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City ordinances protecting gays illegal, according to Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning
BY TIMBERLY ROSS, ASSOCIATED PRESS
OMAHA, Neb. -- Nebraska cities can't adopt ordinances protecting people from discrimination for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender because the state's anti-discrimination laws don't extend to sexual orientation, the state attorney general's office said in a legal opinion issued Friday.
Voters can approve changes to city charters to extend protections to groups not covered by state law, but local governments lack the authority, the opinion said.
"Nebraska statutes do not authorize political subdivisions in Nebraska, including municipalities, to expand protected classifications beyond the scope of the civil rights classifications created in state statute," Attorney General Jon Bruning said in a statement after the release.
Read the opinionNew Jersey man convicted of webcam spying that led to suicide of Tyler Clementi seeks probation
BY GEOFF MULVIHILL, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Old friends are coming to the defense of a former Rutgers University student who was convicted of hate crimes for using his webcam to view his roommate and another man kissing in a case that came to symbolize bullying of gay youth.
Letters from several friends of 20-year-old Dharun Ravi were included in a Friday court filing that requests that a judge sentence him to probation rather than prison. The legal papers characterize Ravi as outgoing and not hateful, and say it would be unfair to send him to prison in part because doing so would likely mean he would face deportation to his native India.
One of the letters came from Alisa Agarwal, a Rutgers student who testified on behalf of the state at Ravi's trial earlier this year. "Although his humor may seem offensive to people who are not familiar with his personality, by experience, I can easily vouch that words have no malicious intention," she wrote. "Never could I imagine him bullying someone."
Sentencing is scheduled for May 21 for Ravi, who was convicted in March in a case that gained national attention when the roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself days after the spying in September 2010.
New FCKH8.com video | 'Gay Marriage: What's the Big FCKIN' Deal?!' (NSFW)
News release from FCKH8.com:
Dwarf Mr. T Lookalike with Short Temper Throws Big Tantrum for Gay Rights
Mr. T Lookalike Hilariously Taunts Gay Rights Opponents in Snarky New FCKH8.com Video to Raise Money for Anti-Bullying Projects
Los Angeles, CA – May 4, 2012 – Coming off the success of the, “It Doesn’t Get Better” campaign, described by Dan Savage as, “FCKIN’ GENIUS,” gay activist T-shirt website FCKH8.com is back! In the snarky new Internet comedy video, called "Gay Marriage: What’s The Big FCKIN’ Deal?” - the short-tempered Mr. T lookalike hilariously blasts homophobes who continue to make a big deal out of the sanctity of marriage. The new video has going viral on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube, and the group pledges 10¢ for each Facebook “Share" & tweet up to $10K as part of its fundraising effort with proceeds donated to H8SUX.com - a project giving thousands of free "OK4U2BGAY" T-shirts to teens to fight bullies in schools.
The sometimes shocking F-word-laden clip features a disgruntled little person with a big opinion - taunting homophobes with lines like, “Equality means no one gets short-changed under the law! It’s none of your f*ckin’ business if Bob and Bruce like to butt-f*ck, so butt the f*ck out!" Activists in the video wear bold, neon T-shirts emblazoned with the messages of “GAY MARRIAGE: WHAT’S THE BIG FCKIN’ DEAL?” and “LEGALIZE LOVE.” The T-shirts and tank tops are sold on FCKH8.com’s website starting at $9.99 each. The website also sells bumper stickers, wristbands and buttons to spread its "in your face" pro-gay message.
"What’s The Big FCKIN’ Deal?” gets straight to the point, asking homophobes and ballot box bullies the simple question, “Some dudes like the pole, some chicks like the hole... what’s the big FCKIN’ deal?!”
Video director Luke Montgomery comments, “This video really tells it like it is in a non-diplomatic way that our mainstream gay organizations understandably just can’t. That’s why millions have watched and shared FCKH8.com videos on the Internet, including Glee's Jane Lynch, Adam Lambert, and even Perez Hilton. Gay or straight, this video is uniting people to say 'F*ck Hate'.”
FCKH8.com videos have generated over 6 million on-line views and sold over 70,000 T-shirts with $250,000 raised for gay rights causes. The web movement has recruited over 179,000 Facebook supporters & over 41,000 Twitter followers to date.
Gay musician Richard Cortez releases new music video, 'The Poor Man's Love Song'
Official music video for Richard Cortez' "The Poor Man's Love Song," available May 1 from Wollenberg Records on the new EP [rec]ord.
For more about gay South Florida musician-actor Cortez, read this profile at Guy Magazine.
Wolfsonian-FIU to present 'Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985–2010'
From The Wolfsonian-Florida International University:
Graphic Intervention: 25 Years of International AIDS Awareness Posters 1985–2010
May 11 2012 - September 09 2012
Sixth Floor
The rampant spread of the HIV/AIDS virus over the past 29 years has created the most significant global public health crisis in modern history. Because of the complexity and despite scale of the epidemic, there is still a lack of worldwide strategies to lead AIDS education. Education initiatives in many countries are still shouldered to a great extent by government agencies and grassroots organizations led by community activists who are often motivated local citizens.
The poster has played a special role in promoting AIDS awareness and safe sex education across cultures. Different aims, messages, visual metaphors, and strategies have strongly influenced the content and design of AIDS posters. In many countries, the poster as a communicative tool was uncommon before the emergence and identification of the HIV virus. With a disease involving sexuality and sexual behavior, and therefore social and moral issues deeply rooted in culture and tradition, messages to raise awareness and encourage preventative behavior have varied significantly to best serve the intended audience. This information can successfully reach specific targeted groups in part because the poster inexpensive and easy to produce locally.
Regardless of cultural differences, AIDS posters can be meaningful to viewers because they frequently draw on images from popular culture and express the living habits of people. This exhibition features a selection of 153 posters, which presents an insightful overview of diverse visual strategies employed by many different countries in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a public health emergency.
Graphic Intervention is organized by Elizabeth Resnick and Javier Cortés in collaboration with James Lapides, International Poster Gallery, Boston, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston.
'The Rarest of Birds' about Montgomery Clift plays Friday, Saturday, Sunday at Miami Beach Cinematheque
From Omar Prince:
Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8:30pm:
“CINE-THEATRE”
Miami Premiere!
A LIVE ONE MAN PLAY based on the
Life and Work of Montgomery Clift
Starring Omar Prince
Written by John Lisbon Wood and Omar Prince
Directed by Bill Fabris
The characters represented in this play, both recorded and live, are performed by the actor playing Montgomery Clift.
SETTING:
The action takes place in a dressing room off the Freud movie set at Geiselgasteig Studios, a former psychiatric concentration camp in
Munich, Germany . Director John Huston had locked Montgomery Clift, who is playing Sigmund Freud, in his dressing room to work off his inebriation. Clift ruminates about his life and career, revealing his drug and alcoholic addictions and his struggles with homosexuality.
He was one of our greatest and most influential actors. The most idolized Matinee Idol of his time.
And one of Hollywood's most tortured souls. He spoke six languages. Elizabeth Taylor begged him to marry her. He was friends with Picasso, Matisse and Gertrude Stein. He became the first uninsurable actor inHollywood. Marilyn Monroe said that he was the only person more messed up than her.
The show is a must-see for students of cinema, the Golden Era of Hollywood, movie buffs and historians, archivists of gay life and theater aficionados of all types.
All of Monty's seventeen films and the major plays are mentioned in the play, as well as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia De Havilland, John Huston, and Kate Hepburn, who appear as voiceovers in conversation with him.
The Rarest of Birds, was penned by both actor and playwrights,
John Lisbon Wood and Omar Prince and stars Omar Prince.
The show runs approximately 75 minutes with no intermission.
Iowa justices ousted after gay marriage affirmation to be honored with JFK Profile in Courage Award
Three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were removed from office after they affirmed gay marriage in the state will be honored May 7 with the 2012 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Three former Iowa Supreme Court Justices who were part of a unanimous decision to legalize same-sex marriage in that state will be honored by Caroline Kennedy, President of the Kennedy Library Foundation, with the 2012 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award™. Former Iowa Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and former justices David Baker and Michael Streit were chosen in recognition of the political courage and judicial independence each demonstrated in setting aside popular opinion to uphold the basic freedoms and security guaranteed to all citizens under the Iowa constitution.
Several national groups congratulated the justices on Friday:
BOSTON – Three years after the unanimous Iowa Supreme Court decision affirming the freedom to marry, three former justices ousted in a retention election following the ruling will receive the prestigious 2012 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Monday, May 7. Caroline Kennedy will present the award to former Iowa Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and Justices David Baker and Michael Streit at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
“Former justices David Baker, Michael Streit, and Chief Justice Marsha Ternus showed tremendous courage when they joined a unanimous court in upholding the freedom to marry for all loving, committed couples in Iowa, and, again, when they honored the bedrock American value of an independent judiciary by refraining from political campaigning even as they faced an unprecedented moneyed campaign mounted against the court by anti-marriage shell-groups,” said Evan Wolfson, founder and President of Freedom to Marry. “These courageous justices have stood by their decision and fidelity to the constitutional guarantees they defended, even as Iowa’s voters have begun expressing buyers’ remorse over succumbing to the scare-tactic, special-interest campaign that rabbit-punched judges for doing their job .”
“Freedom to Marry honors the profile in courage set by these faithful judges, and applauds the Kennedy Foundation for recognizing the power of their example,” added Wolfson.
The award ceremony will take place at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston on Monday, May 7 from 11am to 12pm and will be webcast live. The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award is presented annually to public servants who have made courageous decisions of conscience without regard for the personal or professional consequences.
Same-sex couples in Iowa have been able to marry in Iowa since April 27, 2009. This year, Freedom to Marry partnered with One Iowa, the state’s leading LGBT organization, to launch a statewide public education campaign of neighbor-to-neighbor conversations about gay couples and their families in Iowa, and why marriage matters.
WASHINGTON - The Human Rights Campaign today commended the three Iowa Supreme Court Justices set to receive the 2012 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for their judicial independence. Former Iowa Chief Justice Marsha Ternus and former Justices David Baker and Michael Streit ruled in favor of marriage equality three years ago and, as a result, came under fire by the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage during their retention elections. All three refused to mount a counter-campaign believing it would send the wrong message to litigants who may appear in court before them.
"Even with their jobs on the line, the justices stood firm for an independent judiciary," said HRC President Joe Solmonese. "They put principle over politics, and are supremely deserving of this award. NOM should still be ashamed of themselves for running a campaign seeking revenge on these judges for making well-reasoned, constitutional arguments extending marriage equality."
During the last election cycle, all three justices lost their races. NOM's $600,000 campaign to oust them had nothing to do with marriage in the Hawkeye State – marriage for gay and lesbian couples remains legal there. Instead, NOM’s campaign was meant to send a chilling warning to judges across the country: rule the way we want you to or we will come after you.
On Monday, Caroline Kennedy, President of the Kennedy Library Foundation, will honor the justices with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. The award is presented to public servants who have demonstrated the courage of their convictions "without regard for the personal or professional consequences." The ceremony will be webcast live at www.jfklibrary.org/webcast beginning at 11:00 a.m. on May 7.
The Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2009 to allow committed gay and lesbian couples to marry. The deliberative decision was consistent with Supreme Court rulings in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Still a scream: Lily Tomlin at the Arsht Center
BY STEVE ROTHAUS, srothaus@MiamiHerald.com
Comedy icon Lily Tomlin says she “incredibly proud of the younger generation who’ve come out and refuse not to be acknowledged.”
“Not that there isn’t lots of backlash,” says the movie, stage and TV star, who has lived much of her professional life as an out lesbian.
Tomlin, 72, who performs in concert Sunday night at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, says that in 1975 Time magazine “offered me the cover if I’d come out in a very public way.”
The alter ego of Ernestine the telephone operator and 5-year-old Edith Ann declined. “Too cheesy” an offer, Tomlin says. “They just needed a gay person.” After she said no, Time put Air Force Technical Sgt. Leonard Matlovich on the cover with a big, bold headline, “I Am a Homosexual.”
Unable to let the moment pass, Tomlin included a sketch on her 1975 comedy album, Modern Scream, in which she mocked straight actors who play gay and then — always — declare their heterosexuality to reporters.
In the sketch, Tomlin plays a lesbian actress being interviewed about playing straight: “What was it like on the big screen making love to a man?”
“It ends up you don’t have to be one to play one,” jokes Tomlin, who has won two Tony Awards, a Grammy, and several Emmys. (The 1975 Robert Altman film Nashville also brought her an Oscar nomination.)
She calls the Modern Scream sketch a “much hipper, more artistic way to make that statement.”
“But don’t misunderstand me,” Tomlin adds. “It would have taken a tremendous amount of guts and I don’t know if I could have handled it.”
Tomlin’s career throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s was red hot: Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on TV; The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe on Broadway; 9 to 5 with co-stars Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in the movies.
Her comedy persona sometimes worked against Tomlin, as it did in 1976. “I wanted the Sybil part in television that Sally Field did,” she says. “They were interested in me, but they were afraid I would be funny as the different characters.”
That disappointment pales to what came next: the big screen’s Moment by Moment, co-starring Tomlin and John Travolta (just after Saturday Night Fever and Grease); and written and directed by her longtime partner and collaborator, Jane Wagner.
Critics and audiences trashed the 1978 film. “That was a very tough time. Tough for John. Tough for Jane,” Tomlin says.
The movie’s premise: Tomlin’s middle-age, wealthy character takes a much younger lover, Travolta.
Her last word on the subject: “You don’t have to be one to play one.”
IF YOU GO
Lily Tomlin appears 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Adrienne Arsht Center Knight Concert Hall, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami Tickets from $30 to $80. www.arshtcenter.org.
Romney: 'We select people not based upon their ethnicity or their sexual preference or their gender. But upon their capability.'
From ThinkProgress:
Mitt Romney appears on Fox News on Friday and comments on the resignation of Richard Grenell, his campaign's openly gay spokesman for Foreign Policy and National Security.
Romney: "We select people not based upon their ethnicity or their sexual preference or their gender. But upon their capability." Click here for more.
