Queer News

[Kobi]

Schools with gay-straight alliances and initiatives to reduce homophobia have fewer students — both gay and straight — who attempt suicide, according to a new study by the University of British Columbia.

Not only were the odds of homophobic discrimination and suicidal thoughts reduced by more than half among LGB students in schools with GSAs, but heterosexual boys at the same schools were also half as likely to attempt suicide, compared to their peers at schools without a GSA.

In addition, at schools where antidiscrimination policies have been in place for more than three years, gay and bisexual boys were more than 70 percent less likely to attempt suicide. The same attempts for lesbian and bisexual girls were two-thirds less likely than their peers at schools without such campaigns.

“We know that LGBTQ students are at higher risk for suicide, in part because they are more often targeted for bullying and discrimination,” says Elizabeth Saewyc, lead author of the study and professor at the UBC School of Nursing. “But heterosexual students can also be the target of homophobic bullying. When policies and supportive programs like GSAs are in place long enough to change the environment of the school, it’s better for students’ mental health, no matter what their orientation.”

The study was conducted among nearly 22,000 students across British Columbia in grades 8-12.

http://www.shewired.com/need-know/20...-suicide-rates

[Kobi]

Two surprises here. First, there is only 1 POC on this list?

The second, David Cicilline, who as the former Mayor of Providence took a thriving city to the brink of bankruptcy and went on to share his voodoo economics as US Representative is gay?

21 most influential openly gay and lesbian Washingtonians

[Kobi]

November 22, 2013–March 16, 2014

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery, 4th Floor, Brooklyn

In the late 1950s, the fight for gay rights was developing alongside the growing Civil Rights and feminist movements. An important voice in the Civil Rights struggle was author, essayist, and activist Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), the award-winning playwright of A Raisin in the Sun. This exhibition explores a largely unknown but significant aspect of Hansberry’s biography connecting her to the gay rights movement: the letters she wrote in 1957 to The Ladder, the first subscription-based lesbian publication in the United States. In these provocative letters, Hansberry drew on her own identity and life experiences to articulate the interconnected struggles of women, lesbians, and African Americans during the period. She pointed to her identification with the burgeoning feminist movement in a 1959 interview with Studs Terkel, saying that "the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women," adding that those who are "twice oppressed" often become "twice militant."

The exhibition includes approximately twenty-seven issues of The Ladder, beginning with the publication’s launch in 1956 and documenting its early underground years, under the waning force of the Comstock Act. (Under these laws, enacted in 1873, it was illegal to send "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials in the U.S. mail. Free press rights around homosexuality were granted in 1958.) Also included are Hansberry's handwritten lists to herself on her birthdays, typewritten essays on "the homosexual question," a poem titled "Le Masque," and a notebook with a drawn self-portrait. There is also a listening station with Hansberry’s interview with Studs Terkel.

Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to "The Ladder" is the latest exhibition in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which is devoted to subjects that explore the significant contributions of the women named in The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.

Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to "The Ladder" is organized by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.