For those within the LGBTQ community and our allies, events like this are especially important because issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation are often entwined and complicated. Some of the same types of factors that impact and marginalized the African-American community also marginalized gay, lesbian, bi and trans persons.
The single most important thing to do in relation to groups like the FRC, is to call them out and hold them accountable for their lies and fear mongering. WE shouldn’t try to silence them. To do so allows their monster images to remain rather than shrivel in the light of the truth. We need to let them speak this stuff and then confront it with reality- our realities and real sharing of our real humanity.
Having LGBTQ impact upon the City is not only about so-called LGBTQ Rights related stuff. Rather, Pittsburgh will progress and grow when individuals from all sorts of communities across the City come together and work together on the everyday stuff that is all about the life of the City.
I have no intentions of watching the games, and I encourage everyone to make their own choices about watching. I just don’t however, want to feed into the fallacy that if we all fail to watch, it is somehow a “win” for the LGBTQ community. It isn’t. There is no strategy that creates a win for the LGBTQ Community, and especially not for the Russian LGBTQ community.
Gay and gaydar are both terms that exclude and carry connotations that aren’t really very helpful today, or in thinking about changes to the heteronormativity of the status quo.
Maybe Aravosis will be successful and his aggressive pushing will be the right stuff to force Aaron Schock out of the closet, but I’m predicting it won’t succeed. Why isn’t anyone talking about the DC gay bar and politics culture that allows someone like Aaron Schock to be so out while not being out at all?
If he is gay, it is hypocrisy and should be called out, and truly outed, but doing it with facts and proof, rather than hearsay and belittling jokes. Really calling him out is holding him accountable, and there is no part of that which is bullying. But mentioning hearsay, and calling someones’s instagram “gay,” well that may be bullying.
As part of a larger effort to address the concerns of Pennsylvania women, state Reps. Erin Molchany, D-Allegheny, and Brian Sims, D-Phila., introduced a bill today that would clarify and update the legal standards for pay-equity lawsuits.
Pittsburgh is a great city because we are not simply a collection of neighborhoods and communities, but because together, in concert with one another we are greater than the sum of the parts.
The Washington gay scene as well as the political arena in general has been complicit before in protecting closet cases, and that can not be tolerated any longer. Does that include making public information that illustrates what is being called hypocrisy?