LGBT and the Media
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Sen. Tom Coburn is Not a Legitimate Voice for a Gay Publication
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Sixth Graders Take Toys 'R' Us to Task for Gender Stereotyping
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There are More Gay Characters on Broadcast Television Than Ever Before
Who is the Most Discriminated Group in America?
Published September 15, 2009 @ 10:29AM PT
It's 2009, we have an African-American President, the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, six states have recognized marriage equality, and a female Speaker of the House. That's a pretty impressive line-up, but as the Pew Forum finds, these are the best of times and the worst of times for discrimination.
To be sure, great strides have been made by many groups in the United States. But when it comes to the issue of who are the most discriminated groups in America in 2009, the survey says: LGBT people and Muslims.
LGBT people, according to the Pew Forum, face the most amount of discrimination in the United States. Their numbers show that 64 percent of the public at large think that gays and lesbians receive heavy doses of discrimination on a day-to-day basis. Muslims come in a close second at 58 percent.
Arsalan Iftikhar at trueslant.com writes that these numbers reflect a change in how society reflects on race and civil rights.
"We can find that both, one, American Muslims and, two, the American LGBT community now currently represent two of the lower societal ‘rungs’ of our current civil rights ‘discrimination totem pole’ today," writes Iftikhar.
Does that gel with where we are as a country nowadays; that LGBT people and Muslims face the brunt of discrimination?
Regardless, surveys like these always reaffirm that more work needs to be done to truly make this a post-racial, post-sexual orientation, post-gender society.
Happy Birthday Rachel Maddow Show
Published September 09, 2009 @ 09:31AM PT
How's this for an eye-popping (and we don't mean in a good way) statistic: despite being 51 percent of the population, women only make up 3 percent of clout positions in the media. As the Women's Media Center points out, audiences are hungry to break free from the all-male media mold. Where are they turning?
Well, one place is the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, which celebrates its one year anniversary this month. Maddow, who is also the first lesbian to host a a prime-time news person in television history, has been a progressive star these past 365 days, taking on everyone from Pat Buchanan to the National Organization for Marriage.
And for her part, perhaps no other news show on television has focused as much on LGBT issues has The Rachel Maddow Show this past year. There was her spot with Lt. Dan Choi after he was discharged from the military under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." There was her spot talking about the role of race in last year's Proposition 8 vote. Most recently, she covered the fact that Massachusetts - which became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage - actually has the lowest divorce rate in the entire country. And last week she took Gov. Bobby Jindal to task for trying to label critics of his decision to charge taxpayers for helicopter rides to church as radical same-sex marriage activists.
In other words, the last 365 days of cable television news has been a lot gayer, and a whole lot more interesting with Rachel Maddow on the tube. It also helps that she's probably one of the most prepared journalists out there. Need evidence? Check out the clip below, where she takes on former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge over how terror alerts were politicized during the Bush administration.
So, happy birthday Rachel Maddow Show. Here's looking forward to many more years.
Celebrating Gay Penguins and Other Banned Books
Published September 09, 2009 @ 04:32AM PT
You have to hand it to those gay penguins -- they really know how to rile up the right-wing. This year marks the third straight year that And Tango Makes Three, the book about two male penguins who take in and raise a baby penguin, tops the list of the American Library Association's most banned books.
It's odd that a book about the power of love and family continues to be despised by very conservative forces. But with each passing year, numerous right-wing parents object to the book because of its gay-friendly themes. In fact, LGBT themes and/or sexual themes are the reason most books end up banned, at least according to Deborah Caldwell Stone, the Director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom.
As a means of responding to parents that go on book burning crusades, the American Library Association created a "Banned Books Week," which will take place at the end of September (September 26-October 3, 2009). The goal is to promote the more than 1,000 books that have been banned since 1982 by the 'family values' crowd. Books for this year include And Tango Makes Three, of course, as well as The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Uncle Bobby's Wedding, both of which touch on the subject of homosexuality. Seven other books make up the top-ten this year, including the best-seller The Kite Runner.
Really? The Kite Runner? For goodness sake's...the book was sold in Starbucks it was that popular!
Guess that just goes to show the lengths some parents and folks will go to censor information from their communities. And speaking of, the American Library Association has launched a fascinating interactive map that allows you to see where in the country folks are getting their pantaloons in a bunch over books. You can see that in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, wingnuts tried to ban The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. Or in Waltham, Massachusetts, The Lovely Bones was moved to the faculty-only section because folks thought it was too scary for middle-school students. Or in Baxley, Georgia, where a minister objected to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.
It's almost embarrassing to think that all throughout the country, we're engaging in the type of book-banning that is popular in authoritarian countries. But then it's also kind of sad to realize that many communities get deprived of some of the best literature of our day.
All the more reason to celebrate Banned Books Week later this month, and get these banned titles out in front of eyes that otherwise wouldn't be allowed to see them.
Resurrecting Angels in America
Published September 02, 2009 @ 05:02AM PT
There's no cast put in place yet, nor any plans behind how to mount a performance of one of Broadway's epic shows in an intimate, off-Broadway theater, but Angels in America, one of the first plays to deal exclusively with the subject of HIV/AIDS and its onslaught within the gay (especially gay male) population is staged for a comeback in 2010.
The show, written by Tony Kushner, is set in 1985-1986 during the height of the Reagan administration and nearly five years into the HIV/AIDS crisis. Technically, Angels is two shows - “Part 1: Millennium Approaches” and “Part 2: Perestroika”. And it interweaves stories from those dealing with HIV/AIDS - a gay male couple, real right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn - as well as a story involving coming out amidst a heaping helping of religious indoctrination (a closeted Mormon lawyer, and his sedated wife).
The show is expected to open in late Fall or Winter 2010. Interestingly enough, the show comes back to life at a time when HIV/AIDS numbers are back on the rise. Perhaps a tie-in educational/advocacy campaign is in order?
We'll leave with one of the best quotes from Angels, from the protagonist, Prior. It's all about being addicted to life. Take it away:
But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.
Live Nation Sponsors Artist Who Sings About Killing Gay People
Published August 24, 2009 @ 04:54PM PT
Generally speaking, if you hear someone sing about taking an uzi, holding it up to a gay person's head, and then blowing the trigger, you wouldn't anticipate that they would get a national concert tour sponsored by one of the leading music industry promoters in the world. That's not the case with Buju Banton, a Jamaican artist who has repeatedly called for the execution of gays in his songs, who is being promoted by Live Nation for a series of concerts at the House of Blues this October. Live Nation lists four concerts for Banton, in Chicago, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Houston. And they're all at House of Blues.
Banton's songs are laced with the type of violence toward LGBT people that one would expect from a terrorist, not an international music star. A sample:
Anytime Buju Banton comes
Faggots get up and run.
Boom (gun shot) bye bye (Goodbye, as in you're dead)
In a faggot's head
Rude boy don't promote any nasty (queer) man
They have to die...
Send for the automatic (gun) and
The Uzi (gun) instead
Shoot them, don't come (to help them) if we shoot them...
If a guy comes near me
Then his skin must peel
Burn him up bad like an old tire wheel
I'm curious what part of that song Live Nation most wants to promote? The part where he advocates shooting a gay person in the face? The part where he advocates pouring acid on a gay person's skin? Or the part where he wants to burn gay people like old tires?
Efforts to protest Buju Banton have been around for quite some time, and even led the singer to sign in 2007 a "Reggae Compassionate Act," which sought to root out homophobic lyrics in reggae music. Pink News, however, reports that Banton withdrew his support for the Reggae Compassionate Act and never signed it.
Whether he did or didn't, Banton has continued to use pretty vile language to define the LGBT community. He's called LGBT protestors of his music "stupid" and "ignorant," told them to "fuck" off, and continues to sing homophobic songs (like the one above). YouTube video of him singing the song above in Miami came out AFTER he made a pledge to stop singing the song. Banton also sang the song at a Guyana music festival, causing the ire of local LGBT activists.
If Buju Banton is going to renounce homophobia in his lyrics, he should make that commitment extremely public. Until then, by Live Nation choosing to sponsor his tour, it sends the message that singing about murdering gay people is not only appropriate, it's lucrative.
Let Live Nation and the House of Blues know what you think. He's got four dates scheduled on Live Nation's site. Gayliberation.net has even more dates listed for Banton.
Wise Latina is the New Queer
Published August 20, 2009 @ 10:11PM PT
During the confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, many conservative and right-wing pundits tried to make a big to-do over the fact that Sotomayor said the following statement: "[A] wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life." Conservatives wanted to paint this statement as racist and offensive. Pop culture instead has embraced the phrase "wise Latina," pushing the term into the lexicon of words, like queer, that have been reclaimed by minority groups as a means of empowerment.
Queer is a term that, for many, was an offensive slur that harkened back to the days of "Mad Men," when it was regularly used as a derogatory term to refer to LGBT folks. Now? For many, it's a cultural concept that means a rejection of labels for one's sexual orientation. Or, as some folks have put it, queer was a term that was reclaimed by the LGBT community as a source of power.
Exit queer, enter Wise Latina. The latter phrase was used by many a conservative politico as a means of trying to discredit Sonia Sotomayor. Sen. John Cornyn, for instance, said that Sotomayor's reference to being a Wise Latina was "antithetical to the whole idea of the rule of law." Rush Limbaugh called Sotomayor a "racist" for using the term Wise Latina. Glenn Beck said that Sotomayor's comment was "one of the most outrageous racist remarks" he's heard.
So how are people reacting to conservatives trying to criminalize the phrase "Wise Latina"? They're embracing the term as a badge of honor, and a proud descriptor. Booyeah.
AP notes that "Wise Latina" has become a pop culture phenomenon. And now it's being marketed on books, cups, T-shirts, and onesies, to name a few items. Charles McIlwain, a media prof at NYU, told AP that people are seeing this phrase as an opportunity to take pride in their roots, and reclaim it as something worth aspiring toward.
"I think one thing many people are doing, Latinas and the Latino community in general, is reframing the phrase and saying: 'Hey, when we talk about the wise Latina, we're not trying to show that somehow we're better than others, but we want to associate being Latino with something that's wise and good," McIlwain told AP.
What a great example of owning a phrase that haters tried to tarnish. Talk radio might want to demonize Wise Latina, along the same lines as words like queer were once demonized. But these are words and terms that can be reclaimed, and can be used to educate and inspire, rather than label or disparage.
David Letterman Pauses for a Marriage Equality Riff
Published August 20, 2009 @ 09:15AM PT
Kudos to David Letterman for taking advantage of Donald Trump's appearance on his show this week to champion the issue of marriage equality. The audience's reaction to Letterman's comments? Widespread applause.
Trump was on the show promoting the Miss Universe pageant. Tangentially tied to the Miss Universe contest is the Miss USA pageant, where earlier this year Carrie Prejean (otherwise known at the time as Miss California) went on to proclaim that opposite marriage is morally superior to same-sex marriage. Letterman asked Trump what he thought about the brouhaha involving Carrie Prejean, and Trump provided a bit of strange fodder by saying that the only reason people jumped down Carrie Prejean's throat for her marriage comments was because she's so "beautiful."
Or, in other words, nobody gave a damn that Carrie Prejean thought that gays and lesbians should be relocated to a second class status in this country. Rather, they just didn't like her because she was too pretty.
If that sounds a little crazy, it's because it is. Thankfully, Letterman didn't let the moment pass without getting a marriage equality riff in. "Anybody who wants to get married ought to be able to get married." Cue widespread applause, and cue a little 'eating of the crow' so to speak by the Donald.
Check out the clip below.
