonder “how was I ever in such a position when I’ve lived my life in reality for so long?”
We remember our own subjection to abuse and bigoted rhetoric. Then, freshly recalling the trauma, we ask “what did they expect?” and “why do they belong to an organization that hates them?”
We were traumatized. Our intelligence was insulted. But we tuned all of it out. We don’t maintain contact with most members. We ultimately “other” the organization, leading to our wondering about how anyone, including ourselves, could stay in such an organization.
We project our trauma, even with such trauma being distinct in some way from someone else’s experience. Maybe it is not appropriate. Maybe it is an unthinking reflex.
But because we tuned out the experience for our own mental stability, we may not have the proper words, let alone actions, to expressing our solidarity.
What are those words of solidarity? What are those actions of solidarity? What are those expressions which can transcend between my “non-denominational” experience and the experience of those raised in the “Catholic” religion?
And how can we even begin to move forward in that solidarity?
We’re being told that it probably isn’t beneficial to encourage survivors of anti-LGBT abuse to leave their religion altogether, or that it is rather smug to encourage survivors to choose another religion or congregation that is more welcoming. What is the necessary solidarity?
Until these questions are answered, until *real* progress is possible at such levels, our questions of “what did they expect?” and “why do they belong to an organization that hates them?” will be the default.
via LGBT Catholics Deserve Respect, Not Indifference | The Bilerico Project.
“They will say we are not here”: Choices, From Uganda to Arkansas
David Kato’s murder in January 2011 was a brutal footnote in the ongoing attempt to fully criminalize homosexuality in countries which are heavy in Abrahamic religion and light in liberal arts education. U.S. President Barack Obama’s statement of support for same-sex marriage in May 2012 was a touchstone in the history of LGBT people’s relationship with the U.S. electorate.
Two events in LGBT history involving two men of color of renown in two different political climates, in two years.
But I think that they, both Kato and Obama, are examples of what can happen when someone decides not to hide, but to stay, come out and fight.
Some time before his murder, Kato told filmmakers Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright this:
“So if I run away, who will defend the others?”
And defend he did, even to his last breath, even as the threat of the upcoming Anti-Homosexuality Law continued to enshadow so many LGBT people in Uganda. It has gotten worse since his death, with the bill now law and more Ugandans seeking asylum in neighboring Kenya or elsewhere.
By contrast, Obama was one of countless beneficiaries of those in the United States who did not run away from their home communities, but stayed and fought for better conditions. By the time he stated his support for marriage equality for same-sex couples, tens of thousands of couples had already gotten married and challenged other states’ prohibitions on their marriages. Several more jurisdictions – state, county, city – had placed non-discrimination laws into their books. But none of these laws would have been instituted had the LGBT residents of these jurisdictions had ran away or focused on their vacations in more LGBT-friendly destinations rather than sought change in their own neighborhoods.
California would not have overthrown Proposition 8 had safer conditions had not been fought for in the 1960s and 1970s by the likes of Harry Hay, Harvey Milk and Jose Sarria. New York would not have gained marriage equality in 2011 had the Stonewall riots not happened against gross police brutality. No anti-discrimination laws would have been sought to the present without a bunch of activists getting them put into law in Ann Arbor and Lansing, Michigan in 1972.
People stuck it out and fought for their posterities when their own sexualities and gender identities were proscribed under state law, when they were subjected to police abuse, when there was nothing to protect them from violence or discrimination.
And now, you have marriage equality in freakin’ Arkansas! South of the Mason-Dixon Line!
So if someone stuck it out here in the Southeast, if someone waited for all these years somewhere in a region which tends to be the last to do anything that is politically inclusive and progressive until after every other region has written such legislation into law, then why can’t I?
My friend Edric from Macon, who runs PFLAG Macon and MaconOUT, tells me often about how so many LGBT people in Middle Georgia would rather indulge in Atlanta Pride every year rather than have a pride festival in Macon or Middle Georgia. But is there nothing in Middle Georgia that is positive for LGBT people?
Nothing at all?
This is why I’m torn right now. I will put myself more into website design, make some money, pay for my expenses, and spend the rest on LGBT-related or UU-related work. But when I have the opportunity to leave for a greener pasture, will I leave? Or will I stay and fight?
Politically, I want to stay, whether it is in Columbus or in Macon, but I want to stay and help the LGBT community here in Georgia.
I want to help build a better, more inclusive community for HIV+ people in the community, LGBT people, women, people of color, organized labor, secular atheist, etc. – in Middle and West Georgia.
By the day, I revisit my interest in going to places like California, with its enticing tech sector, but right now, it’s only half a place I’d want to live in and half a place to visit. The people there are leaps and bounds ahead of where we are here in Georgia, but their experience of equality is only one experience by people who already have a lot more going for themselves.
I think these two regions of Georgia, if we pulled hard and long enough, can go much further. I think this place can be much more inclusive. We can have non-discrimination ordinances, and domestic partnership registries, and more pride/diversity events, and LGBT people being elected to office, and less homeless or destitute LGBT adults and young people on our streets.
I hope to help with that, just as I’ve already helped as President of a Gay-Straight Alliance in college. I plan to stay and fight, whether in Columbus or in Fort Benning, until more people are awakened to the possibilities and can fight for themselves.
David Kato stated “If we keep hiding, they will say we are not here”. That can accurately describe the present situation in Middle and West Georgia.
Edric, let’s not hide. Let’s stay and fight. For Middle Georgia and West Georgia.
My weapon of choice will be this blog.
RIP, Irving Martinez
My friend, Irving Martinez, died yesterday at age 51 in Macon.
He was very passionate about politics, and last time I saw him, he was very talkative about perceived corruption in Macon city politics. I first met him at a downtown bar after a Bibb County Democratic Party conference at Macon City Hall. Openly identifying as bisexual, he claimed to have been a participant in the landmark Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969. We talked about the work that I did with PFLAG Macon, and about the political status of LGBT people in Macon and Middle Georgia. We friended each other on Facebook that night.
The last time we met, or even spoke, was during my 16 April 2013 guest spot on The Morning Roast, a live-streaming Internet show hosted by Irving, Derrick Barrett and Anthony B. Harris. On a 2 April episode, they had hosted then-incumbent State Senator Miriam Paris.
I’ll never forget what he kept saying to me during my guest spot: “Look at the camera!”
Unfortunately, the video of the episode is blocked on YouTube for music copyright reasons. Video is here:
Last I read, he pursued his political dream and gained 6 percent in the Democratic party primary, forcing Paris and former State Representative David Lucas into a runoff which Lucas won. Perhaps his message got through to that district.
The last time he posted to his Facebook account was on 6 February. Nothing in his post indicated what would happen this past Sunday morning, 16 February 2013.
Solidarity for his friends and family. I hope that The Morning Roast will press on in his stead.
