RIP

[Kobi]

Fiery lesbian feminist activist/author/publisher Jeanne Cordova died peacefully at around 4:30am at her home in Los Angeles Sunday morning.

Jeanne

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Fiery lesbian feminist activist/author/publisher Jeanne Cordova died peacefully at around 4:30am at her home in Los Angeles Sunday morning.

Jeanne

Damn. What a terrible loss.

[BullDog]

RIP Jeanne Cordova, an amazing lesbian activist and butch woman who did so much for us. She has always been a great role model of mine.

[Gemme]

Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White passed away.

[GeorgiaMa'am]

Gender expression non-conformist David Bowie passed away at his home in the company of family on Sunday, January 10, 2016. His death followed an 18-month battle with cancer. His latest album, _Blackstar_, was just released on Friday, his birthday.*

His stage persona Ziggy Stardust definitely influenced me as a young queer person. David Bowie, you will be so missed, and you will leave a hole in the world.

*source: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35278872

[Jedi]

RIP David Bowie........you were a pioneer in the gender bending community......you will be missed.

[~ocean]

RIP Bowie ~ Best music we ever danced too ,and still do !

[storyspinner70]

I'll miss you Ziggy... One of the absolute best!

[Genesis]

[cricket26]

[Greyson]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Fiery lesbian feminist activist/author/publisher Jeanne Cordova died peacefully at around 4:30am at her home in Los Angeles Sunday morning.

Jeanne

Jeanne and I met when we were both "baby butches." There were not too many Butch Mexican American activist back then in Los Angeles or anywhere for that matter. (I digress.) We did not always agree but I had and still have much respect for her. RIP Jeanne and thank you for all you did for our community.

[Kobi]

The character actor is best known for playing Commandant Eric Lassard in all seven Police Academy films, as well as the grouchy foster parent Henry Warnimont on the 1980s sitcom Punky Brewster.

Gaynes also starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 1982 film Tootsie, which received 10 Academy Award nominations, although only Jessica Lange won for best supporting actress.

Gaynes’ other film credits include The Way We Were, Altered States and Wag the Dog. He appeared in hundreds of episodes on television shows, including The Defenders, Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, The Six Million Dollar Man and Hawaii Five-0, as well as the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

He was 98.

[CherryWine]

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 10 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, has died. She was 89.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/20...ww.google.com/

[candy_coated_bitch]

Oh, that's a tough one. I was I in the middle of Go Set a Watchman.

[C0LLETTE]

Originally Posted by CherryWine

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 10 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, has died. She was 89.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/20...ww.google.com/

I so love photos of creative beautiful transformative women that smoked and lived to be 89. RIP Harper Lee.

[Kobi]

Yolande Betbeze Fox, a convent-educated Alabamian who defied convention, and set new standards, by refusing to tour the country as Miss America of 1951 in revealing bathing suits, died on Monday in Washington. She was 87.

By the time Ms. Fox won her title on Sept. 9, 1950, in Atlantic City, pageant officials, trying to calibrate propriety and sex appeal amid changing mores, had already decided to stop crowning Miss America while she was wearing a swimsuit. That pageant staple had been confined to the swimsuit competition, an event Ms. Fox — Ms. Betbeze at the time — had already won. She began her reign in a gown.

But given that the swimsuit competition’s chief sponsor, Catalina, manufactured swimwear, Ms. Fox was still expected to model bathing suits as the reigning Miss America.

What the organizers did not expect was her response. “Yolande declared, ‘I’m an opera singer, not a pinup!’ and refused posing in a bathing suit again,” according to her official biography on the pageant’s website.

As a result, Catalina withdrew as the pageant sponsor and began the rival Miss USA contest.

“In Yolande’s words, she made a stand for ‘propriety’ that has gone down as a significant flash of pageant history and altered the course of its future,” the official biography says.

Ms. Fox put it another way in an interview with The Washington Post in 1969: “There was nothing but trouble from the minute that crown touched my head.”

Ms. Fox never fulfilled her goal of becoming a professional opera singer, though she belted out “Caro Nome” from “Rigoletto” in the talent competition. But she used her newfound fame to become a model, theatrical producer and social activist.

She participated in a vigil in 1953 at Sing Sing prison to protest the impending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Manhattan couple convicted of conspiring to commit espionage. She joined civil rights protesters in picketing a Woolworth’s in Times Square in 1960 to support black sit-ins at the store’s lunch counters in the South. (“I’m a Southern girl, but I’m a thinking girl,” she said.) And she joined demonstrations against nuclear weapons.

In a 2006 profile, Smithsonian magazine said Ms. Fox’s “exotic Basque looks” — she was of Basque ancestry — and her rebellious streak may have made her “the most unconventional Miss America ever.”

Yolande Betbeze (her mother picked her given name from a book of medieval history) was born in Mobile, Ala., on Nov. 29, 1928, the daughter of William and Ethel Betbeze. Her father was a butcher.

She was educated in Roman Catholic convent schools and the extension division of the University of Alabama. She began her beauty contest career in 1949, when she won Spring Hill College’s Miss Torch pageant. She entered the Miss Alabama competition hoping to win a scholarship to study singing in New York.

After her one-year reign, she studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York; married Matthew Fox, a movie executive (they had a daughter, Yolande Fox Campbell, who survives her, along with a granddaughter); and produced theater in a playhouse on East Houston Street.

She later moved to Washington, where she bought the Georgetown mansion formerly owned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and became a fixture of the capital’s social scene.

In the 1960s, Ms. Fox criticized the Miss America pageant for its lack of ethnic and racial diversity. “ ‘How could we say it’s Miss America,’ I asked, ‘if it’s not open to all Americans?’ ” she was quoted saying in “Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations,” a 2011 book by Roy Hoffman. In the 1970s, she said the pageant perpetuated sexist attitudes.

“Today,” the Miss America website says, “Yolande feels her actions have been pivotal in directing pageant progress towards recognizing intellect, values and leadership abilities, rather than focusing on beauty alone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us...ies-at-87.html

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Love the brave women who had the courage to speak up, stand by their values, and pave the way for the rest of us.

[Kobi]

George Kennedy, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in “Cool Hand Luke,” died Sunday. He was 91.

Kennedy’s film credits also included “The Dirty Dozen,” the “Airport” movies, a series of “Naked Gun” comedies and the disaster film “Earthquake,” among many others.

Kennedy also starred as rival rancher Carter McKay in the long-running CBS drama “Dallas” for three seasons. His many television appearances included roles on “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Peter Gunn,” “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “McHale’s Navy” and “Gunsmoke.”

As an author, Kennedy wrote three books, including the 1983 murder mystery “Murder on Location,” the novel “Murder on High,” published the following year, and his 2011 autobiography, “Trust Me.”