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Via Towleroad: NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY

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by Andy Towle
October 11, 2016 | 12:22pm

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It’s that day again: “28 years ago, on the anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, we first observed National Coming Out Day as a reminder that one of our most basic tools is the power of coming out. One out of every two Americans has someone close to them who is gay or lesbian. 

For transgender people, that number is only one in 10. Coming out – whether it is as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or allied – STILL MATTERS. When people know someone who is LGBTQ, they are far more likely to support equality under the law. Beyond that, our stories can be powerful to each other.”

Make the jump here to read the original and more at Towleroad

Via JMG: Democrats Applaud National Coming Out Day

October 11, 2016 2016 Election, LGBT History

Via press release:

Today, on National Coming Out Day, we celebrate one of the most powerful forces in the fight for LGBT equality. When someone decides to come out as member of the LGBT community, it gives their friends, family, loved ones and neighbors a personal reason to support LGBT rights, and it inspires more members and allies of the LGBT community to stand up for what is right, even in the face of discrimination, bigotry and violence.

Despite the great strides we’ve made in recent years – marriage equality, the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and more – the sad fact remains that coming out is still a risky, even dangerous thing to do for too many Americans, young and old. But that’s why it’s so important. Together, we can end the discrimination and build a brighter, safer future for all.

“The Democratic Party is proud to stand with the LGBT community, and proud to support candidates for elected office who are fighting for the promise of full equality. If we hope to continue building on the progress of the last eight years, we must elect Hillary Clinton and Democrats up and down the ballot across the country.”

Make the jump here to read the original and more on JMG

Via JMG: Tim Kaine Denounces Bullying On National Coming Out Day: Adults Need To Promote Acceptance [VIDEO]

October 11, 2016 2016 Election, Activism, LGBT News

Via press release from the Clinton campaign:

In honor of National Coming Out Day, Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine sat down with ATTN: Editor-In-Chief Matthew Segal, telling him that it is incumbent upon adults in leadership positions to promote the message of acceptance.

Amid clips of LGBT kids describing the bullying and hate-speech directed at them, Senator Kaine says that National Coming Out Day is important because we need to let kids know that they should “be proud of who you are. You’re made the way you’re made for a reason…celebrate that and accept it.”

Senator Kaine also said that school districts receiving school safety funding should work to reduce the rate of bullying in their schools. As someone who has been standing up to bullies her whole life, Hillary Clinton, together with Tim Kaine, will continue fighting for the the LGBT community and celebrates National Coming Out Day.

 Make the jump here to read the original and see the video on JMG

Via Wasington Post: How one man’s idea for the AIDS quilt made the country pay attention

Twenty-nine years ago, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded on the Mall for the first time, with 1,920 panels. Today, it has grown to more than 49,000. The project was the idea of Cleve Jones, a San Francisco gay rights activist. This article is adapted from Jones’s book “When We Rise: My Life in the Movement,” which is being published Nov. 29 by Hachette Books. 
 

Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, sits on the floor in front of a quilt panel in San Francisco on Mar. 29, 2001. (Eric Risberg/AP)

 

I could see it so clearly in my head, and it was starting to make me crazy. All I had were words, and apparently the words I had were insufficient to paint for others the image in my brain: the Mall, covered in fabric stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. But whenever I began to talk about it, I was met with blank stares or rolling eyes.

Even the word had power for me. Quilts. It made me think of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers. It evoked images of pioneer women making camp by the Conestoga wagons. Or enslaved Africans in the South, hoarding scraps of fabric from the master’s house. It spoke of castoffs, discarded remnants, different colors and textures, sewn together to create something beautiful and useful and warm. Comforters.

I imagined families sharing stories of their loved ones as they cut and sewed the fabric. It could be therapy, I hoped, for a community that was increasingly paralyzed by grief and rage and powerlessness. It could be a tool for the media, to reveal the humanity behind the statistics. And a weapon to deploy against the government; to shame them with stark visual evidence of their utter failure to respond to the suffering and death that spread and increased with every passing day.
I couldn’t shake the idea of a quilt.

My friend Joseph and I started making quilt panels. We made a list of 40 men whom we felt we had known well enough to memorialize, and we began painting their names on blocks of fabric. We talked about how much land would be covered if the bodies of our dead were laid out head to toe, each panel the approximate size of a grave.

For more than a year, activists had been working to organize a mass march for lesbian and gay rights to be held in October 1987 in Washington. I was determined to unfold the quilt on the Mall at the march.

As the annual Gay Freedom Day celebration approached in San Francisco, we asked Mayor Dianne Feinstein for permission to hang the first five squares from the mayor’s balcony at City Hall, overlooking the main stage and Civic Center Plaza. To our surprise, she readily agreed.

We had a name now: The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

On Sunday, June 28, 1987, more than 200,000 attended the parade and celebration. The day was dedicated to the memory of people who had died of AIDS. Everyone in the plaza could see the multicolored quilt sections hanging from the mayor’s balcony. I finally had more than words to describe my vision. People could see it now. They lined up at our information booth to get copies of our first brochure with instructions for creating memorial-quilt panels. Those brochures would travel back to the home towns of all the visitors. Across America, people began to sew.

[Your lifetime risk of HIV by race, state and sexual preference — in four charts]

 

On Oct. 11, 1987, the second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights drew perhaps 500,000 people. The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded at dawn, with 1,920 individual panels, just a small fraction of the more than 20,000 Americans who had already lost their lives to AIDS.


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Via Daily Dharma / October 11, 2016: Finding Happiness

Happiness is not happiness unless it is shared. For happiness is the one thing in all the world that comes to us only at the moment we give it, and is likewise increased by being given away.

—Clark Strand, "The Wisdom of Frogs"