Dallas Set To Revisit Stonewall Riots With 'Million Gay March'

By Kelli Busey, May 31, 2009, planetransgender

As my radical friend's webpage headlines "Stonewall was a riot not a candle light vigil"

What happened at the Stonewall Riot? What happened on June 28th 1969 that so incensed the transgender, lesbian and gay patrons of this small innocuous tavern to precipitate such violent social disobedience? Why is our 'Stonewall' constantly respectfully referred to worldwide in countries that are experiencing their first LGBT rebellions?

There are people among us in Dallas who were there at Stonewall that balmy night and the Dallas voice's John Wright was there to document this historic meeting some forty years latter .

The Dallas Texas GLBT community is hosting a march and gathering on June 28 2009 to commemorate and perhaps recall the spirit of defiance and sacrifice that bought our current freedoms. It will also be a time to realize civil rights are not given, they are earned. In this moment we all are pilgrims on the front line of civil rights!

I was alive in 1969, but being only 11 and living in rural Ohio, we were just hearing about a fancy new 'fast food' called 'McDonald's' and something called a four lane super highway'!

What I do remember is the highlight of a train trip with a transfer at Grand Central Station in New York NY. We arranged this unsupervised stop so I could fill my suit case with torrid R rated periodicals obstinantly to look at the briefly clad women. But in the back of those tabloids, when no none was looking, I could sneak a peek at people like me! People who were not the same as everyone else. People who said there bodies did not confirm their true selves and changed their sexual organs!!!

Now we have the Internet super highway, a wayback machine of sorts.

In 1969 gay people or 'faggots' as some of my own family and neighbors called me were the targets of unending and merciless harassment and brutality by civilian thugs and the police. As a form of intimidation police and right wing groups rountinely conducted raids of establishments that served LGBT people. Photographers were always at hand to document the stricken faces of our brothers and sisters as they were shackled and lead to paddy wagons. The fallout in 1969 of having your picture eyes downcast in shame was career ending social and marital suicide.

What were the people feeling in 1969? The same as you and I except now we have rightfully earned a communial sense of accomplishment and pride.

Thanks to the brave souls who escaped unharmed and those who stood up to tyranny we can now in our own country be gay proud and loud. We owe nonjudgmental unconditional gratitude and our very freedom to the souls who were at Stonewall tavern.

wikipedia.org

Dallas Voice article by John Wright Recalling Stonewall

Beyond Chron 21st Century Stonewall in Moscow

planetransgender Русский язык Гей Изолировано и преследовал Мировые Стенды Близко Russian Gay's Isolated and persecuted the World Stands By

Jerimaries Transpride speech

The Dallas Principles - Full LGBT Rights Now

"On May 15-17, 2009 in Dallas, Texas twenty-four thinkers, activists, and donors gathered to discuss the immediate need for full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender people in the United States. Collectively we prepared The Dallas Principles."



Why I Support the Dallas Principles


Dr.Dana Beyer on the Dallas Principles


PDF Download The Dallas Principles

Home page and to endorse theThe Dallas Principles click here.

On the web

The Huffington Post The Dallas Principles, a New Approach to LGBT Equality

Nationwide Response May 26 Cal. Marriage Day of Decision

Rallies Planned for CA Supreme Court Decision This Tues May 26th

Source : Queers United

http://queersunited.blogspot.com/2009/03/rallies-planned-for-ca-supreme-court.html

The California Supreme Court will decide on the validity of prop 8 and the existing 18,000 same-sex marriages that have been performed during the months of May-November this Tuesday May 26th. Thousands of people will converge in cities nationwide in an effort to celebrate the decision, or to show their disapproval and rage while showing solidarity with a national movement for federal protections.Day of Decision
Nationwide organizing effort to respond to the courts decision, check for a city near you!
Meet in the Middle for Equality California activists will head to more conservative Fresno to demonstrate.

Dallas Texas

Queer LiberAction

Rally in Celebration or Protest at 7:00pm on the Day of the Decision
WHAT IS IT?

When the CA Supreme Court announces their decision on Proposition 8, we must act! We are calling you to join us for a rally in celebration or protest on the day of the decision. Protests will occur nationwide and our voices will be heard! We hope that we will come together in celebration, but must know that even in celebration we have many more battles to win and need to unite on the day of decision in one loud voice.

Rally:Time: 7:00 pm

Place: Meet on the corner of Oaklawn and Cedar Springs

Organizer:

Name:Email: Queer Liberaction: lgbtliberaction@gmail.com

POSTER & FLYER DOWNLOADS:http://queerliberaction.org/

http://dayofdecision.wetpaint.com/page/Dallas?t=anon

Childhoods of Terror | Catholic Atrocities report to be Released

AP Press "Ireland braces for report on Catholic child abuse"

DUBLIN – A commission report into the abuse of thousands of Irish children in Roman Catholic institutions is published Wednesday after a nine-year investigation repeatedly delayed by church lawsuits, missing documentation and alleged government obstruction.

The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse will release a 2,575-page report in an attempt at a comprehensive portrait of sexual, physical and emotional damage inflicted on children consigned to the country's defunct network of reformatories, workhouses, orphanages and other church-run institutions from the 1930s to 1990s.

Most of the children were ordered into church care because of school truancy, petty crimes or because they were the offspring of unwed mothers. Many faced regimes of terror involving ritual beatings and intimidation. But until the investigation came along, thousands of survivors said they had nowhere safe to tell their stories — because swathes of Irish Catholic society sought to label them liars.

Some of those victims say they feel hopeful now that vindication might be at hand.

Christine Buckley, who was one of the first to break silence in the early 1990s on the church's institutional abuse of children, said the report's verdict on church and government failings should demonstrate "whether the journey for justice, undertaken by so many and for so long, has at last been successful."

She, like many campaigners, said it was critical that the truth of their brutal childhoods be placed indisputably on the public record after decades of dispute from the religious orders — principally the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy nuns — that ran Ireland's 19th century-era industrial schools and other state-funded refuges for Ireland's most vulnerable children. Most closed in the 1970s.

Typically, children at such facilities stopped receiving any formal education by age 12. But they kept generating income for the religious orders through their teens with their mandatory, unpaid labor on farms, in laundries and as domestic cleaners.

In Buckley's case, she was consigned to a Dublin orphanage in the late 1950s because she was the child of a single Irish mother and Nigerian father; children born out of wedlock typically were placed for adoption or into state care.

All the girls at her former Sisters of Mercy-run home, Goldenbridge, were expected to manufacture 60 rosary necklaces a day or suffer humiliation or beatings.

Officials of the Sisters of Mercy, Christian Brothers and more than a dozen other orders implicated in sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children all testified to the commission. None was willing to comment this week in advance of the report's unveiling.

During the commission's investigations, oral evidence was collected from more than 1,000 people chiefly in their 50s to 70s — several hundred of whom traveled back to Ireland from as far away as the United States and Australia — who described childhoods of terror and intimidation.

The Christian Brothers delayed the investigation for more than a year with a lawsuit that successfully defended their members' right to anonymity in all references in the report — even in cases where individual Christian Brothers have already been convicted of sexual and physical attacks on children.

The Catholic Church's practice of protecting the sexual predators in their parishes and schools, rather than the children who suffered at their hands, has fanned several waves of outrage in once-devout Ireland starting in the mid-1990s.

The damage done to the church's reputation here has exceeded, in scope and political impact, even what happened in the United States, which suffered its own wave of abuse-coverup scandals in the past decade.

Ireland's first major pedophile-priest scandal, in 1994, triggered the collapse of a government. In 1999 former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern issued an apology for the state's failure over decades to defend children's rights in church-run facilities.

Ahern established both the fact-finding commission and a panel that has already paid out damages averaging nearly euro65,000 ($90,000) each to 12,000 abuse victims. The taxpayer, not the church, has footed most of that bill.

"The depth and duration of the abuse endured by our children in these institutions beggars belief," said Maeve Lewis, executive director of an abuse-victims support group called One in Four.

AP article "Ireland braces for report on Catholic child abuse"

Also on he web

Documenting the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church Bishop Accountablity.org

GID Reform | Remove Transgender People From The DSM-V

Through out history there has been a need for society to pigeon hole people who live outside of what is generally accepted as 'normal'.
The APA is currently inflicting great harm on one such group now.

Transgender people have long been stigmatized and marginalized by the APA which then profits from this diagnosis.

The truth is the APA is causing anguish and suicide.

APA protest speaker Dr. Madeline Deutsch



We are calling on the APA to make an official statement that all Gender Identities and Expressions are natural human variation, and not disease or mental illness. And for the APA to reshape the upcoming DSM V version to remove stigmatizing and problematic portions of the diagnosis "Gender Identity Disorder."

GID Reform Now.com

GID Reform Advocates

On the web:

Resolution from the IFGE BOD to the APA

Empire State 'GENDA CALL IN DAY' Pride Agenda

Wednesday May 20 is the Statewide GENDA Call-In Day - It’s Time to Act!
You are receiving this e-mail because the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) has been passed by the Assembly and has enough support to be passed by the Senate. The time is NOW to take action and make our final push to get the Senate to vote to end discrimination against transgender New Yorkers.
We need you to get on the phone and call the lead Senate sponsor Tom Duane and your Senator to tell them that you want them to bring GENDA to the Senate floor and pass it. We’re in the final stretch and it is vital that they hear from you.

You can reach Senator Tom Duane at (518) 455-2451 and you can find your State Senator’s Albany phone number here.

GENDA would amend the state's human rights law to include anti-discrimination protections based upon gender identity and expression, providing crucial civil rights protections for transgender New Yorkers by banning discrimination in housing, employment, credit, public accommodations, and other areas of everyday life.

With more than half of the Senators indicating their support for GENDA, we know that we have enough votes to get it passed in the Senate if it comes to the floor for a vote. So now is the time to call Senator Duane and your State Senator!

Talking Points:

Reach Tom Duane at (518) 455-2451 and find your Senator’s Albany phone number here. Call their offices on Wednesday to tell them that the time is now to end discrimination against transgender New Yorkers.

Remember to give them the number of the GENDA bill (S.2406).

Ask your Senator to vote for GENDA, and ask lead Senate Sponsor Tom Duane to bring the bill to the floor for a vote now.

Tell them about the broad support for GENDA statewide, including:
78% of New York voters
Unions representing 2.1 million working New Yorkers
27 Fortune 500 companies based in cities like Rochester , Corning , New York City and White Plains .
344 clergy and lay leaders, representing over 20 different denominations
Working together, we can make this happen! Start making those phone calls now!