Tag Archives: Texas

Exxon/Mobile Bans on LGBT Rainbow Pride Flags

Exxon/Mobile Bans LGBT Rainbow Pride Flags

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Exxon Mobil Corp. plans to prohibit the LGBT Rainbow Pride and rights flag from being flown outside its offices during Pride month in June prompting an immediate backlash.

Via Bloomberg:

Exxon updated company guidance on what flags can be displayed outside its offices, banning “external position flags” such as PRIDE and Black Lives Matter, according to the policy seen by Bloomberg News. In response, members of Exxon’s PRIDE Houston Chapter are refusing to represent the company at the city’s June 25 Pride celebration, according to an employee group email.

“Corporate leadership took exception to a rainbow flag being flown at our facilities” last year, Exxon’s PRIDE Houston employee group wrote in the email Thursday. “PRIDE was informed the justification was centered on the need for the corporation to maintain ‘neutrality.’” 

“The updated flag protocol is intended to clarify the use of the ExxonMobil branded company flag and not intended to diminish our commitment to diversity and support for employee resource groups,” Tracey Gunnlaugsson, vice president of human resources, said in a statement. “We’re committed to keeping an open, honest, and inclusive workplace for all of our employees, and we’re saddened that any employee would think otherwise.”

Sure Jan.

Alabama Senate Approves “Don’t Say Gay” Law 

Alabama Senate Approves “Don’t Say Gay” Law 

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Via The Birmingham Herald

The Alabama Senate passed its own version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law Thursday after a surprise amendment to a transgender bathroom bill. At the start of debate Thursday, an amendment was offered that would stop K-5 elementary teachers from “instruction” on sexuality and gender. The bill passed the Senate 26-3. Since it was amended, it needs to go back to the House for final approval. In addition to instructional limits, the bill requires students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex on their birth certificate.

The GOP in Red states are following the templates that have be devised by renegade Florida and Texas. This will not stop until we make them stop.

Texas Officials Tell Librarians to REMOVE LGBT Books, AG Tell School District "PRIDE Week" is Illegal

Texas Officials Tell Librarians to REMOVE LGBT Books, AG Tell School District “PRIDE Week” is Illegal

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Texas or Florida. Which sucks the most right now? It’s like they are in a race to the WORST.

Reading is Fundamental Except in Texas:

Via The Texas Tribune:

In early January, a day before students returned from winter break, Jeremy Glenn, the superintendent of the Granbury Independent School District in North Texas, told a group of librarians he’d summoned to a district meeting room that he needed to speak from his heart. “I want to talk about our community,” Glenn said. He noted that members of Granbury’s school board — his bosses — were also very conservative. And to any school employees who might have different political beliefs, Glenn said, “You better hide it,” adding, “Here in this community, we’re going to be conservative.”

Glenn added the was concerned about the inclusion of books with LGBT themes, even if they do not describe sex.

“There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

“Specifically, what we’re getting at, let’s call it what it is, and I’m cutting to the chase on a lot of this,” he said. “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books. That’s what the governor has said that he will prosecute people for, and that’s what we’re pulling out.”

Legal experts say the North Texas superintendent’s comments raise concerns about possible violations of the First Amendment and federal civil rights laws that protect students from discrimination based on their gender and sexuality.

PRIDE Illegal in Texas Schools

The Hill reports:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said in a letter to the Austin Independent School District (AISD) this week that its Pride Week was “breaking state law.” Paxton wrote Tuesday that by hosting pride week, the district “has, at best undertaken a week-long instructional effort in human sexuality without parental consent. Or, worse [the] district is cynically pushing a week-long indoctrination of [students] that not only fails to obtain parental consent, but subtly cuts parents out of the loop.” The Texas AG also wrote that the Austin ISD’s curriculum and lesson plans “deal head-on with sexual orientation and gender identity—topics that unmistakably constitute ‘human sexuality instruction’ governed by state law.”

No more than 45 minutes after Paxton’s office tweeted out the letter, the school district’s superintendent, Stephanie Elizalde, replied back: “I want all our LGBTQIA+ students to know that we are proud of them and that we will protect them against political attacks.”

District spokesman Jason Stanford told The Washington Post the celebration will continue as planned. “We’re going to react to this by doubling down on making sure our kids feel safe and celebrating Pride.”

#COVID19 – Comatose Anti-Vaxxer Flown To Texas After Minnesota Hospital Decides To Turn Off Ventilator.

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Via The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Scott Quiner, 55, of Buffalo, was flown from the Twin Cities to Texas over the weekend, an attorney representing the family said. Scott Quiner’s case drew widespread attention last week after Mercy Hospital said it would disconnect the ventilator on Thursday. Quiner, who was unvaccinated, had been in the hospital’s ICU since Nov. 6 with critically low oxygen levels and had shown little signs of improvement since his arrival.

Quiner’s wife, Anne, went to Anoka County court seeking an emergency restraining order to prevent Mercy from disconnecting the ventilator. Without a judge’s decision, “my husband will die,” Anne wrote in her petition seeking the court’s action. A GoFundMe has pulled in more than $28,600 as of Monday morning. A second fundraiser on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was seeking to raise $100,000. As of Monday, the effort had brought in $41,000

Of course anti-vax extremists and QAnon/Trump loons are besides themselves and Quinner’s wife wants to keep giving him futile care while taking up an ICU bed in a pandemic so she can give him ivermectin and vitamins.

I’m sure everything will turn out just fine. (No it won’t)

TX GOP Dan Crenshaw Trashes Greene & Gaetz's Freedom Caucus. Calls Them "Performance Artists and Grifters"

TX GOP Dan Crenshaw Trashes Greene & Gaetz’s Freedom Caucus. Calls Them “Performance Artists and Grifters”

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Look’s like the GOP is beginning to splinter as Texas GOP Rep Dan Crenshaw is breaking from the EXTREME right of certain members of the Republican party and is trying to distance himself a bit more center and away from the Freedom Caucus and GANG GREENE.

There are two types of members of Congress: there is performance artists and there is legislators. Performance artists are the ones who get all of the attention, the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well.

They know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear. What you hear so often is not true. It’s not true. We have grifters in our midst. I mean in the conservative movement.

Lie after lie after lie because they know something psychologically about the conservative heart. We’re worried about what people are doing to do to us, what people are going to infringe upon us, that’s the nature of conservatism.

GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw

Dan Crenshaw in an asshole, but he is kinda hot. Maybe he and Adam Kinsinger could get together and do some Daddy GOPorn when their political careers are over.

Gay History – September 16: Farewell Maria Callas, NAMBLA, Wilheim Von Gloeden, and GM’s “Little Faggot Truck”

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September 16:

1730: In Amsterdam, Lourens Hosponjon is executed for sodomy. Other than the record of his execution no other historical details are available.

1856: Wilheim Von Gloeden, German photographer of beautiful young men, is born in Wismar, Germany. . At the turn of the 20th century his picture postcards of naked youths from the Sicilian town of Taormina were “must haves”. Even though they passed for art they were among the first examples of modern gay porn.  

Wilhelm von Gloeden lived heroically.  He knew what he was and was proud.  Like Oscar Wilde before him, von Gloeden lived in dangerous defiance of an age and a Christian society that hounded and tortured men of his kind.  As Charles Leslie writes:

He was one of those rare nineteenth century men who would not accept the destruction of his true being as the price for being allowed to survive in an allegedly civilized Western world that officially despised what he was.  In his own way he triumphed, and therefore became one of those figures who, to this day, stand as models for people who dare to live the truth of what and who they are.

Today Von Gloeden is considered one of the most important gay visual artist of the pre–World War I era. 

1977:  Soprano Maria Callas dies at the age of 53.  There may have been divas before Maria Callas, but there is no doubt that the modern idea of what is a diva owes a great deal to the legendary opera singer, who, without ever singing a note of popular music, was as famous during her lifetime as a movie star.  “I am divine, I am oblivion, I am love.”

1979: The newly formed New York City Gay Men’s Chorus holds its first auditions.

1990:  Thanks to The San Francisco Board of Supervisors who loudly complained to General Motors after learning that a video, made to be shown only to GM personnel only, referred to a Japanese-made vehicle as a ”little faggot truck”

The presentation, made from 90 hours of taped interviews with 500 Chevrolet owners, contains one from a farmer who says he prefers full-size pickups.

“There isn’t no foreign company that makes any decent working pickup. It’s either going to be big, or some “little faggot truck,” the farmer said.

GM publicly apologized and never showed the video again.

1992: Robert Sawyer of Brattleboro, Vermont pleads not guilty to charges that he murdered his ex-girlfriend, Judith Hart Fournier, after she left him for another woman. She had a restraining order, but Sawyer violated it repeatedly. The case sparked a demand for anti-stalking legislation.

1992: Fifty-eight year old Roy Downs files a complaint of brutality against the Ft. Worth Police Department. He was arrested during a series of raids on gay bars, and officers beat and verbally abused him.

1994: The International Lesbian Gay Association loses its non-governmental organization representative status at the United Nations after a campaign by US Senator Jesse Helms revealed that one of its member organizations was NAMBLA, (The North America Man Boy Love Association) which condoned sex with children. As a result, ILGA expelled NAMBLA from its membership.

1994: Richard Hongisto, a former San Francisco police chief, is convicted of civil rights violations for ordering the removal of an issue of Bay Times, a gay newspaper, from the stands. Hongisto began his career championing justice and equality for racial minorities and homosexuals, but his career was later marred by various controversies, ending with the Bay Times controversy.

 

PRIDE MONTH: Celebrating Tommy Gene Brown “The Waco Bride”

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April 12, 1953:

A well-planned raid early Sunday morning broke up a statewide “homosexual convention” while a mock wedding was in progress, police reported Monday. Detective Capt. Wiley Stem said 63 men, mostly ranging in ages from 24 to 33 were arrested in the raid of a two-room private residence in South Waco, Texas

Fifteen detectives, a Texas Ranger, and a district attorney working with information furnished by undercover agents, closed in on the small house as the “bride” and “groom” were going through the mock ceremony before 60 invited guests. Police said some of the “guests” had come from as far away as New York, Virginia and California.

Other “guests” were registered from Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Fort Hood, and Connally Air Force Base just north of Waco. Police said all had received “invitations” to the affair. – The Waco Citizen.

To call what occurred an “interstate convention” would be quite a stretch.  The men, mostly local gathered in a small cottage on La Salle Street in South Waco.  It is not clear what the primary purpose of the gathering was, but at some point, whether planned as the centerpiece of the event or not, two men attempted to hold a marriage ceremony.  It was to resemble a traditional wedding, with the “bride,” Tommy Gene Brown (pictured above), donning drag. (And a white wedding dress no less, as if she was a virgin.) But the vows were never exchanged. Two detectives, two vice squad men, one Texas Ranger, and an assistant district attorney surrounded the cottage before the wedding occurred. After realizing they could not handle the raid themselves, they called for backup. In total, 17 law enforcement officers descended on the cottage to bring an end to the “immorality” taking place behind the walls

The Associated Press put the number arrested at 64. Some men reportedly chanted “Long live the queens!” on the way to jail..  One guest from Ft. Worth was charged with possession of marijuana, and others were charged with vagrancy — they posted $25 bonds (that’s about $220 in today’s money) and were released.  The Waco Citizen, a twice-weekly neighborhood paper printed all the names of those arrested and since it was 1953 many of men’s lives were ruined.

And what happened to Tommy Gene Brown, the “Waco Bride”?

Dallas LGBT community leader and historian Phil Johnson did some investigative reporting and published a follow-up in a 1989 issue of This Week in Texas:

As for Tommy Gene, she held her head up high and went on to live a productive, and quite colorful life. In 1959, Tommy Gene and his lover Fred–whom he met in Dallas–left Texas for San Francisco where they lived happily forever after. Fred worked and Tommy Gene kept house. That’s the way Fred and Tommy Gene wanted it.

In San Francisco, Tommy Gene became involved in one of America’s first gay organizations, the Society for Individual Rights (SIR). Here he helped with the dances and costumes for gay productions of “The Boy Friend,” “Pal Joey,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “The Wizard of Oz.” As a child, Tommy Gene’s favorite fantasy was to be like Shirley Temple, so friends at SIR called her Shirley, and the name stuck.

Under the Imperial Court System, Gene aka.”Shirley” won the title of “Empress III Shirley,” after which she refused to appear in public without drag. 

Tommy Gene Brown  who started as a bride and ended up an Empress passed away in 1989.   

Lets all raise a wedding  toast to the “Waco Bride”and to remembering  our history.   “Long live the queens!”

Texas Officials Tell Librarians to REMOVE LGBT Books, AG Tell School District "PRIDE Week" is Illegal

Texas State Board of Ed Rejects Teaching Students About Respect for LGBT People

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The Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education rejected proposals in a series of votes Thursday and Friday to teach students in public school health classes that everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.

Board member Ruben Cortez, D-Brownsville, proposed standards requiring students in Grades 7-8 and high school be able to define and differentiate between sexual orientation and gender identity. Two other proposals called for students to learn that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their orientation or identity. Board Democrats and one Republican backed all four proposals, but nine Republicans voted them down.

“Imagine the tragic message state board members have sent by refusing to acknowledge that LGBT students even exist in our classrooms,” said Carisa Lopez, political director for the Texas Freedom Network., “The board had a chance to stand with young people who are looking to feel safe and respected in their schools. A majority of board members chose to abandon them and stand with the bullies instead.”

Mary Elizabeth Castle, policy advisor at the 501(c)(3) non-profit anti-LGBT hate group Texas Values countered: “Today, we are grateful that the State Board of Education voted to stick to education and teach children how to live a healthy and productive life as opposed to confusing them with controversial political ideologies. The statewide Health standards look nothing like Austin ISD’s radical sex education propaganda; and efforts to politicize Science failed.”

HEARTBREAKING: San Antonio Councilman and His Husband Die Within Hours of Each Other From Coronavirus

HEARTBREAKING: San Antonio Councilman and His Husband Die Within Hours of Each Other From Coronavirus

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A tragic story comes out of San Antonio, Texas as city councilman and his husband died within hours of each other of coronavirus.

Philip Tsai had gone to the doctor and was given medications, then sent home to only go back days later and be put on a ventilator. In his last post on Facebook he said

Back in the ER.. oxygen super low. Heart rate low. Shortness breath vomiting blood pressure high fever 102.9. Update: I tested positive for corona. Be here for a couple of days.. then quarantine 14 day”

Philip would never make it back home, his husband would soon join him in a San Antonio ICU. Tony had also been sick, but didn’t want to go to the E.R. He was found unresponsive by Philip’s mom and days later ended fighting for his life in a hospital room near his husband’s.

“These doctors in the ICU and nurses they tell us new frontier for them they’re trying to figure it out all the stuff that you’re hearing on the news and all the stuff that we hear from the actual people fighting in the front lines,” said Alfred and Robert Tsai, Philip’s brothers.

Alfred and Robert say they want to share Philip and Tony’s story, and they know the way they died should serve as a warning to everyone young or old, healthy or sick, male or female.

“You can look at the end of the day, there are two family members we will miss and will never get back. It’s not worth going out socializing and having that chance risking the chance of getting it.

Tony Brooks Tsai was a councilman at Live Oak and worked at San Antonio Military Medical Center. Phillip Thai Brooks owned his own salon called Extreme Opulenece Hair Studio, LLC. They will be buried together at Fort Sam Houston.

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott is rushing to try and open the state by May 1st despite the states lack of coronavirus testing

Patrons Attacked In Dallas Gay Bar. Police Seek Suspects [VIDEO]

Patrons Attacked In Dallas Gay Bar. Police Seek Suspects [VIDEO]

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Two men entered the Liquid Zoo Bar & Grill in Dallas, TX on February 2 and began harassing patrons by yelling homophobic slurs. Bartenders tried to escort the men from the premises but they resisted, and began throwing punches.

Now Dallas police have made a public plea in hopes of finding two unidentified suspects. Law enforcement is treating the incident as a hate crime.

Cameras caught the attack, on tape and police hope a member of the public can aid in identifying the suspects.

“It was kind of nightmarish because you never know what’s going to happen in that situation,” Ronnie Mikyles, one of the bar employees, told CBS News. “My face had gotten split open, and the back of my head was swollen on the right side of my face.”

The bar posted the following statement via Facebook.

“One thing we at Zoo don’t condone is the behavior that took place at the bar tonight. We are a family of customers, friends and staff. We want to apologize to our Zoo Peeps that were subjected to the group that came in and was causing problems. I just met with my Zoo Crew and addressed how this type of situation is to be handled in the future. We managed to provide good video to PD as well as license plates for a handful of the vehicles. We will not tolerate HATE against our bar.”

Gary Welborn, owner of the Liquid Zoo Bar & Grill said this is a first for them. He said his patrons are a tight-knit group of regulars, and he never expected anything like this to happen.

“You would think being 2020 we wouldn’t have that issue, but unfortunately, it’s bred into a lot of people,” Welborn said.