Tag Archives: why?

Longtime Vancouver LGBT Activists Speak Out Against BLM’s Demands Of No Police At PRIDE

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A group of veteran Vancouver LGBT activists and community pioneers have launched a petition to counter Black Lives Matter Vancouver’s request to have the police removed from the Pride parade. These activists are concerned that the voices of older generations who helped found the communities and worked hard to develop relationships with the police are being ignored, in addition to others. 

The organizers of the petition are Velvet Steele, a Vancouver trans and sex worker rights advocate who was a member of the Trans/Police Liaison committee in the early 1990s; Gordon Hardy, a co-founder of the Vancouver Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s; Sandra Leo-Laframboise, a trans queer activist and Métis Two Spirit elder; and Kevin Dale McKeown, Vancouver’s first out gay journalist and an LGBT columnist for the Georgia Straight in 1970s

The petition states:

Vancouver’s LGBTQ community has a long history of positive engagement with the Vancouver Police Department, from the first Gay and Lesbian/Police Liaison Committee in 1977, through the 1980s with the work of community leaders like Jim Deva, Jim Trenholme, and Malcolm Crane, and continuing today as the LGBT/Police Liaison Committee. We’ve been doing this work for 40 years now.”

“While the objections that Black Lives Matter Vancouver makes against the presence of the Vancouver Police Department in the Vancouver Pride Parade reflect historic and ongoing injustices against the black communities in major American and Eastern Canadian cities, they do not reflect the relationships between Vancouver’s LGBTQ communities with local law enforcement.” 

The petition organizers also note that the VPD and RCMP have participated in the parade since 2002, which “signifies the progress we have made in our struggle for LGBTQ equality”.

The counter-petition is a reaction to BLM Vancouver’s petition launched on February 7 to request, for a second time, that the Vancouver Pride Society have the VPD withdraw all of its uniformed, armed officers from the parade. 

The counter-petition is available for all to sign on the change.org website. The petition will be delivered to the VPS.

The petition will close on February 20, the day before the Vancouver Pride is scheduled to meet with BLM Vancouver members on February 21. This year’s Vancouver Pride parade will be held on August 6.

 

“They started telling me about the incident, a shooting... And then I go on to find out it’s a gay bar. I got scared, ‘Shit, is he gay?’ And he’s not gay, so I said, phew… I am a conservative Republican.”

New Gallop Poll Shows That Anti-Gay Countries Are Not Good Places For Gays To Live. Duh!

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WTF

 

Gallop is at it again trying its inept hands at LGBT polling.  And boy is this one a doozey.

Gallop reports that nearly 3 in 10 adults (28%) across 123 countries have responded in a new and most probably worthless poll that their city or area is a “good place” for gay or lesbian people to live, but hospitable attitudes range widely from as high as 83% in the Netherlands to as low as 1% in Pakistan and Senegal.

Meaning that LGBT’s shouldn’t live in anti-gay countries.

How brillant!

The Netherlands, where more than eight in 10 residents say their local communities are good places for gays or lesbians to live, was also the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage in 2001. As of 2013, Iceland (82%), Canada (80%), Spain (79%), the United Kingdom (77%), and Belgium (74%) had legalized gay marriage.

By contrast, in many of the countries where the residents are least likely to feel their city or area is a “good place,” it is illegal to be openly gay. For example, “an improper or unnatural act with a person of the same sex,” as Senegal’s anti-gay law dictates, can be punished with up to five years in prison and fines of up to $3,000. Laws that allow for the imprisonment of gay and lesbian people are also on the books in Pakistan — where 1% say their area is a good place for gay people to live — Uganda (2%), Ethiopia (2%), and Afghanistan (2%).

Of the countries or areas where residents are most likely to say their city or area is “not a good place” for gay and lesbian people, nearly all were African nations, where same-sex relationships are still largely taboo. This sentiment is nearly universal in Senegal (98%), Malawi (96%), Gabon (95%), Niger (95%), Mali (95%), and Uganda (95%). With passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda, for example, same-sex intimacy was punishable by life in prison. This, however, was recently struck down by a Ugandan court.

The perception that their local communities are not hospitable to gay and lesbian people is widely shared throughout the African sub-continent. South Africa may be the sole exception, with nearly half of the population (49%) saying their community is a good place for gay or lesbian people to live, but a slight majority (51%) says it is “not a good place.” This comes after the nation was the first and only in Africa to legalize same-sex marriage in 2006

“These latest findings show that for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) people around the world, being open about their sexual orientation or gender identity likely comes with substantial risk,” said controversial statistician Gary Gates, at the Williams Institute, whose recent surveys about LGBT population numbers has been widely disputed. “This helps to explain why legal and social change toward greater acceptance toward LGBT people can be so elusive in regions of the world like much of the African continent.

The global average and the country rankings do not include data from more than a dozen countries where the question is too sensitive to be asked: Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Nigeria, Bahrain, Bhutan, Iraq, Kuwait, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen which right there if added to the mix would have skewed the numbers.  So not only was it a needless poll, its worthless to boot.

For methodology and specific survey dates, please review Gallup’s Country Data Set details.

But really why bother.

GLAAD Announces It’s 4th Annual Network Responsibility Index And Leaves The GAYEST Television Channels OUT!

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GLAAD’ has named MTV and The CW tops on it’s list of television networks offering the most visibility to LGBT people, according to the group’s fourth annual study,  Which is really bizarre.

Yes, MTV has had gay charcters on some shows since “Undressed” waaaaay back in 1999 which had the best portrayl’s but since then?  It seems that all of MYV’s MTV’s gay or bi male characters are usually there for the purpose of mockery or to test the attitudes of others and MTV’s gay or bi female characters are usually long-haired attention whores who use their sexuality to turn on men with girl-girl action.  Now tell me does that fir into GLAAD’s criteria of “quantity, quality and diversity of images of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and lets not forget the fact that the word “faggot” gets thrown around……ALOT

The most INTERESTING part is that the Index is that GLAAD left “gayest” networks OUT!

Many cable networks remain at the forefront of the television landscape through their consistent inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) stories within series that have broad and mainstream appeal.  The 2009-2010 Network Responsibility Index evaluated and analyzed primetime original cable programming in addition to the broadcast networks’ primetime schedules. GLAAD selected ten of the top basic and premium cable networks, as reported by Nielsen Media Research in June 2009, for review.


GLAAD also created the following review of a select group of networks to acknowledge the considerable quantity and quality of LGBT-inclusive content found outside of the top rated basic and premium cable networks. Though GLAAD did not conduct thorough reviews of the following networks, their contributions in LGBT programming during the 2009-2010 season are worth noting.

The  major cable channels the skipped?  BRAVO (The skipped BRAVO one of the gayest Cable Channels there is.) BBC America, HERE!, HGTV, LOGO, Sundance, and Comedy Central just to name a few.

So GLAAD left the “gayest” channels out.  But did it really leave out LOGO?  After all LOGO is owned by MTV and Viacom.  Is that what gave MTV the edge?  Or was MTV/Viacom the BIG donor of the year?

Who knows? 

But really how can the rankings even be taken seriously?  And seriously how can GLAAD even justify the money and time spent on this report.  Does GLAAD not have more pressing matters to attend to that your donation money can be used for?

You can read the entire GLAAD report by CLICKING HERE.