FROM THE ARCHIVES: National Coming Out Day is over this year, but homophobia is still ongoing. This week a 13-year-old kid hung himself in the schoolyard at the same middle school that I attended. I remember my days in 8th grade there and how I desperately tried to pretend that I was NOT achingly in...
A conversation with a bunch of high school students certainly gives one food for thought. Recently I had a friend sit with a group of teens at a school in Texas. It was Sadie Hawkins day. Back when I went to high school that meant the girls asked the boys to a dance. Sadie Hawkins...
Watching a recent show on transgendered people reminded me of a common thread I have noted since first advocating for transgendered folks, especially female to males (FTMs); genital reassignment surgery and its lack of necessity for many. At first I was quite confused as to why someone who was so obviously born into the wrong...
Setting aside what genitalia one is born with, most people conform to the notion that gender is made up of females and males. While most people are content with living the expected lives of the gender they were assigned according to their genitals, there are many who feel their gender is completely opposite of their...
Identifying as a lesbian for most of my life has given me a place to belong. Even when I produced my two children the ‘old fashioned way’, in my eyes, I was just a lesbian having heterosexual sex to create a child. Bisexual was never an option for me, even though I have had relationships...
Recently I was browsing some genderqueer forums. I don’t often participate in the conversations, not because I have no opinion, but because I seem to be so much older than most looking for guidance. I feel out of place in a community that seems inundated with much younger people. I wonder had I been exposed...
I went into my son’s freshman high school class last week as a member of the Spectrum’s LGBT Speaker’s Bureau to help dispel myths about LGBT people and to educate them about the consequences of teen bullying by sharing my story. It was 8:00 am and the kids just stared blankly, with their mouths agape. ...
In 1944 Tony and Pulitzer award-winning songwriter Frank Loesser (“Guys & Dolls”) wrote ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’ for his wife Lynn and sang it at private parties before selling it to a studio which put it in a movie. It won the 1949 Academy Award for Best Original Song. And it is original. A duet...
“Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.” Albert Einstein I’m a Lesbian Feminist, which means—to me—that I’m mindful of male privilege in our culture and believe it my social responsibility to educate and be an activist around the harm that patriarchal privilege creates and sustains. War, rape, bullying, stock market...
Why do Gays and Lesbians love Halloween so? Celebrating Halloween was a longstanding tradition in my family growing up in Northern California. As a child I was allowed to run free—dressed as a monster or in some sort of boy-themed costume. Candy was like money for us, a commodity that involved trading and counting. The...
Hang on, it’s going to be a wild ride!
— Robin