This year, I posted the names of 30 LGBT people killed in hate crimes around the United States. Here is the explanation that I posted to my facebook wall ( Read more... )

When I was nine years old, I locked myself in a bathroom and threatened to kill myself. I had no idea how to do so, which of the medicines would be harmless, how much one should take. I was at A.F.'s house. She had been the new kid in my fourth grade class. No one had wanted to talk to her, and I was always the kid who approached those children ( Read more... )

I have a secret: I was a Philosophy major. This dismays papertigers somewhat, but by the time she found out, it was too late for her ( Read more... )

Here are some of the best words I've heard in a long time. This is sweet and loving and oh so very hopeful. It's water in the desert.

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By now, you have all heard about what we in the LGBT community have known for years: suicide is an epidemic among gay children. It is very hard to live with constant negative messages about homosexuality at home and at school and at the same time cope with your own emerging sexual identity. That's why antigay speech, whatever terms it is couched ( Read more... )

Here is Part Two of yesterday's list of short biographies of the people I've been quoting throughout the month of June.

Irshad Manji, b. 1968, is a Canadian writer and commentator who promotes a progressive vision of Islam. An out lesbian, she works to inform the international community on gay and lesbian issues in cultures informed by Islam.

( Read more... )

Poets. Runaways. Loudmouths. Drag queens. Queers. Trannies. Perverts. Leather daddies. Outcasts.

Forty-one years ago today, these people took to the streets to defend their right to exist. I owe them my average, middle-class suburban life, a life in which I can walk down the street hand-in-hand with papertigers and no one stares. This month, in ( Read more... )

This is my first Pride Report for 2010. (I will, of course, be making the annual post on the anniversary of Stonewall). We went to the Baltimore parade yesterday and the festival today, and at both we ran into this coalition of hotel workers and gay rights activists. What an excellent idea! Communities that fight for people's rights should work ( Read more... )

I wish I could go to the festival. We've been talking about it in just this way for a couple of days now, in between watching Into the Woods and being entirely unmotivated. There will be no Pride festival for us this year, though. We don't have the money for gas, and papertigers has a terrible respiratory infection and thus no stamina for a long day at ( Read more... )

Why so sad, Jenise ( Read more... )