"Equality Act introduced in House to provide sweeping LGBTQ protections"
”Democratic U.S. lawmakers last week introduced sweeping legislation to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, marking the first step in advancing a set of historic measures that President Biden has pledged to sign.”
"Strategy talks in high gear to get Equality Act across the finish line"
”With a U.S. House vote on the Equality Act set for next week, talks between LGBTQ rights advocates and Capitol Hill have begun on getting the legislation across the finish line with Democratic control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, although that has become more complicated with opponents raising fears about transgender kids in sports and Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) newly declared opposition to the bill.”
“Rush Limbaugh mocked the deaths of People with AIDS to disco music in despicable radio segment"
”Rush Limbaugh included an “AIDS Updates” segment on his radio show in the 1990s, just one of the many ways he trafficked in cruelty against LGBT+ people.”
"Carmen Vázquez, a longtime force in the world of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, dies at 72."
”Vázquez, a longtime force in the world of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and issues, first in San Francisco, then in New York, died on Jan. 27 in Brooklyn. She was 72. The cause was complications of Covid-19, said her longtime friends Carlie Steen and Erica Pelletreau. The National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force was one of several organizations to post news of her death. Its executive director, Rea Carey, called Ms. Vázquez “one of our movement’s most brilliant activists.”
Samuel Clowes Huneke, "The Death of the Gay Bar"
”The pandemic may spell the end of many gay bars, but apps and increased acceptance for LGBTQ people meant most were already on the rocks. Should we mourn their passing?”
A.J. Bauer, "His Ignominy Is His Triumph: a counter-obituary of Rush Limbaugh"
”An alternative obituary of Rush Limbaugh anchored in social and cultural theory.”
Riley Grace Roshong, "The LGBTQ+ ‘Panic’ Defense Needs to Go in Maryland"
”According to the LGBTQ Bar, the LGBTQ+ “panic” defense is: ‘a legal strategy that asks a jury to find that a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity/expression is to blame for a defendant’s violent reaction, including murder.’ The LGBTQ+ “panic” defense has been banned in California, Illinois, Rhode Island, Nevada, Connecticut, Maine, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Washington, Colorado and the District of Columbia. Legislation has also been introduced to ban the LGBTQ+ “panic” defense in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Iowa and Virginia.”
Article Spotlight
Joseph Plaster; Safe for Whom? And Whose Families? Narrative, Urban Neoliberalism, and Queer Oral History on San Francisco’s Polk Street. The Public Historian 5 August 2020; 42 (3): 86–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.3.86
In this essay I reflect on my experience as director of Polk Street: Lives in Transition, a project that drew on oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, sex work, queer politics, and public safety in the highly polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco. From 2008–10, I recorded more than seventy oral histories from people experiencing the transformation of the city's Polk Street from a working-class queer commercial district to a gentrified entertainment destination serving the city's growing elite. Oral histories enabled me to document a local past rich in non-biological family structures, which I interpreted through public "listening parties," professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues, a traveling multimedia exhibit, and radio documentaries. The project challenged gentrifiers' claims to be promoting "safety" and "family" by positing alternative understandings of both concepts drawn from oral histories with transgender women, queer homeless youth, sex workers, and working-class gay men who had made Polk Street their home.
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Episode Spotlight
In 1975, two years after Roe v Wade, an all white and mostly Catholic jury convicted Dr. Kenneth Edelin, an African American physician, of manslaughter for performing a legal second trimester abortion. His trial transformed the anti-abortion movement.
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