Lesbians In The News

[CherylNYC]

I spotted what looked like an obvious lesbian in the photo accompanying the below article, and I found the journalist's perspective fascinating. There's very little weight placed on the young lesbian's orientation. In fact, it's ony mentioned matter-of-factly in a quote from her lawyer in the third paragraph; “I felt that if she could escape from that, she could transform her life. She has a wonderful aunt and grandmother and girlfriend who wanted to see her succeed.”

This simple nonchalance is very new in the mainstream press, even here in NYC, and it still gives me goosebumps.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/ny...l?ref=nyregion

Facing Jail Time, Until a Lawyer With Survival Skills Helped Her Find Her Way
FEB. 11, 2014


The .22-caliber pistol was in her waistband, not only unlicensed but defaced, its serial number scratched or sanded off. She had not been to school in at least six months. Sitting in a detention cell in December 2010 at age 17, Jessica Williams of East Harlem realized she had been caught cold and was about to be cooked: a year in jail on a Class D felony, and then lifetime membership in the Rikers Island Alumni Association. “Reality didn’t hit me until I was in Rikers Island, and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is not my life,’ ” Ms. Williams said this week.

Turns out she was right.

On Thursday, Ms. Williams, now 20, will take the day off from her job at a CVS drugstore and turn up for graduation from Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School. Among the speakers on the commencement program are the lawyer who decided that she was worth another chance and the judge who decided to give it to her. And cheering her on will be school advisers who helped her get a driver’s license and have her poised to start a training program with U.P.S. next month.

“She hadn’t been through the system,” said Eliza Orlins, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society who represented her. “I felt that if she could escape from that, she could transform her life. She has a wonderful aunt and grandmother and girlfriend who wanted to see her succeed.”

For all that, nothing about Ms. Williams’s case is much out of the ordinary, except that enough people made the effort to help her way to redemption. Ms. Orlins, a graduate of private schools in Washington, is dedicated to her work, but that is not a rarity in the Legal Aid Society or in the offices of New York City’s district attorneys. (Though, it should be said, Ms. Orlins apparently is the only public defender in New York to have appeared twice on the reality TV show “Survivor.”)

As a teenager, Ms. Williams had a dreadful record in school — cutting classes, getting suspended, a fib-a-day for her parents — but none whatsoever of violence, or, for that matter, any criminality. She had a clean rap sheet.

She grew up in the Jefferson Houses projects in East Harlem, raised by her mother and stepfather, living with “five other siblings — one brother, one sister, two nephews, one niece,” she said. After attending Bayard Rustin High School for a few years, she effectively dropped out.

“I was hanging out in the projects, partying, running around, doing negative things,” Ms. Williams said. “I was, like, popular.”

One afternoon in December 2010, she said, she and some friends found the gun near a trash can on 119th Street. “I thought it would be cool if we kept it, and that night — I don’t know why — I decided to take it outside,” she said. The police rolled up. She explained that she had thought it might be worth a few dollars by turning it in at a police station house. “The officer said if I was going to take it there, I should never have had it in my waistband,” Ms. Williams recalled.

A minimum of a year in jail is the formula applied by New York State as a hedge against the history of misery associated with guns; when it turned out that the gun was not working, and that its possession was therefore not a felony but a misdemeanor, the Manhattan district attorney’s office stuck by its demand for a year in jail. Even a broken gun is a source of havoc. Then again, so is too much jail.

In Brooklyn, the Red Hook Community Court has taken drastically different approaches and has shown that some problems are better solved by not locking people up. It accepts criminal cases from three police precincts and, under a single roof, manages to steer people into drug treatment, alternative schools, and other places besides jail. Its recidivism rate is lower than that in the rest of the city, and it saves up to $15 million a year in incarceration costs, according to a recent study.

But what is routine in Red Hook demands special agility elsewhere. Ms. Orlins told Ms. Williams to get back into school if she wanted to have any hope of avoiding jail. After getting advice from others at Legal Aid, Ms. Orlins approached Judge Lynn Kotler, who was hearing the case, and asked that Ms. Williams be given a chance to work with Bronx Connect, a mentoring program to help young people stay out of prison. After a few stumbles, Ms. Williams wound up at Manhattan Comprehensive, where Judge Kotler and Ms. Orlins will speak at graduation on Thursday.

Had being on “Survivor” helped Ms. Orlins navigate the court system?

“You mean being starving and miserable and dealing with people who are cranky and miserable?” Ms. Orlins said. “It’s the perfect preparation for criminal court.”

[ProfPacker]

very touching speech by Ellen Page (Juno)

I was moved by her honesty. Wish I could have been so eloquent when I was her age.

I know that Juno for kids is like a cult film. Hopefully her coming will have an impact on LBGTQ youth.

here's the link

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqJThFrFXh4"]Ellen Page Comes Out As Gay At Human Rights Campaign Time to Thrive Conference - Full Video - YouTube[/nomedia]

[Kobi]

A rare case of female-to-female HIV transmission has been found in Texas, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported on Thursday.

A 46-year-old woman allegedly acquired the virus from her female partner during their six-month sexual relationship. She was infected with a strain that had a 98% genetic match to her partner’s. According to CDC, the HIV-positive woman had not taken medication for two years.

“In this case, the discordant couple [one HIV-infected partner and one uninfected partner] routinely had direct sexual contact – without using barrier methods for protection – that involved the exchange of blood through abrasions received during sexual activity,” the CDC said in a weekly report.

The CDC noted that HIV infections in women who have sex with other women are traced to intravenous drug use or heterosexual sex. The woman newly diagnosed with HIV did not report any other risk factors, such as injection drug use, tattooing, transfusions or transplants, officials said. She did not engage in any heterosexual relationships during the past 10 years.

However not common, the infection was possible since HIV can be present in vaginal fluid and menstrual blood, and the women are said to have engaged in unprotected sex involving oral contact with vaginal fluids or inducing bleeding, and shared sex toys.
--------------------------------------


Good reminder of why lesbians need to play safe too.

[Kobi]

***** Trigger Warning ****

March 13th marked the 50th anniversary of the murder and rape of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old lesbian bartender from Queens, New York.

Genovese is one of America’s most famous murder victims because 37 of her neighbors allegedly listened to her screams for help as she was being raped and stabbed to death by Winston Moseley and did nothing.

Her murder was deemed emblematic of urban apathy and the New York Times headlined the story with, "37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call Police."

The NYT's headline and story was later proven to be incorrect. Depending on which source you use, the number of people who were aware there was a problem in the street outside there apartments drops dramatically.

Those who did hear her screams for help still were unaware of the attack per se. Some thought it was a lovers quarrel, a woman who was beaten up, or rowdy people leaving a bar.

One of her neighbors did shout out the window for the man to leave her alone, which initially scared off the attacker. Several called the police station. Back then, one had to call the station directly and talk with a desk sargent, who was responsible for determining if police assistance was needed. It is unclear why the police did not respond to the first round of calls.

The attacker, Winston Moseley, who had been cruising the area "looking for a woman to kill", came back to the scene. By then, Genovese had moved herself into the alley way leading to her apartment. She was hidden from the neighbors when Moseley returned to stab her again and sexually assault her.

The attacks spanned a half hour.

The police were called again. When they responded, Kitty was still alive in the arms of her neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that [Mosely] had fled.

This case was supposedly responsible for the development of the 911 system which was implemented in 1968.

It was also responsible for the development of the Genovese syndrome or the bystander affect/apathy, a a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. Several variables help to explain why the bystander effect occurs. These variables include: ambiguity, cohesiveness and diffusion of responsibility.

Fascinating shit. Check it out.

In addition, this case was supposedly the impetus for neighborhood watch programs.

Wikipedia provided the best, least bias account of the events I could find.

[Kobi]

Legendary gay rights activist Vernita Gray, who made history as one-half of the first same-sex couple legally wed in Illinois, died late Tuesday night after a prolonged battle with cancer. She was 65.

The Windy City Times first reported the news of Ms. Gray’s death. Her wife, Pat Ewert, was by her side and she was visited by family in the weeks leading up to her death.

Ms. Gray’s legacy will reach far beyond her marriage to Ewert last November. She was a pioneering gay rights activist in Chicago starting in 1969 when she organized a gay and lesbian hotline; the phone number spelled out FBI-LIST. She founded Chicago’s first lesbian newspaper, Lavender Woman, and was a victims advocate for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office for over 20 years. Her work to empower African-American gays and lesbians often endangered her among Chicago’s black community. Ms. Gray was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 which spread to her bones and formed inoperable tumors in her brain. Her last wish was to be wed to Ewert, to whom she proposed in 2009.

Ms. Gray received her wish in November 2013 when U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman ordered the Cook County Clerk's office to immediately issue marriage licenses to all Illinois same-sex couples who, because of a life-threatening illness, cannot wait until next summer to get married. A court ruling last month allowed same-sex couples to be married ahead of Illinois’ marriage equality law taking effect in June.


http://chicagoist.com/2014/03/19/lgb..._gray_dies.php

[Kobi]

A new burial area exclusively for lesbians is set to be introduced in a historic Berlin cemetery this weekend.

A 400-square-metre (4,300-square-foot) area of the Lutheran Georgen Parochial cemetery, established in 1814 in central Berlin, will be reserved as a graveyard for up to 80 lesbians, said Usah Zachau, a spokeswoman for the Safia association, a national group primarily for elderly lesbians.

The association said it had created a burial area to be inaugurated Sunday, as a space 'where life and death connect, distinctive forms of cemetery culture can develop and where the lesbian community can live together in the afterlife.'

The group was given use of the cemetery area for 30 years in exchange for cleaning up and landscaping the area, and promising to be responsible for its upkeep.

In Germany is it customary to have long-term, renewable leases on burial plots rather than buy them outright.

'We don't have to pay any rent, but we had to invest a lot of money to turn that part of the cemetery into a usable burial ground again,' Zachau said Tuesday.

The group commissioned a landscaping company to build winding sand paths and has reserved spaces for cremated ashes in urns and for the burial of bodies. The area is framed by oak, birch and yew trees.

Neighboring parts of the Lutheran cemetery, which is located near Alexanderplatz square, are currently not being used. Old, toppled tombstones are overgrown by weeds.

A spokesman for the Berlin Lutheran church said the agreement with the women's group comes as part of the church's efforts to 'revitalize its cemetery grounds by cooperating with other groups.'

'We are also in an ongoing discussion with Muslim groups to see whether they can have their own plots on our cemeteries,' said Volker Jastrzembski.

The Lesbian and Gay Association of Berlin welcomed the creation of the cemetery.

'It increases the diversity of opportunities and is a nice opportunity for those lesbian women who want to be buried among other lesbians,' said spokesman Joerg Steinert.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ed-Berlin.html

[vagina]

Anyone here a basketball fan? Brittney Griner has been making the news headlines after coming out as a LESBIAN despite being pressured/forced to keep quiet about her homosexuality by her basketball coach and Baptist Univesity.

She is one of the hottest basketball stars these days and an out and proud LESBIAN.


http://www.swishappeal.com/2013/5/21...imone-augustus

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports...-hope/7437521/