Innehållsförteckning för April - May 2016 från The Advocate

THE EDUCATION OF MS. JENNER Our February/March issue’s profile of Caitlyn Jenner focused on the critiques she’s received as the world’s most visible transgender person. Though she is increasingly fluent in the language of advocates, she rejects the idea that she is a spokesperson, a point reader Vanessa Sheridan takes up: “How can someone who knows relatively nothing about… the real trans experience presume to be an educator on that same transgender community?… And yet, that lack of qualification doesn’t appear to give her pause or be an obstacle in any way. She plows ahead, apparently blissful in her ignorance and ready to speak on trans issues at the drop of a hat. With great power comes great responsibility, Ms. Jenner, and part of great responsibility includes doing the work…

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey’s new documentary, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, is an unflinching look at Robert Mapplethorpe’s artistic life, which mirrors his unflinching images of nude bodybuilders, close-ups of erections, and objects inserted into bodily orifices. Mapplethorpe went into the dark, unlit recesses of consensual gay sex and coaxed it into the camera’s view. To wit, Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait (1978), in which he wears leather chaps and a vest and stands crouched and curled, so that his face and buttocks both face the camera; a bullwhip handle has been inserted into his rectum. In an era before a handheld Internet, his images rocked multiple worlds: art, sex, and politics, to name a few. Those only familiar with his more provocative and demanding works may be startled to see…

“When my partner and I have traveled internationally as a couple, and even with groups of gay friends, we’ve never totally let our guards down,” says Australian attorney Aaron Zoanetti, who now lives in London. “And it’s not because the hotels haven’t been welcoming of us…it’s been more because of the other travelers in the resort. There always seemed to be a look here or there, and we just didn’t feel comfortable being ourselves.” Looking around for just his kind of weeklong beach holiday for gay men, Zoanetti found that “there just wasn’t anything that met our needs,” he says. “Sure, we want to meet and party with other gay travelers, but we also want to get out and experience the destination and chill out a bit too.” After discussing…

In one of the more ghastly moments in recent daytime television memory, a charlatan in Mexico, sought out by Charlie Sheen, claimed to have cured Sheen of his HIV. He explained that he was so confident of his success that he withdrew Sheen’s blood and injected it into himself. The sickening story was told during a two-part interview with Sheen on The Dr. Oz Show, but it felt more like an episode of American Horror Story: AIDS. For 30 years, activists have changed the course of HIV treatment through everything from protesting the pharmaceutical industry to successfully redesigning and accelerating the Food and Drug Administration’s clinical trial process. They are directly responsible for the life-extending medications that neutralized the HIV in Sheen’s body—the very medications he blithely tossed aside before…

AFTER LEARNING he couldn’t buy life insurance on his own because he is HIV-positive, Mike Grant thought it would be worth exploring whether he might qualify for coverage under a group plan offered by his husband’s employer. “I was thinking, maybe because it’s a group plan, just maybe I could possibly get $100,000 of coverage,” Grant says. He was prepared for the possibility that his HIV status might make him ineligible for even a group plan, but he was unprepared for what happened the moment he revealed his status to the employer’s insurance broker. “He was excited because it was going to be a big policy,” he recalls. “I was thinking, Great! This is going fantastic. It looks like there’s not going to be an issue. Then I said, ‘Before…

In Hello, My Name Is Doris, you play Sally Field’s love interest. Where does one go from there? [Laughs] I know. It’s over, man. I’m going out on top. I think the second scene we shot was where I’m shirtless, we’re making out, and I throw her up on a counter. After that, it’s all pretty much a blur. What’s your favorite Sally Field movie? Maybe Steel Magnolias, because I remember that’s the only movie I watched as a kid where death really resonated with me. I thought Terms of Endearment was a movie where Jack Nicholson played a really cool astronaut. I watched it years later, as an adult, and thought, Where did all the cancer come from? You played gay characters on Greekand Happy Endings. Are you conscious…

We’re in the thick of the primary season, and the Democratic contenders for the presidential nomination are vying for the title of “Best on LGBT Issues.” That’s great for the national debate, but this is politics, so there’s mud being slung. Hillary Clinton’s surrogates have latched on to a 1982 Bernie Sanders-signed, evangelical-backed resolution for “We Believe in Marriage Week,” affirming marriage as only between a man and a woman. Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, Vt., supported Pride parades and civil unions, but he only went on record for marriage equality as of 2009. But Clinton’s side would do well to back off, as she has her own checkered past on LGBT rights. Despite her affirming that “gay rights are human rights” before a U.N. audience in 2011, emails emerged…

Bullied Bakers “Regarding establishment GOP leaders, it seems they’re becoming willing tools of the gaystapo, the same revolutionaries who routinely bully bakers, florists, photographers and innkeepers without batting an eyelash.” —LINDA HARVEY, FOUNDER OF MISSION:AMERICA Sexual Exhaustion “It will be interesting to know that a homosexual [economist John Maynard Keynes] ruined the world…It makes a lot of sense: Sexual nihilism, of course, will produce sexual burnout, and that must be tied to economic burnout and epistemological burnout as well when societies lose the will to live.” —KEVIN SWANSON, PASTOR Hungry Enemies “We have to understand who the enemy is and what he wants to do. He wants to devour our homes. He wants to devour this nation, and we have to be so careful who we let our kids hang…

He joined a nearby gym upstairs at Sheridan Square. There was lots of loud joking among the folks working out; some of them were grotesquely muscular and one guy had to be helped up the stairs by his brother. Every day the guy ate an entire rotisserie chicken and drank a pint of bull’s blood. Guy couldn’t understand most of the gibes, but it seemed half the folks were gay and half normal and they were joking about which orientation was more amusing: “Just think of dick as pussy on a stick,” one of the loudmouths guffawed. The population of the gym was at the tipping point between gay and normal. In the cedar-lined sauna a polite flabby man with a bushy gray mustache and expensive sapphire eyes and the…

New York-based writer, TV host, and trans advocate Janet Mock is the author of the bestseller Redefining Realness. Her writing has appeared in publications like BlackBook, Elle, and Marie Claire. She is at work on her next memoir, Firsts, from Atria Books in 2017. C. Brian Smith has been contributing to The Advocate since 2009. Originally from Connecticut, he relocated to Los Angeles in 2006 to work in a number of sitcom writers’ rooms (The Cleveland Show, My Boys, Accidentally on Purpose). Smith’s writing has been published in Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, UrbanDaddy, and OutTraveler. Mark S. King is an HIV advocate and writer living in Baltimore. His award-winning blog, MyFabulousDisease.com, chronicles life with HIV and the people and issues that define the epidemic. Twitter.com/TheAdvocateMag Facebook.com/TheAdvocate Instagram.com/TheAdvocateMag…

Four days before Christmas 2015, Air Force Maj. Adrianna Vorderbruggen was killed when a Taliban suicide bomber drove a motorcycle packed with explosives into a security patrol she was leading near Bagram Air Base in eastern Afghanistan. It was the deadliest day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan in 18 months, in what was supposed to be the waning days of the war. Five others were killed in the attack, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility. Vorderbruggen is remembered as a wife, mother, sister, daughter, and friend to many. “She’s a hero, and I hope she’s a hero to all of us, not just to me,” remembers her older brother Christopher. Contrary to some reports, Vorderbruggen was not the first active-duty openly gay female service member to die in combat.…

“Accurate Identification of a Preference for Insertive Versus Receptive Intercourse from Static Facial Cues of Gay Men” By Konstantin O. Tskhay and Nicholas O. Rule, Archives of Sexual Behavior In a study originally published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers Konstantin O. Tskhay and Nicholas O. Rule reported findings from research with interesting implications for queer sexuality. The paper, “Accurate Identification of a Preference for Insertive Versus Receptive Intercourse from Static Facial Cues of Gay Men,” detailed the results of two studies that aimed to see if casual observers could tell tops from bottoms. Two hundred faces were culled from photographs found in the online dating profiles of gay men—evenly split between self-professed tops and bottoms—by research assistants who were hypothesis-blind (meaning they had no knowledge of the study…

“People sense a bit of a childlike quality in me, both in my enthusiasm and also my penchant for stirring things up. I get the ‘naughty pixie’ thing a lot.” Ever since he burst onto our shores in 1998, Scottish actor-singer-writer Alan Cumming has been a pervasive force in entertainment, illuminating projects with his frisky adventurousness and wry wit. On Broadway, he redefined the sensationally sleazy role of the MC in Cabaret, and he went on to sprinkle his presence into quirky movies through the years, from X-Men 2 to Burlesque. In cabarets, he’s served a bracing mix of standards and original songs, always laced with his personal twinkle. (His new album is Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs.) And since 2010, Alan’s costarred in The Good Wife, now in its…

300 Approximate number of love verses written by Michelangelo to young Italian nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri 1870 Year Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania, the earliest known novel about a gay relationship, was published in the U.S. N o 20No 99No 126 Shakespeare’s love sonnets that are clearly dedicated to men. 7th Circle of hell reserved for Sodomites, according to Dante’s Inferno ~200 Remaining fragments poetry written by Sappho, the same-sex loving resident of Lesbos, whose island home inspired the term lesbian 1791 Year Dream of the Red Chamber was published in China; it featured a bisexual character and an account of gay bashing 1928 Year of publication of the first lesbian-themed novel written in English, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness 24 Age at which…

“Twitter is half me trying to live in the world, and half me processing and sharing the world. I share a lot, and some of that is to keep me honest.” The first time I sit down with DeRay Mckesson—the most followed activist in the Black Lives Matter movement—I am struck by his familiarity. This feeling of knowingness is unique to my generation: millennials who’ve grown up not only with the Internet but on the Internet, where our online selves—our avatars and selfies and tweets—take the lead. He feels familiar—like I know he loves Spotify and uses Dove soap; I’ve seen his blue vest and raised fist on the streets of Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore; I’ve watched him respond to and block trolls. Yet he remains unknown. Consuming images…

Marijane Meaker isn’t a household name, but she should be. A literary pioneer many times over, she wrote the 1952 novel Spring Fire, one of the first lesbian “pulps,” giving thousands of Americans their first glimpse of a sexually compatible same-sex couple, even if the rules of the genre required that the relationship end badly. Her books about lesbian life in New York City, which appeared between 1955 and 1972, were indispensable guides to a hidden world. And beginning in the 1970s, she was one of the first authors to write for young adults, often telling stories of underdogs and “others,” including gay and lesbian teenagers. Over a career spanning 65 years, more than 60 books, and millions of copies sold, she has consistently, if not exclusively, published groundbreaking work…