[PLEASE REBLOG!] Bloomberg to cut homeless LGBT youth services by $7 million, eliminate 160 youth beds

transradical:

I am currently homeless in NYC and my bed is provided for by the Ali Forney Center. If Mayor Bloomberg’s budget goes through, there is a good chance that I will end up back on the street or into a shelter where I’m likely to face constant harassment and probably violence. (That is not a hypothetical, I know a lot of people who have been attacked in city shelters.) 

If you have a problem with a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg forcing LGBT youth like me out of safe shelters and onto the street, you can let him know here. 

If you want to donate to or volunteer at AFC and help homeless LGBT youth, you can do so here.

Don’t let New York City’s billionaire mayor get a way with this. I will provide details on the planned protests of Bloomberg’s budget by AFC as I get then. 

(via qbits)

Source: transradical

Photographer Uses Camera to Fight Back After Gay-Bashing

(TW: gay bashing, violence, anti-gay slur)

By Lucas Grindley

IANNIS DELATOLAS BAT FULL SIZE ART 560x (COURTESY) ADVOCATE.COM

Art photographer Iannis Delatolas says he was gay-bashed at a Brooklyn, N.Y., bar while dozens of onlookers did nothing to help.

Delatolas told the story to Michael Musto of The Village Voice. He said he took his dog, Tulip, to Mission Dolores, a hipster bar in Brooklyn, where a “frat boy” in his 20s cut in line in front of him.

“I told him to wait his turn and he mouthed off some ‘fuck you, you fucking queer,’” Delatolas remembers. “I had some loud words with him, and he took his beer and left. I was shaken, I go there all the time, I never thought this would happen there.”

A security guard asked the man to leave, and that, Delatolas tells Musto, is when the shouting match really began. One of the man’s friends, he said, suddenly attacked and punched him nearly a dozen times before the security guard could stop it. After all that, the moment Delatolas says haunts him is when he asked for help.

“I get up in a daze,” he tells the Voice. “I ask for a witness as I am dialing 911. The courtyard is packed with about 30 mostly white hipsters. No one comes forward.”

Delatolas shot the self-portrait you see here the next day and says it’s “helped me take back my dignity, it was my way of fighting back.”

Learn more about Delatolas’s art on his website.
Read the complete first-person account as told to Musto.

Ruling is victory for transgender New Yorkers who seek to change gender on birth certificates

by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Judge holding gavel, close-up

Tom Grill/Getty Images

A judge says New York City asked too much of a transgender man by seeking a psychiatric report and detailed surgical records.  He wanted to have his sex changed on his birth certificate.

NEW YORK — He had been through sex-change surgery and wanted his birth certificate to reflect the man he’d become, at nearly 70.

City health officials said they needed a psychiatric report and detailed surgical records to switch the gender on his birth certificate — requirements that put up undue roadblocks, a judge recently ruled in a case that highlights legal questions around a sensitive issue of identity.

The ruling, made public last week , orders the city Health Department to re-evaluate his request and questions the agency’s understanding of “the lives and experience of transgender people.” It marks something of a victory for advocates seeking to make it easier for people who have changed gender to change their identity documents.

Click the link above to read the full article.

comingoutjournal:

Pictures from New York City Gay Pride Parade (Heritage Pride March) 2011.
Greenwich Village, New York City.

Pictures’ All rights reserved by Vivienne Gucwa. 

Source: Flickr / vivnsect

Transgender Americans take on New York

By Daniel Nasaw

A group of transgender men and women want New York City to make it easier to change the “M” or “F” on their birth certificates. What makes a man or a woman, and why do governments care?

Teen gets jail in bias beating at NYC gay bar

Associated Press

NEW YORK — A teenager involved in an anti-gay attack at a landmark New York City gay bar is headed for two months in jail.

Christopher Orlando didn’t speak at his sentencing Tuesday. Defense lawyer John Rapawy says the 18-year-old “just wants to put this behind him.”

Orlando pleaded guilty in September to charges including assault as a hate crime.

Co-defendant Matthew Francis was accused of beating a man in the Stonewall Inn’s bathroom after using an anti-gay slur. Prosecutors say Orlando tackled the man and held him down.

Francis also pleaded guilty. He’s serving two years in prison. His lawyer has said Francis was high on drugs during the attack.

Patrons’ defiance of a 1969 police raid at the Stonewall Inn became a defining moment in the gay rights movement.

LGBT Group Moves Into Building Named for Antigay Lawmaker | advocate.com

By Trudy Ring

RUBEN DIAZ SR X390 (SOURCED) | ADVOCATE.COM
Ruben Díaz Sr.

Bronx Pride, the New York City borough’s largest LGBT rights group, will open its new headquarters Monday — in a building named for antigay state senator Ruben Díaz Sr.

The group is moving into the Reverend Ruben Díaz Gardens, a two-year-old building financed by the city Housing and Development Corp. and backed by the lawmaker’s nonprofit organization, the New York Post reports.

“I hope people say, ‘Wow, they’re reclaiming this building for the LGBT community!’” executive director Dirk McCall told the Post, laughing. “We’re very excited.”

It’s merely coincidental, though, that the group is moving into the building, McCall said. Díaz, however, is said to be unhappy about the new tenant. “It’s such a direct shot at him,” a source told the paper.

Díaz, who represents a Bronx district, was the lone Senate Democrat to oppose the marriage equality law passed by both houses of the state legislature and signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in June. A Pentecostal minister, Díaz has called acceptance of same-sex marriage a sign of the apocalypse.

Archbishop Dolan Prohibits Church From Using Facilities, Services That May Further Same-Sex Marriage | thinkprogress.org

By Zack Ford

New York Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan has been incredibly vocal in his opposition to marriage equality, repeatedly condemning the rights of same-sex couples under the guise of love and support for the gay community.

As of last month, he has prohibited by decree any Church personnel or property from being utilized for same-sex marriage ceremonies under penalty of “canonical sanctions,” calling the state’s new marriage equality “irreconcilable with the nature and the definition of marriage as established by Divine law”:

1. No member of the clergy (priest or deacon) incardinated or assisting in the Archdiocese of New York, or any person while acting as an employee of the Church, may participate in the civil solemnization or celebration of a same-sex marriage, which includes but is not limited to providing services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privilege for such event. Ecclesiastical solemnization or celebration of same-sex marriages is expressly forbidden by Canon law.

2. No Catholic facility or property, including but not limited to parishes, missions, chapels, meeting halls, Catholic educational, health, or charitable institutions or benevolent orders, or any place dedicated, consecrated, or used for Catholic worship may be used for the solemnization or consecration of same-sex marriages.

The property restrictions in Dolan’s decree are troubling, particularly given he specifically cites educational and health institutions. This would mean that a bed-ridden patient in a Catholic hospital would not be permitted to marry his partner on the property. It’s not clear from the decree, but this could conceivably extend to any and all recognition of same-sex unions, which would create severe complications for couples who might be accessing healthcare or charitable services that are provided by the Church.

Dolan continues to show just how out of step Catholic leadership is from the mainstream Catholic population, which overwhelmingly supports marriage equality. With this decree, Dolan signifies that discriminating against same-sex couples is one of the Church’s highest priorities.

A Gay Wedding Windfall for New York

When the New York Senate voted to legalize same-sex marriage on June 24, Michael Watts rushed to celebrate at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, birthplace of the gay rights movement. The next morning, after a more sober assessment of the news, he bought advertisements in three gay publications for his catering business. “Congratulations New York! It’s time to start planning,” read the ads for Cocktail Caterers, the company Watts founded in 2005 with his domestic partner. Since then the company has received 50 inquiries about feeding nuptial guests, up from three in all of 2010. “People are realizing, ‘Hello, there’s a market in this,’ ” says Watts.

As thousands of gay couples have lined up to exchange vows in New York, they’ve been courted by florists, caterers, event planners, and other businesses trying to capitalize on the new market of same-sex brides and grooms. Even the Manhattan Clerk’s office, which issues marriage licenses, has started selling wine stoppers and coffee mugs adorned with two grooms or two brides in its gift shop. “There are no rules” with same-sex ceremonies, says David Beahm, who plans high-end parties, including the nuptials of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2000. “Most grandmothers haven’t been to a gay wedding.”

New York may reap $310 million over the next three years from license fees, taxes, and tourism related to same-sex weddings, according to a May report by four New York state senators. Morgan Stanley (MS) Chairman John Mack, Goldman Sachs (GS) Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, and other Wall Street executives argue that legalization was necessary for the state to remain an economic leader. As other places “extend marriage rights regardless of sexual orientation, it will become increasingly difficult to recruit the best talent if New York cannot offer the same benefits and protections,” the business leaders wrote in an open letter in April urging legalization of same-sex unions.

Click the link above to finish reading the article.

Hasidic Jews Claim New York Marriage Law Caused ‘Surge’ Of Pedophilia | thinkprogress.org

by Zack Ford

A New York City group known as the Jewish Political Action Committee (JPAC) is now alleging that the legalization of same-sex marriage has led to a “surge” of child molestation:

The Jewish Political Action Committee is now organizing an awareness program to stop Gay molesters from attacking children and teens. Since the gay marriage bill in New York was introduced,there has been a surge of gay attacks against youngsters in New York. Children and teens are now at the mercy of the militant gay liberals who are brainwashing society to their evil.

The group is distributing signs that condemn homosexuality as a sin worse than murder and that claim “G-d sent AIDS to punish male gays.”

While JPAC’s efforts may be small and local, they reflect a renewed trend among anti-gay groups trying to connect homosexuality and pedophilia, even though the two are mutually exclusive phenomenon that cannot be compared. Anita Bryant and John Briggs were making the same claims 40 years ago as they fought against gay rights, but groups like the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, the Liberty Counsel, and the American Family Association have all recently been promoting the connection again.

These efforts to demonize the LGBT community reveal a complete misunderstanding of the nature of sexual orientation that dates back decades.

Click the link above to watch gay activist Harvey Milk debate John Briggs in 1978, challenging him on the very same claims that gays were more likely to be child molesters (and thus should not be allowed to teach).

Facebook co-founder seeks gay marriage for New York | gayagenda.com

Politicians signal move towards gay marriage legislation in the state as entrepreneur and campaign funder announces intention to marry.

View Source at PinkNews.co.uk

Bible-Thumping NY Town Clerk Refuses To Give Same-Sex Marriage Licenses | gayagenda.com

With her Bible tucked under her arm, Belforti proclaimed that freedom of religion protects her from needing to comply with the new law.

 

“New York law protects my right to hold both my job and my beliefs,” she told the Times. “God doesn’t want me to do this, so I can’t do what God doesn’t want me to do. Just like I can’t steal, or any of the other things that God doesn’t want me to do.”

It’s an interesting argument, but it has a big gaping hole in it: The right to religious freedom does not give a person liberty over the law. She couldn’t, for example, refuse to give a marriage license to a non-virgin, a divorcee or an interfaith couple. Governor Cuomo seems to agree: Earlier this summer he said that “when you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose”.

NEW YORK: Orthodox Jewish Hate Group Says "Gay" Is Another Name For Satan

Click the link above to watch the video.

New York Clerk Refuses to Sign Gay Marriage Licenses

Source: frilldora

JOB OPENING: Attorney; Lambda Legal; Nationwide

Lambda Legal always welcomes resumes from experienced attorneys who are interested in employment in any of our offices nationwide. Please send resumes to Hayley Gorenberg, Deputy Legal Director, 120 Wall Street, Suite 1500, New York, NY 10005.

(via qbliss)

Source: lgbtjobs