Random Musings

Last night Carlos and I, along with Further-Round-The-Way-Gays David and Neal, traveled to Columbia to have dinner with a group of gay men and women to discuss ways in which we can spread the word, educate, and fundraise for the lawsuit brought by Tracie Goodwin and her wife Katie Bradacs against the state of South Carolina to have their marriage recognized, and legalized, in the state.

It was a fascinating group of people, some of whom I’ve met before and consider friends, and some I’ve only heard about, like Harriet Hancock, or as some call her in South Carolina, Mother of Pride.

Harriet has been an ally to the LGBT community in South Carolina since her son came out to her in 1982, Yes, 1982; she learned her son was gay and she founded the Columbia chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays [PFLAG].

• In 1985, Harriet co-founded Palmetto AIDS Life Support Services [PALSS], which has become the primary AIDS service organization of South Carolina’s Midlands.
• In 1989, after an LGBT community picnic, Harriet and small group of gay and lesbian South Carolinians organized the first South Carolina Gay and Lesbian Pride March. As the march moved from an annual event to an organization working on LGBT issues, the name changed to the Gay and Lesbian Pride Movement and is now called the SC Pride Movement.
• In 1991, Harriet worked with the Greater Columbia Community Relations Council ad hoc Committee on Civil Rights for Lesbians and Gays to make sexual orientation a part of Columbia’s nondiscrimination employment policy; the work of that committee was the inspiration for the Human Rights Ordinance passed by both the City of Columbia and Richland County councils in recent years.
• In 1997, Harriet received the Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national LGBT organization in the country.
• In 2011, Harriet received a personal invitation from President Barak Obama to attend a reception at the White House in Washington, DC in honor of LGBT Pride Month. She was one of only 12 national leaders selected to meet the President in a private session before his public speech.

Harriet remains active with the LGBT Center which bears her name — the Harriet Hancock LGBT Center — as Vice-President and she was elected to the Board of the SC Pride Movement for 2012.

I am thrilled to have met her and to be able to, in some small way, work with her and learn from her, and from all the other folks who’ve stepped up in our fight for equality in South Carolina. With the recent ruling by the Fourth Circuit Courts regarding Virginia, this fight may nearly be over.

Speaking of equality … hold your applause for that amazing segue … the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear six marriage equality cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee on August 6.

That could be the next big celebration in our march!

So, as if TV wasn’t stupid enough, now The Mama Grizzly Bore™, that failed vice-presidential candidate and rogue loudmouth for wingnuts, has launched her own channel!

Yes, for $9.99 a month, or $99 a year, you can listen to crazy rant and rave about all things wacknut like impeaching the president.

Good luck, enjoy, and I hope you don’t miss those IQ point falling by the wayside.

Speaking of impeachment … damn the segues and full steam ahead … when the GOP began sputtering, as they do, about impeaching the president, they hoped that America would say, “Hell yeah.”

Well, America did say that, only they said it to the Democrats by way of donating almost $8 million to the party.

So, keep prattling against Obama GOP, you’re his greatest fundraiser!

We’ve been watching The Strain on FX. It’s kind of a vampire-meets-virus-meets-alien story that is creepy and icky and gross, and engrossing.

It also stars the delicious the delicious Corey Stoll. That’s him, on the right, as he appears in The Strain, wearing a rug, and that’s him on the left in his bald glory.

He’s totes adorbs either.

Note to Lindsay Lohan: when someone asks you what your tattoo says, and you have to hoist your twenty-seven year old breast to look at it, perhaps it’s time for a lift, or at least, a bra.

Plus, you have the belly and flat ass of a sixty-year-old alcoholic woman.

Just saying.

So, this week in California, Governor Jerry Brown was in Mexico on a trade mission, so Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom would be governor; but Newsom was attending a Special Olympics event on the East Coast so the job fell to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. But he was in Chicago, so, following the line of succession, the job went, for a few brief hours at least, to Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins.

An openly gay woman.

Yes, California, for a speck of time, was governed by an openly gay woman! Atkins was the nation's second openly gay governor, following New Jersey Governor James McGreevey’s brief stint as an "out" governor before resigning in 2004.

In the stupid file, one of our clients at work—who is a raging racist and avid anti-Obama-ite—was ranting about the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, and then twisted it into an argument about those immigrant children, telling anyone who would listen, that the kids were bringing Ebola to “Amurrica.”

Feel my pain.

And, segueing again, this is an actual church sign in Harlem where apparently God is not love and people who are gay should die.

Lovely.