Via FB [DID YOU KNOW]

 [DID YOU KNOW]

28 years ago today, On October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student at the University of Wyoming, di*d from catastrophic injuries sustained in a horrific attack that shocked the world. He was only 21 years old, with dreams, ambitions, and an entire future ahead of him.

Matthew was more than the victim of a hate crime. He was a son, a friend, a student, and a young man who deserved the chance to live freely and without fear. He studied political science and international relations, hoping to make a difference in the world. His life was tragically cut short because two men subjected him to unimaginable violence.

On the night of October 6, 1998, Matthew visited the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming, where he encountered Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. The two men lured him into their vehicle, robbed him, and brutally att*cked him with a pistol. They then drove him to a remote area, tied him to a wooden fence, and abandoned him in the freezing night.

For approximately 18 hours, Matthew lay gravely injured before a passing cyclist discovered him. The sight was so shocking that the cyclist initially mistook his motionless body for a scarecrow. Matthew was rushed to the hospital with severe brain injuries, but he never regained consciousness. His family stayed by his side until he passed away in the early hours of October 12, 1998.

He was just 21 years old.

Matthew was openly gay, but reliable historical accounts do not clearly establish that he had a boyfriend at the time of his de4th. His story should not be reduced to whether he had a romantic partner. He was a human being whose life had value, whose dreams mattered, and whose identity should never have made him a target for violence.

Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were convicted in connection with Matthew's kidnapping and murder. Both received two consecutive life sentences. Although robbery was also involved, the case became a powerful symbol of anti-gay violence and the devastating consequences.

Matthew's murd5r sparked international outrage, vigils, and renewed demands for stronger legal protections for LGBTQIA+ people. Eleven years later, on October 28, 2009, Pres Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, expanding federal protections against certain viol5nt crim5s motivated by a victim's actual or perceived s5xual orientation or gender identity, among other characteristics.

Matthew never lived to see the change associated with his name. But his story helped strengthen a movement demanding that LGBTQIA+ people deserve the same protection, dignity, and safety as everyone else.

Today, we remember Matthew not only for the horrific circumstances of his death, but also for the life he lived and the change his story helped inspire. His name remains a reminder that behind every hate-crime statistic is a real person, a grieving family, and a future that should never have been taken away.

No one should have to hide who they are to survive. No one should be targeted because of whom they love. And no family should ever have to bury a child because someone decided that their life mattered less.

Rest in peace, Matthew Shepard. Twenty-eight years later, we remember you. Your life mattered. Your story matters. And the fight for a world where LGBTQIA+ people can live openly, safely, and without fear must continue.

#MatthewShepard

Watch "Lighthouse Family - Lovin' Every Minute (Official Music Video)" on YouTube

 

Watch "Jay Adonis - Born Ruler | HIGHER SELF (Official Music Video)" on YouTube

 

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via FB

 

Via Daily Dharma: Right Attitude

 

Support the Tricycle community with a donation »

Right Attitude

Right attitude in practice fearlessly inquires, “What story of suffering am I telling myself?” When awareness observes the threads of the story, wisdom dissolves the suffering. Steve Armstrong, “Got Attitude?” CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Appreciative Joy

 

Via LGBTq Nation \\ Samuel Alito says marriage equality probably won’t be overturned despite how much he hates it He also called it “a privilege” to have written the majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

 

What No One Tells You About Gay Spirituality

 

Insight App Msg

 

Via GBF San Francisco

 

Via Soul Boom \\ David Archuleta: I Lost My Faith to Find Myself

 

Via Daily Dharma: The Path of Happiness

 

Donate »

I have much gratitude for Daily Dharma. Each offering is like a seed, growing into a forest. I keep each and every quote, so I can explore this forest and learn from the trees how to be in this world. It's a hard time to be a human, and every quote is like a lamp of hope and a guidepost. –Daily Dharma reader

Support Daily Dharma »

The Path of Happiness

Happiness means feeling you are on the right path every moment. You don’t need to arrive at the end of the path in order to be happy. The right path refers to the very concrete ways you live your life in every moment. Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Heart of the Matter” CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering

 

Via FB

 

Via FB \\ The pink triangle

 

When Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps in the spring of 1945, they freed political prisoners, Jewish survivors, Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the other men, women, and children the Nazi regime had systematically targeted. The men wearing pink triangles were a different matter.

Under the U.S. Army handbook governing the occupation of Germany, prisoners convicted under Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing sexual acts between men, were classified as common criminals. They were not to be released. They were to be transferred to civilian prisons to serve out their remaining sentences. The camps had been liberated. For gay prisoners, the imprisonment simply continued under new management.

Paragraph 175 had existed in German law since 1871, but the Nazis weaponized it. In 1935, the regime rewrote the statute to expand the definition of criminal homosexual behavior to include kissing, hugging, or even homosexual fantasy. Heinrich Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936 to coordinate enforcement across the Gestapo. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested under the law. Approximately 53,000 were convicted and sentenced to prison. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.

Those sent to the camps wore downward-pointing pink triangles sewn onto their uniforms, part of the color-coded classification system the SS introduced in 1937 and 1938. Red triangles marked political prisoners. Green marked criminals. Purple marked Jehovah's Witnesses. The pink triangle placed gay men at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy, where they were singled out for abuse by guards and fellow prisoners alike. They were assigned the most punishing labor details. They were subjected to medical experiments, including forced castration. An estimated 65 percent of gay men sent to the camps did not survive.

The men who did survive came home to a country that still considered them criminals. West Germany retained the Nazi-era version of Paragraph 175 until 1969, when it was revised to decriminalize homosexual acts between men over 21. The law was not fully repealed until 1994. East Germany had reverted to the pre-Nazi version of the statute in the 1950s and enforced it until 1968, convicting some 4,000 men in the process. Tens of thousands more were convicted across both German states in the postwar decades under laws that had roots in Nazi legislation.

Gay survivors were not recognized as victims of National Socialism. They received no reparations. Asking for compensation would have required them to identify themselves publicly as gay in a country where homosexuality remained a criminal offense, making them vulnerable to immediate arrest. Most stayed silent for decades. The few who tried to claim reparations were turned away.

Heinz Dörmer spent nearly ten years in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. After liberation, West German authorities kept him incarcerated for another eight years. In 1982, he applied to the German government for reparations. His application was denied. He died in 1998 at 86 years old, having never received a cent of compensation or a word of official acknowledgment for what had been done to him.

Another survivor, known only as Heinz F., spent nine years in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. After the war, he told no one what had happened to him. He was afraid. "Nobody wanted to hear about it," he said in an interview for the 2000 documentary film "Paragraph 175," tears on his face. Gay ex-prisoners were regarded as criminals, not victims. That was the official position of the West German government, and it remained the official position for decades.

Germany did not overturn the postwar convictions under Paragraph 175 or offer compensation to surviving victims until March 2017, when Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet approved legislation to do both. By that point, most of the men who had survived the camps, served additional prison time, been denied reparations, and spent their lives unable to speak about what had happened to them were dead.

The pink triangle the Nazis forced gay men to wear as a badge of degradation was reclaimed by gay activists in the 1970s, after the 1972 publication of "The Men with the Pink Triangle," one of the first survivor memoirs from a gay concentration camp prisoner. It became a symbol of resistance and then of pride, appearing on protest signs, in pride parades, and eventually on everything from flags to bumper stickers. The men who actually wore it in the camps mostly never saw that reclamation. They died alone, uncompensated, legally classified as criminals by the country that had tortured them, waiting for an apology that took seven more decades to arrive.

See less

Today in "Sometimes we are our own worst enemies" we have: PETER ANDREAS THIEL

 

Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989
This Day in Gay History
October 11

---

Peter Thiel and husband Matt Danzeisen

1967 -

PETER ANDREAS THIEL is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 391 on the Forbes 400 in 2020, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. As of June 25, 2021, Thiel has an estimated net worth of US$7.24 billion and is ranked 385th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is famously conservative and, more than just occasionally, weird.

Born in Frankfurt, he moved with his family to the United States as an infant. He spent a portion of his upbringing in Southern Africa before the family settled in California in 1977. He studied philosophy at Stanford University, graduating with a B.A. in 1989. He then earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1992. After graduation, he worked as a judicial law clerk for Judge James Larry Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, as a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, as a speechwriter for former-U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett, and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

After PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2004, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, and served as its chairman through 2019. In 2005, he launched Founders Fund with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Earlier, Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000 in August 2004. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion in 2012, but remains on the board of directors. He co-founded Valar Ventures in 2010; co-founded Mithril Capital, serving as investment committee chair, in 2012; and served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017.

Through the Thiel Foundation, Thiel governs the grant-making bodies Breakout Labs and Thiel Fellowship, and funds nonprofit research into artificial intelligence, life extension (by blood transfusions from younger people), and seasteading (floating, independent city-states). In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay (though he maintains he came out of his own accord.) The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker. A co-founder of The Stanford Review, he is a conservative libertarian who is critical of high government spending, high debt levels, and foreign wars. He has donated to over 50 political figures on the American Right, including Donald Trump and Meg Whitman. He also maintains a political action committee, Free Forever.

Thiel is difficult to encapsulate in the space here. He is a collection of contradictions. He is a gay man who is also a conservative christian. He is a professed libertarian who bankrupted a press outlet. He is a capitalist who believes capitalism is incompatible with Democracy.  He is someone we need to watch. 

Vice President J.D. Vance has had a long, collaborative relationship with Thiel, one that has aided Vance from his time in venture capital to his role as an Ohio senator, and now as Vice President of the United States.

Peter Thiel is deeply entwined with JD Vance’s political and professional trajectory through a mix of financial backing, mentorship, employment, and ideological influence, and this relationship has shaped Vance’s rise to national prominence

Vance launched his own venture capital firm in 2019 under the name Narya Capital, which sought to invest in startups in overlooked cities and reportedly received backing from Thiel and other billionaire investors like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as Axios reported.

Thiel also reportedly brought Vance, who had established himself as a critic of Trump, to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to smooth over his relationship with the former president, according to The New York Times.

Vance garnered more support from Thiel during his successful Senate run in 2022, receiving record-breaking donations of about $15 million from Thiel, which marked the largest amount of money donated to a single Senate candidate ever.

Thiel has written:  "...I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron... In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms... Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom." He has been quoted as saying that he thinks that a monarchy is the most efficient form of government.

Thiel married his long-time partner Matt Danzeisen in October 2017, in Vienna, Austria. Danzeisen works as a portfolio manager at Thiel Capital. They have a baby daughter.

In the summer of 2021, it became known that Thiel began providing information as a "confidential human source," or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns.

Charles Johnson, a longtime associate of Thiel's and a notorious figure in the far-right movement that Thiel has subsidized for a decade, revealed in a statement that he helped recruit the billionaire as an informant by introducing him to Buma.

A source with knowledge of Thiel's relationship to the FBI, whose identity is known to Insider but who insisted on anonymity, corroborated Johnson's account, telling Insider that Johnson brokered a relationship between Thiel and Buma. Insider was able to confirm through an additional source that the FBI added Thiel to its formal roster of registered informants.

|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8| Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! www.whitecraneinstitute.org |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|

Via Tricycle \\\ The Voice That Shaped Zen in the West

 

BUDDHIST WISDOM TO LIVE BY

Support the Tricycle community with a donation »

October 10, 2026

The Voice That Shaped Zen in the West

The influential Japanese Buddhist philosopher Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (1870–1966) played a pivotal role in bringing Zen Buddhism to Western audiences and introducing readers to Japanese ways of thinking and being. The author of more than 100 books on Zen and Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki shared teachings on a wide range of topics, including satori, or awakening; the intersections of Christianity and Buddhism; and Zen perspectives on the self, reality, and life and death. But his influence extended beyond Buddhism, profoundly shaping Western psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the arts too. A Zen Life – D.T. Suzuki, directed by Michael Goldberg, explores Suzuki’s life and legacy through archival footage, exclusive audio recordings, and interviews with renowned thinkers, artists, theologians, and psychologists whose work was deeply influenced by his teachings. “Buddhism was coming over the horizon through the books of Daisetsu Suzuki,” recalls religion scholar Huston Smith. “And they swept me off my feet. It was his account of satori that really drew me into Zen.” ​ Watch A Zen Life on Tricycle’s Film Club and explore Suzuki’s enduring message of unity, respect, and transcending our differences.

Watch the film »