GLBTQIA: Combined Gay News Headlines (T5T-1)

"Raul Hernandez, a gay man who defected from Cuba in 1993 to live in Brazil, had hoped to obtain permanent U.S. residency under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act after he arrived in 2000. Congress passed the Cold War-era act to provide an expedited and mostly automatic approval process for Cubans seeking refuge in the United [...]

GRATUITOUS SKIN — We've enjoyed the work of photographer Brian Sloane before. But it's not until you see more of his portfolio that you realize you're walking through an A&F catalog. CONTINUED Â» CONTINUED Â» Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us Tagged: brian sloane, gratuitous skin, Models, Photos, risque

Prone to delivering serious monologues to the interwebs, microcelebrity Chris Crocker adds this American Idol reaction video to his list of must-sees. But he doesn't want this latest video — where he wears only a tee and American Apparel underwear — to become another melodramatic clip a la "Leave Britney Alone," so there will only [...]

This is an event just for you! That’s right, we’re having a lesbian speed dating event to raise money for bigger and better events for the Lesbian Social Group! We will have two separate sessions, for the younger and older ladies. Each woman will have 10 “speed dates” with different women. You will have 8 minutes [...]

Okay, nobody worry, I promise you’ll be fine on the dance floor this week. We totally got it fixed after I TORE IT UP to some Beyonce last week. For those of you that came late, you missed it, but if you beg and plead with DJ Binx and DJ Skittles, as well as buy [...]

Come join Fresnoâ€™s GLBT+ Community, as well as visitors from ALL OVER the Central Valley, as they celebrate the 19th annual Fresno Rainbow Pride for 2009.Â This is perhaps the single biggest one-day gay event in the Valley, and perhaps the most tedious and difficult in its organization and preparation. This memorable event will take [...]

I don't know if he's too engrossed in his planning for IML or Folsom, but if Peter LaBarbera flips on his TV and checks out the local news, he's going to go apoplectic over this. (Wash Blade):

The Illinois General Assembly is expected to approve a measure next week that would legalize civil unions, according to an LGBT activist.
Rick Garcia, political director for Equality Illinois, said Thursday he's "absolutely" expecting the full state House and the Senate to pass a civil union measure either Tuesday or Wednesday. The bill has support from Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D).
The House Youth and Family Committee, chaired by Rep. Greg Harris, who's gay, intends to attach an amendment legalizing civil unions to a "shell bill" that's already been approved by the Senate, Garcia said. If the full House votes in favor of the legislation, the bill would be sent to the full Senate within hours for a vote of concurrence.
...Should the measure become law, both gay and straight couples could enter into civil unions. As there's no explicit language regarding an effective date, couples could start entering into civil unions 30 days after the bill is signed into law, Garcia said.

Eric Holder was right. We are a nation of cowards.

One might say that Attorney General Holder is proving himself to be part of that "nation of cowards" that he called the United States in a different context, i.e. our unwillingness to address the issue of race. What about when the victims of torture are Muslims? Where’s squo;s Holder’s courage then?
Surely, I was not the only one stunned by former Vice President Dick Cheney’s public admission that he helped authorize waterboarding of detainees. But, on reflection, there seems to have been a method to his madness; and, so far at least, the method seems to be working.

Have Holder and Colin Powell forgotten from their days growing up in the Bronx the typical reaction of bullies when caught in the act? "Okay, so waddaya gonna do 'bout it!" It was an attempt at intimidation, and it was generally effective with those who felt not quite up to the challenge.

This has been the case on the issue of the economy (i.e. the bailout), and it is the same on the issue of torture. We let ourselves be bullied into re-electing Bush in 2004, after we knew about Abu Ghraib, And now we are being bullied into not prosecuting the officials responsible for putting America back on the list of nations that practice torture. Now we are being bullied into not even looking at further evidence

(WARNING: NSFW/POSSIBLE TRIGGER IMAGES AFTER THE JUMP).

These are not pictures, really, that we’re looking at. They are a mirror.

Watch Abu Ghraib in Sexy | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Of course, we’ve seen these before. As bad as they are, we know there’s other evidence we haven’t seen.

Donald Rumsfeld and Sen. Lindsey Graham know what we haven’t seen is much worse than what we have seen.

Graham, speaking after Rumsfeld’s Senate testimony, suggested that material in at least one tape held by Defense Department investigators could be by far the most-damaging yet to the U.S. military effort in Iraq and its prestige around the world.
"The American public needs to understand, we’re talking about rape and murder here. We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We’re talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges,’’ Graham said to reporters. Graham said, however, he hadn’t seen the videos that are part of the investigation into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers and military contractors.

Rumsfeld, too, said that even more damaging evidence is likely to come.
"There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist. If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse."

In fact the entire senate was able to view hundreds more pictures from Abu Ghraib, worse than what we’ve seen, that the Pentagon has not released to the public.

The 100 senators were able to view hundreds of sickening pictures of prisoner abuse last night - images which the Pentagon now say will not be made publicly available.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden said: "I expected that these pictures would be very hard on the stomach lining and it was significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated.
"Take the worse case and multiply it several times over," he added.

Some snaps showed Iraqi women commanded to expose their breasts.

"I don’t know how the hell these people got into our army," said Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, from Colorado.

"There were several pictures of Iraqi women who were disrobed or putting their shirts up.

"They were not smiling in the pictures, that’s for sure. But it didn’t look like they had been beaten or hurt."

"It was pretty disgusting, not what you’d expect from Americans," said Senator Norm Coleman.

And if Seymour Hersh - whose reporting has been pretty reliable so far - is right, there is much, much worse that we haven’t seen.

Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:
"Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying ’Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out."

"It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there’s enough enough out there, they can’t (Applause). .... So it’s going to be an interesting election year."

Also, The Telegraph described a videotape made by U.S. soldiers that showed Iraqi guards raping young boys. The Guardian reported "formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator."

Much was said about Saddam’s "rape rooms" in the buildup to the Iraq war, in the build-up to the Iraq war. I do not doubt their existence or the veracity of the victims statements. The documented atrocities commited by Saddam Hussein and his regime, were touted as justification for invading Iraq, in the build-up to the war. And upon reports of mass graves of some of Saddam’s victims being uncovered, I even heard some supporters claiming (in the face of clear Iraqi opposition to U.S. occupation) declare of those in the graves, "Those people want us there."

But never mind the likelihood that they would have preferred U.S. intervention at some point prior to their interment. The truth is that Saddam Hussein had the full support of the U.S. even as his rape rooms operated, and other atrocities were committed by his regime.

Although most of Hussein’s large-scale atrocities took place during the 1980s and early 1990s, his tenure was also characterized by day-to-day atrocities that attracted less notice. Wartime rhetoric regarding Hussein’s "rape rooms," death by torture, decisions to slaughter the children of political enemies, and the casual machine-gunning of peaceful protesters accurately reflected the day-to-day policies of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Hussein was no misunderstood despotic "madman." He was a monster, a butcher, a brutal tyrant, a genocidal racist--he was all of this, and more.

But what this rhetoric does not reflect is that, until 1991, Saddam Hussein was allowed to commit his atrocities with the full support of the U.S. government. The specifics of the al-Anfal Campaign were no mystery to the Reagan administration, but the decision was made to support the genocidal Iraqi government over the pro-Soviet theocracy of Iran, even to the point of making ourselves complicit in crimes against humanity.

...Saddam Hussein was unquestionably one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century. History cannot even begin to record the full scale of his atrocities and the effect they had on those affected and the families of those affected. But his most horrific acts, including the al-Anfal genocide, were committed in full view of our government--the government that we present to the world as a shining beacon of human rights.

Make no mistake: The ouster of Saddam Hussein was a victory for human rights, and if there is any silver lining to come from the brutal Iraq War, it is that Hussein is no longer slaughtering and torturing his own people. But we should fully recognize that every indictment, every epithet, every moral condemnation we issue against Saddam Hussein also indicts us. We should all be ashamed of the atrocities that were committed under our leaders’ noses, and with our leaders’ blessing.

N;p>Nevertheless, we were supposed to be different, this time. We made promises to be different this time.

"The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don’t have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over."-Paul Bremer, Administrator, [Iraq] Coalition Provisional Authority, Sept. 2, 2003

"Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."-President Bush, remarks to 2003 Republican National Committee Presidential Gala, Oct. 8, 2003

In the end, we ended up creating our own "rape rooms" in Iraq, or at least allowing them to be created on our watch. And it happened because we opened that door when "sexual humiliation" was accepted as an "enhanced interrogation" technique. No surprise, considering that rape is now known to be an effective weapon of war. (Something else that Senators were recently told, though it’s been known by invading and occupying armies for centuries.)

In his book, Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq, Tony Lagouranis, an Army interrogator whose New York Times op-ed helped spark debate about "enhanced interrogation" techniques when it appeared in 2006, quotes a relevant passage from George Orwell’s "Shooting an elephant.

I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow... For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives"... He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

It is relevant to the times we live in. We are afraid our faces will or even have grown to fit the mask we’ve worn in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and various "Black sites" around the globe. Better to disavow that mask. Even if that means keeping it on, rather than taking it off and looking at it.

Crossposted from The Republic of T.

I was waiting to see what kind of response Kerry Eleveld was going to receive from the Obama admin after she asked Robert Gibbs during a presser this week about the timeline for acting on DOMA. He said that he would "go check on that." Well, he checked and here you go...

According to a statement from the White House press office, "DOMA is a federal law passed by Congress that precludes uniform federal recognition of same-sex relationships, even those recognized as valid under the law of the state. Because the President believes that this is an issue that should be left to the states, he continues to support the legislative repeal of DOMA."

That doesn't answer the question, which was:

But the White House statement stopped short of substantively addressing the second part of the question, which sought a remedy and a timeline for honoring same-sex marriages: "Now that same-sex couples can marry legally in five different states, what is the president doing to make sure those marriages can be recognized at the federal level, and what's the timeline for something like that?"

A flaming pile of horse crap, indeed. No 10 second photo op with Judy Shepard can clean up this mess. It's insulting.

UPDATE: Just checked my mail and I received the same response Kerry did from the WH.

...to Casey's on June 1st to support Umatilla Morrows Alternatives, a key partner in the movement for gender, social and racial justice that works on the frontlines in Eastern Oregon, defending those communities who need them most. Monday, June 1st, 2009 4:00pm - 8:00pm Casey's (610 NW Couch Street in Portland, OR 97209) For more information on Umatilla Morrows Alternatives, visit www.umalt.com.

The good folks at the Multnomah County Democratic Party recently passed an impressive resolution in support of marriage equality. They've made a commitment to support the repeal of Measure 36 and to help establish the freedom to marry for all caring and committed couples in Oregon. This is yet another example of the great work led by the LGBT Caucus of the Democratic Party of Oregon. This is a dedicated group of community leaders who volunteer with the Democrats and work tirelessly for LGBT equality. If you're not already connected to the Caucus, check out their website to get informed. The Caucus also has a number of local chapters around the state - great places to get involved - including in central and southern Oregon, as well as crn Oregon, as well as chapters all through Willamette Valley.

We STRUTted, we sure did, and now's the time to get your official Red Carpet photos from STRUT! Click here to see the fashion, the fabulousness and the glamour that was this year's STRUT - and don't forget, 50% of all phhion, the fabulousness and the glamour that was this year's STRUT - and don't forget, 50% of all photo sales until May 31st go back to benefit Basic Rights Oregon. An official Red Carpet photo AND helping out a good cause - it doesn't get much better than this! And a special thank-you to Rosemary Ragusa and Brooke Thompson of monAmour photography and the fabulous Bolivia Carmichaels for making this year's Red Carpet experience one to remember! monAmour Photography: www.monamourphotography.com Bolivia Carmichaels: www.myspace.com/boliviacarmichaels

NASHVILLE, TN â€"- The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Tennessee sued two Tennessee school districts in federal court on Tuesday, charging the schools are unconstitutionally blocking students from accessing online information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, Knox County Schools and as many as 105 other school [...]

My first news headlines post of the week, so its time to get back up to speed on what else has been happening. Obits: Rodger McFarlane, Former Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Director, Died on Friday (Age 54 — Cause: Suicide.). The lights of Broadway theaters in Manhattan were scheduled to be dimmed for one minute on Tuesday [...]

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Combined Gay News Headlines (T5T-1)

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