LA Blade - To ensure that Blacks lost to AIDS are not ignored — including those who chose to remain anonymous — longtime HIV/AIDS advocates Jeffrey King, Founder and Executive Director of In The Meantime Men’s Group, Inc., The  Black LGBTQ+ Mecca in South Los Angeles, and Cynthia Davis, MPH, the renowned Professor at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine — recently convened a community meeting to create a Black AIDS Monument on the grounds of the Carl Bean House in South LA. 

“All Black Lives Matter. Every Black life lost to the HIV/AIDS epidemic still matters today.

Read More...

Many sports enthusiasts are anxious to get back on the playing field.  Varsity Gay League is preparing to open things back up with precautionary measures in the coming weeks.  We spoke to Will Hackner, founder of Varsity Gay League about what to expect and when.

WEHO Times - At a regular West Hollywood council meeting on Monday, March 1, 2021, the council unanimously voted to move forward with a motion to look into installing a memorial honoring lives lost to suicides in the LGBTQ+ communituy. The item brought forward by Mayor Lindsey Horvath and Councilmember John Erickson directs city staff to follow the City’s Memorials, Tribute Trees and Plaques Policy Guideline to review the request to install a memorial at a park space in West Hollywood.

Read More...

LGBTQ Nation - Locals Jewel Thais-Williams, Patrice Cullors, Alicia Garza, Ron Oden and Phill Wilson are named in the resolution.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) introduced a resolution that “seeks to uplift the contributions of Black LGBTQ+ individuals, both past and present, as fearless trailblazers in American culture and society.”

House Resolution 170, as introduced by Lee and co-sponsored by 29 other Congress members, specifically lists 26 Black LGBTQ people — including civil rights activists Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, and Black Lives Matter co-founders Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza — to celebrate and recognize, “those whose names we will never know.”

Read More...

WEHOville - Iconic lesbian activist Ivy Bottini has died at age 94.

A champion of LGBT rights, she lived in West Hollywood for 22 years, but was in the greater Los Angeles area for over 40 years.

In 2019 with her health declining, she moved to Sebring, Florida to live with her daughter Lisa Santasiero-Perron and her wife Beth Perron.

Read More...

Premieres with a FREE weekend screening beginning Thursday, February 25 at 5pm PT through Sunday, February 28 at 11:59pm PT

“We Can Never Go Back to Before” is a lyric from the musical Ragtime, a show based on a book about America at the turn of the century. It exemplifies how in a time of radical change there is no reaching back for normalcy or the nostalgia of the comforts we once knew.

The Gaze is a cycle of plays, New Media Series, and a #Digiplay Experience that examines the process of building culturally specific and queer works of color in historically white spaces. It tackles hard topics like systemic racism and the ways in which we at times implicate ourselves in our own trauma; how both of these things can be true in the same time space continuum. It wrestles with the question:

Why strain to be free under a gaze fixed on your imprisonment when it’s you who is holding the key?

Why stay? Go where? No Homo is the first play in the cycle.

Read More...

LA Times - The nightly drag shows were advertised in dramatically stylized Spanish-language Facebook fliers. “Maritza and Her Divas” performed on Wednesdays. “Chantal and Her Dolls” had Fridays. And Yesenia Gaitan’s Saturday “Taboo Nights” was billed as the best musical show in downtown Los Angeles.

The New Jalisco Bar welcomed people in just as they were — homosexuales, transgeneros, sin papeles, dressed as vaqueros and old enough to feel out of place dancing to house music in West Hollywood.

To help, check out their Gofundme page.

Read More...

LA Times - It has been seven months since Marimar, a transgender woman, was infected with the coronavirus, but the disease and the pandemic still affect her physically and financially.

Behind on rent by five months and her body weakened by illness, the 57-year-old Los Angeles County resident doesn’t know where to turn for assistance.

“The help I have had has come from my transgender friends, but from the government I don’t know where to ask, since there is no specific help for my community,” 

Read More...

L.A. Times - The year is 2021. Watches record our steps, cars park themselves, helicopters fly on Mars. Yet, despite all of these advancements, when it comes to human decency, the nation still reeks of the Dark Ages.

This week the House is expected to vote on the Equality Act, a bill that would make it illegal to discriminate based on someone’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Believe it or not, it is still legal to fire or refuse housing to someone simply for being LGBTQ in 27 states. The bill was also introduced in the Senate this week and if passed, President Biden is expected to sign it into law.

Read More...

Lambda Legal - Bayard Rustin, the openly gay labor organizer who eventually served as advisor to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and architect of the 1963 March on Washington, was a civil rights icon and hero to LGBTQ and Black communities in the United States. Earlier this week, he was posthumously pardoned by California’s Governor Gavin Newsom for a 1953 charge of “vagrancy” for having consensual sex with other men, which resulted in a criminal conviction, 50 days of jail time, and having to register as a sex offender.

Read More...