Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 - January 2016 i The Advocate

STRIBILD is a complete HIV-1 treatment in 1 pill, once a day that combines the medicines in TRUVADA + TYBOST + VITEKTA.* Ask if it’s right for you. www.STRIBILD.com STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD can also replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL of virus in their blood) and whose healthcare provider determines that they meet certain other requirements. STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1or AIDS. What is STRIBILD? STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD can also replace current HIV-1 medicines for some adults who have an undetectable viral load (less than 50 copies/mL…

Honey Lee Cottrell, a visionary photographer and filmmaker who pioneered lesbian erotica in the 1980s through her contributions to the women’s sex magazine On Our Backs, died September 21 in Santa Cruz, Calif., from pancreatic cancer at the age of 69. Cottrell donated her archives to the Cornell University Library Human Sexuality Collection in what it declared “a gesture in keeping with her lifelong goal of empathetically reflecting and documenting the lives and sexualities of the lesbian and gay community.” Cottrell revolutionized the female nude, validated women’s right to pleasure, and opened possibilities for women to see themselves and their desires in new ways through her engagement in a variety of feminist, artistic, and sex-education projects. She was one of the “core four,” along with Debi Sundahl, Nan Kinney, and…

Despite many companies’ increased commitment to equality, many employees remain concerned that their sexuality will have a negative impact upon their employment. In fact, 41% of America’s LGBT workers remain closeted at the office. Although the number of employers advocating on behalf of their gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees has grown tremendously in the last decade, there is still a lot of work to be done. Many young LGBT executives and entrepreneurs have limited access to mentors and other resources necessary for effective career development. “Equality and acceptance shouldn’t end in courtrooms or in parades. We need to be willing to embrace equal rights at work, as well. Changing the culture of America’s companies – and investing in sharp, young LGBT executives and entrepreneurs - must start with today’s…

Treatment also helps make it possible to live a healthy life. STAYING ON TREATMENT HELPS LOWER THE AMOUNT OF VIRUS IN YOUR BLOOD. The amount can get so low, it cannot be measured by a test. This is called being undetectable and it means you are taking care of your health. It also lowers the chance of passing HIV on to others. TALKING ABOUT HIV TREATMENT An open conversation with your healthcare provider can help put you on the path to a long and healthy life. When you work together, it helps your healthcare provider find the treatment that is right for you.…

JANUARY 30 ‘LEELAH’S LAW’ petition In the wake of the suicide of trans teen Leelah Alcorn at the end of 2014, a White House petition to ban so-called LGBT conversion therapy receives over 120,000 signatures. Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett responds noting the legislation in states to disallow conversion therapy, and writes that the Administration agrees: “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this Administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors.” Reported Transgender Suicides in 2015: Eylul Cansin, 23Melonie Rose, 19Zander Mahaffey, 15Aubrey Mariko Shine, 22Ash Haffner, 16Sage David, 17Taylor Wells, 18Blake Brockington, 18Ezra Page, 15Taylor Alesana, 16Sam Taub, 15Rachel Bryk, 23Cameron Langrell, 15Kyler Prescott, 14Jess Shipps, 31Sam Ehly, 21Skylar Marcus Lee, 16Ryley Courchene, 29 FEBRUARY 18 FIRST LESBIAN GOVERNOR: Kate…

As promising as the possibility of new cash infusion pouring into red states over the coming years is—as state LGBT organizations battle “religious freedom restoration acts”—it won’t necessarily help the traditional progressive LGBT organizations. The conservative donors poised to jump into the fray (which I discuss in “The Conservative Case for Funding” in the October/November issue of The Advocate) generally prefer to contribute to a campaign that will dry up once its mission is accomplished, rather than to an institution that will exist forever after. The close-your-doors model is exactly how Evan Wolfson always pictured the work of Freedom to Marry, and it’s an ethic that other marriage organizations in the states—like Love Makes a Family in Connecticut—have embraced. But a very real and common refrain among LGBT advocates is…

Before the revolution, the regime forces of President Bashar al-Assad were doing a routine sweep at a checkpoint while I was on my way to university, and they took all the young people to a detention place, a house in the woods. Immediately I could see that there had been people there before. I could see their blood, their stains. They noticed that I’m a little bit different in the way that I walk and talk, and they started to call me names. They asked questions about my family. They released the others, but they kept me, and I really thought that they would rape and kill me. But then they just released me. I don’t know why. I couldn’t risk going back to university, so I stayed home. A…

I first read Eve’s work in grad school in the mid-’90s. By 1998, I had left grad school and was working in an entry-level job at HarperCollins in New York. There, my supervisor told me she was auditing a course with Eve Sedgwick at CUNY Graduate Center. Eve was teaching a yearlong Proust course, in which students read Remembrance of Things Past over the course of the entire year. I dashed to the Graduate Center and begged my way into the course as an auditor. I ended up matriculating as a Ph.D. candidate one semester later. In the five years I spent as a Ph.D. student, I took every course that Eve taught—I think it was seven different classes. I joked that I majored in “Eve Studies.” To say her…

MARRIAGE EQUALITY COUNTRIES BY CONTINENT 916 million Number of people living in places where same-sex marriage is currently performed, or 13% of the world’s population 34 Number of same-sex couples married at the 2014 Grammys by Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Queen Latifah 130 Number of same-sex couples married at the largest same-sex mass wedding, in Rio de Janeiro in 2013 6% Average annual percentage of marriages in Massachusetts that are between people of the same sex, since its legalization there in 2004 $259 MILLION Economic boost to New York City’s economy over the first year of legalized marriage equality 1.2 million Number of people who voted for marriage equality in Ireland’s referendum, the first such popular vote in the world, or 62% of total voters $52.7 million Cost of most…

How fortunate I am to be living at a time when LGBT rights have achieved such advances. Through my pre-Stonewall eyes, all of it sometimes seems a little unreal. After all, these are eyes that saw bar lights flashing to tell slow-dancing couples of the same sex to pull apart when cops entered on their weekly “vice checks.” They are eyes that 48 years ago saw my loving father imploring me to spend the summer in Washington, D.C., to be cured of deviance by Dr. Frank S. Caprio, a well-known psychiatrist who could “fix” people like me. It’s difficult for many younger gays to believe that the fear and shame of the old days ever existed. What we seldom admit, however, is that at times the present seems intangible. Am…

The late-August raid of the Rentboy.com offices in Manhattan by an interagency task force including Homeland Security, and the resulting arrests of seven past and current Rentboy employees, has caused many LGBT activists to call for an end to the prohibition against prostitution in the United States. Just a week prior to the raids, Amnesty International issued a resolution calling on the nations of the world to decriminalize sex work in the interest of human rights and public health. It was a move endorsed by the Transgender Law Center, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Center for Transgender Equality. Sex workers are—along with men who have sex with men, drug users, and people living under incarceration—one of the…

Goldstein: One of my very first jobs out of the Yale School of Drama was designing clothes at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts for a Tennessee Williams play called Camino Real. When I was a grad student, I allowed my driver’s license to lapse. I couldn’t drive anywhere, so they assigned Kim to the task. He was an intern in the production office. Powers: When I met him for the first time, I said, “I’d love to see your sketches.” That wasn’t a line! He needed a chauffeur so he could shop for antique clothes and fabrics. Over that two-week period, we did some long-range trips into New York City, which is about 3½ hours away from Williamstown. Goldstein: That’s how we got to know each other. It was…

This exhibition highlights the work of renowned gay Québecer ceramists Léopold L. Foulem, Paul Mathieu, and Richard Milette. The trio, whose oeuvres span three decades, pay homage to camp—that quintessentially queer form of countercultural resistance. Exaggerations, appropriations, subversions, vulgarities, ironies, humor, and kitsch abound in the artists’ radical repertoires. Visual standouts in the “Camp Fires” exhibit, curated by Robin Metcalfe, include Milette’s S&M-inflected Guasparre, in which the handle looks like a metal-studded black leather belt affixed to male genitalia to form a teapot; Foulem’s Santa and Blue Boy, which suggests an illicit affair for Old Saint Nick, who stands two tongue-lengths apart from a male youth clasping a hat that resembles a used condom nearly half the kid’s size; and Mathieu’s Crucifixion Bowl, which depicts an eroticized Jesus Christ in…

Sitting down to a gay-themed TV show has often meant watching with one eye closed—figuratively, at least—so as not to notice certain glaring problems. The most common annoyances are characters who bear no resemblance to any queer person, living or dead, who seem to have been created solely because a certain body type or subculture needs to be represented in order to attract viewers, and predictable, politically correct plotting, which appears to have been shaped by a desire to avoid negative feedback from “the community” rather than an active desire to tell an interesting story. Go ahead: Try to think of a gay show that doesn’t suffer from those flaws. If you succeeded, there’s a good chance the program you have in mind was created by Welshman Russell T Davies.…

We’re having a lesbian moment in entertainment right now with several mainstream, sometimes big-budget, films and TV series featuring queer female characters—and sometimes the actresses playing them are queer too. While some of these new films revisit old themes, they’ve been updated and modernized for our post-marriage-equality world. And we have a lot more narratives for queer women—the path of happiness being one. What I’m learning, besides the fact that we’re a pulchritudinous lot, is that each film heroine who emerges as lesbian comes from a creator—a writer, director, or actor—crafting their own version of the lesbian narrative. Carol, based on Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel The Price of Salt, opens in theaters Nov. 20 and is sure to win Cate Blanchett, who plays the title role, an Oscar nomination. Carol…