Innehållsförteckning för June - July 2016 från The Advocate

I was 18 the first time I fell in love with another guy. He lived in Cleveland, Miss. It was about two hours from Madison, the polished upper-middle-class city just north of Jackson where I lived with my mom and stepdad. One weekend, when my parents were away visiting family in Chicago, I drove the two hours to see him. The span of highway that cut through the Delta was terrain that felt untouched by modern society. It exemplified the calm beauty of the state that raised me. I may have recently succumbed to the rush of New York City life, but I often still long for the two-lane highways of Mississippi. It’s an escape with a view. In Jackson, there was a borderline-dilapidated building on a block of Roach…

Unless you have been living under a social media rock, chances are you have seen the spin class flash mob proposal that took the Internet by storm. In less than 24 hours, the marriage proposal of Adam Keller and Jared Marinelli, now known as #TeamJadam, racked up over 3 million views. Their engagement, however, was not the only source of inspiration to come out of the spin class couple, because Keller and Marinelli are also a public example of a mixed HIV-status relationship. On Valentine's Day, JoyRide spin instructor Keller surprised his boyfriend and fellow JoyRide instructor, Marinelli, when Marinelli’s class burst out into a top-secret, choreographed wedding proposal. With Keller on a bike front and center, everyone appeared to be cycling as usual. But, when Marinelli began the warm-up,…

In March 1994, America freaked out when two women kissed on prime-time television. After word leaked that Roseanne would include a scene in which a lesbian, played by Mariel Hemingway, planted a lip lock on the titular character, conservative groups protested, advertisers balked, and ABC decided not to air the episode. It took an angry Roseanne Barr threatening to take the show to another network to make ABC relent, although it felt the need to precede the episode with a stern parental advisory. In March 2016, few people even noticed that ABC had two shows in its lineup focused on the lives of gay teenagers: The Real O’Neals, a sitcom about a Catholic family’s response to 16-year-old Kenny O’Neal’s coming out, and the drama American Crime, which in its second…

“It was really tough to suppress those feelings and hide my sexuality from my parents and extended family. It was like living a lie, always having to pretend to be someone else.” Growing up in a devout Catholic family, I knew that being gay just wasn’t an option. I knew I liked boys from when I was 11. I fell for our class leader in school, but I didn’t have a word for it. Ironically, it was by hearing my schoolmates bully the “homos” that I realized there were other gay people out there. Eventually I hinted at my sexuality to my aunt, back in the ’80s, and she told me that if I was gay I’d contract AIDS. This was a terrifying idea, so I repressed my feelings and…

As Coverson and Joseph sat in a Kuwaiti jail for eight months, the charges began to escalate. By the time they were tried in January, the couple were charged with drug trafficking—the one ounce of K2 had somehow become a pound of hashish. “It was Mother’s Day, and I was expecting my daughter to come home.ButinsteadIfoundoutshewas in a jail cell in Kuwait,” recalls Michelle Jackson. “In jail for what?” On the morning of May 8, 2015, Kuwaiti police kicked in the door of American military contractors Monique Coverson and Larissa Joseph’s apartment and confiscated one ounce of a “tobacco-like substance.” The lesbian couple were sent to the Central Prison in Sulaibiya, Kuwait, for eight months while the substance was sent to Germany for analysis. Upon testing, lab results concluded it…

My name and birthdate are engraved on a grey, granite headstone in Woodlawn Cemetery. At Dad’s death, Mom thought it best if all our names were carved on the headstone. It was cheaper. I have a constant reminder of my immortality, as if I needed it. I’ve been at the threshold of death since age 40 when I left a California testing center holding a piece of a paper that said HIV-positive. My life, and my friends instantly became like batteries, forever viewed as positive or negative. That day I felt fine. There was no diarrhea, no night sweats, no neuropathy, and no pill box. At that moment, I would have been content to be Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt caught in the moment, never to change, looking like…

THE TWO MAIN relationships in the life of Colin (Gerald McCullouch, CSI, the BearCity trilogy), a 40-something sports columnist and TV host in Pittsburgh, are his friendship with his best buddy Stewart (Dan Via), a droll but fussy loner, and his complicated (and not just for its May-September qualities) romance with a 21-year-old office intern nicknamed “Tee” (Jaime Cepero, Smash). Colin, the gay daddy of the title, may have been a serial hookup artist, but something about Tee has drawn him in like no other. Daddy is McCullouch’s feature directorial debut, from a screenplay by Via, who also wrote the off-Broadway stage play on which the film is based—and in which the pair starred in New York and Los Angeles runs. “Living with this story for four years was certainly…

Ryannah Quigley grew up in a modest home in Kaysville, Utah, with 22 siblings. Her father was a bishop, the head of a congregation, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The family was staunchly Mormon. By age 7, Quigley—who was assigned male at birth—began to wear women’s clothing, at times taking down the curtains to make dresses. On many occasions, her parents attempted to quash the problem—as they saw it—but to little avail. Worried that this behavior not only would induce their other children into perversion but might hinder the entire family’s chances of meeting God in the hereafter, the Quigleys relinquished custody of their child to the state foster care system, where she bounced around from foster homes to treatment centers to hospitals around the…

In the spring of 1987, as the Midwest was thawing out, Brent Brand, a cute gay teen—or maybe bisexual, maybe even he didn’t know yet—from Vincennes, Ind., was found dead in a drainage ditch in nearby Illinois. It was more than a decade before Matthew Shepard was found tied to a fence, before the media made Shepard the ultimate symbol of the deadly violence of gay bashing. But in the 1980s, things were different. “The antigay rhetoric being broadcast into American living rooms by televangelists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker—their vitriol wrapped in religion only escalated with the onset of the national AIDS crisis,” recalls J. Patrick Redmond, author of a new novel set in that era, Some Go Hungry. He, like Brand, was a teenager at…

One small pill contains rilpivirine, emtricitabine, and tenofovir alafenamide (TAF). Ask your healthcare provider if ODEFSEY is right for you. To learn more visit ODEFSEY.com Brief Summary of Patient Information about ODEFSEY ODEFSEY (oh-DEF-see) (emtricitabine, rilpivirine and tenofovir alafenamide) tablets Important: Ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist about medicines that should not be taken with ODEFSEY. There may be new information about ODEFSEY. This information is only a summary and does not take the place of talking with your healthcare provider about your medical condition or treatment. What is the most important information I should know about ODEFSEY? ODEFSEY can cause serious side effects, including: • Build-up of lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Lactic acidosis may happen in some people who take ODEFSEY or similar medicines. Lactic acidosis…

When Justice Antonin Scalia died, many liberal court-watchers noted cheerfully that the proudly reactionary justice was unable to block the Supreme Court’s chief civil rights achievement of the century so far: Obergefell v. Hodges, the vindication of marriage rights for same-sex couples. This fact was often observed with a sigh of relief, as if marriage equality were the climactic legal battle for LGBT Americans and every other right would now surely fall into place. That, however, is hardly the case. The post-Scalia court will likely confront a host of legal questions important to the LGBT community, from antigay “religious liberty” and employment discrimination to trans rights and bathroom access. It is not at all clear that the champion of marriage equality, Justice Anthony Kennedy, will again side with the liberals…

“I used to walk by and check him out and leave unsigned love notes on his counter,” Melendez remembered. “He would smile at me,” Arrue said, “so I knew it was him.” At a Peruvian airport in 1983, Javier Melendez, a handsome 19-year-old with dark wavy hair and sweet brown eyes, spotted the rugged good looks of 25-year-old Rodolfo Arrue. The men, born and raised in the country’s capital, Lima, worked for competing airlines in close proximity to each other. “I used to walk by and check him out and leave unsigned love notes on his counter,” Melendez remembered. “He would smile at me,” Arrue said, “so I knew it was him.” The notes were anonymous for good reason. Peru remains one of the most homophobic countries in South America.…

Worldwide, a typical Grindr user spends approximately two hours a day on the app. That’s more time than we spend eating, and more time than most of us spend exercising. It’s longer than a Los Angeles commute. Mobile geolocation dating apps are relatively new (Grindr was launched in 2009), but unlike the desktop online experience of chat rooms and forums, the mobility of the mobile app means it can be used at the office, or on the toilet, or at dinner with your parents, or even at a gay bar. Or all day. The app offers access to one million men at any given moment, according to Ansley Brown, a representative for Grindr at PR Consulting, and the men are of all ages, races, and body types. There’s something, presumably,…

The concepts of Black Pride and Gay Pride developed almost concurrently in the United States. In 1968, James Brown released “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” the same year Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in defiance on the medal podium at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. In 1969, young street kids, many of them black and Latino, fought to be seen, heard, and respected at New York’s Stonewall Inn. The following decade saw the rise of black consciousness and gay liberation—the “black is beautiful” movement; the Black Panthers; the premiere of and subsequent national obsession with Roots in 1977; the first Pride marches in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles in 1970; the American Psychiatric Association declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in…