RIP

[nhplowboi]

RIP Senator John McCain.....you were a man among men.

[Gemme]

Originally Posted by nhplowboi

RIP Senator John McCain.....you were a man among men.

I am so sad about this. He was a good man.

[Martina]

He died as a result of glioblastoma, the same disease that killed my mother. My mom was also 81 when she passed. I feel so sorry for the family. Like McCain, Mom was very healthy and acive before diagnosis.

[Gemme]

Originally Posted by Martina

He died as a result of glioblastoma, the same disease that killed my mother. My mom was also 81 when she passed. I feel so sorry for the family. Like McCain, Mom was very healthy and acive before diagnosis.

Ted Kennedy also died from it, 9 years to the day prior to Senator McCain passing. It's a brutal disease.

[Breathless]

Burt Reynolds has passed away today, at 82 yrs of age. Reports say it is from cardiac arrest.

Most of my childhood was spent laughing watching some of his movies..


https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/0...ad_a_23519479/

[Gemme]

It's okay! He has someone waiting for him.

Captain Chaos!!!

[Orema]

Marcia Lipetz, leader in the LGBT community, dies at 71

By Graydon Megan
Chicago Tribune


Marcia Lipetz was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and helped establish the Center on Halsted. (Hal Baim/Windy City Times)

Marcia Lipetz had a knack for recognizing issues early and tackling them head-on, whether it was the AIDS crisis, challenges facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community or the fight for women’s rights.

Lipetz was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago in the 1980s and also helped establish the Center on Halsted, which describes itself as the Midwest’s largest LGBTQ social service agency.

In 2009, Lipetz was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame, which cited her “leadership, energy, passion, and vision for Chicago’s LGBT community and the institutions affiliated with it, especially for her work with the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the WPWR-TV Channel 50 Foundation, and Center on Halsted.”

“She really was a foundational person in our community,” said Tracy Baim, longtime editor of the Windy City Times who was recently named publisher and executive editor of the Chicago Reader. “She never sought the limelight. She just did the work day in and day out. She really helped build the community as it is today by creating these long-lasting institutions.”

Lipetz, 71, died Sept. 11 in her Evanston home of cancer, according to her spouse, Lynda Crawford.

She was born and grew up in Louisville, Ky. Both of her parents were social workers, and she grew up with an orientation to the Jewish concept of “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world, Crawford said.

She went to Douglass College of Rutgers University in New Jersey for her undergraduate degree, then got a master’s in sociology from Ohio State University in Columbus. She came to Chicago to get a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University.

Fred Eychaner, chairman of Newsweb Corp., met Lipetz around 1980 when both were on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“She was a relentless defender of the Bill of Rights and a woman’s right to free choice unhindered by government dictates,” Eychaner said.

As the AIDS crisis unfolded in the 1980s, she was among those who saw the epidemic both as a health disaster and a threat to civil liberties.

“Marcia struggled fearlessly to protect everyone affected by that horrible disease,” Eychaner said. “She fought fiercely against those who saw the epidemic as an opportunity to moralize and blame rather than a true public health emergency.”

Lipetz soon became the first full-time director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. She later became the first executive director of what is now the Alphawood Foundation, where Eychaner is president.

Patrick Sheahan worked with Lipetz when she was with the WPWR Foundation. Lipetz had been on the board of Horizons in the mid-1980s, formerly Gay and Lesbian Horizons, and Sheahan recruited her to help with plans and fundraising for what would become the Center on Halsted.

“I twisted her arm,” Sheahan said, “and she graciously agreed to serve on the steering committee.”

Sheahan said Lipetz was an invaluable resource whose strengths included “her remarkable standing in the community, a rich history of creating organizations and a deep knowledge not only about Chicago’s LGBT community but the broader Chicago philanthropic community.”

In an interview on the website Chicago Gay History, Lipetz offered her own version of her contributions. “I guess I’m a builder — solid hard work that builds for the future — and I’m enormously proud of the work of the ACLU and the future of Center on Halsted.”

Lipetz later was president and CEO of the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, working with local nonprofits. Most recently, according to Baim, Lipetz started Lipetz Consulting, where her clients included the Chicago Community Trust, working as an adviser on the LGBT Community Fund.

“I don’t think people realize how much of a teacher she was,” Crawford said. “She just quietly helped people — teaching and mentoring.”

Lipetz is also survived by a sister, Judith Graham.

A memorial service will be at noon Sept. 23 in the Skokie chapel of Chicago Jewish Funerals, 8851 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/o...14-story.html#

[Orema]

Jinx Beers — pioneering feminist, Lesbian News founder — dies at 84



Jinx Beers, the pioneering lesbian activist who founded the long-running Southern California magazine Lesbian News, has died at age 84.

Beers died Friday at Nazareth House Los Angeles, a senior living facility, her friend Wendy Averill told Q Voice News. She had been suffering from renal failure for several months and was in hospice care.

“At a time when our community needed a voice, Jinx was there,” Averill said in a statement to Q Voice News. “She created the Lesbian News at a time when our community was not organized and needed someone, something to help us rally.”

“Jinx was never a part of our history for her own gain. She did it for our community,” Averill added. “She kept such a low personal profile that some people thought she didn’t really exist.”

Beers started Lesbian News in 1975, and it still operates as both a print and an online publication. From its beginnings as a four-page monthly newsletter, it “grew into a tabloid-sized magazine that covered Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego,” Q Voice News reports.

“I never planned to have a publication. I had to learn everything along the way,” Beers once said, according to Q Voice News. “My point of view was it would be open to anyone in the lesbian community, and it would be free.”

“If you wanted to know where there was going to be a demonstration, how to find a therapist, locate a partner or job and a myriad of other opportunities, the LN was there,” Averill said.

Before founding the publication, Beers, a California native, had served four years in the U.S. Air Force, which she joined at age 18 in 1951, and 12 years in the Air Force Reserve. She left the military in protest of the Vietnam War and to become a more vocal lesbian activist. She was out to her military colleagues but not her commanding officers, and at the time being gay or lesbian could result in a dishonorable discharge.

“I couldn’t support the military because I didn’t believe in why we were in Vietnam,” she said recently, according to Q Voice News. “I also knew it was just a matter of time before someone would connect the dots about my being a lesbian. I didn’t want to be dishonorably discharged.”

After leaving the service, she earned a psychology degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and then worked in the UCLA Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering. She also taught a class called the Lesbian Experience. She eventually became active in a variety of political groups.

She was inducted into the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame in Philadelphia in 2017 for her work with Lesbian News.

A memorial service is being planned for December at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood. Details are forthcoming.

https://www.advocate.com/media/2018/...n-news-dies-84