Born On This Day- February 4th... Crusader Evan Wolfson

Evan Wolfson is Executive Director of Freedom to Marry, the leading campaign to win marriage equality nationwide. His national leadership on marriage equality & his appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v. James Dale, prompted the National Law Journal to named Evan one of "the 100 most influential lawyers in America." In 2004, Time magazine named Evan one of "the 100 most influential people in the world."

 

In 2004, he published a book,- Why Marriage Matters, in an attempt to create dialogue with straight Americans who don’t realize that civil unions are a parallel alternative, & not on an equal footing with marriage.


Wolfson: “Gay marriage is not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the legal right for gays to marry. You don’t ask for half a loaf. We don’t need two lines at the clerk’s office when there’s already an institution that works in this country, & it’s called marriage. One of the main protections that come with marriage is inherent in the word: certainly in times of crisis any other word than marriage would not bring the same clarity or impart the same dignity.”


His passion for Marriage Equality does not mean Wolfson wants to get hitched. No one has put a ring on it, he is not even engaged. Wolfson: “Why get engaged, if you aren’t allowed to get married?”


Before attending Harvard, he spent 2 years with the Peace Corps in Togo in West Africa, where he had his first gay relationship. After law school, he was recruited by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.


Wolfson worked as a prosecutor from 1983 to 1988 , writing amicus briefs arguing for a ban on racial discrimination in jury selection & the abolition of the marital rape exemption. He did pro bono work for Lambda from 1984 to 1988. Which meant he had to “come out” professionally.


With Lambda, he represented James Dale, the ousted Eagle Scout, against the Boy Scouts of America, & participated in Baker v. State, which led to civil unions in Vermont.


Jewish, portly, short, & bald, Wolfson is just my type. He is a Blogger. He turns 53 today.


Wolfson & his significant other for the last 6 years, Cheng He, a Canadian whose field is molecular biology, are not married- “but we would love the opportunity to have that choice.”

Born On This Day... Michelangelo Signorile

Considering the striking news of the vote to repeal DADT, I can't help but reflect that when I came out to myself at 15 years old, I held back the anquish by reminding myself: "Hey, you won't have to be drafted & go to Vietnam, or get married & have children." Then the world changed around me.


Michelangelo Signorile became embroiled in a controversy when he published a story outing the former Assistant Defense Secretary Pete Williams. The scandal brought even more discourse about the hipocricy of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gays serving in the military.

Signorele is one of the most notable gay activists of our time. A journalist, radio talk show host & an author, Michelangelo Signorile helped pave the way for gay people to come out more easily. There may be a bit of controversy attached to his name from his actions, but his work helped change the way gay people can freely live their lives today, including the right to serve in the military.

Signorile was born on this day in Brooklyn. His childhood was spent in Brooklyn & Staten Island. He recognized his sexual preference at an early age, but he chose to keep it a secret from his family & friends, because of his Roman Catholic upbringing.



During the 1970s & the 1980s, Michelangelo Signorile studied journalism at Syracuse University. After graduation, he landed a job at public relations firm in NYC, & his job involved getting his clients into the city's gossip columns. Later on, he ended up working as a gossip columnist himself.

"Outing" was a word coined by Time magazine. The term itself is controversial, even to this time, because the definition is to cause a closeted homosexual to admit his or her sexual orientation publicly by force. In the early 1990s, Michelangelo Signorile found himself at the center of that controversy.



For OutWeek magazine, Michelangelo Signorile watched the gossip columns of other publications. It became the goal of his work in OutWeek to challenge what he perceived as the media's double-standard when it comes to being silent on reporting on homosexual celebrities while glamorizing heterosexual couples.

Among the celebrities that Michelangelo Signorile was credited for outing are film & record producer David Geffen & gossip queen Liz Smith.



Perhaps the most controversial outing that Michelangelo Signorile was responsible for was the publishing tycoon, & frequent Elizabeth Taylor date Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine. Within weeks of Forbes' death in 1990, Signorile published a story about Forbes being a closeted gay. It is a fact that was known in the social circles of New York but was never publicly declared.

The Forbes story became the subject of scandal at the time & many other mainstream media refused to report on Malcolm Forbes' sexuality until months later.

Signorile was once arrested for disrupting a speech made by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1988. Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote many of the policies of the Catholic Church against homosexuality & the use of condoms at the time. Signorile attended the speech only as a spectator, but hearing Cardinal Ratzinger talk, Signorile said that his childhood experiences of homophobia came back to him & filled him with rage. This rage prompted Signorile to jump up the platform, point to Cardinal Ratzinger & declare the cardinal as the devil.

I am so shallow; I need to admit that I started reading him because I found him to be so hot. He grew to be one of my favorite writers on the subject of gay rights.

Born On This Day- November 19th... Gay Rights Pioneer Morris Kight

40+ years ago, Christopher Street West, which oversees the L.A. Gay Pride Parade, was co-founded by gay rights pioneer- Morris Kight, who also started up the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles in 1969 & the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center in 1971, when it was known as the Gay Community Services Center.

Born in 1919 in Comanche County, Texas, Kight arrived in Los Angeles in 1958 when he was almost 40. He had been working for social justice causes since the early 1940s, & suddenly he found himself, dealing with the brutal ways that the L.A. Police Department chose to treat gay people.


He often cited Eleanor Roosevelt as an influence on his values & his activism. He came to prominence with the Dow Action Committee, protesting weapons manufacturing during the Vietnam War. In 1969, he & a small group of others launched the Gay Liberation Front, one of the first such efforts.He focused his work on GLBT people, but he was a dedicated civil rights proponent & had long, deep ties with the Peace & Non-violence movements. Kight followed a Gandhian pacifism. He had taken a personal oath of poverty, & lived on very little money. He truly wanted people "to live an open & free life without fear of persecution."


Kight was a relentless organizer & protested & won all sorts of battles. His proudest achievement was the founding of the Gay Community Services Center, later to be known as the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, in 1971, a time when gays & lesbians still needed to be extremely cautious about living openly gay lives.


The Center was initially housed in 2, & eventually 3, ramshackle Queen Ann buildings on Wilshire Boulevard. Right after the opening, Kight was standing on the rickety front porch of the main building under the home made-looking sign: Gay Community Services Center. One man said, "Morris, you are going to get us all killed with that sign." Kight: "Well, dear, then don't stand under the sign."


One of the most important & effective gay rights figures in the history of the United States, Kight spent his final days at Carl Bean House in Los Angeles, a guest of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, one of the many agencies he nurtured & supported. He passed away in 2003 at 83.


Rarely satisfied with all he had achieved, Kight also created some of the movement's most visible efforts, including: The L.A. gay pride march (Christopher Street West Parade); The Morris Kight Collection, which archives 1000s of artifacts chronicling the beginning of gay, lesbian, bisexual & transgender civil rights & contains both fine art by gay men & lesbians & memorabilia including posters & photographs documenting the struggle for glbtq rights.; & the Stonewall Democratic Club in California politics.


Kight: “I'm sure we are going to get our freedom. I see it everywhere: In the marketplace, in the stores, in the homes, in dealing with families, in the kind of attention we get from radio, television and the newspapers. Still, I realize we're not home yet. We have a long way to go. There are 1,750 arrests in L.A. each month. I weep for each of them. Everyone who's denied a job, I weep for. Everyone who is driven from their homes by a misunderstanding family, I have to offer my love to."

A portrait of Morris Kight by Stathis Orphanos,

 & a sign from a West Hollywood restaurant that inspired a protest led by  Kight.

On This Day In Gay History

Harvey Milk dreamed of a gay march on the Nation's Capital & spoke of it many times before his assassination in 1978. He believed that gay visibility would lead to the end of discrimination. Inspired by him, the first march was held on October 14, 1979. Harvey Milk dreamed of a gay march on the Nation's Capital & spoke of it many times before his assassination in 1978. He believed that gay visibility would lead to the end of discrimination. Inspired by him, the first march was held on October 14, 1979.



The man who would become my husband & I had just started out on our romance & we were cautious of being "too out". A Democrat in the White House. Demands for sweeping civil-rights protections. Religious opponents working to undo a string of state-based victories.That was the backdrop in 1979 when gay rights activists staged the first national march in Washington.

 The National March on Washington for Lesbian & Gay Rights was the first such march on Washington, it drew close to 125,000 gay men, lesbians, bisexual & transgender people & straight allies to demand equal civil rights & urge the passage of protective civil rights legislation


The march served to nationalize the gay movement, which before had been focused on local struggles. This spirit is invoked in the closing paragraph of the welcome program of the march:


"Today in the capital of America, we are all here, the almost liberated & the slightly repressed; the butch, & femme & everything in-between; the androgynous; the monogamous & the promiscuous; the masturbators & the fellators & the tribadists; men in dresses & women in neckties; those who bite & those who cuddle, celibates, diesel dykes & nelly queens; amazons & size queens, Yellow, Black, Brown, White, & Red; the shorthaired & the long, the fat & the thin; the nude & the prude, the beauties & the beasts, the studs & the duds, the communes, the couples, & the singles; pubescent & the octogenarians. Yes, we are all here! We are everywhere! Welcome to the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights!"

The march began at the National Mall, turned left onto Pennsylvania Avenue, proceeded northwest towards the White House & ended in a rally between the Washington Monument & the Reflecting Pool. The march was led by the Salsa Soul Sisters, who carried the official march banner. Speakers & artists who spoke at the main rally included Harry Britt, Charlotte Bunch, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Flo Kennedy, Morris Knight, Audre Lorde, Leonard Matlovich, Kate Millett, Troy Perry, Eleanor Smeal, & Congressman Ted Weiss. Mayor Marion Barry, gave a welcome to the marchers on behalf of the city of Washington, DC.

 In addition to the march itself, the organizers arranged three days of workshops featuring artistic events, strategy sessions, focus groups on specific issues of women & minorities within the LGBT community, consciousness raising, local organization, religion & other issues. The Monday after the march was organized as a "Constituent Lobbying Day" in which over 500 participants attempted to contact every member of Congress to express support for gay rights legislation. The participants successfully met with 50 senators & more than 150 house members.