http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-emanuel-gay-marriage-20120216,0,2716931.story
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday that he would press for legislation pending in Springfield that would legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois.
“I’ll push for it because it is consistent with the values base, and the practical values base, that I think is right as a city, as a state and as a country,” said Emanuel, who supported gay marriage during the mayoral campaign.
http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-lgbt-rights/court-orders-missouri-school-district-stop-censoring-lgbt-websites
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – A federal district court ruled today that the Camdenton R-III School District must stop censoring web content geared toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities through discriminatory filtering software. The ruling orders the district to not block content based on the viewpoints expressed by the website.
http://www.out.com/news-commentary/2012/02/14/alex-morse-gay-mayor-holyoke-massachusetts?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OutComFeatures+%28Out.com+Features+|+Fashion%2C+Style%2C+Celebrity%2C+Opinion+for+the+Modern+Gay+Man%29
Alex Morse has a slick of red hair, crisp blue eyes, and a complexion the color of vanilla Häagen-Dazs. The hair is inherited from his father, Tracey, who retains a splash of it in his full beard. No one knows how he came by his eyes, shared neither by his Jewish mother nor Scots-Irish father, or either of his two brothers. “My mom always jokes around, ‘I don’t know where you came from,’ ” says Morse, who sits upright in his chair in the spacious wood-paneled mayor’s office he inherited January 3, following an election that pitted the 22-year-old against the 67-year-old incumbent, Elaine Pluta, a veteran of city politics. It was a race that galvanized voters around youth and experience, roused the press, and shifted the balance of power from the old guard to the new in Holyoke, a blighted mill town of 40,000 people—among the poorest in Massachusetts.
“We were never supposed to win,” says Morse. “I mean—22, openly gay, in an old Irish Catholic community.” He has not wasted time, firing five staff and quietly persuading the city council to vote off the president who had held the position for 26 years. That was on his first day. “Unfortunately, a lot of folks in Holyoke City Hall assume they are going to be here for their entire lives, and my mindset is that if you want to be here, you have to live, eat, and breathe it—the job has to be your life.”
Dori Dean, Morse’s Scotch-drinking, Patriots-loving chief of staff, recalls that, before his inauguration, there was plenty of ribbing in City Hall about Morse’s age—a running theme during the campaign. “The joke was that they were going to bring diapers and talcum powder, rattles, and all these baby accoutrements to City Hall to accommodate our arrival,” she says. “Then, when we showed up with the axe and started chopping folks’ heads off, the tenor changed. No one is talking any shit now.” To date, four lawsuits for wrongful termination have been filed by former city employees.
http://www.lhj.com/relationships/family/raising-kids/gay-teens-bullied-to-suicide/
September 9: Billy Lucas, age 15, of Greensburg, Indiana, hanged himself from the rafters of his family’s barn. September 19: Seth Walsh, 13, of Tehachapi, California, hanged himself from a tree in his yard. September 22: Tyler Clementi, 18, a Rutgers University freshman, jumped off the George Washington Bridge in New York City. September 23: Asher Brown, 13, of Houston, Texas, shot himself in the head. These four boys didn’t know each other, but they did have something in common. They’d been bullied at school, and one by one, they all apparently came to the same conclusion: If you’re gay or thought to be gay, life just isn’t worth living.
For most Americans the news reports were heartbreaking. They took us beyond our political arguments over gay marriage and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” — even past our deeper disagreements about homosexuality. For once we could all agree: Those kids should be in their classrooms, not in caskets.
September’s gruesome trend raised pressing questions. Homosexuality appears to be more widely tolerated than ever: Fifty-two percent of Americans consider it morally acceptable, according to a recent Gallup poll. Kids can join gay-straight alliance groups at more than 4,000 high schools and more than 150 middle schools nationwide and find advice and support online. Yet according to the Journal of Adolescent Health, about one-third of gay, lesbian, and bisexual teens report an attempt at suicide. Why are so many still driven to try to take their own life?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/24/uk-lgbt-bullying-video_n_1228169.html
LGBT teens are revealing some of their most painful experiences — from being subjected to schoolyard bullying to being forced to use opposite-sex locker rooms — as part of a new British advocacy video.
“When I was in P.E., I couldn’t get changed in the girls’ toilets or the locker room or anything, so I had to get changed with the lads,” one girl says. “My P.E. teacher said, ‘You’re not attracted to lads, so you have to go and get changed there,'”
Posted by LGBT Youth North West, the video is intended as an opportunity to have an open discussion, according to Pink News.
“I really hated school, because every day was just constant insults and the teachers told you to just get over it,” another boy explains in the clip.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/josh-d-scheinert/america-canada_b_1258759.html
Dear America,
It must be hard being you these days. You have so many big issues — from the economy to national security and the looming election, just to name a few. If I may though, I’d like to focus on another one.
This is Canada, your northern neighbour (I spell it with a “u”). Blessed with a bird’s eye view, I’ve watched troubling developments unfold below. Before more damage is done, I thought it best to offer some Canadian insight in the hopes that it may assist you as you move forward in your struggle.
I’ve wanted to write this for a while. During the lead up to Proposition 8 and the continued legal battle that has ensued, as debates over gay marriage spread to other states, you questioned if allowing soldiers to fight and die openly would ruin your military just as teenagers across your country tragically took their own lives after being bullied for who they were.
What finally forced my hand was a heartbreaking and infuriating article in Rolling Stone chronicling how one school district in Minnesota not only condoned but actively promoted the bullying of its LGBT students.
Children who are ostracized by their peers and bullied often become depressed, but new research suggests that the relationship may work the other way around as well: children’s depressive symptoms in elementary school precede social victimization and isolation later on.
Previous studies that tried to work out whether bullying causes depression, or whether depressed kids become magnets for bullies — or whether the two problems drive each other — have produced conflicting results. However, the new study found a clear path from depressive symptoms in 4th grade to being bullied in 5th grade and rejected more widely by peers in 6th.
http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/feb/12/much-has-changed-since-kings-death-four-years/
Middle school was tougher on Taylor Kennepohl than it was on most.
Even before eighth grade, when she realized she was gay, she endured a barrage of anti-gay insults. They called her a litany of derogatory names meant to sting. It made her feel like a freak.
The Ventura teen struggled with depression and thought about suicide, keeping her sexual orientation a secret.
“At that point in time, there was really no option to be open and not have your life become a living hell in middle school,” she said.
But in the four years since, things have gotten better. The name-calling has stopped. Students accept her for who she is. Taylor, now 17, chalks some of it up to her and her classmates maturing. But something else also changed.
The nation started to address the issue of anti-gay bullying in schools, and many say that is partly because of what happened in Oxnard four years ago today.
In the weeks leading up to Feb. 12, 2008, 15-year-old Larry King began not only telling his friends at E.O. Green School that he was gay, he also began wearing high-heeled women’s boots and makeup to class.
Some students were uncomfortable with it. Some thought it was no big deal.
Brandon McInerney thought it was a big deal.
During first-period English class, after the two had taunted each other for several weeks, McInerney shot King twice in the head. King’s death two days later made news around the world and sparked what some said was the start of a national discussion on anti-gay bullying in the classroom.
“What happened to Larry King in February of 2008 was the opening salvo in a barrage of horrifying stories that came to light from then to now,” said Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_parker?fb_ref=social_fblike&fb_source=home_multiline
Dharun Ravi grew up in Plainsboro, New Jersey, in a large, modern house with wide expanses of wood flooring and a swimming pool out back. Assertive and athletic, he used “DHARUNISAWESOME” as a computer password and played on an Ultimate Frisbee team. At the time of his high-school graduation, in 2010, his parents bought space in the West Windsor and Plainsboro High School North yearbook. “Dear Dharun, It has been a pleasure watching you grow into a caring and responsible person,” the announcement said. “You are a wonderful son and brother. . . . Keep up your good work. Hold on to your dreams and always strive to achieve your goals. We know that you will succeed.”
One day this fall, Ravi was in a courthouse in New Brunswick, fifteen miles to the north, awaiting a pre-trial hearing. In a windowless room, he sat between two lawyers, wearing a black suit and a gray striped tie. His eyes were red. Although he is only nineteen, he has a peculiarly large-featured, fully adult face, and vaguely resembles Sacha Baron Cohen. When Ravi is seen in high-school photographs with a five-o’clock shadow, he looks like an impostor.
His father, Ravi Pazhani, a slight man with metal-frame glasses, sat behind him. Some way to the right of Pazhani were Joseph and Jane Clementi. Jane Clementi, who has very straight bangs, wore a gold crucifix. She and her husband form a tall, pale, and formidable-looking couple. Their youngest son, Tyler, had died a year earlier, and the family’s tragedy was the silent focus of everyone in the room. That September, Tyler Clementi and Ravi were freshman roommates at Rutgers University, in a dormitory three miles from the courtroom. A few weeks into the semester, Ravi and another new student, Molly Wei, used a webcam to secretly watch Clementi in an embrace with a young man. Ravi gossiped about him on Twitter: “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” Two days later, Ravi tried to set up another viewing. The day after that, Clementi committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-pilots-2012-complete-guide-287221
Glee‘s Ryan Murphy tackling a half-hour comedy for NBC. Kevin Williamson bringing his Vampire Diaries sensibilities to Fox for a serial killer drama starring Kevin Bacon. Grey’s Anatomy‘s Shonda Rhimes back in business with ABC for a period piece. Josh Schwartz and his Gossip Girl cohorts exploring Carrie Bradshaw’s youth at the CW and Greg Berlanti with projects set up at three of the five broadcast networks.
These are a few of the highlights of Pilot Season 2013, where ABC, CBS, NBC, ABC and the CW sift through the numerous development projects and move forward in a bid to find the next breakout comedies and dramas. Here’s a look at the pilots in contention for the 2012-13 television season, which THR will be updating through casting season so be sure to bookmark the page and come back for the latest news.