Indholdsfortegnelse for February - March 2015 i The Advocate

STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used as a complete single-tablet regimen to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. Patient Information STRIBILD® (STRY-bild) (elvitegravir 150 mg/cobicistat 150 mg/emtricitabine 200 mg/ tenofovir disoproxil fumarate 300 mg) tablets Brief summary of full Prescribing Information. For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information, including Patient Information. What is STRIBILD? • STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD is a complete regimen and should not be used with other HIV-1 medicines. • STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. You must stay on continuous HIV-1 therapy to control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses. • Ask your healthcare provider about…

PERSON OF THE YEAR: VLADIMIR PUTIN Our December 2014/January 2015 cover and accompanying citation of Russian president Vladimir Putin as person of the year brought cheers and jeers, and a surprising number of reports in other media outlets that our cover was “satirical.” (For the record, there was nothing satirical about it. We were dead serious.) Most responses to the choice and the cover fell into one of three categories: 1) “The cover was genius,” 2) “The Advocate should have honored a hero, not cited a villain,” or, 3) “How could you be honoring Putin?” (Maybe those readers didn’t notice the strategic placement of the cover line.) There was a negligible fourth category of responses that went something like: “You stupid Americans and your vile homo propaganda!” We’re not expecting…

Most people discussing the crisis in Ferguson, Mo., are missing the point. The countless conversations, in social settings and on social media in the time leading up to and following the grand jury decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson, focused on the minute details of who did what and when. But the truth is that we may never know the truth. Participating in these discussions and watching them play out makes it clear to me that most people find it impossible to transcend their own experience. This lowers the bar for discussion and reveals a shocking lack sympathy for others. An indifferent attitude is particularly offensive when it comes from white LGBT people who purport to be interested in furthering human rights, but only as it pertains to themselves.…

Ezra Miller, best known for his roles in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and We Have to Talk About Kevin, will be speeding to screens in 2018 in DC Universe’s The Flash. The news marks the first time an openly queer actor has been cast to play a superhero movie’s title role. He’s also the first out actor to be cast as a superhero in a major comics franchise. Ellen Page was cast as Kitty Pryde in the X-Men films, but before coming out in 2014; Ian McKellen, out since 1988, also takes a major role in that series, but as supervillain Magneto. “I have a lot of really wonderful friends who are of very different sexes and genders,” Miller told Out in 2012. “I am very much in…

In an apparent homophobic arson attack, Kiev’s historic Zhovten cinema was set ablaze on October 29, during the screening of an LGBT film. Though no injuries were reported among the 100 or so moviegoers, the city’s oldest theater was left badly damaged. The Moscow Times report suggested the attack was made in protest against the screening of the French film Summer Nights, which explores the life of drag queens during the late 1950s. It was shown during Sunny Bunny, a queer program of the Molodist International Film Festival. The festival’s coordinator, Ljosha Chashchyn, was at the screening and witnessed the attack. “The fire started before [10 p.m.]. At first there was a strange noise, but then the flames spread very quickly through the top rows of the cinema hall,” he…

We start at twilight, piling in the van for the bumpy ride to Mosquito Bay. We park in a sandy lot, and our guides ease the kayaks into the dark waters. “Don’t jump in,” Enrique instructs. While this bioluminescent bay has had thousands of visitors who have enjoyed a dip in the spectacular lagoon, the government is attempting to protect the delicate, microscopic organisms that glow when disturbed, so it doesn’t want people spoiling the water with chemicals and other toxins. Although my partner was born and raised in Puerto Rico, he’d never visited Vieques (a former U.S. military zone), and no trip to the tiny, 21-mile-long island off the coast of Puerto Rico is complete without a trip to Bio Bay, as it’s known. As we paddle out to…

If there’s one thing the 2014 midterms demonstrated, it’s that the LGBT movement is in political trouble. No, not simply because Republicans swept the nation. It’s worse. We were virtually nowhere in the discourse. Some analysts took this as a welcome turn of events. “It’s the end of the wedge!” they proclaimed. True. But it also meant that our political agenda—whatever that might be—got exactly zero airtime. Perhaps that’s because, aside from winning marriage equality, no one really knows what our political agenda is anymore. At the outset of the 2008 election, the battle lines on LGBT issues were already clearly drawn: hate crimes, employment protections, repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, and eventually seeking marriage equality. Those goals have now been gutted either because…

Whether 37,000-year-old cave paintings of female anatomy qualify as porn is debatable—porn is defined in a cultural context. Nevertheless, as a species we’ve appreciated erotic imagery since our earliest days. But in the two decades since the Internet moved inextricably into our daily lives, it has brought nearly unfettered access to an essentially infinite amount of sexually explicit material. A study published last year by the University of East London indicated that almost 80% of boys had seen people having sex by age of 16, and some estimates put the volume of Internet traffic devoted in one way or another to sex as high as 50%. Despite porn’s ubiquity, there has been very little research into what effect it has on human brain structure and function. Perhaps the only exception…

Shortly after the November polls revealed that democratic congressional hopeful Clay Aiken failed to dethrone Republican incumbent Renee Ellmers (he lost by 18 points) in North Carolina’s second district, Esquire Network announced plans to air a four-part docuseries on the American Idol alum’s campaign. Controversy ensued. As reported by Karen Ocamb in Los Angeles’s LGBT magazine Frontiers, the donors of one particular L.A. fundraiser felt duped, wondering whether Aiken’s whole political enterprise was a mere publicity stunt. Two people in particular—host Michael Corbett and actor Steve Tyler, who spearheaded the fundraising—felt betrayed. Aiken neglected to inform them that his documentarians (Academy Award winner Simon Chinn and his Emmy Award-winning cousin, Jonathan Chinn) would be showing up to film the extravaganza, and the film crew allegedly lied to the attendees in…

People think they know New Orleans. Whether they’ve been to the city or not, they have definite ideas about what the city is or isn’t. And if they have been there, the city is fixed in their minds as the way they experienced it: the parties at Mardi Gras, the hookups at Southern Decadence, the bucolic families at Papa Noel, the students flooding Uptown. But if New Orleans as a city had a gender it’d be genderqueer. It’s a languid metropolis that’s always in flux, always in some state of transition. I’ve been there nearly 60 times now, beginning with the 1984 World’s Fair, when I was 16—a heady time for a girl coming into her own sexuality. There were also four stints living there, first in college (Tulane, later…

There have been times when I’ve stood alone in a room emitting witty remarks, as couples and groups giggle and saunter by, and I’ve realized the absolute horror: I am a gay cliché. I am an embodiment of the guy in the corner who spews wisecracks and gains some popularity because he says things to jazz up an otherwise bland night. I am the witty gay. This wouldn’t be so horrible except for two things. One, the wit may very well be a coping mechanism, as well as an attention-getting device. It’s a way to simultaneously hide and stand out, since witticisms allow you to stay on the outskirts of the central action while achieving some glittery fallout because you dare to be funny. Two, as I’ve mentioned before (witty…

The National Organization for Marriage is barely clinging to life, according to the group’s reluctantly released tax returns for 2013. The Human Rights Campaign reported the contents of the NOM’s tax returns on its blog in November but received the information only after repeated requests and after HRC filed a complaint with the IRS to compel NOM to release its 2013 Form 990, as required by federal law. NOM provided the documents two days after the legally mandated November 17 deadline. The main findings are that NOM’s donors have virtually vanished. Meanwhile, NOM’s debt has ballooned to $2.5 million in 2013, from $2 million a year earlier. Of the $5.1 million that NOM raised last year, more than half came from just two donors. That’s a roughly 50% drop in…

After a long wait and much deliberation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced the approval of more than 1,000 new generic top-level domains. Among them are .cheap, .ninja, and .lgbt. ICANN also announced that it had rejected an application from gay businessman Scott Seitz’s organization Dot-gay LLC to administer .gay. Had it been approved, Dotgay LLC would license.gay to organizations within the LGBT community. But ICANN determined that Dotgay LLC failed to represent a community, giving it zero out of four points for its “nexus between proposed string and community” in its 16-point evaluation. Consequently, the potentially lucrative .gay will be auctioned off, and Dotgay LLC will have to contend with three other much larger competitors with an eye on making money from the domain extension. This…

Thriving on food, wine, and spending time with friends—nobody knows how to live like the Spanish. Even if the daily schedule (especially siesta) takes a little getting accustomed to, the quality of life Spain offers makes it thoroughly worth working around some occasional odd shop hours. Beautiful Barcelona is a dreamy mix (though not a blend) of gothic and modern, Spanish and Catalan, from the bustling La Rambla rife with locals and tourists, to the wine country nearby. It’s a marvel on the Mediterranean. It’s been years since neighboring Sitges has been a sleepy fishing village—LGBT visitors are unlikely to get much rest, unless it’s a nap on a sunny beach. The old and the new contrast in chic chiaroscuro in Madrid’s high rises and centuries-old plazas, palaces, and pop-up…

The night air had cooled, a contrast from earlier in the day when the summer sun soared high and bright overhead. Around me, a crowd (mostly gay, mostly male, mostly shirtless) undulated to a deep, rolling bass line heaved at us from onstage by European house duo Chus & Ceballos. As it tapered into a distant storm of drumbeats, the lights faded to a glow and highlighted the twinkling cityscape on one side and the glimmering waterfront on the other. A young woman wearing a backpack and sparkly makeup pranced toward us, cackled something in French, and vanished back into the sea of bodies. I wiped the sweat off my brow and chugged some water as a flash of light anticipated the return of the drums. The beat hung overhead…

ON OCTOBER 30, 2014, TIM COOK TOLD THE WORLD HE WAS PROUD TO BE GAY, ending years of speculation and making him the first CEO of a Fortune 500 company to come out of the closet willingly. For a man so famously private, his decision to reveal a very personal part of himself was not an insubstantial decision for the CEO of one of the world’s most valuable companies. Given the remarkable advances in civil rights, it’s notable that the corner office suite is one of the last remaining frontiers for LGBT people. And it’s clear that financial performance isn’t the only measure by which CEOs are evaluated. Is Cook an anomaly, or will the next wave in corporate culture be one in which the professional meets the personal, in…