Election 2016 produced stunning surprises, and if you are still looking for explanations, try this one used on an eight-year-old when he asked his grandfather, “I thought you said Trump was a bully?”The answer went something like this: “Sometimes, the bully wins.” And some-times, the bully changes his/her ways.It’s our best hope. Now for the […]
Since the middle of July, my home-away-from-home has been the Hillary Campaign Office. I have been spend¬ing as many of my waking hours there as possible. There are so many reasons why I am volunteering for Hillary. I believe in what she believes in – taking care of our children and families; paid sick-leave for
October 11th was National Coming Out Day, and it is also around this time of year, eight years past, that I first began to be honest with friends and family about my identity. I came out when I was fourteen. I lived in Mooresville, Indiana, and the number of other people I knew to be
The Queen has spoken.Everyone listens because, well, how can they not? Her bearing, her stature, her very demeanor demand attention from all her subjects and in the new book, “The Essential RuPaul” by John Davis, illustrations by Libby Vanderploeg, these queens have a lot to say.When RuPaul Andre Charles was a little boy, his mother
It will surprise none of you to learn that I’ve been engaged in LGBTQ+ activism since I was a teenager. At 15, I joined a group of students in forming a Gay-Straight Alliance. I held leadership roles in that organization until I graduated, working in turns with and against my school’s administration and the wider
The debate on bathrooms continues in Indiana.Senate Bill 35 was introduced in 2015 and stated that one could only use the bathroom that matched your birth sex. It was defeated before it came up for a vote, but it’s anticipated that more “bathroom bills” are on their way for 2016. The ideology of the “bathroom
Beautiful. What does that word make you think of? Or, more to the point, what kind of person do you think of?It seems that the world belongs to the beautiful ones who merely have to smile while the common folk bow at their feet. But just how powerful is beauty? In our culture, beauty is
Recently, in the wake of the massacre in Orlando, news feeds, blogs, you tube videos and tweets have focused on the 49 young people who were senselessly murdered and the whys and wherefores of how such a thing can happen in this day and age. Although we are inundated with news about shootings daily, when
As a professional queer activist its part of my job to educate myself and others on difficult social issues. I want to use this months column to tackle one that is near to my heart and has been weighing on my mind heavily lately – the issue of rape culture. Rape culture is the tendency
I’ve been writing this column since 2008 and I’ve never missed an issue. Then, on the cusp of my deadline for last month, 49 people were murdered inside of Pulse in Orlando – and I had written a column called, “The Death Of The Gay Bar.” Needless to say, the title was glaringly inappropriate and
