Indholdsfortegnelse for October - November 2019 i The Advocate

YOU PROBABLY KNOW that National Coming Out Day is October 11. I’ve written so many times about coming out in different ways: as a les-bi-queer girl; as the wife of a transgender man; as someone with an invisible disability; as a white-passing woman of color. What I’ve found in my years of journalism and activism is that coming out feels freeing for most people when it’s done on their own time. I have no qualms about outing folks who are doing real harm to our community, but for everyone else, coming out should be your own impetus. I feel for folks like Ed Smart (pg. 11) who came out in a Facebook message to family and friends without realizing how much media would amplify and run with it. Spend any…

THE GLOUCESTER COUNTY, Va., School Board violated transgender student Gavin Grimm’s constitutional rights by denying him use of the boys’ restroom while in high school, a federal judge ruled in August. The board violated Grimm’s equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as his right to be free of sex discrimination under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law, Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled. She also ordered the school district to update the high school transcripts for Grimm, who graduated in 2017, to reflect his male gender and provide copies to him within 10 days. The ruling is the latest chapter in a long legal saga that at…

From fast food to instant insurance quotes, Americans place a premium on speed. It seems only in retrospect we lament about not appreciating the time we have. Our addiction to the daily rush of life can blind us to the benefits of a slower lifestyle, but we need only look to Denmark and Sweden for a different perspective. Both countries have long cultural traditions that value the little things in life, which can help you simplify, downsize, or fight FOMO. Danes are fiercely proud of hygge, a philosophy loosely translated as taking comfort and intrinsic rejuvenation from the simple things around us. Sweden’s relaxing national mind-set, lagom, is, for lack of a better analogy, Goldilocks’s mantra of not too much, not too little, but just right. The differences between the…

MY FIRST CRUSH on a boy was on Brad in the fifth grade, though I certainly didn’t know it was a crush at the time. It was the early days of the internet and he would print out porn pictures from his dial-up connection and bring them into school in a Lisa Frank folder. It was mostly just titties and stuff, but a few of the boys in class, Brad, and I would go to a quiet part of the playground, open up the folder, and look at these pages of porn. Hell, if you told me now, as an openly gay adult, that you had a Lisa Frank folder full of boob photos, I’d probably be just as excited about it as I was then. There was one picture…

LOOKING BACK on all the winners of the Emmy Award-winning drag crossover hit RuPaul’s Drag Race, it certainly is an eclectic crowd. But there is a special sort of triumph when the dark horse of the season—like the irrepressible and flexible Yvie Oddly (Jovan Bridges)—rips through the competition to win the race. On a rare day of rest from the RPDR season 11 tour, Oddly spoke with us about his newfound fame, the future of his career, and representing those living with invisible disabilities. On fame, the Denver native says, “I’m glad people like my art, but that’s really the only thing I’ve ever wanted to get out of this experience. I don’t really care a whole lot about the rest.” It was Oddly’s creativity that set him apart and eventually…

New Hampshire State Rep. and author Lisa Bunker’s Felix Yz and Zenobia July, aimed at middle school students, are both heavily populated with strong LGBTQ characters. Felix Yz (pronounced “Felix is”) tells the story of a gay middle school boy fused with a hyper-intelligent fourth-dimensional alien (Yz). Zenobia July is about a trans girl living a new life in Maine with her lesbian aunts. Like Zenobia, Bunker is also trans, and while she directs her work at mainstream middle school readers, the LGBTQ inclusion is intentional. “I very much on purpose made a whole bunch of characters LGBTQ,” Bunker says. “There’s a whole bunch of people in the world who don’t realize that the queer community exists.” The former community radio program director notes that requests from her own son…

Thank you for making Out and THEADVOCATE a part of your lives. For over 50 years, our magazines have been the source of LGBTQ news, culture and entertainment and we are excited to continue being that for you. As we look to 2020 — a year when LGBTQ voices will play an important role in the biggest Presidential race of our time — we wanted to inform you of a few changes that will enable us to continue serving you best. Beginning next year, Out will have 6 bold issues each year. This reduction will allow us to deliver even more high-quality content that will help you understand where our movement is and where it is going. We also will be ramping up our digital sites to help ensure that…

IN JULY, 17-YEAR-OLD aspiring Instagram influencer Bianca Devins came out as bisexual as part of a Q&A with her followers. The next day she was murdered. Devins met Brandon Andrew Clark, 21, on Instagram and the two started a romantic relationship. According to police reports, after attending a concert together in New York City on July 13, the pair returned to Utica, N.Y., and began an argument, which ended with Clark murdering Devins, partially decapitating her with a knife and calling 911 to confess to the crime. When police arrived on the scene, they say, Clark stabbed himself in the neck with the same knife he’d used to kill Devins, lay down across her body, and began taking photos of himself with her corpse. Clark has been arrested and charged…

FOR ANYONE WHO knows Karamo Brown beyond his role as the warm, sensitive but strong, tear-inducing culture guru on Queer Eye, they know his most important role in life is dad. Before the 38-year-old father of two became part of the Fab Five and showed us his smooth moves on this season of Dancing With the Stars, Karamo was introduced to the world as the first out Black gay man on reality TV, on MTV’s The Real World: Philadelphia in 2004. Following some admitted issues dealing with the pitfalls of fame after the show, he took a conscious step away from the spotlight and resumed his pre-TV career path in social work. “I got addicted to drugs… and was like partying every night, wasting away, killing myself, basically, because I…

Jovan Bridges, better known as Yvie Oddly, revealed on RuPaul’s Drag Race that he suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. EDS is actually a group of related genetic disorders affecting connective tissues that support the skin, bones, blood vessels, and other organs and tissues. Symptoms range from mildly loose joints to life-threatening complications. There are 13 recognized types of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Bridges suffers from type 3, also known as hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS). Though this type of EDS is generally considered less severe, significant complications, such as spontaneous bone dislocations, are common and can be extremely painful (something we saw Bridges struggle with on the show) Currently, there is no cure. You can find info at Ehlers-Danlos.com.…

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”—Toni Morrison “I didn’t know that words could do what they did until Toni Morrison.”—DeRay Mckesson, gay Black Lives Matter activist, writer, and host of the podcast Pod Save the People. “Thank you for your gifts, for showing us how to do it, that we CAN and SHOULD write. I love you despite only knowing you through your writing, which really is, I guess, the best way to be known. I carried this quote from Sula with me as a young girl searching for, making, creating myself: ‘I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.’”—Janet Mock, trans activist and producer-writer of Pose. Toni Morrison died in…

After being forced to flee New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, transgender starlet Amiyah Scott moved to Atlanta. There she quickly made a name for herself in the ballroom community, where, despite still being a teenager, she quickly dominated the competition. Her success led to a strong following online—which is where Lee Daniels discovered her before casting her on the Fox series Star. Scott’s role on Star, now in its third season, makes her one of the first out trans actors to be a series regular on a network show. Scott recently sat down with The Advocate’s podcast, LGBTQ&A, which documents modern queer and trans history, to talk about her groundbreaking character, why it’s difficult to play a character that’s gone through so many of the things she went through, and…

Cooking was the last thing on Thomas Romero’s mind growing up in Sacramento, Calif. Always one to look for opportunities to learn, his search eventually led him to Oakland, where he lived for seven years. It was only the beginning of a long road toward culinary success. Now the head chef at ACME (AcmeNYC.com), a new American bistro located in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood, Romero is the first to tell you that his journey was anything but cliché. The out gay chef had no interest in cooking professionally until he was 22 years old. At the time, he was pursuing a degree in nursing and hoping to have a career in hospice care. That is, until the day he went to work and realized that nursing “wasn’t the type of place…

It’s been another brutal year so far for Black trans women, in particular, so there are many to honor for Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20. Founded by activist and journalist Gwendolyn Ann Smith after the 1998 murder of a Massachusetts transgender woman, Rita Hester, whose case remains unsolved, TDOR remembers the names and faces of those killed each year. Stories of murdered transgender people are rarely covered properly by major news outlets, and their deaths aren’t officially counted by any government agency. As in years past, the majority of this year’s victims are women of color and almost all died due to gun violence. Here are the names of transgender people murdered this year (as of August 15). DANA MARTIN When Martin’s body was discovered in January in…

IT MAY BE Spain’s number one app (beating out Netflix, Instagram, and YouTube), but that’s not the only mission of Unfold. The viral app that helps social media users create engaging Stories on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat is also leading the way in tech companies giving to HIV causes. Last December, it raised nearly $70,000 from its exclusive 99 cent (UNFOLD)RED template collection for the U.S. Fund to fight AIDS with (RED). Unfold’s contribution was enough to provide over 350,000 days of life-saving HIV medication in sub-Saharan Africa. The gay cofounder and CEO of Unfold. app, Alfonso Cobo, 27, saw his fast-growing app amass 10 million users in less than a year and used some of that money to give back monthly to organizations such as the Ali Forney Center…

You may think you don’t know Michael D. Cohen’s work, but you undoubtably do. Like many character actors who fill out casts of television shows and movies but rarely garner leading roles, Cohen has made a career out of disappearing into a bevy of supporting characters. In the past two decades he’s appeared in literally dozens of roles, many on hit TV shows including The Real O’Neals, The Mindy Project, 2 Broke Girls, Modern Family, and My Name Is Earl. Earlier this year, Cohen—who starred on Grossology and now plays a central character on Henry Danger, the long-running Nickelodeon sitcom—stepped into the spotlight in a whole new way by publicly sharing that he is a transgender man. Instantly, Cohen became one of Hollywood’s most visible and recognizable trans men, perhaps…

When Netflix dropped Orange Is the New Black season 1 in the summer of 2013, it changed TV forever. It was one of the first truly bingeable shows to air on streaming—literally altering the way viewers consumed content. But more than its power to render enthralled fans helpless to turn away for hours when a new season was released, it excavated the intersections of issues facing women of color, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans women. And it did it with humor and heart while tackling tough issues around classism, white privilege, sexual violence, addiction, police brutality, and the prison industrial complex. The landmark series from creator Jenji Kohan (Weeds, Glow), based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, deployed lead character Piper (Taylor Schilling)—a bisexual white woman happily enjoying her upper-class suburban advantages until…

Hotel Maya LGBTQ travelers have discovered what locals know: Long Beach, Calif.’s Hotel Maya offers a fun and affordable weekend by the ocean that’s uniquely SoCal, fusing both Latinx and beachy Cali vibes, Hotel Maya is a waterfront hotspot across the harbor from downtown Long Beach and minutes to the famed Queen Mary (don’t miss Dark Harbor, the boat’s ghoulish Halloween celebration); yet only 30 minutes from Los Angeles International Airport. The resort features numerous conference and banquet rooms (popular for same-sex weddings), an outdoor garden, a circular wall of waterfalls, and an impressive variety of tropical plants (and over 400 palm trees). A quick walk leads to a dock with water taxis that will take you across the bay for a few bucks. Its restaurant, Fuego, is in a…

ASIAN-AMERICANS ARE the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, but they are still not reflected widely in sports, nor are there widespread support systems for Asian-American LGBTQ athletes to come out. Amazin LeThi has made it her mission to change that. In 2014, the Australian-born athlete and activist became the first Asian ambassador for Athlete Ally, a nonprofit LGBTQ athletic advocacy group. In August, she became the first Asian ambassador for Stonewall U.K., Europe’s largest LGBTQ organization. Now with her own organization, Asian Athletes Alliance, which launched this summer, she’s advocating for LGBTQ allyship within the Asian community itself by igniting a larger discussion about equality and sports. LeThi’s mission couldn’t come at a better time. Asia will soon play host to several major sporting events—including the 2020 Summer…