Editor’s Note: Contributor Charles Alexander fell ill last monthand was unable to provide his usual weekly Parting Glances Column. This selection was chosen in honor of Pride month and Stonewall’s 50th Anniversary. Everyone at Between [...]
June is Pride Month, which means anti-LGBTQ folks are losing their goddamn minds. I attended Motor City Pride in Detroit with my wife, our son and my wife’s 69-year-old aunt. It was a family affair. There were rainbows galore, men holding hands with men, women holding hands with women, transgender and genderqueer people holding hands with men or women or with whomever they wanted because it’s pride and love is love, damn it.
June 28, 1969. With no civil rights protections available for LGBTQ people and rampant harassment and brutality by law enforcement against our community and LGBTQ establishments, a group of brave men and women — including two transgender women of color, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson — stood up to the New City Police Department and determined that they were not going to take it anymore.
“Gay is good. You are not alone.” This was the slogan when the Affirmations LGBT Center opened its doors in Ferndale more than 20 years ago. It was a bold statement to make at the time: reassurance for many cautious, confused, isolated young people in need of understanding, trained organizational support and a place to hang out.
It's June and pride is busting out all over! This year’s celebrations are just a little brighter as we also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
Donald Trump is the most anti-LGBTQ president in recent history. While past presidents might very well have hated LGBTQ people more, Trump has certainly been the most openly hostile.
About a dozen days ago tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow — at my age how can I be sure? — I was gifted with a pair of John Lennon enchantment glasses.
"When Aiden Became a Brother," written by Kyle Lukoff and illustrated by Kaylani Juanita (Lee & Low), is a sweet and joyous tale about a biracial (black and South Asian) transgender boy awaiting the birth of his new sibling. The book starts by explaining that everyone thought Aiden was a girl when he was born, but he later realized he was a boy.
The Trump Administration has declared war on transgender people. This isn’t a new revelation, but they have succeeded in dismantling every protection the Obama Administration had put in place for transgender people. You might not have even noticed the most recent rollback unless you follow this subject closely. After all, these past two years it has been all anti-trans all the time. Not to mention the daily barrage of news about Trump and the no good, horrible, very bad people he has working for him throwing norms in the trash and pissing on the rule of law. It’s dizzying.
GATORADE, Ariz.: I’m a skeptic concerning things supernatural; but the wonder-working weekend I spend reporting for BTL on the Drag Queens for Jesus confab is, well, miraculous – awe-inspiring. It’s also ecumenical, as the three-day [...]
For the past week, I haven’t been able to log on to social media without seeing controversy about the abortion bans that are sweeping the country. Even the most politically apathetic people are weighing in on it.I grew up in a cultishly tight Evangelical Christian community. I went to private Christian schools. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I was raised to be pro-life.
Hello LGBTQ Americans! Are you ready to enslave “people of faith throughout these United States of America?”
Hopefully by the time you read this the United States isn’t routinely opening up criminal investigations into women who have miscarriages. And I say routinely because there are already cases where women have ended up in prison after their miscarriages were called baby murders.
1. In the year of the Trumpeted Mongrel 666 Beast of War endlessly chasing his flea-bitten tail, a prophet of restless dudes scaled Mt. Rush-No-More, seeking counsel with the electrifying powers that sometimes to Be (or, not to
Caster Semenya is a South African middle-distance runner. She took home Olympic gold in both 2012 and 2016 and has won the world championships three times. She grew up in the village of Fairlie, located [...]
During the Nazi reign of terror that ended only in Germany’s defeat by the American, English and French Allies in 1945, about 15,000 gay men were incarcerated in concentration camps from 1935 to 1944, where an estimated 60 percent of homosexual "schweinhund" were brutally worked to death.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has finalized a new rule that will allow health care workers to refuse to provide or assist in providing medical services if doing so violates their religious or moral beliefs. In other words, it will allow them to discriminate widely and putting LGBTQ people and our families, among others, at risk.
In a parallel universe somewhere President Hillary Clinton is expanding access to health care in the United States and LGBTQ people are fully protected under the law. Unfortunately, Trump is the president and he, along [...]
Fifty years ago when gay ID closets were leased for a lifetime, it was SOP – standard operating procedure – to go by a catchy nickname.
So often when people who are not transgender speak of transgender people, there is one important thing that is gotten terribly wrong, and I think it's a core part of understanding exactly what it is to be transgender.
Well hello, and welcome to another episode of “A Gay is Running for President,” a minute-by-minute freakout by the conservative right and sponsored by Homophobia and The Dumb. The gay in question is Pete Buttigieg, [...]
Well hello, and welcome to another episode of “A Gay is Running for President,” a minute-by-minute freakout by the conservative right and sponsored by Homophobia and The Dumb. The gay in question is Pete Buttigieg, [...]
The “Coffee Table Book of Astrology” tattles that “taurus is the astrological sign of sexual deviancy.”Or, as a friend of mine used to tell me year after year of our 40-year friendship, “Brandy” — his nickname for me, as in the alcoholic beverage, brandy Alexander — "May babies are gay babies.” There may be some truth to this observation.
Can a business fire someone because they’re LGBTQ? The Supreme Court will soon tell us.
Hello and welcome to a world where a gay man with the word “butt” in his last name is running for president and it is not a joke. Pete Buttigieg, who has been Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, since 2012, is an absolute contender in a crowded Democratic field. He made headlines when he kissed his husband Chasten Buttigieg IN PUBLIC.
If you are like me, your position on the 2020 presidential election might come down to this: You will elect any of the Democratic candidates for president, no matter how far they stray from your [...]
Just in time for Easter 2019, Fools for Christ (and Donald Trump) — an American Bible GOP group headquartered in Lumbago Falls, Texas — held a press conference on Palm Sunday to publicize “National Hate [...]
As I write this the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris is on fire. It is a terrible loss to anyone who cares about history. Donald Trump’s response, however, was to Tweet to try to tell [...]
An open house I attended a blossoming spring or two ago was winding down at the home of BTL co-publishers Jan Stevenson and Susan Horowitz. Two boys of some of the invited party guests were fussing over who’d get to release balloons at the festive closing of the couple's full bloom garden showcase.
While scrolling through my Twitter feed I stumbled upon a photo of Jonathan Van Ness walking hand in hand through Capitol Hill with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Van Ness, one of the stars of "Queer Eye," was wearing a pink sweater and skirt, Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat representing New York, was wearing a magenta pantsuit. Someone had Tweeted, “THIS is the future Democrats want.” My first thought: Oh, hell yes. That future cannot come soon enough.
I grew up in a Southern California suburb in the 1970s, a short distance from the smog-filled skies of Los Angeles. Right around the time of Fleetwood Mac's Rumors album, mood rings and bell bottoms, there was a veneer of patriotism brought forth thanks to the bicentennial.
I am often asked from clients and friends if I believe there is a healthy amount of alcohol that may be consumed on a regular basis. Of course, no one likes my response: actually no, there is not. However, I also like to reframe the question: How do you define healthy? More specifically, is there a use for alcohol?
Lori Lightfoot was elected Mayor of Chicago! Let that sink in – an African-American Lesbian was elected Mayor of the nation’s third largest city. If that wasn’t historic enough, on the same day Madison, Wisconsin, and Kansas City, Missouri, also elected queer women as mayors - Satya Rhodes-Conway and Jolie Justus.
As a gay teenager, I hung out at the Hub Grill in downtown Detroit, a greasy spoon of a place, located at the corners of Farmer and Bates in convenient walking distance of four quite popular gay bars, City Hall and the 1st Precinct Police Station!
On the morning of Saturday, March 22, 2014, I received a call from my lead Deacon demanding, “I need you to get to the Oakland County Courthouse. Now!”
BY SUSAN GRETTENBERGER I am a lesbian. I am also a lifelong United Methodist and the daughter of wonderful, loving, accepting parents. My dad is a UM pastor. I have seen the best sides of [...]
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network's annual Day of Silence is Friday, April 12, and you know what that means. Silence.
According to a tad too many fundygelical church know-it-alls, we LGBTQs are doomed to spend an eternity in hell. (Purgatory be damned!) So agree President Trump and VP Mike Pence, America’s hand-me-down present political and past-tense, self-styled saints.
This past Friday came the announcement that the ACLU of Michigan and the state of Michigan settled a lawsuit that we, the ACLU, had filed — challenging the state’s practice of allowing state-contracted, taxpayer-funded foster care and adoption agencies to use religious criteria to exclude same-sex couples.
