In the news

March 6, 2012

* Signs of life at Equality California?

* HRC has fun with Mitt

March 5, 2012

* Asante Cotman dons heels, stands up to the principal, gets suspended, talks to the media. Richmond, Va., TV station does a great job on the story. Watch.

* Chad Griffin produced outing movie and fought with Gay Inc

* Maine Catholic diocese will stay out of same-sex-marriage battle this year (after essentially leading it in 2009)

* Broadcast live from your earpiece camera

March 2, 2012

Chad Griffin to head Human Rights Campaign

This is a new day for HRC -- and a vindication/embracing of younger LGBT activists who have dared to think outside the box. Several national LGBT groups were, as you recall, ferociously ... opposed to Chad's federal lawsuit against Prop 8 -- and now he's to be America's #1 gay activist.

"I left what was happening at the stage [at that grassroots Prop 8 demo on Nov. 5, 2008], and went into the middle of the crowd, and I didn't know anyone. ... Living in L.A. for as long as I had, I thought I knew every gay person. ... I called a close friend of mine ... and I said, 'The world has changed.' ... In many ways, on that night I found my voice." (The full interview is here.)

Other recent news

* Equality California board nixed taking Prop 8 back to the ballot by one vote

* California voters now support same-sex marriage 59 percent to 34 percent. All kinds of people told Equality California to put Prop 8 back on the ballot this November because we would win and be done with it, but the group's board refused to do it. And now a new Field Poll shows a 25 percent gap in our favor.

* Santorum video: "President Obama wants to send -- he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college: He wants to remake you in his image. I wanna create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

* Latest win against Prop 8 may see rehearing

Mike Tidmus has died

Well-known San Diego gay blogger Mike Tidmus died yesterday. Karen Ocamb has a nice tribute here. Here are some of my photos of my buddy. He never would stand still for my camera. I always had to zoom in on him from afar when he wasn't looking.

ACT UP/Chicago leader dies

Frank Sieple, who was part of the inner core of ACT UP/Chicago, has died. Here are few excerpts of a long profile I did of Frank for The Advocate in 1990.

"Oh, I've been acting up for a long time," explained Frank Sieple, when asked what first led him to ACT UP/Chicago. "I got permanently kicked out of high school when I was a sophomore. I was questioning authority when I was 14."

A 29-year-old flight attendant, Sieple joined ACT UP in 1987 because he was "really tired of seeing friends diagnosed and dying while the newspaper wrote about the good things the government is doing."

"I tried other activist groups," Frank said, "but I always ended up stuffing envelopes. I realized I needed to speak out in the streets if I wanted to see change in my lifetime. ACT UP fights back rather than just accepting one AIDS death every 18 minutes. We know there are drugs to prolong lives and the knowledge out there to find a cure."

Frank has the support of his family in the Chicago suburbs and his lover of eight years, Bob, although he says his mom and dad worry that he might get hurt and Bob had to acquire a taste for being surrounded by "hard-core activists." ...

Frank considers Chicago's "hard-core activists" his family. "Danny [Sotomayor] and Tim [Miller] and Billy [McMillan] and Carol [Jonas] and Ferd [Eggan] and I have a camaraderie," he said. "When they get sick or I see them manhandled by police, I really feel that part of me is being taken away."

The group's activism, Frank says, stands in stark contrast to "the passive attitude of people who just go to work and to bars and hope to get lucky on weekends and then everything is alright and they don't have to worry about repression and discrimination."

"Ultimately, they will be confronted with discrimination and they'll have a choice," he said. "They can fight back or go back into their closets and hide." ...

My friend Paul Varnell, the syndicated gay journalist, has died

My friend Paul Varnell, the well-known syndicated gay journalist, has died. Here is a wonderful article in The Windy City Times.

And a great tribute by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg.

Paul was one of the most independent persons I ever have known. It wasn't easy to get close to him, and I figure I got as far as anyone did. He was a journalist, he was an opinion columnist, he was a thinker, he was a libertarian and, I think, a Libertarian, he was an intellectual. He liked classical music and opera, he was a voracious reader. His columns raised the intelligence quotient of all the gay papers he appeared in. He was an activist, with the Illinois Gay & Lesbian Task Force and other entities.

He and I, as a journalistic exercise, tried to get a marriage license in Cook County -- in 1989! And when rebuffed, we filed human-rights complaints with the city and the state. We lost. We claimed sex discrimination but they told us it was sexual-orientation discrimination and that that wasn't illegal at that time in Illinois. The Sun-Times made a big story of our little effort. We turned down an invite to appear on Oprah. :-| I suppose everyone is unique, but Paul was unlike anyone I've ever known. I think it was the degree of his independence and the degree of his self-sufficiency that stood out. He had very specific ideas about how he wanted to live his life -- and that is exactly how he lived it, each day and without compromise.

Tributes, obituaries and articles:
Windy City Times
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times
The Reader
Queerty
LGBTPOV.com
Independent Gay Forum
AMERICAblog
Box Turtle Bulletin
National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association
The Pink Paper
Towleroad
Washington Blade
PortugalGay.pt
Bilerico
Box Turtle Bulletin (2nd post)
Simply David
Wisconsin Gazette

Hillary Clinton's historic, game-changing Human Rights Day speech to the U.N. on LGBT rights

Best gay marriage TV ad to date

Every country seems to know how to do this except for the U.S. Dear Maine: This is how you show commonality between straight and gay people.

New gay TV ads

New ads in the new Maine push for same-sex marriage: Paint-by-numbers crap. Watch here: http://t.co/wEfrtpE

Some recent ads from the Argentine LGBT movement: Pure art. (Yes, the same Argentina that has national same-sex marriage, passed by Congress and signed into law by the president amid much official joy and celebration.) Watch here: http://t.co/6b33Q3j

Who put didactic East German bureaucrats in charge of the U.S. LGBT movement, and how can we fire them?

The bureaucrats explain the Maine ads: http://tinyurl.com/6lzz8dc

Absolutely nothing was learned from Prop 8. And if something was learned from Prop 8, the people who learned it were crushed and silenced by the didactic East German bureaucrats who mysteriously control our movement. It is a tragedy.

I believe that winning full LGBT equality is much more art than science. Let us never ever forget this focus-group-justified abomination of an ad from the 2008 Prop 8 campaign: http://youtu.be/vB0lZ8XbmJM.

Occupy San Diego 're-occupies' Civic Center Plaza

Last night, Occupy San Diego was dismantled by police and more than 50 people were arrested. Tonight, around 1,000 people re-occupied Civic Center Plaza, and several hundred took to the streets and marched through the Gaslamp Quarter nightlife district, messing up traffic.

L.A. group plans to take Prop 8 back to the ballot

Love Honor Cherish will submit language to the California attorney general by Friday for a ballot measure to overturn Prop 8.

The attorney general will write a petition title and summary, and then LHC can collect voter signatures for 150 days.

The group would need to collect valid signatures from 807,615 registered California voters.

The initiative would amend the California Constitution to delete or overturn Prop 8, via which voters amended the Constitution in 2008 to re-ban same-sex marriage.

The Los-Angeles-based organization's outreach director, Lester Aponte, said Oct. 11 that LHC already has launched efforts to build a statewide campaign structure.

He also blasted Equality California for showing "a tremendous lack of leadership" when its board voted in early October against leading an effort to put Prop 8 back before California voters next year.

After the EQCA board vote, EQCA's new executive director, Roland Palencia, gave four days' notice that he was quitting his job.

Some California LGBT leaders think the EQCA board may reverse its decision.

EQCA has promised to provide information on its future leadership and plans before Palencia leaves on Friday.

In a statement to this reporter Oct. 11, Palencia said: "The decision about going or not back to the ballot to overturn Proposition 8 was a gut-wrenching one. Ultimately, I believed that initiating a signature drive could ignite something powerful in our movement here in California. This needs to be balanced with the responsibility of raising close to $2 million by December 2011 for the signature gathering alone; and maybe over $40 million to win this campaign by November 2012. Not a small task. Given the pending federal lawsuit, the economy, critical support among the base and a number of other factors, not winning this campaign could be a very disempowering experience."

Rex Wockner

Rex Wockner has reported news for the gay press since the 1980s. His work has appeared in hundreds of publications.

He has a B.A. in journalism, started his career as a radio reporter, and has written for the mainstream press as well, including the Chicago Tribune and The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Highlights of Wockner's career include:

Going to Denmark in 1989 to cover the world's first registered partnerships granting gay couples the rights of marriage.

Covering the world's first full gay marriages in the Netherlands in 2001.

Reporting from the first gay-pride events in Moscow and Leningrad in 1991.

Reporting from world conferences of the International Lesbian and Gay Association and the international AIDS conferences.

Making early contact with gay movements in the former East Bloc and developing nations.

And filing stories in the U.S. from the Democratic and Republican conventions, Creating Change, NLGJA conferences, the GLAAD Awards, Equality Begins At Home, the National Gay Men's Health Summit, the LGBT marches on Washington, major ACT UP demonstrations, the National Equality March, the Maine same-sex marriage battle, the trial in the federal Prop 8 case, and New Orleans after Katrina.