Pride Month // Current

If you could come out again, what would you do differently? (Brighton)

If you attended some of the Pride events in Brighton, you might have seen us handing... more

gaybot
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What's the best thing about being Gay? (Brighton)

If you attended some of the Pride events in Brighton, you might have seen us handing... more

gaybot
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What's it like to be Gay? (Brighton)

If you attended some of the Pride events in Brighton, you might have seen us handing... more

gaybot
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Why Aren't We Equal Video

Why Aren't We Equal shows the world that everyone is human and deserves to be created... more

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2009 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade

On Sunday (06-28-09) was the 36th Annual San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade. The gay... more

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Police raid gay nightclub on Stonewall anniversary

TEXAS - A crowd of more than 100 protesters chanted "No more!" from the steps of the... more

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Commemorating Gay Pride: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

“Commemorating Gay Pride: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” is a commemorative,... more

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40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans

LIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I was riveted by the violent confrontations between the police and protestors in Selma, 1965, and Chicago, 1968. But I never heard about the several days of riots that rocked Greenwich Village after the police raided a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the wee hours of June 28, 1969 — 40 years ago today.

Then again, I didn’t know a single person, student or teacher, male or female, in my entire Ivy League university who was openly identified as gay. And though my friends and I were obsessed with every iteration of the era’s political tumult, we somehow missed the Stonewall story. Not hard to do, really. The Times — which would not even permit the use of the word gay until 1987 — covered the riots in tiny, bowdlerized articles, one of them but three paragraphs long, buried successively on pages 33, 22 and 19.

But if we had read them, would we have cared? It was typical of my generation, like others before and after, that the issue of gay civil rights wasn’t on our radar screen. Not least because gay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows. As David Carter writes in his book “Stonewall,” at the end of the 1960s homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois. It was a crime punishable by castration in seven states. No laws — federal, state or local — protected gay people from being denied jobs or housing. If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.

The younger gay men — and scattered women — who acted up at the Stonewall on those early summer nights in 1969 had little in common with their contemporaries in the front-page political movements of the time. They often lived on the streets, having been thrown out of their blue-collar homes by their families before they finished high school. They migrated to the Village because they’d heard it was one American neighborhood where it was safe to be who they were.

Stonewall “wasn’t a 1960s student riot,” wrote one of them, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, in a poignant handwritten flier on display at the New York Public Library in the exhibition “1969: The Year of Gay Liberation.” They had “no nice dorms for sleeping,” “no school cafeteria for certain food” and “no affluent parents” to send checks. They had no powerful allies of any kind, no rights, no future. But they were brave. They risked their necks to prove, as Lanigan-Schmidt put it, that “the mystery of history” could happen “in the least likely of places.”

After the gay liberation movement was born at Stonewall, this strand of history advanced haltingly until the 1980s. It took AIDS and the new wave of gay activism it engendered to fully awaken many, including me, to the gay people all around them. But that tardy and still embryonic national awareness did not save the lives of those whose abridged rights made them even more vulnerable during a rampaging plague.

On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a “fierce advocate” for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor increased this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

The Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was merely a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA — which hardly mitigates the brief’s denigration of same-sex marriage, now legal in six states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has also asserted that its Stonewall ceremony was “long planned” — even though it sure looks like damage control. News of the event trickled out publicly only last Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting gay donors droppLIKE all students caught up in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, I... more

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'Gayby boom': Children of gay couples speak out

Jesse Levey is a Republican activist who says he believes in family values, small... more

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40 years after Stonewall, gay man sees progress

Sunday, June 28, marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, considered by many... more

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Noone is Gay or Straight!?

What if noone is actually gay or straight, but rather we're all on a bell curve of... more

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Obama Invites Gay Rights Advocates to White House

As advocates for gays and lesbians intensify their criticism of the White House,... more

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5 months ago
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The History Of Homosexuality

Coinciding with the Pride celebrations across the UK over the summer, This Is Gonna... more

graemesmith
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6 months ago
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No Gay Rights, No Gay Money

Picketers protest a Democratic National fundraiser in Boston yesterday. Another... more

uroborus8
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5 months ago
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6 comments

Eric Holder Urges for Expanded Hate Crime Bill

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder stepped up his call for the passage of federal hate... more

NotCaleb
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Obama’s Justice Department on DOMA: Comparing gay marriage to incest and pedophilia?

Last week Obama’s Justice Department filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage... more

OhAlex
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Pride Month On Current - Promo

Pride Month 2009, all this June. Only on Current.

dgahr
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Equality Someday???

Like you, I feel happiness & I feel pain. When cut, I bleed just as you do. I have loved & I have lost. I am a daughter, a sister, a grand daughter, a niece, a Godmother, a spouse, a friend. I am human.

I live and let live. I treat others, as I would want to be treated. I want to live, learn & grow. I have dreams for the future. I am human.

I get up and go to work, not only for myself, but also for you. It can be two in the afternoon, or two in the morning…. I race to your aid when you are in need. I extinguish the fire that threatens you, your loved ones, & your possessions. I run in when others are running out. I cut you out of your vehicle when it no longer resembles one, because you have been involved in a collision. I care for you when you are in pain, broken & bleeding. I come to pick you up when you can’t get back up on your own. I mitigate the hazardous material incident; I enter when others don’t dare to come near. I go into the hole to retrieve you when you have fallen in and your cries can barely be heard. I enter the swift water that has swept you away, threatening to take your life. I risk my very own life for yours and never expect a thank you in return. I am a firefighter.

I am fair and try to always do what is right. I am honest. I am kind, I smile at you, open a door for, pick up something you have dropped, help you find something when you are looking, and return something you may have lost.

I contribute to society. I pay my taxes, I donate to charities, I volunteer my time, I don’t take unless I earn, I stay out of debt and live within my means, I don’t except free rides to take from those truly in need, I contribute to the economy by being a consumer. My tax dollars go to programs you benefit from, ones I will never use, and that is ok.

I am a proud American. I would give my life for the red, white, & blue. I am grateful for the people who have and do serve in our armed forces. My heroes are those who have paid that ultimate price.

With the above, I think you would agree that I satisfy the social and civil roles of a citizen, and that of a descent human being???

Then how can it be I am tolerant of you, yet you may not be tolerant of me? I am a woman. A woman who loves, cares for, and cherishes another woman. A woman who deserves the same civil rights as any straight human being, the right to take care of another & to protect our assets until our dying days, the right to love and cherish until death. THE RIGHT TO MARRY in one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for ALL.

While foundations may seem set, what we build upon then can change, I'm motivated to help change, which I truly believe is just a matter of time. It was not long ago women didn't have the right to vote, or blacks did not have the right to be free, & not too long ago inter racial marriages were an issue. With that said I hope it is in my lifetime the fight for gay marriage is just another one of those issues that become a page in history.Like you, I feel happiness & I feel pain. When cut, I bleed just as you do. I have... more