Rosie and Barbara

Barbara Walters "wanted everyone to believe and think and act as if [the women on 'The View'] get along and are really good friends and happy and hang out together, and, you know, that's just not the reality. "I'm not saying they loathe each other, but the fact of the matter is, there was not a lot of camaraderie off camera." Rosie ...

"There are some people who have done this show and then for years feel like they have to dump on it, maybe for their own publicity. And that not only hurts me, but I resent it, so if the shoe fits, lady, get on, ladies, get on with your lives. We are not perfect, we are not always happy, but we're pretty good." - Barbara Walters on "The View"

Steph - Parady

Callie Confides in Bailey - Grey's Anatomy

Out Lesbian

Callie and Erica

Callica

Why McCain - Palin

Religious Beliefs - Civil Rights

If you cannot see the video Click Below
http://www.gaywired.com/video/index.cfm?showID=1073479

Fringe's Out Lesbian Jasika Nicole

"For fans growing tired of the gang from Lost’s Oceanic Flight 815, the show’s creator J.J. Abrams offered something equally compelling when he plane-crashed into prime time this fall with Fringe. In typical Abrams fashion, the show quickly introduced a dozen unrelated events and characters in as many minutes. Left to figure out the common thread?

FBI agent Astrid Farnsworth, is played by the adorable Jasika Nicole, whom you may recognize from her role in Take the Lead with Antonio Banderas. Nicole, a theater, voice, and dance major, relished the jump into the supernatural. “I think that we as actors are as excited to get the scripts as people are to watch the show to see what happens. Usually when you start a project you have a pretty good idea of who your character is and how they fit into the story, but each episode I get a little more information about who I am. It’s an ongoing practice in character development,” she says.

For Nicole, who lives in Brooklyn with her partner of more than three years, being in the closet was never an option: “I came out about 3½ years ago. When I went on my first date with a woman, it was so exciting that I wanted to share it more than anything because it was such a big deal to me,” she recalls. So isn’t prime time ready for an out lesbian detective already? “You’re absolutely right. Who knows? We’ll need to see how that all plays out. I definitely want Astrid’s personal life to show up a little more, she told Out.com."

http://www.shewired.com/Article.cfm?Section=2&ID=21204

Obama - Rick Warren

Well Folks, it was the VP Debates where my heart first sunk, I even changed the Channel, when Biden said what he did about Gay and Lesbians. So we knew then that Obama was not pro gay. We can hope that there is not an all out war out on us. I am saddened on the Hate Crimes in California involving Lesbians and hoping for Justice though I know this will not take away the pain of the Horrific Crime that have happened Recently.

Obama Picking a Lesbian and Gay Hater to Speak is Of Course Sad and Will most like bring out more "justified" hate our way.

The LA Gay and Lesbian Center Responds to Rick Warren's Selection
By:


Jim KeyChief

Public Affairs Officer

323-993-7623

L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Calls on Obama to Disinvite Homophobic Rick Warren From Delivering Inaugural InvocationPresident-Elect's Big Tent of Hope Stretches to Include BigotryLOS ANGELES, December 18, 2008-In response to President-Elect Barack Obama's selection of homophobic mega-church minister Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the presidential inauguration, L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Chief of Staff Darrel Cummings has issued the following statement:"

If President-elect Obama's selection of Rick Warren to give his inaugural invocation is intended to send a message to America that he will be an inclusive leader, then he has clearly made a decision that the exclusion of the LGBT community is acceptable.Inclusion is generally a term referencing the involvement of those who have been historically underrepresented, the subject of historic discrimination, or unrecognized altogether. The inclusion of people with disabilities in public policy decision-making related to housing and building codes, for example, is vital and a relatively new trend. T

his kind of action not only sends an important symbolic message to people with disabilities and to the larger community, it contributes to better policy.Mega-church multi- media stars and religious "leaders" like Rick Warren have been overrepresented in government decision making for many years and have brought their narrow, exclusionary brand of theology into the oval office, Congress and the Supreme Court. They amass great wealth, own powerful financial empires, and preach division on the public airways. Yes, they and their followers are part of America-a relatively large part-but they are redundant as messengers of inclusion since they have always had influence over government, especially since 1980.

The unfortunate consequence of this "big tent" approach is that Obama is not really sending a message of inclusion, at least not the kind that invites into the tent those who have been historically and intentionally locked out for so long. Instead, on the first day of his presidency, he plans to send a very clear message that LGBT people are only welcome if we are agreeable to our own oppression, as represented by his choice of spiritual leader on inauguration day. Obama's response to press inquiries on the subject rings hollow.

He talks about others like Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Joseph Lowery who will share the spotlight and bring alternative views to the stage, as though it's important to have "balanced" representation regarding the issue of our civil rights. Joseph Lowery does not represent an alternative viewpoint to Warren.

He represents an ethical and just choice on behalf of people historically oppressed and left off the presidential stage. Is it important to "balance" the work of a person who has spent his life fighting racial bigotry and discrimination with someone who opposes those ideals? Are these the politics of hope we have heard so much about?Continuing his defense, Obama spoke eloquently about his campaign's support for full equality for lesbians and gay men as an indication of how he will govern. Unfortunately, he did not and does not now stand for our full equality since he has made it clear that he opposes marriage equality. In this regard, he walks in lock step with Warren, even though Obama opposed the passage of Prop 8.Warren played an important role in helping to re-write the California constitution to eliminate our rights. So now it is clear.

If President-elect Obama does not disinvite Rick Warren, then he is defining what inclusion in America will mean under his administration. It will mean that the practice of bigotry is acceptable, and that as president-in the name of "inclusion"-he will provide a place and platform for that bigotry to be expressed and grow. Apparently we are welcome into the big tent of hope, but if we choose to enter, we should do so knowing we are in hostile, yet "balanced" territory."

http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20225358&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=569342&rfi=6

Jerry Brown - Debates Continue

As the Saying Goes, the Majority Should NEVER vote on Rights for the Minority.

Jerry Brown's reverse on gay-marriage ban: Is it a game-changer?

Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown's reversal on Proposition 8 -- he now is asking the California Supreme Court to reject it -- is the talk of the blog world today. Of course, the pro-gay-marriage forces are happy. But there is a lot of debate about whether Brown's rejection of the voters' will on gay marriage can fly. Jonathan Turley writes:

Brown's position between the earlier and current litigation seems hopelessly conflicted. It would have been more consistent if he refused to defend either the earlier law or current law. Yet, there is the problem of lawyers defending a law that they consider to be unconstitutional. Brown can argue that, once the Court recognize the constitutional right of same-sex couples in the Constitution, it became a problem to have it set aside by popular vote. The earlier law was the result of legislative consensus while this is the product of popular vote.

Yet, there status as "law" is the same for the purposes of the Attorney General's office.

Red County California sees a political motive in Brown's stance:

Jerry Brown, as the California State Attorney General, said that he would defend Proposition 8 if it passed. He is now asking those same black-robed dictators to declare Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Heck of a democratic state we live in, when an attorney general with an eye on the next gubernatorial race will pander to an activist voting bloc to thwart the democratic process dutifully followed by a majority of citizens to express their will multiple times and in multiple ways.

-- Shelby Grad

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2008/12/jerry-browns-re.html?cid=143189014#comments

Sarah Waters - Lesbian Novelist

Sarah Waters is a British Novelist

Sarah Waters is best known for her novels such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.

Sarah Waters was born in 1966 in Pembrokeshire, Wales. She studied English Literature at the universities of Kent and Lancaster, after which she worked in bookshops and libraries, before returning to postgraduate study.

She then gained a Ph.D in English Literature, her field of study being lesbian and gay historical fiction, and also had articles on gender, sexuality and history published in a number of journals.

While working on her Ph.D thesis, she became increasingly interested in London life of the nineteenth century, and began writing fiction. She has since written three novels set in Victorian England, for which she has received high praise from both mainstream reviewers and the gay and lesbian press.

In 1998, her first novel Tipping the Velvet was published - a picaresque adventure based around Victorian music hall, with a lesbian love story at its centre.

This book was adapted into a drama serial by Andrew Davies, and received much press attention when it was shown on BBC TV in 2002. Her second novel, Affinity (1999), is a darker novel set in a London women's prison, and explores the Victorian world of spiritualism.

This book won a Somerset Maugham Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction and a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2000. Fingersmith was published in 2002, a thriller and love story set among petty thieves and criminals in 1860s London.

Its central character, Susan, is a pickpocket. This book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Sarah Waters was for a time an associate lecturer for the Open University and has also tutored on Creative Writing programmes, but is now a full-time fiction writer living in London. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Her novel, The Night Watch (2006), is set in London during and after the Second World War.

Before writing novels, Waters worked as an academic, earning a doctorate and teaching. Waters went directly from her doctoral thesis to her first novel. It was during the process of writing her thesis that she thought she would write a novel; she began as soon as the thesis was complete. Her work is very research-intensive, which is an aspect she enjoys. All of her books contain lesbian themes, and she does not mind being labeled a lesbian writer. She said, “I’m writing with a clear lesbian agenda in the novels. It’s right there at the heart of the books.”

She calls it “incidental,” because of her own sexual orientation. “That’s how it is in my life, and that’s how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn’t it? It’s sort of just there in your life.”

Alison Bechdel

Two years ago Alison Bechdel seemed to come out of nowhere with a graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” that knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over. You didn’t have to go quite as far as Time magazine, which called “Fun Home” the single best book of 2006, to recognize Ms. Bechdel’s achievement. Her memoir, about coming of age as a lesbian in her secret-filled family’s rural Pennsylvania funeral home, was moody, astringent, microscopically observed. “Fun Home” belongs on that same small, high shelf of comic books where “Maus” dwells.

Plenty of readers, however, needed no introduction to Ms. Bechdel. For more than 20 years she has been the creator of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a weekly comic strip, printed mostly in college-town alternative newspapers, about the fractious lives and loves of an articulate group of lesbians in a city that resembles Minneapolis. The strip is sexy, sometimes in an R-rated way — imagine “Doonesbury” with regular references to sex toys — and it’s political, in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way. Ms. Bechdel’s lesbians wanted to impeach the first George Bush.

Taken together, these comic strips don’t have the tightly coiled impact of “Fun Home,” but in some ways they offer greater consolations — they’re looser, more funny, and they offer the chance to watch a group of very appealing women grow and change (and struggle to have better sex) over the course of more than two decades. Ms. Bechdel calls her strips “half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel,” and that’s not far off. I suspect that, over the years, “Dykes to Watch Out For” has been as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle” (1973) and Lisa Alther’s “Kinflicks” (1976) were to an earlier one.

As Ms. Bechdel observes in her introduction to this new anthology, “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For,” it was not especially easy to be openly lesbian back in 1983, when she published her first cartoon. “We had no ‘L Word,’ ” she writes. “We had no lesbian daytime TV hosts. We had no openly lesbian daughters of the creepy vice president. We had ‘Personal Best,’ and we liked it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/books/03garner.html?ref=arts

Toni McNaron -

Toni McNaron, Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is a multiple award winning teacher and scholar who worked joyfully with graduate and undergraduate students for over 35 years at the University of Minnesota.
Her passion as a writer led her to explore topics ranging from diversity in the academy, gender and genre, the works of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, to the contours of her own life as a white Southern lesbian.

In recognition of her accomplishments, the Steven J. Schochet Center for GLBT Studies was pleased to inaugurate its Distinguished Lecture Series in April 2000, by introducing the Toni McNaron Lecture in Arts and Culture.

The Sister Bond : A Feminist View of a Timeless Connection (Athene Ser., No. 6)