What really concerns librarians;
what do they discuss when they self-organise and decide for themselves? After the
inaugural UK event, the
second UK Librarycamp, with around 200 attendees, was recently held; reflections by
Frank Norman, Carolin Schneider
[1] [2],
Sarah Wolfenden,
Amy Faye Finnegan,
Shambrarian Knights,
Michelle,
Jennifer Yellin,
Jenni Hughes,
Bookshelf Guardian,
Amy Cross-Menzies and
Simon Barron, and by one of the
organisers.
[more inside]
posted by Wordshore
on Nov 1, 2012 -
10 comments
"I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others."
On Saturday, Lana Wachowski (co-director of the "Matrix" franchise and "Cloud Atlas") received a "Visibility Award" from the Human Rights Campaign for her recent
decision to publicly come out as transgender. In a powerful 25-minute acceptance speech, Lana spoke about the pain she went through growing up and how she developed self-acceptance.
Video.
Transcript.
Q&A with the Hollywood Reporter.
posted by zarq
on Oct 24, 2012 -
76 comments
“
212” (nsfw) was voted Pitchfork’s no. 9 track of 2011, propelling Banks to the top spot on NME’s 2011 “Cool List” and earning her a coveted endorsement from Kanye West—all before she even landed a record deal.
But some listeners just couldn’t get past that C-word. In a December 2011 cover story for self-titled magazine, the interviewer asked Banks a question that no one would have asked, say, Lil Wayne, who was three years younger than Banks when his debut album dropped: “Is it weird to play these songs for your mother?”
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Oct 19, 2012 -
68 comments
"Look, goddamn it, I’m homosexual, and most of my friends are Jewish homosexuals, and some of my best friends are black homosexuals, and I am sick and tired of reading and hearing such goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit about me and my friends." - Merle Miller.
In 1970, two years after Stonewall,
Joseph Epstein wrote a cover story for Harper’s Magazine,
Homo/hetero: The struggle for sexual identity, that came to chilling conclusions: "I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth." His incendiary language prompted author/journalist/writer Merle Miller to come out of the closet in the New York Times Magazine, with an angry and poignant plea for dignity, understanding and respect: "What It Means to Be a Homosexual." 40 years later,
that essay helped inspire the launch of the "It Gets Better" campaign. Via [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 17, 2012 -
62 comments
California has become the first state in the country to
ban the so-called "reparative" ex-gay therapy for people under the age of 18 years old. "This bill bans non-scientific 'therapies' that have driven young people to depression and suicide. These practices have no basis in science or medicine and they will now be relegated to the dustbin of quackery," Brown said in a statement to The San Francisco Chronicle.
[more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen
on Sep 30, 2012 -
37 comments
"
Take everything you know and imagine about Freddie Mercury: the iconic British rock star, the philandering partier, the serial maker of testosteroned-anthems, and flip it around to something less familiar: Farrokh Bulsara, a demure, bucktoothed Indian boy in a Bombay boarding school, listening to Lata Mangeshkar, playing cricket." -- Janaki Challa writes about the contradiction in the openly gay image of Freddie Mercury the performer and his much more private cultural identity off it.
posted by MartinWisse
on Sep 6, 2012 -
36 comments
In
an interview published yesterday, Dan Cathy, president of
Chick-Fil-A, tells the Baptist Press that Chick-Fil-A is "very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit."
Also this week, Cathy told radio host
Ken Coleman "I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say 'we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage." This is a change in Chick-Fil-A's corporate position; in 2011, responding to criticism that the company and its charitable arm, the
WinShape Foundation,
support organizations that work against LGBT rights and marriage equality, Cathy stated that the company "will not champion any political agendas on marriage and family." Chick-Fil-A is a fast food chain of franchises that operates in 39 US states; in 2011, annual sales exceeded $4 billion USD. The company is privately held.
posted by catlet
on Jul 18, 2012 -
212 comments
The Advocate
has compiled a list of all of the openly LGBT athletes who will be competing in the 2012 Olympics. Considering that 10,500 competitors will be traveling to London this summer, it's a very short list.
(Warning: gratuitous pagination)
posted by schmod
on Jul 16, 2012 -
32 comments
"
Though now almost forgotten, the case of “the Chickens and the Bulls” as the NYPD called it (or “Operation Homex,” to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging."
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Jul 13, 2012 -
19 comments
Obama evolved. The NAACP evolved.
The NCLR has evolved. How do you get your friends and family to evolve into support for LGBT rights?
The
Movement Advancement Project's excellent
Talking About LGBT Issues series gives research-driven rhetorical and messaging frameworks that work best for meeting reluctant folks where they are. They include warnings about civil rights framings, how to hit emotional marks that emphasize commonality and cover things like adoption, marriage, transgender etiquette and employment protections.
posted by klangklangston
on Jun 25, 2012 -
17 comments
In 1971, "decades before any state had seriously considered legalizing gay marriage, long before anyone had thought of creating—never mind repealing—a policy called “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” before Reagan, before AIDS, before the American Psychiatric Association determined that homosexuality was not a mental illness, and before half the people currently living in America were even born, a man named John Singer stepped into the King County marriage license office in Seattle."
Meet Faygele ben Miriam, the radical activist who pioneered the fight for same-sex marriage in Washington State, 41 years ago. Via.
posted by zarq
on Jun 7, 2012 -
16 comments
“Sexual orientation does make you poor,” says Manohar Elavarthi, a community organizer with Sangama in Bangalore. “Poverty is not just economic – you miss access to so many things: ration cards, inheritance rights, voter ID cards.” In several South Asian countries, there are reports that LGBT people have even been denied access to disaster relief. And homophobia is intricately connected with other divisions in South Asian societies, particularly around gender but also religion and caste.
Yet I saw many signs of hope and change in both India and Nepal. Those transgender sex workers in Chennai have organized a coalition, called V-CAN, of every single community-based organization in the state of Tamil Nadu that serves homosexual or transgender people. Working with the NGO Praxis, they have been able to gain access to some public benefits, such as pensions and registering as “third gender” on government ID cards. Activists in Nepal’s Blue Diamond Society have achieved similar results and more. ~
World Bank blog post
posted by infini
on Jun 3, 2012 -
9 comments
You may have seen
Replacements, Ltd.'s print ads in the back of PARADE magazine (of
Howard Huge fame). Replacements, both a seller and a
resource for china and glassware owners, was one of the few North Carolina businesses to
publicly take a stand [NYT] against the state's vote to ban gay marriage.
As an employer, Replacements is one of only nine companies in the country to receive a
perfect score for ten years straight in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index. But the company is also known for another surprisingly liberal policy: encouraging its 450 employees to bring their pets to work amidst millions of pieces of china and glassware. How many?
A whole lot. [more inside]
posted by Madamina
on May 29, 2012 -
31 comments
"The NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution." Today, the
NAACP passed a resolution endorsing same sex
marriage.
posted by cashman
on May 19, 2012 -
98 comments
When the Supreme Court decision
Loving v. Virginia in 1967 declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional, the last affected state in which a legal interracial marriage occurred was South Carolina in January, 1969, in the city where the Civil War started. What most people don't know is the
bride was a transsexual.
[more inside]
posted by 23
on May 10, 2012 -
29 comments
Blogger-writer Andrew Sullivan proudly attended Obama's latest state dinner for Cameron
with his husband, in an open display of growing acceptance of same-sex marriage possibly by the powers-to-be. Michael Shaw's always-insightful BagNews (but not MS himself in this post) notes that there
were 3 bearded men in the photograph.
posted by growabrain
on Mar 18, 2012 -
60 comments
On February 6th, the infamous Westboro Baptist Church is
planning a protest at Clayton High School in St Louis because of their support of the LGBT student body. The counter protest, however, has taken the form of a fund raising opportunity.
[more inside]
posted by deanklear
on Feb 3, 2012 -
42 comments
Fred Martinez was nádleehí, a male-bodied person with a feminine nature, a special gift according to his ancient Navajo culture. He was one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at 16. Two Spirits explores the life and death of this boy who was also a girl, and the essentially spiritual nature of gender. (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Nov 10, 2011 -
15 comments
Pioneer and tireless activist for the LGBT civil rights movement, Frank Kameny was fired from his job as an astronomer for the US government in the late 1950s because he was gay. He
co-organized the Mattachine Society of Washington,
campaigned for equal treatment of gay employees in the Federal government, was the
first openly gay candidate for Congress and worked to remove the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The Library of Congress holds his papers, the
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History includes in its collections Kameny's picket signs carried in front of the White House in 1965, his home has been made a DC Historic Landmark, and a street near Dupont Circle was declared Frank Kameny Way in 2010. In 2009, John Berry, Director of the Office of Personnel Management, formally apologized to Kameny on behalf of the United States government.
Frank Kameny died on
National Coming Out Day this October 11, 2011.
[more inside]
posted by Morrigan
on Oct 12, 2011 -
56 comments
