RIP

[Stone-Butch]

Betty White there can't be enough said by enough people how much you were loved and admired and will be missed beyond reason. A wonderful, caring, funny human being who spread so much joy and laughter to millions. RIP Ms. Betty you will be remembered by the multitude. I just heard it on our news and I am truly grieved.

[homoe]

Originally Posted by Stone-Butch

Betty White there can't be enough said by enough people how much you were loved and admired and will be missed beyond reason. A wonderful, caring, funny human being who spread so much joy and laughter to millions. RIP Ms. Betty you will be remembered by the multitude. I just heard it on our news and I am truly grieved.

In December 2021 it was announced that White's 100th birthday would be celebrated with a new documentary-style movie about her life and career. The title was revealed as Betty White: 100 Years Young - A Birthday Celebration

The announced cast includes many of White's friends: Ryan Reynolds, Tina Fey, Robert Redford, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Jay Leno, Carol Burnett, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Valerie Bertinelli, James Corden, Wendy Malick, and Jennifer Love Hewitt.

I am so glad they still plan on airing this.

[Orema]

Lani Guinier, Legal Scholar at the Center of Controversy, Dies at 71

President Bill Clinton pulled her nomination as assistant attorney general in 1993 after she came under criticism for her views on voting rights.


Lani Guinier in 1998, five years after her nomination for a top post in the Justice Department was withdrawn.Credit...Librado Romero/The New York Times

By Clay Risen
Jan. 7, 2022

Lani Guinier, a legal scholar whose work on voting rights and affirmative action led President Bill Clinton to nominate her in 1993 to be an assistant attorney general, only to withdraw her name two months later in the face of a Republican campaign against her, died on Friday at an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. She was 71.

Her cousin Sherrie Russell-Brown said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Descended from a long line of lawyers, Ms. Guinier made her name in the 1980s as an unorthodox thinker about whether America’s legal institutions, even after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, needed to change further to realize true democracy.

She argued, for example, that the principle of “one person, one vote” was insufficient in a system where the interests of minorities, racial or otherwise, were inevitably trampled by those of the majority, and that alternatives needed to be considered to give more weight to minority interests.

Ms. Guinier was a 43-year-old professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School when President Clinton nominated her for the post of assistant attorney general for civil rights. But she quickly came under fire from Republicans for her progressive views on voting rights and quotas.

Her work was not without its liberal critics: Some scholars questioned whether her ideas about voting were in fact democratic, as she claimed, and several Democratic senators voiced their concerns about her nomination to President Clinton.

But her Republican opponents also made clear that their campaign was a matter of opportunity. Still stinging from the Supreme Court nomination battles over Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, they were looking for payback, and saw her liberal views as an opportunity to hit the president early in his term.

“Clinton has not had to expend any political capital on the issue of quotas,” Clint Bolick, a conservative lawyer and activist who helped lead the charge against her, told The New York Times in 1993, “and with her, we believe we could inflict a heavy political cost.”

Mr. Clinton eventually bowed to pressure and withdrew her nomination in June 1993, calling some of her positions “anti-democratic.”


Ms. Guinier in 1993. She was nominated that year for the post of assistant attorney general for civil rights, but she quickly came under fire from Republicans for her progressive views on voting rights and quotas. Credit...Jose Lopez/The New York Times

Ms. Guinier returned to teaching. She also wrote a memoir about her nomination experience, “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice,” published in 1998. That same year, she moved to Harvard Law School, where she became the first woman of color to receive tenure.

While the rest of the country remembered her for her failed nomination, she continued to make strides as a legal scholar and teacher. She pioneered research on implicit bias in the classroom and workplace. Later in her career she opened a wide-ranging critique of merit, especially the way it distorts institutions like her own.

Many of her positions have since moved into and informed the mainstream, especially her criticisms of voter redistricting processes.

“The ability to see so far down the line was her gift,” Heather Gerken, the dean of Yale Law School, said in a phone interview. “She had a deep understanding of the insidious ways that power corrupts institutions, even institutions acting in good faith.”

Carol Lani Guinier was born on April 19, 1950, in Manhattan and grew up in Queens. Her mother, Eugenia (Paprin) Guinier, was a civil rights activist. Her paternal grandfather and her father, Ewart Guinier, were both lawyers, and her father also served as chairman of what was then the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard.

Ms. Guinier recalled first wanting to become a civil rights attorney when she was 12, watching on television as Constance Baker Motley, a lawyer with the N.A.A.C.P., helped escort James Meredith in his fight to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962.

She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1971 and Yale Law School in 1974, a year behind Mr. Clinton and in the same class as Clarence Thomas.

Ms. Guinier married Nolan Bowie, a fellow professor and legal scholar, in 1986. He survives her, as do her sisters, Clotilde Guinier Stenson, Sary Guinier and Marie Guinier; her son, Nikolas Bowie, also a law professor at Harvard; her stepdaughter, Dana Rice; and a granddaughter.

After a clerkship with a U.S. District Court judge in Michigan and a year working with juvenile offenders in Detroit, Ms. Guinier moved to Washington to work in the Department of Justice. She left in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan took office, and for most of that decade she led the Voting Rights Project of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Ms. Guinier became an aggressive litigator, traveling, for example, in 1985 to Alabama, where, with Deval Patrick, the future governor of Massachusetts, she helped lead the defense in a voting rights case against Jeff Sessions, the future senator and attorney general who was then a U.S. attorney. Her team won an acquittal.

“She was easily one of the most innovative thinkers in the voting rights space,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the outgoing head of the Legal Defense Fund, said in a phone interview.

Ms. Guinier left the defense fund for a position at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1989. There she began to turn her experience defending voting rights into ideas about how to reform the system.

She argued, for example, that merely having a vote was not enough for minorities, especially those from oppressed classes. She proposed a variety of alternatives, like cumulative voting, in which people get a number of votes to distribute as they wish — a process that might allow minority voters to concentrate their support on a single candidate and in that way increase their influence as a bloc.

“Her concern was that each vote count the same as the next vote, and the normal districting process does not create that,” Gerald Torres, a professor at Yale Law School and a frequent collaborator, said by phone.

Such ideas caught the attention of the Clinton administration, whose officials also liked her fiery rhetoric about the backsliding on voting rights under the Reagan and George Bush administrations.


Ms. Guinier with Mitt Romney, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time, at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Boston in 2005. Ms. Guinier was the keynote speaker. Credit...Josh Reynolds/Associated Press

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that her Justice Department nomination would become a lightning rod. She insisted that her positions had been taken out of context, and she noted that cumulative voting was already used in communities around the country. But Republicans doubled down, calling her a “quota queen” for, they said, supporting affirmative action quotas (she did not).

Still, Ms. Guinier seemed to take the president’s decision to withdraw her name in stride — especially since it had made her something of a national figure.

“When I walk through the train to the snack bar, many people seem to recognize me — and these are men, women, whites, Blacks, Republicans, Democrats,” she told The New York Times in 1993. “People come up and say, ‘I disagree with everything you have said, but I think you should have had a hearing, and I admire the way you handled the situation.’”

Above all, she said, she appreciated the perspective that the process gave her and the insights she was able to take with her back to the academy, among them an understanding of how political polarization got in the way of democratic decision making.

She also became known for her innovations in the classroom, said Susan Sturm, a professor at Columbia Law School and a frequent collaborator. Ms. Guinier would bring in drama students to help her class construct short plays around legal questions, or hand over a lesson to a group of students.

She wrote a number of books, on topics as varied as voting rights, gender equality and affirmative action, including “The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy” (1994); Who’s Qualified?: A New Democracy Forum on the Future of Affirmative Action” (2001), with Ms. Sturm; and “The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America” (2016).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/u...nier-dead.html

[Jedi]

Another talent gone..........sad
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/21/enter...bit/index.html

[Jedi]

RIP Louie!!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/21/enter...ead/index.html

[FireSignFemme]

Originally Posted by Jedi

Another talent gone..........sad
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/21/enter...bit/index.html

[Jedi]

RIP Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...ti-1235084085/

[BullDog]

We have lost June (T-Rex) to a senseless act of gun violence and hate. She was helping to get a BLM protest set up in Portland when a man came out of a house and started to swear at them calling them violent terrorists and then started shooting at them. June lost her life and five other people were injured and taken to the hospital.

The police released information that the killer and protestors were both armed, but I don't see any evidence of that being true. One of the survivors who was shot said she wasn't armed and no one around her was either. Neighbors have also said they saw the man go out of the house and start shooting. This wasn't an "argument" between two armed "sides" that led to a shooting the way it is being described by many in the media.

We all know what a powerful force June was. She made a big difference in this world. RIP June and thank you for fighting the good fight.

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/...jbFrWo8-uypOyw

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by BullDog

We have lost June (T-Rex) to a senseless act of gun violence and hate. She was helping to get a BLM protest set up in Portland when a man came out of a house and started to swear at them calling them violent terrorists and then started shooting at them. June lost her life and five other people were injured and taken to the hospital.

The police released information that the killer and protestors were both armed, but I don't see any evidence of that being true. One of the survivors who was shot said she wasn't armed and no one around her was either. Neighbors have also said they saw the man go out of the house and start shooting. This wasn't an "argument" between two armed "sides" that led to a shooting the way it is being described by many in the media.

We all know what a powerful force June was. She made a big difference in this world. RIP June and thank you for fighting the good fight.

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/...jbFrWo8-uypOyw

I haven't been on here in forever but I just saw the story posted on twitter. I can't believe it. I can't believe it.

[TexasCowboi]

Rest In Power T-Rex!

[clay]

Fly free & know you made a tremendous impact on many lives. YOU are T REX!! Love & rest in peace, Juney!!

[kittygrrl]

T-Rex

[Jedi]

https://nypost.com/2022/03/10/emilio...et-dead-at-81/ RIP old friend. I grew up on Sesame Street as I am one year older than it. I have such fond memories of the show.

[firegal]

I am sad and shocked at Junes/T-Rexs passing.

The hate seems to grow.Things have been crazy here in Seattle and Portland these past few years.I just dont get it. Rest in peace June ive enjoyed your thoughts/posts/humor and knowledge for many years. Hugs to all her loved ones who are in pain.

Terry

[JDeere]

https://people.com/country/country-l...icide-sources/

Naomi Judd

I knew she suffered from mental health issues but I never thought, she would unalive herself!

This is speculation that she did but when Wynona and Ashley said they lost her to mental illness, I knew she committed suicide.

[JDeere]

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.

[Orema]

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.


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.


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.”


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

[Gemme]

Ruby, the dog portrayed in Rescued by Ruby, passed away from cancer.

She was a good girl. A very, very good girl.

[Bèsame*]

Rest in Peace dear Sandy. Olivia Newton John was such a soundtrack to our lives. 💝💝💝💝

[Orema]

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.


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.”


“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.


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