The organization Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays is offering a new guide designed to help healthcare providers offer more effective care to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender patients.
The guide, “Straight for Equality in Healthcare,” is a first step in acknowledging that patients can even be LGBTQ. The guide offers “case studies” where nurses and doctors express unease when suspicious that a patient may be LGBTQ. They don’t know how to ask, don’t want to assume and don’t know how that patients issues may different from a straight person.

Scenario: a young boy is in the coming out process and wants to know what he should be doing to be safe (teaching heterosexual safe sex in school is still a huge hurdle, my hunch is that it’ll be a while before LGBTQ sex is explored), but he doesn’t want to out himself to this doctor, who knows his family. It’s an uncomfortable situation. Unless the doctor has it in his/her head to ask, the boy probably isn’t going to bring it up. And will not know the implications of detrimental actions. He gets all his info from friends or does not get it at all.

It is a first step. The likelihood of LGBT people having appropriate messengers and/or messages is rare within traditional settings, given societal assumptions of heterosexuality and the fact that most health professionals are poorly informed about the health care risks of LGBT patients. A 1998 survey of all U.S. medical schools found an average of only 2.5 hours devoted to this topic in the 4-year program. Beyond communication, there is a lack of knowledge about LGBTQ health over all and how it might differ from heterosexual health. Should a lesbian use a dental dam (female condom)? Can a lesbian get an STD through sex? If a doctor does not know these questions, what is a patient to do?

Heterosexuality is still assumed in most medical settings. This guide is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done to change the institution.

I went shooting for the first time in December.

I'm from North Carolina, where my Uncle and cousin are never expected at Thanksgiving because they go hunting. My other cousin has a gun collection, including an AK-47. The cousin with the gun collection had been nagging me to go to the shooting range with him and I had bailed out several times. Guns scare me. They just make it too easy to kill someone.

I finally got the courage and went shooting. It was strangely liberating, but strangely out-of-body. I shot two hand guns, one rifle and the AK-47. I shot at a bullseye target 50 feet away against a wall of dirt. For my cousin, it's a sport. He does not carry a concealed weapon. He keeps the guns tightly locked away from his two children. There is a seriousness around the guns that made me comfortable.

A new movement that very much scares the heck out of me, the right to carry an unconcealed weapon, is brewing. The movement is seperate from the NRA and grassroots-based.

I was curious to find out why exactly people want to carry guns in the open. Yes yes, it's a Constitutional Right, but beyond that, what is the necessity in today's society?

On OpenCarry.org, a grassroots website devoted to media coverage and legality of the issue, the most I got of their mission was this:

“Anthropologist Charles Springwood sums it up nicely when he commented that open carriers are trying to 'naturalize the presence of guns, which means that guns become ordinary, omnipresent, and expected. Over time, the gun becomes a symbol of ordinary personhood.'

OpenCarry.org believes that 'a right unexercised, is a right lost,; and increasingly gun owners are agreeing - it's time gun carry comes out of the closet in America!”

Do they feel like police do not do enough? That they need to be walking around their suburban neighborhoods like cowboys in 1850s Colorado? I do not want guns to become a part of everyday life. For sport (as long as it doesn't involve animals), O.K., but not for going to grab a cup of coffee or getting on a bus.

Guns equal hurt. Let's say I'm walking down my urban neighborhood street at night and someone approaches me and tries to mug me. Instead of pulling out my pepper spray and letting go, I pull out my gun and let go. No thank you. I imagine this scenerio playing out in bars, in road rage, in domestic disputes. People are just too unpredictable to have guns strapped to them.

Californian Senator Roy Ashburn announced he is gay this morning. The San Francisco Gate reports:

“State Sen. Roy Ashburn, the Bakersfield Republican who was arrested in Sacramento last week on suspicion of drunk driving, came out as gay in a radio interview this morning.

'I am gay. And so, those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long,' Ashburn told radio host Inga Banks on her show on the KERN station in Bakersfield.

The announcement follows days of intense scrutiny of Ashburn's personal life after he was arrested just after 2 a.m. on March 3. A Sacramento television station reported that Ashburn was at a popular gay dance club that night and several people have said they have seen the senator at gay bars in the city.

His sexual orientation is at issue because Ashburn has one of the staunchest records of voting against bills that would expand rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Californians.”

The intersection of personal and public life can be hard for professionals attempting to find a balance with their sexual identity. There is a fear that one will not be hired if you're open, will you able to keep your job, will your coworkers treat you the same, will you be able to move up in an organization the same as if you were straight.

There is a huge element of courage to come out in public life. My hope is that one day, it will not be assumed that everyone you work with is straight. It will not matter. But for public officials, the rules are different. He voted to disinfranchise gay people who were couragous enough to come out.

His actions prove that it is still not an equal playing field for the LGBTQ community. He had to keep it a secret to succed, espeically with the conservatives in his state.

There is a saying in the LGBTQ community: when one person comes out, one vote is changed. You change the opinion of those who love you toward that of acceptance. Unfortunately, I don't think that will be the case in this situation.

The headline, “Being a porn star ain't what it used to be” pulled me in.

I hadn't thought of the affects of the Age of the Internet on the porn industry. And, on top of it, empathize with its decline.

After reading a story in the Brisbane Times, I started drawing parallels with the decline of print journalism and the porn industry. And actually started feeling for porn stars.

The article describes the plight of porn star Monica Mayhem, from her introduction, the high life, to now, where sales are down, due to what she attributes as the Internet.

Mayhem says, "And these little girls are coming in doing way hardcore things for $300 and ruining it for everyone.[What they] don't realise is that's never going to happen like [Jameson] again - that she was all marketing - and the industry is never going to be like it was."

Mayhem is talking about Jenna Jameson, perhaps the biggest household porn star name. I imagine the girls going into porn look at Jameson in the same way I look at Walter Cronkite, Margaret Fuller and Nellie Bly. The golden age of journalism is gone. Now, it's all about the Internet. I will probably never work for a print newspaper as a reporter. Most of what I write goes on the Internet. I have to print off copies to send to my grandmother.

Mayhem had a negative perspective on the internet, as I think many older journalists do. She is right that younger people will do more. I'm lucky I came into the working world when I did. I never knew the time when Washington Post reporters made $100,000. I hear the tales and can't believe it. My reality is that I'm just glad to be getting a check for my writing. I will work long hours and pay my time and hope that the internet becomes lucrative.

Porn and journalism are different. I'm selling what's in my mind and my ability to get into the minds of others. Porn stars sell their bodies. But the similarities of the impact of the Internet are striking and both industries can learn from the other.

My fascination with dinosaurs comes from a childhood fascination with where we come from —what existed before people, coupled with the science-fiction sense that we have about dinosaurs. Monsters, aliens and ghosts may exist, however, there is no real evidence toward their existence. But dinosaurs, they did exist. And the more I find out about them and why they became extinct, the more the narrative of what came before me evolves.

Scientists released a consensus Thursday saying that dinosaurs most likely became extinct due to a six-mile wide meteor that hit the Earth while traveling at 45,000 mph. They looked at hundreds of land and sea-floor clay layers to examine microscopic fossils and chemistry dating back to the event.

Dinosaurs are for non-believers, like creationism is for Christians. I want to know where the world started and how it started. What were the first events and how did those events came to pass? Dinosaurs fulfill a larger need to make sense of the world and how I fit into it. I just hope I'm not blasted off the planet by a six-mile wide meteor.

People have a problem with straying outside gender/sex boxes. Rumors spread early this year that Lady Gaga had a penis and was intersex, with both male and female genitalia. Television, radio, and the blogosphere when nuts. Friends and coworkers talked about it in the office and at parties. And now, with Lady Gaga posing with a strap-on buldge in Q Magazine, the frenzy continues.

She breaks the rules with this buldge and with her silence over her sex. People want to know what she is. Like genderqueer people, refusing to adhere to a gender in their everyday lives, she is doing this with her body parts. It draws attention to our need to differentiate between male and female. Our attitudes toward eachother are dictated by the gender/sex of the person we communicate with.

I notice that I am treated quite differently because I am a woman in professional situations. I know that many people would not hold the door for me, let me go ahead in the grocery line or even be more leniant in a job situation if I was a man.

What would happen if they could not recognize my gender?

It throws our brains for a loop. We look at someone, register who they are, make a judgement on who they are and act based upon that judgement. It's a natural way of interacting, but presents problems because the reaction is not always the same for each gender.

We create boxes of who we are around ourselves and when someone steps outside, a big ole' red flag goes up. It's a threat to the way we interact. If I were to meet someone on the street and I could not tell their sex/gender, how would I interact with them?

The reality is, there are more than two genders, more than two sexes. The media and our peers need to get used to it. They are blurring the box walls and Lady Gaga is representative of just one out of thousands of people who blur them through being transgender, genderqueer, asexual, queer and crossdressers. Let's make some room.

A recent New York Times article chronicles the day of a homeless man in New York City. It is not unlike a day in Washington, D.C., where my expertise in homelessness resides. The homeless go to movie theaters and stay all day, they couch surf from friend to friend, sleep on the streets and spend their days in the library.

After the District of Columbia Library announced cutting of hours last Fall, I wondered where the homeless would go during the day. The library serves as a vital source in most major cities as a haven for those without homes.

The story was on this man who utilizes the library to enrich his understanding of culture and stay warm. The comments written after the article took another perspective: shock that homeless people use the library to stay warm and it is allowed.

Some people do not recognize that a homeless person is still a citizen of a city. Many of them have slipped through the cracks of societal institutions as a child or even as an adult, when there was no saftey net under them.

One reader comments, “Why is this guy allowed to game the system? he seems pretty intelligent and can obviously fend for himself.”

The man in the story has a reason for being homeless, just like everyone else. He has family, but when asked why he doesn't stay with them, “I got family in every borough, but you can’t visit your family when you’re homeless. When something goes missing, who do you think everyone looks at?”

Homelessness is deeper and more complex because there are so many different situations. When a person lives on the street, it's because society has failed them. The guy may be intelligent, however, without the proper resources, those that some of us are given at birth because of class and income, it's hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you haven't got any boots.

YouTube videos should not be part of the application process when applying to college, but some universities are allowing it. A kid will turn in his/her application, essay, references, and video montage of classes or a soccer game. College is hard enough to apply to and get in to for kids who come from a family and community with little resources. A recent report found that about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation's largest cities receive diplomas. Students in suburban and rural public high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts in urban public high schools.

A portion of kids who graduate from inner-city schools cannot read and write, which means it's a bit hard to write a college essay and fill out paperwork, let alone get access to a video camera and editing software.

In an economy where young adults are deciding if it is even viable to attend because of money, do we really need to be putting another barrier up?

According to this story, about 60 percent of the videos are from women, and two-thirds are from financial-aid applicants, “easing concern that the video option might help the already-advantaged affluent applicants.”

This does not ease my concerns. There are already hoops to jump through. Put one more up, and shuck off a few more potential college graduates because they do not have access to this technology.

The world evolves around technology, and in a perfect world, so would college applications. Unfortunately, funding and deep social problems are not evolving, but stalling. Until we have equal access to equal education, YouTube has no place in college admissions.

Two Iowa legislators want to remove protection to lesbians, gay and transgender students from the Safe Schools Law, in and effort to reverse the Iowa's Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage.


Rep. Jason Schultz says he's not doing this to hurt gay, lesbian and transgender students, he's just trying to forward his agenda to make same sex marriage illegal here in Iowa. Let me get this straight (no pun intended), you want to take out the words that make it possible for a student to sue a school if they are being bullied for being gay and the school does nothing about it? He does not want to hurt them. He only wants to hurt them after they get to be 18 and want the same rights as their straight counterparts.
"The Bully Bill or Safe School Act doesn't protect anyone anyway. Schools are already doing this, so to remove few words doesn't change the intent or effect of the law," says Rep. Jason Schultz. Who the heck is this guy? Aren't laws enacted to protect people legally? Has this guy read the Constitution?
He wants to take out the wording in the Safe Schools Act, and all Iowa legislation, so lawmakers can debate same sex marriage on the floor. How about this: we just take all the gays out and tie them around a big tree and burn them. Then they'd go away. Let's just give all the homophobes more initative to flog us without penalty or legal action.
One of the commenters says, “I don't care if you oppose gay marriage, this is disgusting and vile. Going after students just because they are gay?” Isn't going after real people just because they are gay a little disgusting and vile too? There is a disconnect between perceptions of gay students and gay adults. Equal rights are equal rights, whatever your age. And one day, those kids are going to grow up and want to get married. What do you tell them then? “I helped to not get you bullied when you were in highschool, but now that you're older, I'll bully you by telling you that you can't get married!”

Either you are for gay rights for all ages, or you are not. There is no picking and choosing here.

Education is too often for the afluent. $40,000 can be too much for a young person to think about as they see their own parents struggle. And then, even if you get loans, there is the repaying of them. I am just beginning to grasp that I will be making payments every month until I am 33 if I stay employed and do not have to defer payments. For someone that is already struggling financially, college can seem unrealistic, to the detriment of our soceity both in loosing someone for the new workforce and adding to the number of people relying on government help.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Early College High School Initiative, along with other programs, gives low-income kids a chance to go to college for their last two years of high school, knocking out $20,000 in tuition, room and board for two years of college.

There need to be more programs like this, especially funded by the government. During this pivotal time when the low-income Americans are going from working in factories to reintegrating into information/technology jobs, it's imperative that we count the kids coming out of high school as part of the shift. Kids that once dropped out to work in menial jobs now find that those jobs no longer exist.

If our government is smart, more initiations will be taken like this, however it seems unlikely in this economic climate where the stimulus money for schools has just run out and schools face issues of funding.

Programs like this prevent poverty and homelessness. When money is not put toward education budgets, it tells that it's not a priority, it's not important. Let's prevent some of societies problems instead of putting bandage after bandage on them.

An anti-abortion group targeting African-American women has begun putting up dozens of billboards around metro Atlanta, declaring black children to be “an endangered species.”

This is a method the pro-lifers call them, have started to use in recent years to call to as a sense of racial solidarity in black women.

The line pro-lifers use to attempt to dissaude women getting abortions is always “we can help you with adoption.” This kills me. There were 126,967 kids in foster homes in 2006, waiting to be adopted.  Washington, D.C., alone has 630 kids waiting to be adopted, 587 of  whom  are black. In 2006  the average wait for a  child in America  to be adopted  was  46.5 months. This does not even include children 16-years-old and older whose parental rights have been terminated  OR  those who have a goal of emancipation. 

It's always amazed me how pro-lifers equate adoption with abortion. A child put up for adoption will spend four years in foster care before they are adopted, and not always in the best conditions. The estimated 518,000 American children currently in foster care are among the most at-risk children in American society.[1] Research shows that adults who were formerly in foster care are more likely than the general population to succumb to poor life outcomes. Former foster children are more likely to become homeless, incarcerated, or dependent on state services.[2]

So the chances of being adopted are slim and if you don't get adopted and are raised in foster care, there is a great chance that you will be incarcerated, homeless or dpeneding on state services.

There should be billboards put up saying, “There is little chance your unborn child will be adopted. Your unborn child will spend four years in foster care and end up emotionally/mentally scarred. Your unborn child will end up homeless.”

Let's leave it up to the mother's to decide that one.

Allyson Kitchel is up in arms because the police caused $3,140 in damages to her house when police received a tip that a suspect lived at what has been Kitchel's home for two years. Police obtained a warrant and were in the process of breaking down the iron doors when Kitchel arrived home and yelled at them to stop. After going to the city and appealing to them to pay for damages, she recently learned that they are refusing to pay for the damages caused because the warrant was valid.

Seems like an atrocity, right? After watching Kitchel in her well-kept suit, nice home and clip that appeared to be something out of “House Hunters,” on her ABC7 interview, I was slightly suspicious of the media coverage this woman is causing. This woman clearly knows how to work the media machine. Turns out Kitchel is an attorney at a D.C.-based firm and has a nice little bio with a list of accomplishments. She obviously has access to resources, knows who to call, and what to say to get her money from the city.

I'm annoyed that this woman has privilege and is flaunting it for her own benefit. I suspect the city will eventually turn over the money. Reporting should be a public service, thus creating this dilemma: who are they serving giving air-time to this woman? I wonder what would have happened if this woman were not as affluent as she is. She probably would not known to go the press and wouldn't have gotten her money back. I hope she takes this lesson of injustice and uses it to stand up for others who are less equipped with resources to get their money back.

A black person walks into a restaurant and the wait staff argues with the host over who will take this table. It's not a bad joke, but something that happened far too many times during my time waiting tables.

Whether or not it's true, there is a perception within the restaurant industry that black people tip less. And it makes for a self-fulfilling prophecy: crappy service that leads to crappy tipping

In an investigation by TheGrio.com, studies found that black people left less money or had a blanket tip amount that served for every check total, no matter how big or small. The topic is one I criticized co-workers for speaking openly about, but it also happened at all seven sit-down restaurants I worked at over the years. I always felt uncomfortable thinking this way because there were times when I was tipped well by black patrons, and times I was not tipped well by other races. It always seemed that a way to ward off this type of thinking would be for restaurant owners to implement an automatic gratuity, no matter the party size. I never enjoyed relying on what I made that night, no matter how hard I worked, on the good will of patrons, whatever their race.

I strove to give good service, especially to black patrons, so that I could go back to my co-workers and show them. According to the researcher, black people do tip less, however, the problem could be partially alleviated by servers giving their full attention to every patron and not giving into a potential self-fulfilling prophecy where they give crappy service, get a crappy tip and the cycle continues.

Excuse me while I choke on my lunch. I could find humor in this if money was going to some charity, or if the fashion show was put on the homeless themselves, or even if she had homeless people advising her with her choices.

But I don't find humor in an old, white, rich fashion designer finding irony and press through a publicity stunt.

According to the Times online, some of the models carried bedrolls, sleeping bags and flaunted bags under their eyes.

For someone who works in an environment where D.C.'s homeless come and go throughout the day, actually carrying these items (and not for fashion), I take homelessness seriously. Sleeping on the street is serious. Begging for money is serious. Going from shelter to shelter is serious.

My understanding of runway fashion business (mostly acquired from The Devil Wears Prada and Vogue) is that it is supposed to set precedent for every-day fashions I buy at Marshall's and H&M. I'm hoping I don't see “homeless-inspired” fashions on my next venture to buy a sweater.

Westwood’s runway theme seems like it is more picking fun and drawing entertainment from the real-life trauma of homelessness than spreading awareness. Her attempt at a political statement failed when it drew upon her reality of homelessness, of never being homeless and seeing them as objects to be used for inspiration and not those living the reality of not having a home.

The New York Times announced yesterday that they will start charging patrons for online content on a metered system in 2011. The journalistic idealist in me hates this. The journalist that would like to make a living writing in me thinks it is not such a bad idea. When I graduated from undergrad a little over a year ago, I was very much still a journalistic idealist. I believed that journalism's purpose was to expose issues of great importance that would otherwise not be on public consciousness.

A report is supposed to broaden someones understanding of an issue or break open a social or political injustice. The vessel of this used to be print. Now, it's changing. Just like I studied in school the great path makers of film, newspaper and radio, journalism students of the future will study the journalists on the frontier of the Internet. The New York Times takes a stab at becoming one of these history-makers with it's decision.

Written-word journalism (what used to be called print) must vamp up the depth and content if it is to remain viable. After applying for journalism jobs for eight months while waiting on tables and getting advice from former journalists to pick another occupation, I am finally making a living with interviewing others and writing. The topics I choose to write on are ones that I don't see covered in depth in other places or at all. And with my writing, I hope to reach out to potential readers. I imagine that a great many of these readers probably could not afford to pay for my writing and I want them to be able to get the same level of knowledge as someone upwardly mobile.

At the same time, my ability to report is based upon my ability to pay rent. We've all got to make a living. Journalism should be a service to the public, not sensationalist or costly. But if choosing costly journalism over no journalism at all, I choose the former.

Sometimes, it sucks being a female-bodied. Arlington, VA Police are investigating five incidents where a man flashed women along the Washington and Old Dominion bike trail last week. They have recommended that women not run or walk alone and not use listening devices, to prevent such an incident.

This brings up a larger issue of safety for women in urban areas. When I first moved to Washington, D.C., my family would ask me, “But, do you go out alone at night?” Well, of course I do, but never with headphones in and always with my pepper spray in my pocket. Perhaps it's from my years of watching Oprah in middle and high school, but I am serious about my safety.

My roommate came home one night in high-alert mode after being verbally assaulted on her walk home from the Metro. At first, I was appalled and scared. Then, I started asking questions. She was on her cellphone when she got off Metro. A young man approached her and said something lude. She did not look at him and continued walking. He approached her again and said something else and she asked her friend on the cellphone to stay on the phone with her until she got home. Huh? It seemed a bit counter productive to stay on the cellphone and to continue to not be aware of what was going on.

A good way to deter assault from happening is to look the potential predator in the eye and address him/her. This is the main problem with using headphones or walking with a cellphone; if you don't know what's going on around you, how are you going to address it?

The worries of a female-bodied person are different from that of someone male-bodied, especially in an urban setting. I do not enjoy being alert when I go on runs in my neighborhood or not being able to run at night. I suspect others do not enjoy not being able to listen to their music as they run. But it's a necessary reality.

Yesterday the first inaugural bus tour of LA Gang Tours took on 50 passengers at $65 each and a waiver acknowledging they could be crime victims. According the the Associated Press, it is the first tour of it's kind outside of historical crime tours across the country.

The tour goes through several neighborhoods, which are to some people, no-mans land. This brings me to Washington D.C., where a large portion of the population lives in poverty, however, this is largely unknown by tourists.

It seems like a revolutionary idea, one that could benefit ex-gang members and potentially bring light to issues in areas that many would never go.

Living in Washington, D.C., I see bus tours almost everyday during my work week when I go downtown and I've been on one with relatives when they came into town. It took us to the monuments, Arlington Cometary, historical houses: sites that were at one time lively, but now serve mostly tourists. They are relics to what was and where we've come from. But these tours are most definitely limited. I am not sure if there are any tours that specifically focus on the 1960s race riots in D.C. after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. or impoverished neighborhoods not on a tourists radar.

Ignorance comes from a lack of exposure and this would definitely be a way to expose someone. However, there is also a fine line between education and exploitation. If a tour of this kind started in D.C., it would need to benefit the communities or be run by the people living there. But it's an idea worth mulling over. Perhaps the apathy toward these communities could be abated by simply opening a bus door.

James von Brunn, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter who fatally wounded officer Stephen T. Jones in June, died in prison yesterday.

This follows the announcement by The University of Maryland that Yiddish classes may not be offered after the 2010-2011 school year because of budget cutbacks.

Von Brunn shared a history of antisemitism and racism through his writing. When the shooting occurred, I was at work and was shocked that someone had actually taken measures to execute his ideology.

It was a reminder that ethnic and racial ideologies are still alive and well, especially for those who live in bubble-like progressive areas.

The works of von Brunn focused on conspiracy theories about Jews and black people in leaflets, in books and on his Web site.

Von Brunn probably would have applauded the demise of the oldest and strongest program of its kind in the region, making it even more pertinent to keep the program afloat.

The dissolve of a program that teaches an century-old language because of money is an indirect act of antisemitism. Programs do not live without money, a correlation with group apathy.

I hope the program is saved through some large single donation or a group effort, not because I understand a word of Yiddish, but because I want the von Brunns of the world to eventually die out, just like one did yesterday.

As Cord Jefferson's already noted here, according to the Census Bureau, some people wrote in “Negro” in the 2000 census. So for this year's census, when a person identifies as black, they check the box marked "black, African American or Negro."

“Negro,” like it said on the minstrel show greeting cards my 93-year-old white, southern grandma pulled out of her closet one afternoon to give to me to use. And not in a historical or ironic way.

Cord says, as a black man, he does not take offense to "Negro," and that it's not a bigoted term. But when I see it, or say it, it feels bigoted.

I think it matters who is doing the naming here. My grandmother used to use the other, now socially unacceptable n-word at my parents' dinner table until my mother told her to stop. Then she started using “colored,” one step ahead of “Negro” in the way white southerners identified black people at the time. I think of her racism when I hear the word.

But then there is another side, that of those who wrote in this word during the 2000 census, claiming it in perhaps the same way some claim “queer.” Or maybe it's just the way they think of themselves.

Perhaps I should get over my uncomfortable feeling with the word. Perhaps the act of reclaiming it from people like my grandmother would do more good than shying away. But I don't think I'll ever be able to use the word because of what it means for some.