Ashley Judd revealed to the public before autopsy report did, Momma Judd, shot herself.

Ashley found her as well....

I also had no idea that there was treatment resitant depression, either.

I pray that Wynona, Ashley and the whole family, get therapy for all this, come together as a family, instead of bickering.

Urvashi Vaid, Pioneering L.G.B.T.Q. Activist, Is Dead at 63
 

Urvashi Vaid, Pioneering L.G.B.T.Q. Activist, Is Dead at 63

By Clay Risen
May 17, 2022

Over a four-decade career, she profoundly shaped a range of progressive issues, including AIDS advocacy, prison reform and gay rights.

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Urvashi Vaid in an undated photo. She placed herself at the center of a wide array of progressive issues, centered on but not limited to the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. Credit...Jurek Wajdowicz

Urvashi Vaid, a lawyer and activist who was a leading figure in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. equality for more than four decades, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 63.

Her sisters, Rachna Vaid and Jyotsna Vaid, said the cause was breast cancer.

From her days as a law student in Boston, Ms. Vaid was at the center of a wide array of progressive issues, centered on but not limited to the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement. Long before the word “intersectionality” entered common parlance, she was practicing it, insisting that freedom for gay men and lesbians required fighting for gender, racial and economic equality as well.

“A purely single-issue organizing approach prevents us from making the connections that would advance our goals and would advance the project of building a progressive movement,” she told the magazine The Progressive in 1996.

At the height of the AIDS crisis, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, she led the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force). That platform made her one of the most vocal and visible figures in the push for AIDS funding and against federally enshrined anti-L.G.B.T.Q. discrimination.

She was the rare activist who was as comfortable within the confines of pragmatic electoral politics as she was marching in the streets. She was ejected in 1990 from a speech on gay rights by President George Bush for holding a sign that read, “Talk Is Cheap, AIDS Funding Is Not.” But two years later she broke with other progressive activists to support Bill Clinton for president.

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Ms. Vaid argued that the movement for L.G.B.T.Q. rights had erred by focusing on access to the mainstream, rather than on gaining power to change it. Credit...Courtesy of the National LGBTQ Task Force

“She wasn’t a zealot,” the playwright Tony Kushner, a friend of Ms. Vaid, said in a phone interview. “She understood the perfect could not be the enemy of the good, and that progress was made in steps.”

But her fondness for President Clinton was short-lived. After he backtracked on his promise to end the military’s ban on openly gay service members and, later, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which codified marriage as being between a man and a woman, she considered not voting for his re-election.

She ended up backing him, reluctantly, but she turned her disillusionment into a teachable moment for progressives. She left the task force in 1992 to write a book, “Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation” (1995).

Ms. Vaid argued, in that book and elsewhere, that the movement had erred by focusing on access to the mainstream, rather than on gaining power to change it. It wasn’t enough to be in the room with Mr. Clinton, she said; the movement had to be able to change his mind.

She also drew a distinction between L.G.B.T.Q. rights and L.G.B.T.Q. liberation. Pushing the mainstream to accept gay men and lesbians, she said, was a worthy first step, but one that risked forcing people to tailor their own identities to fit into straight society.

Liberation, on the other hand, meant altering the mainstream to accommodate a range of gender identities — a seemingly extreme position at the time, but one that accurately foreshadowed the rapid and broad changes now underway around established gender norms.

“She put the gay rights movement in a progressive context that no one else can lay claim to,” Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC anchor and a close friend of Ms. Vaid’s, said in a phone interview. “She really had a singular impact as an individual. She changed the AIDS movement, gay rights and the civil rights movement in ways directly attributable to her.”

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Ms. Vaid was ejected for protesting at a 1990 speech on gay rights by President George Bush. Credit...National LGBTQ Task Force

Urvashi Vaid (pronounced UR-va-shee VAD) was born on Oct. 8, 1958, in New Delhi, India. When she was still a child, her father, the writer Krishna Baldev Vaid, received an appointment to teach at the State University of New York at Potsdam, and Urvashi soon followed with her sisters and her mother, Champa (Bali) Vaid, a poet and painter.

All three Vaid sisters attended Vassar College, from which Urvashi graduated in 1979 with a degree in political science and English literature.

Along with her sisters, Ms. Vaid, who lived in Manhattan and died at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is survived by her partner, the comedian Kate Clinton. She is the aunt to Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming performing artist.

Though Ms. Vaid said her earliest memories of political activism were of antiwar protests in the late 1960s, it was in college that she found her voice. She was especially drawn to liberation movements in the developing world, and she joined other students in pushing Vassar to divest from South Africa.

“My understanding of liberation did not come from the feminist and gay activists with whom I worked, but rather from movements working to end colonial occupation and white supremacy,” she wrote on the website OpenDemocracy in 2014. “The African National Congress, who defined themselves as ‘a national liberation movement,’ were my heroes.”

She attended law school at Northeastern University, continuing her activism on campus and in Boston. She and an alliance of gay and lesbian students persuaded the university to add sexual identity to its nondiscrimination policy, and she worked off campus at Gay Community News, a weekly newspaper.

The paper served as a crucible for Ms. Vaid’s political worldview: Staunchly progressive, it took on a wide swath of issues, including prisoner rights, feminism, antiracism and economic inequality. And it was among the first news outlets to publicize the growing prevalence of H.I.V. in the gay community, and to highlight the homophobia that was swelling around it.

“She was a revelation to me,” said Sue Hyde, whom Ms. Vaid hired as an editor at Gay City News and who, with Ms. Vaid, founded the L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s annual Creating Change conference. “She was a revelation the way she thought, the way she organized, the way she envisioned a movement that really had never existed.”

After graduating from law school in 1983, Ms. Vaid moved to Washington to work as a staff lawyer for the National Prison Project, an initiative by the American Civil Liberties Union that she helped expand to include advocacy for incarcerated people with H.I.V. and AIDS.

She became a spokeswoman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1987 and its director in 1989.

She later worked at the Ford Foundation; served as executive director of the charitable Arcus Foundation; and led a research center at Columbia Law School before establishing her own nonprofit consulting firm. She also founded LPAC, a political action committee that supports political candidates who, in its words, “share our commitment to L.G.B.T.Q. and women’s equality, and social justice.”

And she continued to organize, whether it was a national political campaign or a weekend march down Commercial Street in Provincetown, Mass., where she lived part time with Ms. Clinton.

“If I ever had a question, I’d call Urvashi and she could explain it,” Billie Jean King, the tennis player and activist, said in a phone interview. “She knew every policy that was going on, on every issue.”

In one of her last public appearances, to accept the Susan J. Hyde Award for “longevity in the movement” at the Creating Change conference in March, Ms. Vaid warned that the decades of progress she had experienced were now under threat.

“We are facing an existential threat to our existence,” she said. “Our response must be strong, militant and much more aggressive than it has been thus far.”

Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The New York Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of "Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/u...ead-at-63.html

Elana Dykewomon, Author Who Explored Lesbian Lives, Dies at 72
 

In a five-decade career that began with the coming-of-age novel “Riverfinger Women,” she was outspoken in her fiction, her poetry and her life.

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The author Elana Dykewomon at her home in Oakland, Calif., this year. She wrote lesbian-themed novels, poems and short stories and had been the editor of a lesbian literary journal.Credit...Jane Tyska/East Bay Times via Getty Images

Elana Dykewomon, a gregarious, cerebral author, poet and activist who spent decades exploring her identity as both a lesbian and a Jew while working to foster communities of “chosen families” among her fellow lesbians at a far remove from the patriarchy, died on Aug. 7 at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 72.

The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, her brother Daniel Nachman said.

Ms. Dykewomon never achieved widespread commercial success, but her three novels found an ardent following among lesbian readers. She also published five collections of poetry and short stories and contributed to many lesbian-themed publications.

For seven years, starting in 1987, she was the editor of Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian literary journal. As an activist, she was an organizer of the San Francisco Dyke March.

Ms. Dykewomon was in hospice at her home with friends, preparing to watch a live-streamed performance of her first play, “How to Let Your Lover Die,” when she died, 20 minutes before the performance began. The play is a rumination on love and loss that she wrote following the death in 2016 of Susan Levinkind, her wife and her partner of many decades, from Lewy body dementia.

The play capped a five-decade career that started in 1974 with Ms. Dykewomon’s “Riverfinger Women,” a ribald lesbian coming-of-age novel that in 1999 was named to an Associated Press list of 100 Greatest Gay Novels. The book, Ms. Dykewomon said in a 2004 interview, was initially “written for a straight publishing house that was putting out a new line of pornography for bored housewives” but was rejected.

When ultimately published, “Riverfinger Women” “was the first book that was advertised in The New York Times that was identified as a lesbian book,” Ms. Dykewomon added. “It was important at the time to publish things for lesbians, so lesbians would know that lesbians were out there who loved them and cared about them.”

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“Every lesbian of a certain age has a copy of ‘Riverfinger Women’ on her bookshelf,” one scholar said of Ms. Dykewomon’s first novel, written when she was still using her birth name.

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Ms. Dykewomon’s second novel won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

The book found a loyal and enthusiastic audience: “Every lesbian of a certain age has a copy of ‘Riverfinger Women’ on her bookshelf,” Jennifer Brier, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago and Ms. Dykewomon’s literary executor, said in an interview.

In the early 1980s, the author — who until then had been known by her birth name, Elana Nachman — made perhaps her most pointed statement of identity yet: She adopted Dykewoman, and later Dykewomon, as a pen name, jettisoning the “man” in both her old and new names. “I chose ‘dyke’ for the power and ‘womon’ for the alliance,” she wrote in an essay published in a 2017 anthology, “Dispatches From Lesbian America.”

(“I figured if I called myself Dykewomon,” she joked in an interview with J: The Jewish News of Northern California this year, “I would never get reviewed in The New York Times. Which has been true.”)

Her 1997 novel, “Beyond the Pale,” about Russian Jewish lesbian immigrants who work in New York’s notorious Triangle shirtwaist factory and survive its deadly 1911 fire to become trade unionists, won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In 2009, she published “Risk,” a novel about a struggling middle-age lesbian who turns to gambling as an escape.

Elana Michelle Nachman was born in Manhattan on Oct. 11, 1949, the oldest of three children of Harvey and Rachel (Weisberger) Nachman. Her father was a plaintiffs’ lawyer who moved the family to Puerto Rico in 1958 to open a practice. Her mother was a researcher for Life magazine and later a librarian in Puerto Rico.

It was a fiercely Zionist household. Her father, who had been a navigator in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, volunteered as a pilot in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, her brother, Mr. Nachman, said, and her mother helped smuggle arms to Israel.

Ms. Dykewomon maintained a strong sense of Jewish identity, even if she was not religious as an adult. Regarding her name change, she once said, “If I had to do it all over again, I might have chosen Dykestein or Dykeberg,” according to an obituary in The Times of Israel.

Even before she was a teenager, Elana “knew she was somehow ‘different,’ but was told by doctors she couldn’t possibly be homosexual,” her brother said in an interview. Living in Puerto Rico from the age of 8, he added, she also felt “sharply alienated from the Latin macho culture and the sexual role-playing by women and men there.”

At 11, she attempted suicide, an experience she explored in her 2017 essay. She spent a year recuperating in the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and later found a degree of peace and acceptance at the Windsor Mountain School, a progressive boarding school in Lenox, Mass., Mr. Nachman said.

After studying at Reed College in Portland, Ore., she received a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the California Institute of the Arts, then a master of fine arts degree from San Francisco State University, where she later taught composition and creative writing for nearly two decades.

In addition to her brother Daniel, she is survived by another brother, David, and several nieces and nephews.

The afternoon Ms. Dykewomon died, friends, neighbors and family members viewed her play on Zoom before calling the authorities. When mortuary workers came for her body, the others filed out silently behind them, Rhea Shapiro, a longtime friend who was present, recalled. As the body was placed in the van, those assembled broke into spontaneous applause.

“Mourning is the most difficult form of celebration,” Ms. Dykewomon wrote after Ms. Levinkind’s death. “But I am filled with the beauty of what I need to mourn.”

By Alex Williams, New York Times
Published Aug. 14, 2022, Updated Aug. 17, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/14/b...omon-dead.html

The Queen Lived Long
 

RIP
 

My heart is so sick and sad over the loss of our wonderful Queen Elizabeth.

RIP Your Majesty . My prayers have gone up for days and now may you pass to the other side and know you lived for your people who love you and mourn all over the world at your loss. Your portrait will hang in my home wherever I am as it always has. We miss you already.

"Too many Gen Xers passing away too young."

Isn't that the truth.

Sacheen Littlefeather, Actress and Activist , RIP
 

Actress and Activist Sacheen Littlefeather Dies at 75.

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Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Sacheen Littlefeather, the actress and Native American activist who delivered Marlon Brando’s Academy Award rejection speech, has died. She was 75.

The news comes just two weeks after the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave a celebration in her honor.

Earlier this year, the Academy offered a formal apology for how it treated Littlefeather after the Oscars.

Littlefeather refused to accept Brando’s award for The Godfather, “And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry,” she said through the crowd’s boos, “and on television in movie reruns and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”

Littlefeather’s speech did return national attention to the standoff at Wounded Knee, but it also resulted in death threats and Littlefeather becoming persona non grata in Hollywood. “I was blacklisted, or you could say ‘redlisted,’” Littlefeather said in a documentary about her life. “Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and others didn’t want me on their shows. […]

The doors were closed tight, never to reopen.” Littlefeather went on to work in health activism, working in the Bay Area treating AIDS patients and teaching traditional Native American medicine.

https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/sach...on-brando.html

RIP Loretta Lynn

Angela Lansbury
 

I loved Murder, She Wrote!

Angela Lansbury, the scene-stealing British actor who kicked up her heels in the Broadway musicals “Mame” and “Gypsy” and solved endless murders as crime novelist Jessica Fletcher in the long-running TV series “Murder, She Wrote,” has died. She was 96.

Lansbury died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, according to a statement from her three children. She died five days shy of her 97th birthday.

Lansbury won five Tony Awards for her Broadway performances and a lifetime achievement award. She earned Academy Award nominations as supporting actress for two of her first three films, “Gaslight” (1945) and “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1946), and was nominated again in 1962 for “The Manchurian Candidate” and her deadly portrayal of a Communist agent and the title character’s mother.

Her mature demeanor prompted producers to cast her much older than her actual age. In 1948, when she was 23, her hair was streaked with gray so she could play a fortyish newspaper publisher with a yen for Spencer Tracy in “State of the Union.”

Her stardom came in middle age when she became the hit of the New York theater, winning Tony Awards for “Mame” (1966), “Dear World” (1969), “Gypsy” (1975) and “Sweeney Todd” (1979).

She was back on Broadway and got another Tony nomination in 2007 in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce,” playing a scrappy, brash former tennis star, reflecting with another ex-star as she watches a modern-day match from the stands. In 2009 she collected her fifth Tony, for best featured actress in a revival of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and in 2015 won an Olivier Award in the role.

Broadway royalty paid their respects. Audra McDonald tweeted: “She was an icon, a legend, a gem, and about the nicest lady you’d ever want to meet.” Leslie Uggams on Twitter wrote: “Dame Angela was so sweet to me when I made my Broadway debut. She was a key person in welcoming me to the community. She truly lived, lived, lived!”

But Lansbury’s widest fame began in 1984 when she launched “Murder, She Wrote” on CBS. Based loosely on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories, the series centered on Jessica Fletcher, a middle-aged widow and former substitute school teacher living in the seaside village of Cabot Cove, Maine. She had achieved notice as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth.

The actor found the first series season exhausting.

“I was shocked when I learned that had to work 12-15 hours a day, relentlessly, day in, day out,” she recalled. “I had to lay down the law at one point and say `Look, I can’t do these shows in seven days; it will have to be eight days.‘”

CBS and the production company, Universal Studio, agreed, especially since “Murder, She Wrote” had become a Sunday night hit. Despite the long days — she left her home at Brentwood in West Los Angeles at 6 a.m. and returned after dark — and reams of dialogue to memorize, Lansbury maintained a steady pace. She was pleased that Jessica Fletcher served as an inspiration for older women.

“Women in motion pictures have always had a difficult time being role models for other women,” she observed. “They’ve always been considered glamorous in their jobs.”

In the series’ first season, Jessica wore clothes that were almost frumpy. Then she acquired smartness, Lansbury reasoning that, as a successful woman, Jessica should dress the part.

“Murder, She Wrote” stayed high in the ratings through its 11th year. Then CBS, seeking a younger audience for Sunday night, shifted the series to a less favorable midweek slot. Lansbury protested vigorously to no avail. As expected, the ratings plummeted and the show was canceled. For consolation, CBS contracted for two-hour movies of “Murder, She Wrote” and other specials starring Lansbury.

“Murder, She Wrote” and other television work brought her 18 Emmy nominations but she never won one. She holds the record for the most Golden Globe nominations and wins for best actress in a television drama series and the most Emmy nominations for lead actress in a drama series.

In a 2008 Associated Press interview, Lansbury said she still welcomed the right script but did not want to play “old, decrepit women,” she said. “I want women my age to be represented the way they are, which is vital, productive members of society.”

“I’m astonished at the amount of stuff I managed to pack into the years that I have been in the business. And I’m still here!”

She was given the name Angela Brigid Lansbury when she was born in London on Oct. 16, 1925. Her family was distinguished: a grandfather who was the fiery head of the Labour Party; her father the owner of a veneer factory; her mother a successful actor, Moyna MacGill.

“I was terribly shy, absolutely incapable of coming out of my shell,” Lansbury remembered of her youth. “It took me years to get over that.”

The Depression forced her father’s factory into bankruptcy, and for a few years the family lived on money her mother had saved from her theater career. Angela suffered a shattering blow when her beloved father died in 1935. The tragedy forced her to become self-reliant — “almost a surrogate husband to my mother.”

When England was threatened with German bombings in 1940, Moyna Lansbury struggled through red tape and won passage to America for her family. With the help of two sponsoring families, they settled in New York and lived on $150 a month. To add to their income, Angela at 16 landed a nightclub job in Montreal doing impersonations and songs.

“The only thing I ever had confidence in is my ability to perform,” she said. “That has been the grace note in my sonata of life, the thing that has absolutely seen me through thick and thin.”

Moyna moved the family to Hollywood, hoping to find acting work. Failing that, she and Angela wrapped packages and sold clothing at a department store. An actor friend suggested Angela would be ideal for the role of Sybil Vane in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which was being prepared at MGM. She tested, and studio boss Louis B. Mayer ordered: “Sign that girl!”

She was just 19 when her first film, “Gaslight,” earned her an Oscar nomination, but MGM didn’t know what to do with the new contract player. She appeared as Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in “National Velvet,” Judy Garland’s nemesis in “The Harvey Girls,” Walter Pidgeon’s spiteful wife in “If Winter Comes,” Queen Anne in “The Three Musketeers.”

Tired of playing roles twice her own age, she left MGM to freelance but the results were much the same: the mother of Warren Beatty in “All Fall Down,” of Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii,” of Carroll Baker in “Harlow,” and of Laurence Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate,” in which she unforgettably manipulates her son and helps set off a killing spree.

In the mid-1940s, Lansbury had a disastrous nine-month marriage to Richard Cromwell, a soulful young star of the 1930s. In 1949, she married Peter Shaw, a Briton who had been under an acting contract to MGM, then became a studio executive and agent. He assumed the role of Lansbury’s manager. They had two children, Peter and Deirdre; he had a son David by a previous marriage.

The 1950s were a troubled time for the Shaws. Angela’s career slowed down; her mother died after a battle with cancer; Peter underwent a hip operation; the children were on drugs; the family house in Malibu burned to the ground.

Lansbury later said of the fire: “It’s like cutting off a branch, a big, luscious branch of your life and sealing it off with a sealer so it doesn’t bleed, That’s what you do. That’s how the human mind deals with those things. You have to pick up the pieces and go on.”

Weary of 20 years of typecasting, Lansbury tried her luck on Broadway. Her first two shows — “Anyone Can Whistle” and “Hotel Paradiso” (with Bert Lahr) — flopped.

Then came “Mame.” Rosalind Russell declined to repeat her classic role as Patrick Dennis’s dizzy aunt in a musical version. So did Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. Others considered: Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Beatrice Lillie, Judy Garland. Composer Jerry Herman chose Lansbury.

The opening on May 24, 1966, was a sensation. One critic wondered that “the movies’ worn, plump old harridan with a snakepit for a mouth” could turn out to be “the liveliest dame to kick up her heels since Carol Channing in ‘Hello, Dolly.‘”

After her “Sweeney Todd” triumph, Lansbury returned to Hollywood to try television. She was offered a sitcom with Charles Durning or “Murder, She Wrote.” The producers had wanted Jean Stapleton, who declined. Lansbury accepted.

During the series’ long run, she managed to star in TV movies, to be host of Emmy and Tony shows and even to provide the voice for a Disney animated feature. She played Mrs. Potts in “Beauty and the Beast” and sang the title song. “This was really a breakthrough for me,” she said of her young following. “It acquainted me with a generation that I possibly couldn’t have contacted.”

In 2000, Lansbury withdrew from a planned Broadway musical, “The Visit,” because she needed to help her husband recover from heart surgery. “The kind of commitment required of an artist carrying a multimillion-dollar production has to be 100%,” she said in a letter to the producers.

Her husband died in 2003.

She was back on Broadway in 2012 in a revival of “The Best Man,” sharing a stage with James Earl Jones, John Larroquette, Candice Bergen, Eric McCormack, Michael McKean and Kerry Butler. She also recently co-starred in Emma Thompson’s “Nanny McPhee” and with Jim Carrey in “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.”

At the 2022 Tony Awards, Len Cariou — her “Sweeney Todd” co-star — accepted the lifetime Tony given to Lansbury. “There is no one with whom I’d rather run a cutthroat business with,” Cariou said.

In 1990, Lansbury philosophized: “I have sometimes drawn back from my career. To what? Home. Home is the counterweight to the work.”

In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, plus five great grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury.

RIP Bill Dance
RIP Vince Dooley

Rest In Peace, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac :(
 

Stephen "tWitch" Boss
 

I am stunned. Absolutely stunned. Not only that he passed so young but that it was via suicide. I never felt that sadness in him. I never met the man, but I love dance and I have watched him mature and improve through the years. He is part of many fond memories of mine. My condolences to his family...wife...children.

Stephen ‘tWitch’ Boss, 'Ellen DeGeneres Show' DJ, dead at 40

Stephen "tWitch" Boss — best known for being the DJ on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, a judge and contestant on So You Think You Can Dance and for his fun Instagram dance videos with wife Allison Holker Boss — has died by suicide at age 40.

"It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to share my husband Stephen has left us," Holker Boss, 34, said in a statement obtained by Yahoo Entertainment. "Stephen lit up every room he stepped into. He valued family, friends and community above all else and leading with love and light was everything to him. He was the backbone of our family, the best husband and father, and an inspiration to his fans."

It continued, "To say he left a legacy would be an understatement, and his positive impact will continue to be felt," she continued. "I am certain there won't be a day that goes by that we won't honor his memory. We ask for privacy during this difficult time for myself and especially for our three children."

Holker Boss concluded her statement with a message to her husband, saying, "Stephen, we love you, we miss you, and I will always save the last dance for you."

TMZ was first to report the news on Wednesday morning. The outlet said Holker Boss went to an unspecified LAPD station to report that Boss had left home without his car, which had her worried. Shortly after, police were called to a hotel near the couple's house where he was found deceased. The L.A. County Coroner later confirmed Boss died by suicide at a hotel. The case is closed.

DeGeneres, who brought on Boss as the talk show's resident DJ in 2014, a job he had for the remainder of the show's run, posted a tribute on social media. The "heartbroken" DeGeneres called him "pure love and light" and said she "loved him with all my heart."

Boss, who hailed from Montgomery, Ala., studied dance performance at Southern Union State Community College in his home state as well as Chapman University in California. The hip-hop dancer and choreographer first found stardom competing on So You Think You Can Dance's fourth season in 2008, being named the runner-up. One of his dances, with contestant Katee Shean and choreographed by Mia Michaels, was nominated for an Emmy for Choreography in 2009. He returned to the show for further performances and was one of the SYTYCD All-Stars in several seasons. Earlier this year, Boss joined the judging panel for Season 17.

In 2014, he was first featured as a guest DJ on DeGeneres's talk show. She introduced him by calling him her "favorite dancer." It soon became a permanent role with Boss staying on the show until it ended in May.

In 2020, he was promoted to co-executive producer of the Ellen DeGeneres Show, helping helm the ship amid the show's workplace toxicity scandal. Boss, who backed DeGeneres during the turmoil, also served as DeGeneres's co-star on the spin-off show Ellen’s Game of Games.

Boss appeared in 2015's Magic Mike XXL with Channing Tatum, playing dancer Malik. He was also an honorary judge on Jennifer Lopez's World of Dance.

He met his future wife through SYTYCD, as Holker Boss is also a dancer. She competed during Season 2 of the show and they were both later All-Stars. Talking about how they got together, she revealed that she asked for his number after they attended the 2010 Step Up 3D premiere together with a group, but ended up dancing the night away together. He said at the wrap party for SYTYCD that year, she pulled him onto the dance floor and they "danced the entire night, and we've been together ever since."

In 2013, they were married at Villa San-Juliette Winery in Paso Robles, Calif., owned by SYTYCD co-creator Nigel Lythgoe, and they welcomed a son, Maddox, in 2016 followed by daughter, Zaia, in 2019. Boss also adopted his wife's now 14-year-old daughter, Weslie, from a past relationship. In November, they appeared on the Jennifer Hudson Show and said they were considering expanding their family.

Holker Boss and Boss co-hosted Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings on Disney+ from 2018 to 2020.

The couple — and entire family, in fact — has been known for their fun, uplifting dance videos shared to social media. The last one, a holiday dance featuring Boss and Holker Boss in front of a tree, was posted two days ago.

The couple also recently celebrated their ninth wedding anniversary. On Dec. 10, Boss shared a black and white image of them dancing at their wedding, writing, "Happy anniversary my love." She shared a video with different memories from that day, writing on Instagram that marrying Boss has "been one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life!! I feel so blessed and loved!! I love you baby and I will never take you or OUR love for granted! I LOVE YOU."

They last appeared together at a public event on Dec. 5. They attended the Critics Choice Association's 5th Annual Celebration of Black Cinema & Television at Fairmont Century Plaza and posed for a series of portraits together.

Rest In Peace Barbara Walters
 

Barbara Walters was a trailblazer in journalism and for women. I will miss her eye-opening and deep, candid interviews.

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Raquel Welch
 

Hoist those skirts a little higher!!!!
 

Well, I’m another day late again, and I’m, once again, sad to have to report another loss from the music world. We lost Gordon Lightfoot yesterday. He had numerous hits in the 70’s and early 80’s, most notably, “If You Could Read My Mind”, “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”, and “Sundown”. Gord was 84 years old and considered by many to be one of the very best of the singer-songwriter generation….a real icon!!!

Rest in peace, Gord, and thank you for all of the great music you gave us. :heartbeat:

~Theo~ :bouquet:

Early Morning Rain (GL)
 

Gordon Lightfoot was simply amazing and definitely provided culturally significant work as an artist.

Tina Turner (Rest In Peace)
 

What's Love Got To Do With It? (1983)



:kissy:



Will miss her greatly.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, Celebrated Poet of Lesbian Life, Dies at 76
 

Minnie Bruce Pratt, Celebrated Poet of Lesbian Life, Dies at 76

Her collection “Crime Against Nature,” which recounts her losing custody of her children after she came out, made her a literary star — and a target of conservatives.

https://i.postimg.cc/cLQJmMQK/IMG-0246.webp
Minnie Bruce Pratt in 2008. No one was more shocked than she — a woman married almost 10 years and with two small sons — at the turn her life was taking when she came out as a lesbian. Credit...Rachel Fus

By Penelope Green
July 13, 2023

Minnie Bruce Pratt, a feminist poet and essayist whose collection “Crime Against Nature,” which mapped her despair, anger and resilience after losing custody of her children when she came out as a lesbian, earned one of poetry’s highest honors and made her a target of hard-right conservatives, died on July 2 near her home in Syracuse, N.Y. She was 76.

Her death, at a hospice facility for L.G.B.T.Q. people, was caused by glioblastoma, her son Benjamin Weaver said.

It was 1975 when Ms. Pratt walked into her first gay bar, the Other Side, in Fayetteville, N.C. Same-sex relationships were still considered a crime in that state — “a crime against nature,” as the statute was described — so patrons parked around the corner in hopes that their license plates wouldn’t be photographed by the police. They signed into the place under fake names, as it was run as a private club. (Ms. Pratt often used Susan B. Anthony as hers.)

No one was more shocked than she — a woman married almost 10 years and with two small sons — at the turn her life was taking, as she wrote in her memoir, “S/He” (1995). Like many women of her generation, Ms. Pratt was fired up by the consciousness-raising groups she joined. She campaigned for gender parity in university teaching positions where she was a doctoral student (learning to push back when male colleagues asked her to type their papers and groped her at academic conferences) and discovered that she loved women.

https://i.postimg.cc/nV4ZNcX5/IMG-0247.webp
After their father took custody, Ransom (rear) and Benjamin Weaver were able to see their mother during school breaks. When she self-published her first collection of poetry, they helped her put copies of the books together.Credit...JEB (Joan E. Biren)

“You don’t have a dog’s chance in court,” her lawyer warned her when she and her husband, a poet and an academic like herself, were divorcing. He took full custody of their sons and moved out of state. “How could that happen to someone with a Ph.D.?” a fellow teacher asked years later.

“Crime Against Nature” had been more than a decade in the making when it was published in 1990, making Ms. Pratt a literary star. The Academy of American Poets awarded her the Lamont Poetry Prize, one of the organization’s highest honors. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the poet Carol Muske declared the book a “publishing event” — “startling in the beauty of its unadorned voice,” with each poem “a verbal emergency.”

One poem in the volume, “No Place,” begins with these lines:

One night before I left I sat halfway

down,

halfway up the stairs, as he reeled at the

bottom,

shouting Choose, choose. Man or woman,

her or him,

me or the children. There was no place

to be

simultaneous, or between. Above, the

boys slept

with nightlights as tiny consolations in

the dark,

like the flowers of starry campion, edge of

the water.

Her poetry and activism came out of the Women in Print movement, in which feminist and lesbian poets began hand-printing and binding their work, often in chapbooks: short volumes that resemble zines. It was a vibrant community that gathered at lesbian and feminist bookstores and meeting places, like the basements of Unitarian churches.

Ms. Pratt was constantly on the road, touring the South, giving readings and visiting her children as their father permitted as part of an evolving arrangement that allowed them to be with her during summer vacations and other school breaks.

The movement was an extraordinary time, said Julie Enszer, the editor and publisher of Sinister Wisdom, a nearly half-century-old lesbian literary journal. By 1985, she said, there were about 110 feminist bookstores in the country. Ms. Pratt joined Feminary, a feminist journal and collective, and with a colleague who was her girlfriend she founded the Night Heron Press.

There, she published her first book of poetry, “The Sound of One Fork,” in 1981 — a collection of sensuous pieces that evoke her childhood in Alabama. Her sons, then teenagers on their summer break, helped her put copies of the book together, as she wrote in an essay for the Poetry Foundation. Making them, she said, was her favorite memory.

https://i.postimg.cc/qRYtYBgg/IMG-0248.webp
Ms. Pratt wrote eloquently of the “in-between” space that she and her spouse, the author Leslie Feinberg, left, inhabited as a butch and femme couple. Credit...Robert Giard Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Minnie Bruce Pratt was born on Sept. 12, 1946, in Selma, Ala. Her father, William L. Pratt Jr., worked in the lumber industry. Virginia Earl (Brown) Pratt, her mother, was a social worker and a teacher who once told her that she was disgusted by her daughter’s lesbianism but who later became an ally.

Minnie Bruce was an English major at the University of Alabama when she married Marvin Weaver in 1966. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1968 and was also a Fulbright scholar. When her husband took the children after their divorce, she was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill working on her Ph.D. in English, which she earned in 1979.

In addition to her son Benjamin, she is survived by her other son, Ransom, and five grandchildren.

Ms. Pratt was the recipient of many awards and grants. A 1990 fellowship given by the National Endowment for the Arts to her and two other lesbian poets — the Native American writer Chrystos and Audre Lorde — drew criticism from Jesse Helms, the ultraconservative Republican senator from North Carolina, who campaigned to have their grants rescinded. He said that because the three were lesbian writers, their work was obscene and not suitable for federal funding. The N.E.A. disagreed.

In 1991, the three women won another grant, from the Fund for Free Expression, for being “targets of right-wing forces.”

Until her retirement in 2015, Ms. Pratt was a professor in the writing program and the gender studies department at Syracuse University, where she helped develop its L.G.B.T. studies program. She was the author of eight books of poetry, and her work has been collected in many journals. Her most recent book, “Magnified” (2021), is a collection of love poems to her spouse, the queer author and activist Leslie Feinberg, who died of complications of Lyme disease in 2014 at 65.

Like Feinberg — whose 1993 novel, “Stone Butch Blues,” was lauded for its evocation of gender complexity and considered a touchstone of queer literature — Ms. Pratt wrote eloquently about the “in-between” space, as she called it, that she and Feinberg (who mostly shunned gender honorifics) inhabited as a butch and femme couple.

In “S/he,” which is both an erotic memoir and an investigation into the myriad, shifting expressions of gender, Ms. Pratt writes of a Thanksgiving dinner the couple attended at her son Benjamin and his girlfriend’s house while they were in graduate school. Ms. Pratt was intrigued when no one claimed the seat at the head of the table or stepped up to carve the turkey. Her son clearly hung back. Ms. Pratt ducked out to the bathroom, and when she returned, her spouse was seated next to the empty chair at the head, with the turkey platter in front of them and a carving knife in one hand.

“I’ve never done this before in my life,” Feinberg said, slicing. Mr. Weaver said approvingly, “It took a lot of courage to grasp that knife.” And Ms. Pratt took her place at the head of the table.

Penelope Green is a reporter on the New York Times Obituaries desk and a feature writer. She has been a reporter for the Home section, editor of Styles of The Times, an early iteration of Style, and a story editor at the Sunday magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/b...ion=Obituaries

RIP Tony Bennett <3<3<3
 

1964 on the Ed Sullivan show singing "I left heart in San Francisco"

I just loved his song, Margaritaville.

When I think of Jimmy Buffet, I think of Ronnie Milsap (it was almost like a song).

https://youtu.be/KbeQa2hmznk?si=1gXrokk0Y0U5W6Kg

Rest in peace, Jimmy Buffet.

Rest in Peace, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Cal). :candle::candle::candle:

Dianne Feinstein always had LGBTQ+ rights at the heart of her politics. We have lost a fierce advocate.

Dianne Feinstein's life changed the day Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated — the "darkest day" of her life
By Caitlin O'Kane
September 29, 2023 / 12:34 PM / CBS News

In 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California, and the city's Mayor George Moscone were assassinated. The person who broke the news to the world: Dianne Feinstein, then president of the city's Board of Supervisors.
"Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed," Feinstein told a gaggle of reporters, who expressed shock at the news. "The suspect is Supervisor Dan White."

Feinstein, who died at age 90 on Friday, went on to become California's first woman U.S. senator. But directly after the assassination, she assumed the role of mayor of San Francisco.

In 2008, the 30th anniversary of the assassination, Feinstein spoke to SF Gate about discovering Milk's dead body in city hall after their colleague, White, killed him. "I went down the hall. I opened the wrong door. I opened (Milk's) door. I found Harvey on his stomach. I tried to get a pulse and put my finger through a bullet hole. He was clearly dead," she told the local newspaper.

Feinstein said she was on a three-week vacation before the murder, but she spoke to White on the phone during that time. He was upset that the mayor wasn't going to reappoint him and felt that Milk did not defend him, according to Feinstein.

During his murder trial, White employed the now-infamous "Twinkie Defense," blaming junk food – as well as stress about his job – for the murders. By blaming mental illness, White received a lesser sentence, manslaughter. Furious Milk supporters, who wanted White convicted of first-degree murder, rioted in the city in what is known as the "White Night" riots.

In her interview with SF Gate, Feinstein said White did not kill Milk because he was homophobic, but rather because he felt betrayed by Milk when the mayor decided not to reappoint him.

During the trial, Feinstein testified about White and their friendship, which brought the defendant to tears. But she told SF Gate that when White was released from prison in 1984, she had San Francisco Police Chief Con Murphy tell White not to come back to the city, because "his chances of survival were not good." White committed suicide in 1987. Feinstein told SF Gate if she could undo the moment of the assassination, she would do "it in a second, in a nanosecond."

When the Oscar-nominated film "Milk" was released in 2008, she said she didn't want to see it. "I think in my face you saw the pain of the day 30 years ago," she told SF Gate. "I still have a hard time returning to it, and I'm not a masochist. I know what happened. I lived those times, and I've tried to learn from them in terms of the kind of public servant I am, and that's really enough for me."

Feinstein has since called the day of the assassinations "the darkest day of my life." In the summer of 2016, after several instances of gun violence across the country – including the killings of two Black men by police officers – Feinstein put out a statement and referenced the killings that affected her life.

She said after White's trial, the city was "filled with grief and torn apart by hate and a lack of trust" and as mayor, she formed a task force of gay and religious community leaders as well as police officers to help heal the city.
Decades after the tragic event, Feinstein continued to remember Milk, regularly posting about him on his birthday or on the anniversary of the assassinations. And in 2022, she marked the acceptance of USNS Harvey Milk – a Naval shipped named after the gay rights icon – into the Navy.

She was on the San Francisco board when it passed Milk's gay rights ordinance, which banned discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community in housing, employment and public accommodations. The only person who voted against the ordinance was White, according to a New York Times report from 1978.

During her time as a senator, Feinstein continued to stand up for LGBTQ rights, introducing the Respect for Marriage Act in 2011. The law, passed in 2022, guarantees legal protections for same-sex marriages and repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevented the recognition of same-sex marriage by the federal government. Feinstein was one of the few senators who opposed DOMA in 1996.

She also advocated for equality in the military and supported the Equality Act, which would expand civil rights for the LGBTQ community at the federal level.

RIP
 

Alan Jackson one of country musics greatest entertainers has passed away due to a stroke. The complete story is in youtube.

Luckily, this seems to be a hoax. It's been going around the internet since December 2022. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/al...on-death-hoax/

Piper Laurie, so good as Carrie's mother in that movie:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/14/us/pi...ary/index.html

RIP
 

Matthew Perry, star of the tv show Friends, drowned tonight
From TMZ:
Perry is most famous for his role as Chandler Bing on the hit '90s sitcom, which ran for 10 seasons ... and with him in all 234 episodes. His character was a fan fave, as was performance -- mannerisms and lines of which have gone on to be recreated and spoofed by fans all over the world. One comes to mind, in particular ... "Could (blank) BE more .."

While 'Friends' was his biggest claim to fame ... MP had starred/guest starred in countless other TV shows over the years -- such as 'Boys Will Be Boys,' 'Growing Pains,' 'Silver Spoons,' 'Charles in Charge,' 'Sydney,' 'Beverly Hills, 90210,' 'Home Free,' 'Ally McBeal,' 'The West Wing,' 'Scrubs,' 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,' 'Go On,' 'The Odd Couple' and more.