For decades, LGBT youth have faced hardship and today is no different: Thousands of children and adolescents in the United States are struggling with their sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression.
In an ongoing effort to address this societal concern, the It Gets Better Project, as established by columnist and author Dan Savage, strives to inspire young people facing harassment and intimidation. The staggering number of bullied, LGBT young people inspires the It Gets Better Project to create a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that despite the current adversity in their lives, it does indeed get better.
Recently, Lexus launched “It Got Better,” the newest series on broadband channel L/Studio. With this new docuseries L/Studio once again has the opportunity to back another passion project from the creative team of Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky, who produced the channel’s popular and award-winning “Web Therapy.” Currently in its sixth year, L/Studio hosts an eclectic collection of original films, live-action shows, documentaries and comedy programs designed to engage a discerning, inquisitive audience—outside of the traditional automotive encounter. The Lexus-owned broadband channel also includes original work from the worlds of art, culture, design, science, entertainment, architecture and beyond.
The six-episode docuseries is a collaboration between Kudrow and Bucatinsky and the It Gets Better Project (Dan Savage and Brian Pines). It tells the inspiring personal stories of a diverse group of LGBT actors, athletes and musicians including Jane Lynch, Jason Collins, Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei and Laverne Cox.
“It Got Better” establishes a pithy, yet truly heartfelt connection between LGBT celebrities and the video’s audience. Insightful personal accounts from the most recognizable faces in the LGBT community provide a way for young people and adults alike to experience the unparalleled victory that is self-acceptance.
Growing up as a LGBT person is all too often a bleak existence. So many young/queer people, dissatisfied with their current situations, can only hope for the day when life gives them a break. Happiness becomes a rare commodity only accessible through coping mechanisms, and visions of a utopian future consume most other thoughts.
“It Got Better” is so necessary and innovative in that it validates there is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel. The messages expressed through each video are just as inspiring as the individuals being interviewed and the perspectives gained are both unique and remarkable.
The first “It Got Better” episode features “Glee” star Jane Lynch and can be viewed here.
An incredible new docuseries has hit the web that interviews out lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) celebrities as they share their journey to living freely and authentically as a reminder to the rest of us that it really does get better.
Launched by Lexus in collaboration with the It Gets Better Project, the “It Got Better” docuseries is a collaborative effort between actress Lisa Kudrow and actor and HuffPost Blogger Dan Bucatinsky with celebrities such as Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei, Laverne Cox and Jason Collins. This first episode in the six-part series features actress Jane Lynch and is hosted through the broadband channel L/Studio.
“I believe people come into our life — we draw our people to us,” Lynch shares in the above video. “Always keep your mind open, your heart open for those like-minded, like-hearted others. It doesn’t even have to be somebody else who is gay going through this, just somebody who is sympathetic. And they will come your way — you will find your people. And now I live in a world where I don’t give a shit if you have a problem with who I am.”
Check out the first episode in this incredible series above or head here to visit the L/Studio broadband channel.
The first time Rhys Ernst saw Zackary Drucker was in 2005 at a bar in the East Village.
At the time, both were aspiring artists. Rhys had recently graduated from Hampshire College and was working for MTV networks. Zackary had graduated from the School of Visual Arts and was appearing on a reality TV show called “Artstar,” hosted by Jeffrey Deitch.
But there was one clear impediment to romance: Rhys had never dated a man, and Zackary had never dated a woman.
“I remember thinking,” Rhys said, “if I ever dated a boy, that’s the type of boy I’d date.”
Rhys Ernst, left, and his partner, Zackary Drucker, at “Relationship,” their exhibition of photographs being shown in the Whitney Biennial.
Today, that consideration is not an issue. Over the last five years, Zackary has transitioned from male to female, Rhys from female to male.
And in “Relationship,” a photo exhibition currently on view at the Whitney Biennial, the two have chronicled that process and the evolution of their own love affair. (In a recent preview of the Biennial, Holland Cotter of The New York Times wrote that the Ernst/Drucker photographs “put queer consciousness on the front burner.”)
That a show by two transgender artists should be so prominently featured at the 2014 Biennial should come as a surprise to no one. It is just more evidence of the increasing presence of trans people at the center of popular culture.
In their spring advertising campaigns, the luxury retailer Barneys New York and the award-winning jewelry designer Alexis Bittar feature transgender models. In February, a memoir by Janet Mock, a former editor at People magazine, which drew heavily on her transition from male to female, made the New York Times best-seller list. Laverne Cox has become a breakout star on Netflix’s hit show “Orange Is the New Black,” playing a sympathetic character who winds up in prison after using stolen credit cards to pay for her gender reassignment surgery. And Carmen Carrera, a transgender showgirl who first achieved demi-fame as a contestant on the reality television program “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” has become an in-demand fashion model and muse for the photographer Steven Meisel.
Rommel Demano
Here are their stories.
Laverne Cox
Laverne Cox grew up in Mobile, Ala., with her identical twin brother and her mother, a single parent who worked two to three jobs at a time to make ends meet.
She enrolled at Marymount Manhattan College in New York in the late ‘90s, where by day she majored in dance, took her first acting classes and became immersed in gender studies.
Laverne Cox, plays the transgender character Sophia in a scene from “Orange Is the New Black.”
By night, Ms. Cox was a presence on the downtown club scene, hanging out at Flamingo East in the East Village and performing operatic versions of heavy metal songs at Squeeze Box, a Friday night party at Don Hill’s. (Among the songs she sang were Iron Maiden’s “Be Quick or Be Dead” and Pantera’s “Mouth for War.”)
At the time, Ms. Cox said, she was in a “gender nonconforming space,” no longer living as a man, but still struggling with her own “internalized transphobia” as well as a desire to “be myself and not embody some stereotype of womanhood.”
“It was a mess,” she said.
After completing her transition, she was cast in 2008 on the VH1 reality show “I Want to Work for Diddy.” (Ms. Cox made it halfway through the competition.) Last year, she got her big break with a role on “Orange Is the New Black” on Netflix.
Aaron Tredwell
On the show, the major characters appear in prison and then in flashback sequences that show how they got there. So Ms. Cox’s twin, a musician who lives in Brooklyn, played her character pretransition.
Ms. Cox has spoken at colleges about the transgender experience. She’s also done one now-famous chat on a daytime talk show, where she appeared with Carmen Carrera and gently chastised the host, Katie Couric, for being too focused on questions about genital surgery, which not every transgender person undergoes. After Ms. Couric said to Ms. Carrera, “Your private parts are different now, aren’t they,” Ms. Cox argued that focusing on this objectifies trans people and prevents a more meaningful discussion from taking place.
“Someone called me a man in the airport today,” Ms. Cox said in an interview this week. “Just because there’s a few trans folks having lovely careers and having moments of visibility does not mean that a lot of trans folks lives are not in peril. We need to remember those folks who are struggling, particularly trans women of color who are on the margins.”
Benjamin Norman
Some success stories are neat. Others, like Janet Mock’s, less so. She grew up in Hawaii with a mother who had her first child at 16 and a father who battled drug addiction and had numerous children with other women. (One year, Ms. Mock said, her father “had a baby in January, February and April.”)
Then, in middle school, Ms. Mock met a transgender girl named Wendi, and at 12 or 13, she began applying lip gloss, wearing makeup and tweezing her eyebrows. At 15, she started hormones.
She was an honor student in high school while she worked as a prostitute on Merchant Street in Honolulu, which is how she saved the money to travel to Thailand and pay for gender reassignment surgery.
After graduating from the University of Hawaii in 2005, Ms. Mock became an editor at People.com, then came out as transgender in a 2011 Marie Claire profile.
Valentijn de Hingh, left, in the new Barneys campaign, which features 16 transgender models.
This winter, Atria Books (a division of Simon and Schuster) published her memoir, “Redefining Realness,” in which she quotes Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou but wrote that Beyoncé was most responsible for “shifting” how she viewed herself as a woman of color.
“Everyone celebrated her because she was the girl of the moment,” said Ms. Mock, 31, who has frizzy, Afro-ish hair with blond highlights, and, on the day I met her, looked effortlessly fashionable in a pair of black Theory jeans and a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, showing off her gold-colored infinity bangles. On her arm was a tan leather 3.1 Phillip Lim bag, which she said was a gift to herself after her book became a best seller.
Like Ms. Cox and Ms. Carrera, she has been somewhat offended by the tone of some of her television interviews. Last month, Ms. Mock went on Piers Morgan’s CNN show (it has since been canceled), where the host all but began the interview by saying how “amazing” it was that this attractive woman had once been biologically male.
“Had I not known your life story, I would have absolutely no clue,” he said, as the scrawl at the bottom of the bottom of the screen read “Born a boy.”
“The Longest Day of the Year,” from Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s exhibition at the Whitney Biennial.
Ms. Mock pounced on Twitter, and Slate ran a withering piece on Mr. Morgan’s performance that evening, chastising him for being “obsessed with appearances” and accusing the show of promoting the segment in a “sensational and ignorant way.”
Nevertheless, the interest in Ms. Mock’s book and its subsequent sales is an indication that something is changing dramatically. And, no doubt, she appreciates having a platform now.
As a child, she said: “All I knew was gay. All I knew was RuPaul.”
Valentijn de Hingh
A Dutch camera crew followed Valentijn de Hingh around for the bulk of her childhood, chronicling her journey from male to female. By the end of high school, she was walking in runway shows for Comme des Garçons and Maison Martin Margiela. In 2012, she gave a talk at a TEDx event in Amsterdam titled “Why Did I Choose?” This year, she is appearing in the Barneys campaign alongside 16 other transgender models.
Having understanding parents helped, she said.
They first read about transgender children in a magazine when Ms. de Hingh was 5 and took her to a hospital in the Netherlands with a program for gender-variant children.
“My parents were looking for answers, and they found it there,” she said.
Schoolmates, she said, were largely accepting, though she did experience some taunting. Being openly transgender but preoperative made dating hard, something she struggles with, even after gender reassignment surgery.
“I still have a hard time with dating,” said Ms. de Hingh, 23. “I have some figuring out to do.”
Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker
Many of the photographs in Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst’s show at the Whitney capture them in scenarios most couples can relate to: celebrating anniversaries, lounging around the house while one fights off a cold, sitting poolside on a sunny day.
Others depict circumstances that are perhaps unique to a transgender couple, such as an image of Mr. Ernst’s and Ms. Drucker’s bandage-covered backsides shortly after taking hormone shots.
According to Ms. Drucker, the exhibition has a couple of aims. One is to show that all relationships are in some way banal. Another, she said, is about “learning to love ourselves and deflect the distortions” that prevent people from doing that.
There weren’t a lot of transgender role models for Ms. Drucker and Mr. Ernst growing up. But their parents were progressive and supported their children’s gender nonconformity.
In high school, they both became familiar with the writings of Kate Bornstein, a queer theorist whose books “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us,” and “My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely” outlined a way of living that did not ascribe to traditional gender conventions.
“I don’t call myself a woman, and I know I’m not a man,” Ms. Bornstein once said.
Today, the couple lives in Los Angeles and has been consulting on the pilot of a television show for Amazon called “Transparent.” It stars Jeffrey Tambor of “Arrested Development” as an aging man who is beginning a gender transition. (It was picked up on Tuesday.)
They are also part of a wide circle of “gender queer” and transgender creative types that includes Wu Tsang (a filmmaker and visual artist who identifies as “transfeminine” and “transguy”) and Amos Mac, a photographer and editor who runs Originalplumbing, a magazine and website, that are devoted to hipsterish transgender types.
This pretty much describes Ms. Drucker, 30, who has a penchant for tight leggings, vintage Yves Saint Laurent heels and Grecian tops — and yet has no plans to have gender reassignment surgery, a topic she discusses pretty openly.
The same goes for Mr. Ernst, 31, who sports a light goatee and on Friday was wearing a button-down shirt with high tops and charcoal pants.
Ultimately, Ms. Drucker said, she’d like to get to a point where we “surpass” the binaries of gender altogether.
“That would be the greatest transition of all,” she said.
Correction: March 20, 2014
Because of an editing error, an article last Thursday about wider acceptance of transgendered people misstated the surname of a longtime New York Times critic who reviewed a photo exhibition at the Whitney Biennial by a transgender couple. He is Holland Cotter, not Carter.
Again? But the harder their enemies hit, the stronger the couple becomes.
4/8/2014 | New York Magazine
Hillary Clinton, in 1996, before testifying to a Whitewater grand jury.
About the only political conviction uniting Americans in Election Year 2014 is that Election Year 2016 will be about Hillary Clinton. The likelihood of her unannounced candidacy has stilled the rest of the slim Democratic field, forged a truce among most of the party’s congenitally warring factions, and induced past Clinton antagonists like David Geffen to disarm. At the fractured GOP, where the presidential timber is as thick as a forest if not as towering, Hillary is also a unifier of sorts as the de facto opponent-in-waiting. And Republicans are fine with that too. With the Clintons, you get scandal and the serious shot at victory that Clinton-scaled scandal seems to promise, even if you have no candidate of comparable stature to pit against them.
Such is the right’s undying theory, anyway. But what scandal are we talking about this time? There’s Benghazi, of course, pounded daily at every conservative venue, as it has been since emerging mid–Romney campaign as a last-ditch hope for bringing down the Obama administration. But Benghazi will be a nonfactor in 2016, as it was in 2012, because most voters don’t give a damn—any more than they care about Vladimir Putin’s Crimea grab, which will also be pinned on Clinton’s reign at State—in no small part because the Bush administration’s Iraq fiasco depressed public engagement in foreign affairs for a generation. A more promising alternative might be the persistent odor of sleaze that trails the Clinton Foundation, the subject of both New York Times and Washington Post scrutiny last summer. As Alec MacGillis of The New Republic summed up what we know thus far about the Clinton Global Initiative, there’s “an undertow of transactionalism in the glittering annual dinners, the fixation on celebrity, and a certain contingent of donors whose charitable contributions and business interests occupy an uncomfortable proximity.” Those proximities will be fodder for many dense flowcharts to come, as will the tentacles of Hillary’s extreme speaking fees (an estimated $400,000 for two talks to Goldman Sachs alone).
Yet what the right really wants to talk about when it talks about the Clintons is none of the above. The conversation will quickly turn to sex. It always does. It always has. And it already is.
The sex talk began after New Year’s. Rand Paul, the closest the GOP has to a presidential front-runner, denounced Bill Clinton’s “predatory behavior” with women on Meet the Press. Fox News played host to Kathleen Willey, whose charge of an Oval Office sexual assault by Clinton, made on 60 Minutes in 1998, remains unsubstantiated, as does her insinuation that he played a role in her husband’s suicide. The Washington Free Beacon, a rising right-wing website, mined the Diane Blair papers, the archives of a deceased political-science professor and Hillary friend held at the University of Arkansas. The most breathlessly bandied discovery: an undated letter to an unknown addressee, circa 1976, in which Bill Clinton, just turning 30, “closed by confessing that he had fallen asleep the night before while reading an erotic love poem from the seventeenth century.” (That would be Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”) At another right-wing outlet, the Washington Examiner, the pundit Michael Barone alerted his readers in late March that “a decade ago,” Clinton traveled on “the private plane of a man later convicted of having sex with a minor.” It apparently hasn’t occurred to these outraged moral arbiters that the projection of sex scandals onto a couple campaigning as beloved national grandparents—Bill Clinton turns 70 in 2016, Hillary 69—will strike many Americans as ludicrous.
The mainstream press is nonetheless following the right’s lead, as it did last time under the merry tutelage of Matt Drudge. In late February, Politico posted a helpful Cliffs Notes remembrance of Clinton scandals past, pegged to the fact that thousands of pages of documents had yet to be made public by the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. These secret files, we were told, will “fuel media attention to the Clintons’ past and pose a threat to Hillary Clinton’s possible presidential ambitions in 2016.” A slideshow revisits Whitewater, Travelgate, and the Rose Law Firm—all of which failed to incite mass indignation (or much public comprehension) when litigated ad infinitum two decades ago, and none of which resulted in proof of criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons. But these are just amuse-bouches before the main courses on the menu: Vince Foster and Monica Lewinsky. Foster was the Hillary Clinton law partner and friend who shot himself while serving as deputy White House counsel but whom Clinton haters tried for years to portray as a murder victim, silenced to cover up a supposed affair with Hillary. (According to Foster’s wife, among others, there was no affair, and the police and two independent counsels all concurred that Foster had committed suicide while suffering from clinical depression.) Lewinsky remains the only old Clinton scandal that needs no introduction. That incident of extramarital oral sex and the lying that accompanied it led to the sole impeachment in American history of an elected president. Clinton was acquitted of the charges in the Senate and in public opinion. One can only imagine what the House managers of his 1999 Senate trial—among them Lindsey Graham—make of the March Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll in which Clinton ties with Pope Francis for the highest approval rating among a slate of world figures. (Hillary follows right behind.)
Undaunted, the GOP is back on sex patrol. Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, tweeted in February: “Remember all the #Clinton scandals … That’s not what America needs again”—an acknowledgment that Clinton scandals are exactly what his party does remember and does need again, whether America needs them or not. Priebus elaborated to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that a Hillary run “provides a lot of opportunity for us” and that “everything’s on the table.” You don’t need a slideshow to surmise what “everything” is a euphemism for.
The Democrats will publicly scold the Republicans for recycling yesterday’s garbage. But in private they should pray that Priebus and his camp will bring it on—the old Clinton sex scandals and, better still, some new ones, real or fantasized, the more women the better. The received wisdom that sex scandals threaten a Hillary run is preposterous. It’s the reverse that’s true. The right’s inability to stanch its verbal diarrhea on the subject of female sexuality—whether provoked by rape, contraception, abortion, “traditional marriage,” gay marriage, gay parenting, or pop culture—did as much as anything to defeat Mitt Romney, his “binders full of women” notwithstanding, in 2012. (He lost women voters to Obama by 11 percentage points.) And that obsession with sex can defeat the GOP again. Todd Akin, the avatar of “legitimate rape,” may be gone, but many of the same political players will be in place in 2016 as in 2012—more than a few of them alumni of the Clinton sexcapades of the 1990s. No matter how much Republican leaders talk of reining in their sexist language (though not their policies) to counter charges that the GOP conducts a war on women, they just can’t help themselves. Whether or not there’s a war on women in 2016, there will be a rancorous and tasteless war on one woman. And it is guaranteed to backfire, drowning out fair G-rated questions about the Clintons’ dealings just as Monica and other “bimbo eruptions” drowned out such now-forgotten Clinton scandals as Filegate and Castle Grande.
To appreciate how inexorably the Clintons will seduce the GOP into another orgy of self-destruction, it helps to recall the tone of the insanity the couple induced among their opponents the first time around. That recent past has been obscured in the American memory by the rise in Bill Clinton’s stature and, most of all, by the subsequent detour of right-wing ire to a new hate object in the White House, an actual black president as opposed to merely an honorary one. In addition, many Americans who will vote in 2016 are too young to have grasped or witnessed the Clinton craziness firsthand. (Some first-time 2016 voters weren’t yet born when the Lewinsky story broke in early 1998.) They may be startled to discover what they missed. Only a novelist could capture the mood back then, as Philip Roth did in The Human Stain: “In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band … all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is … It was the summer when a president’s penis was on everyone’s mind.”
If you revisit the avalanche of contemporaneous Clinton-scandal journalism—if journalism is the word for it—you discover that even the high end of Clinton hatred was crazy and creepy. Take the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal—then still owned by the Bancroft family, not the unabashedly agenda-driven Rupert Murdoch. So voluminous was its scandal coverage, and so highly did the Journal estimate its historical import, that the output was collected in six books published from 1994 to 2001 under the umbrella title Whitewater: A Journal Briefing. The complete set weighed in at 3,213 pages, with a collective list price of $100. In the last of these Whitewater volumes, only 15 of 429 pages make any mention of Whitewater itself, so far afield had the Journal ventured from the original scandal (which even it conceded was “a two-bit land deal in the Ozarks”) into True Detective–esque swamps of sexual fever and its noir companions, drugs and murder. Along with the many assessments of Bill Clinton’s alleged paramours in the Whitewater collection, there is an editorial plugging The Clinton Chronicles, a hugely popular video that perpetuated the “Body Count List”—a running tabulation of mysterious deaths linked to the First Family. (The count would rise above 50.) While the Journal is skeptical of some of the video’s contents, it praises it anyway for getting at “something important about the swirl of Arkansas rumors” and recaps as many of the suspicious deaths as it can pack in. The Whitewater books also spill rivers of ink on the goings-on at a rural airstrip where drug running, money laundering, and the Iran-contra scandal were all said to intersect—but whose sole overlap with the Clintons was its location in the state of Arkansas. It was the Journal’s editorial page, too, that ran an excerpt from Unlimited Access, a tell-all book by Gary Aldrich, a former FBI agent who served in the Clinton White House. Aldrich claimed that Bill Clinton frequently snuck out of the White House in the dead of night, camouflaged by a blanket in the backseat of a car, to have assignations at a Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. He also accused Hillary Clinton of countenancing pornographic White House Christmas-tree ornaments, among them two turtledoves “joined together in an act of bird fornication” and “five gold-wrapped condoms.” With the imprimatur of the Journal and ABC’s This Week as a send-off, this work of fiction reached No. 1 on the Times’ nonfiction best-seller list.
When you read all this stuff at a somewhat historical remove of 15-plus years, what emerges is how gratuitously Hillary Clinton is often dragged into charges leveled at her husband, the Clinton actually holding public office, and how frequently she’s the victim of drive-by character assassination. The Journal bizarrely faults her for wearing a “pink suit” when “defending her $100,000 commodities market killing” and holds her accountable for having “had a good deal to do with setting the legal and moral tone of her husband’s administration.” Such tortured logic reached its pinnacle in a sensational 11,000-word investigation of Troopergate in the right-wing rag The American Spectator. Troopergate—not to be confused with Travelgate, which the Spectator hawked with a cover drawing of Hillary on a broomstick—alleged that Bill Clinton, while Arkansas governor, used state troopers to procure women for sex. Yet Hillary is damned along the way on grounds like these: “She would phone the mansion from her law office and order troopers to fetch feminine napkins from her bedroom and deliver them to her at her law firm.” Besides being utterly implausible, this accusation is a non sequitur, and never would have been included if, say, Kleenex were being fetched instead of feminine napkins. But such reportage is in keeping with the misogyny that underlies much of the Clinton literature, including the epic report delivered to Congress and the public by the puritanical independent counsel Kenneth Starr. As the fierce Clinton aide and defender Sidney Blumenthal would later point out in a memoir, Starr kept interrupting his prurient through-the-keyhole account of Bill Clinton’s priapism with weird asides about the First Lady’s whereabouts: “Mrs. Clinton was in Africa … Mrs. Clinton was in Ireland.” The point, Blumenthal writes, is that Starr “wishes her to be stained as well,” for “there is no other reason for her inclusion.”
The Troopergate story was written by David Brock, a self-described right-wing hit man who made his bones by maligning Clarence Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, as a sex freak (“a little bit nutty … a little bit slutty”) in a best-selling book as the Clintons arrived at America’s center stage. Brock would later recant his entire canon, become persona non grata among his old circle, create the liberal media-watchdog operation Media Matters, and morph into the Clinton wingman he is today. He is a contradictory figure, to put it mildly, but his 2002 book about his political change of heart, Blinded by the Right, owns up unstintingly to his own misogyny and is specific and persuasive about its prevalence in the right’s ranks. He tells of both the Starr deputy Brett Kavanaugh (now a George W. Bush–appointed judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit) and the literary agent Glen Hartley (still a prominent representative of conservative authors) calling Hillary Clinton a “bitch.” Ron Burr, the American Spectator publisher, implored him, “Can’t you find any more women to attack?”
In a telling moment of the 2008 campaign, John McCain didn’t object when a female supporter, referring to the still extant presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, asked him, “How do we beat the bitch?” McCain’s silence may say less about his character than about the status quo of a party where such thinking and locutions are business as usual; Ted Nugent and Glenn Beck described Hillary as, respectively, a “worthless bitch” and a “stereotypical bitch” in that same election cycle. Sex-tinged Hillary hatred on the right has dimmed nary a bit since the Clintons left the White House. It’s almost impossible to keep up with all the book-length screeds. In American Evita (2004), by Christopher Andersen, there are three references over 23 pages to the young Hillary’s (purported) habit of not shaving her legs; her body odor and penchant for wearing no makeup also get pride of place in the narrative. In Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary (2005), the misogyny is laced with a heavy dose of homophobia. “There was a long tradition of lesbianism at Wellesley,” he writes about her alma mater, citing what he seems to think is a damning differential between the marital rates of the Wellesley student body and faculty and the national norm at the dawn of the 20th century. Hillary’s gay friends, “military-barracks vocabulary,” “neglect of personal grooming,” and reported disinclination to shave her underarms (as well as her legs) as an undergraduate are intrinsic to Klein’s weasel-worded indictment that she “was much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement than a sexual practice.” While this line of attack tells us absolutely nothing about Hillary Clinton, it is yet another reminder that the right still regards lesbianism as sinister in an era when most Americans have moved on, including the young voters who reject the GOP precisely because of such antediluvian bigotry.
It’s not just men who peddle a misogynist point of view about Hillary Clinton. Peggy Noonan—a frequent contributor to the Journal’s Whitewater volumes—described her as a “squat and grasping woman” and a “highly credentialed rube.” As Hillary geared up for her Senate run, Noonan poured such observations into an obsessive book-length indictment, The Case Against Hillary Clinton (2000). Along the way, she puts several lengthy imaginary speeches in the former First Lady’s mouth (one of them 16 pages long), including a “free associating” monologue with references to “Howard Stern’s penis” and Joey Buttafuoco. By the 2008 campaign, Noonan was warning that Hillary “may be lethal” like “the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction,” and arguing that she “doesn’t have to prove she’s a man. She has to prove she’s a woman.” She rooted for her to beat Barack Obama because a Clinton candidacy “would be easier” for Republicans: “With her cavalcade of scandals, they’d be delighted to go at her.”
Yes, they would! Democrats can only hope that Noonan appears on as many Washington talk shows as humanly possible in 2016: Her scandalmongering and attacks on Hillary’s sexuality will be the gifts that keep on giving to a Clinton campaign. The talk-show auxiliary, meanwhile, will be in the reliable hands of Rush Limbaugh, who can return to slamming Hillary in the terms he had to deploy against a lower-level target, the Georgetown University law student and women’s-health-care advocate Sandra Fluke, in 2012.
Since the last election, Washington GOP leaders have made a big show of trying to curb the sex talk that drove away those women voters who weren’t already repelled by the party’s wielding of transvaginal probes and its hostility to bills protecting women from violence and unequal pay. “Some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be,” said John Boehner last year. The National Republican Congressional Committee has conducted consciousness-raising tutorials in “messaging against women opponents,” but it’s all been to no avail. Wendy Davis, the Texas gubernatorial candidate, has been reviled as “abortion Barbie.” Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia, defending Todd Akin’s views, told a local chamber of commerce that female rape victims can avoid pregnancy because if they’re “tense and uptight … all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.” Mike Huckabee has chastised women who “cannot control their libido or their reproductive system” for turning to “Uncle Sugar” to provide them with “a prescription each month for birth control.” Chris Christie spent at least $1 million of taxpayers’ money on a report heaping much of the blame for Bridgegate on the emotional “state of mind” of his fired aide, Bridget Anne Kelly, after a ruptured love affair. A new anti-Clinton super-pac for 2016, the Hillary Project, has revived an online game from 2000 that allows you to “virtually slap” her “across the face.”
It’s a measure of how entrenched this ethos has been in the GOP for two decades that not even repeated political defeat can move the party to expunge it. The run of electoral setbacks began with Bill Clinton’s first election in 1992: He won despite the Gennifer Flowers scandal, and he was further aided by backlash to the notorious “family values” Republican convention in Houston where Marilyn Quayle, the wife of the incumbent vice-president, gave a speech in which she argued that “most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women.” Her husband, Dan, had already attacked the fictional sitcom heroine Murphy Brown, a single working mom, for making an errant “lifestyle choice.”
Once more Clinton sex scandals arrived, the GOP never wavered in its belief that Troopergate, Paula Jones, Willey, Lewinsky, and all the rest would bring the Democrats down. Yet as the Journal kept noting to its shock and amazement, Bill Clinton would “bounce back from the mat” after every presumed knockout blow. He became the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected to a second term and also the only incumbent 20th-century president besides Roosevelt whose party netted House seats (five of them) in a midterm election—and this in 1998, at the height of the impeachment craziness. Clinton further benefited from what the baffled Journal labeled “the Clinton poll paradox”: The hotter the sex scandals got, the higher his poll numbers soared. In a March 1998 Times–CBS News survey, the president’s approval rating reached 73 percent (and Starr’s fell to 11). Yet only a few weeks earlier, when the Lewinsky scandal first broke, the Sunday-morning seers Bill Kristol and George Will had declared the Clinton presidency dead—in Will’s historical wisdom, “deader really than Woodrow Wilson’s was after he had a stroke.” The good news for Democrats is that Kristol, Will, and Noonan—all of whom called the 2012 election wrong too—will still be on hand to declare the next Clinton campaign dead the moment a new round of “bimbo eruptions” is put on the table by Priebus, Drudge, Fox News, the Journal, or anyone else. And the rest will be history repeating itself, yet again.
It’s at this juncture I must add that political predictions are mostly worthless. Let’s not forget, for instance, that a Hillary-versus-Rudy race had been the foregone conclusion in the run-up to 2008. But it’s hard to imagine at this point why, acts of God aside, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t run, or how she could lose. And should any acts of godlessness surface anywhere near the Clinton household, particularly those of the carnal variety, we may well be looking at a landslide.
Past Television:
Gothica (2013) (TV Movie) – Executive Producer
Americana (2012) (TV Movie) – Executive Producer
Dark Horse (2012) (TV Movie) – Executive Producer
The Worst Witch (TV Series) – Charlie Blossom (4 episodes, 1998–2001)
Animal Ark (TV Series) – Brandon Gill (1 episode, 1998)
Charlie Blossom (The Worst Witch)
From The New York Times:
Ringer (2012) – Studio Executive
Missing (2012) – Studio Executive
Protector (2011) – Studio Executive
Brothers & Sisters (2011) – Network Executive
Desperate Housewives (2011) – Network Executive
Lost (2010) – Network Executive
Ugly Betty (2010) – Network Executive
Pushing Daisies (2009) – Network Executive
Commander in Chief (2006) – Network Executive
Dick Clark’s New Year’s Primetime Rockin’ Eve 2005 (2005) – Network Executive
Dancing With the Stars (2005) – Network Executive
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (2005) – Network Executive
America’s Funniest Home Videos (2005) – Network Executive
Joe Schmo Show (2004) – Production
Oblivious (2004) – Production
Mouthing Off: 51 Greatest Smartasses (2004) – Production
Celebrity Mole Hawaii (2003) – Production Assistant
https://www.facebook.com/nicholas.pepper.50?fref=browse_search
（Pepper’s Facebook group “WERQ” –
The Hollywood Net-WERQ! is a social networking group for gays and lesbians in the “biz.” If you work in production, publicity, casting, at an agency, a studio, a management firm or are an actor or trying to break into any and all of the above, please join. Friends of gays and lesbians are welcome too!
We can use this page to post jobs, look for jobs, add links to the work we have done in the past or work we are currently doing.
Also, look for our once a month happy hour outings!）
In The Media:
ABC Studios Exec Nicholas Pepper Joins Mark Gordon Co. As Head Of Drama
After an extensive search, ABC Studios-based producer Mark Gordon ended up staying close to his TV home with his pick for successor to outgoing president of television Deborah Spera, who is leaving next month to become an independent producer. ABC Studios’ VP drama Nicholas Pepper is joining the Mark Gordon Co. as head of drama TV. He will work alongside head of comedy Andrea Shay, reporting directly to Gordon. This represents a change in the executive structure at Mark Gordon Co., which started off exclusively in drama under Spera until recently expanding into comedy with the hire of Shay. As VP drama programming at ABC Studios, Pepper oversaw such series as Desperate Housewives, Lost and Brothers & Sisters. Before that, he spent six years at ABC overseeing Ugly Betty, Pushing Daisies and Commander in Chief, among others. Prior to that, Pepper, a former actor, was Director of Alternative Series and Specials for ABC. Gordon recently re-upped his deal at ABC Studios for four more years. His company’s portfolio includes five series on the air for ABC Studios: ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, CBS’ Criminal Minds and Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, as well as Lifetime’s Army Wives, and the ABC/ABC Studios’ drama pilot Identity, starring Angela Bassett. Brian Harvey VRP
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianoharvey
VP, Drama Development at The Mark Gordon Company (since August 2010)
Previous Work Experience:
Mediaedge:cia – Creative Consultant (2009-2010)
ABC Studios – Vice President, Drama Development (2007-2009)
ABC Studios – Executive Director, Drama Series (2005-2007)
Touchstone Television – Director, Drama Series (2004-2005)
Touchstone Television – Manager, Drama Series (2003-2004)
Touchstone Television – Coordinator / Assistant (2000-2003)
Mutual Film Co. – Assistant to VP, Development (1999)
Education: DePauw University (BA in Political Science)
Age 41; Zodiac Sign: Taurus
Filmography
Projects in Development:
Gothica – EP
Americana – EP
Agatha – EP
Past Film & Video:
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) – Production Assistant
Trio Promoted at Mark Gordon Co.
10/5/2011 | The Hollywood Reporter
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/trio-promoted-at-mark-gordon-244505
Brian Harvey, Allyson Seeger and Shara Senderoff upped in film, television and new media divisions.
The Mark Gordon Co. has upped three executives in its film, television and new media divisions.
Brian Harvey has been upped to senior vp drama, television, reporting to head of drama TV Nick Pepper. Before joining the Mark Gordon Co. in August 2010, Harvey held creative positions at ABC Studios, where in his nine-year tenure he developed such projects as Brothers & Sisters, Eli Stone, Kyle XY, October Road and Dirty Sexy Money, among others.
Allyson Seeger has been upped to vp film, reporting to Jennifer Todd, the company’s president of motion pictures. Seeger joined the Mark Gordon Co. in 2005 and is currently co-producing The To-Do List and developing Desperados, Die in a Gunfight and New Line’s Private Benjamin remake.
Shara Senderoff has been upped to vp new media and director of development for film, also reporting to Todd. Senderoff, who joined the company in 2007, is currently developing Junkers, Hyde and Desperados. She recently sold comedy pitch Heroes for Sale for Dimension.
The promotions come less than a month after Veronica Gentilli was upped to chief operating officer at the company.
Mark Gordon Co. promotes execs
10/5/2011 | Variety
http://variety.com/2011/film/news/mark-gordon-co-promotes-execs-1118044026/
Brian Harvey has been promoted to senior VP of drama, television. He joined Gordon Co. last year from ABC Studios, where he helped develop ABC series including “Brothers and Sisters” and “Dirty Sexy Money.” He reports to Nick Pepper, head of drama television.
Junior Selected for Hansard Scholar Program and Will Study in London
10/4/1992 | Depauw University
http://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/14025/
October 14, 1992, Greencastle, Ind. – Brian Harvey of Richmond, Indiana, a junior at DePauw University, has been selected by the prestigious Hansard Scholar Program, to spend the 1993 spring semester in London, England, working with English Parliament. Harvey will be there from January 11 through April 2.
…
Harvey is a political science major at DePauw. He hopes to learn on a first-hand basis all he can about the English and their government. “I want to understand British politics from an inside view,” Harvey said.
First Netflix and Amazon. Now Yahoo to Get Into TV Programming Game
4/5/2014 | The Wall Street Journal
By Mike Shields
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer
Yahoo is raising its ambitions in online video, with plans to acquire the kind of programming that typically winds up on high-end cable TV networks or streaming services like Netflix, people briefed on the company’s plans say.
The company is close to ordering four Web series, the people briefed on Yahoo’s plans say. And unlike in years past, Yahoo isn’t looking for short-form Web originals, but rather 10-episode, half hour comedies with per-episode budgets ranging from $700,000 to a few million dollars, the people say. The projects being considered would be helmed by writers or directors with experience in television.
“They want to blow it out big time,” one of the people briefed on the plans said.
Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer is hoping to show off TV-caliber content at this year’s “NewFront” – its answer to a TV “upfront” ad sales presentation for marketers. But it’s not clear if she’ll be able to close enough programming deals before the event, which will be held on April 28 in New York.
Yahoo declined to comment.
Ms. Mayer is keen to create some buzz for Yahoo and convince advertisers that it is offering higher quality video programming than its competitors, particularly Google Inc’s YouTube. The people briefed on Yahoo’s plans say Ms. Mayer and her chief marketing officer, Kathy Savitt, have reviewed more than 100 projects over the past few months, looking for series that are ready to launch and don’t require a lot of development.
The company hasn’t yet finalized any programming deals. One issue for the company is whether it could make enough money from advertising to support the shows. If Yahoo is able to acquire ownership of the content, it could supplement its revenue by licensing the shows in international markets and cutting syndication deals. Traditional TV studios typically bank on those sources of revenue to make a profit.
A breakout Web series would surely help Yahoo’s perception among advertisers. And it could even convince some marketers to shift a portion of their ad budgets that would typically go to TV. But, by aiming higher than typical Web original series, Yahoo is also entered a crowded market for top level TV series. Beside the vast array of cable outlets competing for the type of shows Ms. Mayer is looking to acquire, a slew of deep pocketed newer entrants are snapping up expensive TV series, including Netflix, Amazon, and most recently Sony.
“They’re looking at the same type of shows that Netflix and Amazon are eyeing,” said one person familiar with the situation.
The programming push is part of a broader strategy by Ms Mayer to focus on video. The Wall Street Journal reported at the end of March that the company was in preliminary talks to acquire online video service News Distribution Network Inc. Yahoo also struck partnerships with TV news journalist Katie Couric and former New York Times tech columnist David Pogue.
(Arabella Stein is the first one from the left.)
ARABELLA STEIN (UK) is an agent with the London-based literary agency Abner Stein. She began her career at Pan Macmillan UK and was subsequently commercial fiction publisher at Fourth Estate and paperback publishing director at Bloomsbury UK. Arabella Stein is a guest of the VIP Program, an initiative of the Australia Council for the Arts.
LinkedIn (can’t access her page): https://www.linkedin.com/pub/arabella-stein/0/1b9/57
Genres this agent is interested in:
Travel, Science, Politics, society & current affairs, Other non-fiction, Religion, Mind, Body, Spirit, Memoir and autobiography, Food and Cookery, History, Women’s fiction, Science fiction, Paranormal romance, Horror, Historical fiction, Genre romance, Fantasy, Erotica, Crime, thriller, action, General Fiction, Literary Fiction.
Abner Stein Agency
10 Roland Gardens
SW7 3PH
United Kingdom
Phone: (020) 7373 0456
Fax: (020) 7370 6316
Contact:
Caspian Dennis caspian@abnerstein.co.uk
Arabella Stein arabella@abnerstein.co.uk
Official Website: (not much information) http://abnerstein.co.uk/
Founded 1971. Mainly represents US agents and authors but handles some full-length fiction, general non-fiction and children’s literature. No scientific, technical, etc. No scripts.
· Commission Home 10%; US & Translation 20%.
· Not taking on any new clients at present.
· Member of AAA
(http://www.thewritershandbook.com/sample.asp)
Partners and Clinets: (according to what I’ve found on Google):
Wales Literary Agency http://www.waleslit.com/rights/
Greenburger Associates http://greenburger.com/
Philip G. Spitzer http://spitzeragency.com/
Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises http://amsterlit.com/site/
James Fitzgerald Agency http://www.jfitzagency.com/
Doris S. Michaels Literary Agency http://dsmagency.com/
Waxman Leavell Literary Agency http://www.waxmanleavell.com/
Carol Mann Agency http://carolmannagency.wordpress.com/
Margaret Cezair-Thompson http://margaretcezairthompson.com/about
And so on.
Caroline Weber mentioned in her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution “Arabella Stein worked wonders with the sale of this book in Great Britain.”
Gillian Bagwell mentioned her in the thank-you list of the book The September Queen.
(And a few similar appearance.) In The Media:
Abner Stein’s daughter to run agency ‘as partnership’
01.17.11 | The Bookseller
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/abner-steins-daughter-run-agency-partnership.html
The Abner Stein literary agency will be run as a partnership by his daughter Arabella, as well as Sandy Violette and Caspian Dennis, following Stein’s death last week.
In a statement, the agency said Abner Stein died last Wednesday (12th January) following a brief illness. It said: “He is survived by his daughters Jessica and Arabella, his sister Linda Clark, and his granddaughter Natalie. He will be greatly missed by his family and all his many friends and colleagues in London, New York, and worldwide.”
Stein put in place a succession plan several years ago, which will see Arabella Stein, Sandy Violette and Caspian Dennis run the agency in partnership.
Stein was born in Massachusetts in 1938 and worked at several American publishers before moving to London in the 1960s to join Sphere. He formed the eponymous literary agency in 1971, representing American publishers and agents as well as British and overseas clients.
(Arabella’s fundraising page for Little Hearts Matter: http://www.justgiving.com/Arabella-Stein) Agent Abner Stein Dies
1/27/2011 | Publishers Weekly
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/obituaries/article/45916-agent-abner-stein-dies.html
Longtime agent Abner Stein died earlier this month. He was 70. Stein worked at various American houses before moving to London in the 1960s to join Sphere Books. In 1971, he launched his own eponymous agency, representing American publishers and agents, as well as British clients and others from around the globe. In the wake of his death, the Abner Stein Agency will be run as partnership between (his daughter) Arabella Stein, Sandy Violette, and Caspian Dennis.
Faber buys two from Lippman
09.17.12 | The Bookseller
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/faber-buys-two-lippman.html
Faber and Faber has acquired the rights to two new crime novels from American novelist Laura Lippman.
The writer’s previous books were published in the UK by HarperCollins’ commercial imprint, Avon, but her 18th novel, And When She Was Good, will now be with Faber’s crime and thriller list.
Rights were bought for the UK and Commonwealth by Faber senior editor Angus Cargill from Arabella Stein on behalf of Vicky Bijur.
The e-book version of the novel will be released in November, with a mass-marker paperback following in May 2013.
Lippman’s US publishers, Morrow, will publish the books simultaneously.
S&S to publish tale of wartime bravery
01/13/14 | The Bookseller
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/ss-publish-tale-wartime-bravery.html
Simon & Schuster UK is set to publish the true story of Polish nurse Irena Sendler who helped to smuggle nearly 2,500 out of the Warsaw ghetto during the 1940s Holocaust.
The book was signed through Arabella Stein at Abner Stein on behalf of Lauren Abramo at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management.
Book Deals: The Round-up
4/30/2012
http://chicklitchloe.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-deals-round-up_30.html
Senior editor Kate Howard bought British Commonwealth rights in the title from Arabella Stein at Abner Stein on behalf of Stephen Barbara at Foundry Literary + Media, with plans to publish in hardcover in autumn 2014.
(And a few other book deals on the internet.)
Abner Stein: Literary agent who championed American writing in the United Kingdom
4/5/2011 | The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/abner-stein-literary-agent-who-championed-american-writing-in-the-united-kingdom-2262369.html
For more than 30 years Abner Stein was one of London’s most successful but least visible literary agents; this despite the fact that he worked with a select group of American agents and publishers on whose behalf he represented some of the most important American bestselling authors of the past 20 years. These included Dan Brown, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, Sue Grafton, Audrey Niffenegger, Jane Smiley, Amy Tan, David Baldacci and hundreds of others. Arguably no other literary agent had so many bestsellers, nor such a dazzling list of authors, with repeat successes every year (the Holy Grail of every publisher and literary agent).
Yet, despite this staggering success and exemplary reputation in the book trade, Stein was invisible outside it, refusing ever to speak to the press or give interviews. While some agents want to be stars, elbowing their authors aside to bask in the limelight, Stein always remained in the shadows. He believed agents had no business courting publicity, but everything to do championing their authors’ interests and making publishers behave.
As one of his clients, the bestselling writer Raymond Feist, said: “Abner was old-school. Witty, knowledgeable regarding his work and the larger industry in which he practised it, Abner was the sort of person to whom a handshake was as good as a contract. He spoke truth to power, as the saying goes, dealing with authors whose egos made them as difficult as heads of state, publishers whose agendas might not necessarily be in Abner’s client’s best interests, and deftly navigating the shifting landscape of publishing over decades.”
Abner Stein was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938. In 1964 he moved to London from New York when he was head-hunted to help create a new paperback publisher, Sphere, being set up by Lord Thomson, then owner of The Times. At the time Penguin and Pan were the leading imprints, although paperbacks were not yet a solid part of the ecology of the book world, as they were in the US.
Stein also founded the Poem of the Month Club, an ambitious subscription operation run from his Battersea home. Each poem was signed by the poet, and these included Fleur Adcock, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Brian Patten, Gavin Ewart, John Lehmann, DJ Enright, WH Auden, George Barker, Elizabeth Jennings, Anthony Thwaite, Stephen Spender, Roy Fuller, C Day Lewis, Stevie Smith and Robert Graves, for whose autograph Abner travelled specially to Majorca.
In 1971 Stein set up his eponymous agency. The Abner Stein Agency was, and has remained, unique because it was built on a co-agenting model – jointly representing authors in conjunction with another (almost invariably American) agency. Stein recognised very early on that literary culture, and particularly the mass market, was globalising, following trends in films and television, and that great American authors were not being properly sold into the UK. As the English, and indeed international, appetite for American writing grew, so did Stein’s agency. Whether it was crime, thrillers, literary fiction or the most commercial titles, the agency, through its arrangements with New York and international agencies, had the pick of the titles.
There were two secrets to its success. First, absolutely meticulous efficiency and flawless administration in a business not recognised for world-class organisation; this is a rare and underappreciated skill. Second, an amazing nose for the potential bestseller. Stein had the enviable knack of picking out the special books that would dominate bestseller lists for weeks and make a house’s fortune. These were not submitted with a perfect word-processed letter, but a short note, hand-typed by Abner himself on an obsolete Olivetti typewriter with a raised capital “S” (a troublesome letter from Mr Stein), and included Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie.
In the late 1990s naysayers predicted the demise of co-agenting as the big publishing groups consolidated and tried to buy the biggest properties globally. But with a few exceptions this hasn’t happened because it is far more important to authors to be placed with the right house (for the right money) in each market. And only a great agent on the ground can do this. Jonathan Safran Foer, a client of the agency, expressed it perfectly: “Abner Stein was, professionally, and over time personally, like a father to me. He always fiercely defended me (and ‘fiercely’ really is the right word here – just ask anyone who has to sit across a table from him in negotiations). He was my uncompromising champion… I always looked forward to his sly chuckle, his matzo-dry humor, his knowing smile.”
Abner Stein, literary agent: born Boston, Massachusetts 6 December 1938; married 1968 Annabel Roney (marriage dissolved; two daughters); died London 12 January 2011.
14-year-old Blake Thomas Boothe took his own life because he was bullied for being bi-sexual.
His obituary: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/indystar/obituary.aspx?pid=170153253
President Obama gives his next State of the Union address on Tuesday.
1/27/2014 | Advocate.com
After a joint fundraiser for the Democratic Party last year, it was already clear that Michelle Obama had hit it off with Jason Collins. Now Collins will be among the first lady’s special guests during the State of the Union address this week.
The White House this morning announced Collins will be among those seated in the box with the first lady and Dr. Jill Biden — a spot often used to honor Americans whose example the president wants to highlight. A news release touted Collins as the first man to come out in major pro team sport and recalled President Obama saying he “couldn’t be prouder” of Collins.
For her part, Michelle Obama tweeted congratulations when Collins’ news first broke. (“We’ve got your back!” she wrote.) And the first lady unloaded praise for Collins when both appeared at the Democratic National Committee’s LGBT Leadership gala in New York’s Upper East Side held in May.
“Jason, we are so proud of you,” she said during the event. “We are proud of your talent, your character, your courage, and we are so proud. He has just made the difference in the lives of so many of our young people. So let’s give one more round of applause to our friend, Jason Collins. We love you so much, Jason.”
Collins was equally as complimentary, according to an ABC News report. He said the first lady is “a steadfast champion for LGBT families” and that she and President Obama send the message that “the most important thing that defines a family is love.”
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer
